Khaireni Tar was a roadside town along the snaking Kathmandu-Pokhara highway, set apart from the others by its tropical vegetation, uncommon in the hill regions. Ringed by rich green rice fields and spotted with jacaranda, gulmohar and bougainvillea plants, its bazaar was slightly less drab than most highway bazaars. Its narrow alleys were littered with dirt, bits of torn schoolbooks and plastic wrappers, shards of light bulbs, snarls of chicken wire, fallen leaves and stubbed-out cigarettes. Most of the buildings were huddled together in an unattractive clump and there was no view of the himals from here. Still, it was a good place to live in. It wasn't remote like the villages off the highway. It wasn't a sleepy hick settlement. The bazaar had a police post, a high school, an agriculture office and an intermediate-level college campus; it even boasted a private English-medium boarding school for those who earned handfuls of cash. A few of the shops sold posh city items like handbags, sunglasses, nail polish, and leather belts. Khaireni Tar was a middling kind of town where it was common, while walking through alleys, to enter a twilight of cultures: to hear the screech of Nirvana on a transistor radio while passing a group of women carrying loads of freshly scooped dung. Young men from the town's finest families no longer just joined the British, Indian or Nepali armed forces but went to work as migrant labourers in Seoul, Osaka, Australia and Dubai. From abroad they sent their families a hundred, two hundred, three hundred green dollars a month. Young girls no longer consented to illiteracy but clamoured to go to school. Occupational caste tailors, cobblers, metal smiths and singers rehearsed liberation slogans under their breath. In the bazaar people could be heard speaking Nepali, Gurung, Magar, Hindi, Kumhale-and bursts of English: \'Ta-ta, bye-bye, hello Sir.'
The town's physical structure mirrored its changeling ethos. A new church stood at the edge of the bazaar, near the caves where a Hindu ascetic lived off alms. The newer buildings of the bazaar had firm stone walls, and tin roofs were in demand among the well-to-do. But most of the older houses were made of clay and thatch, and their uneven walls and mismatched windows bore prints of the hands that had built them. Some of the town's houses were covered in red clay, others in house paint, while others weren't decorated at all. Some had metal rods on the windows, others didn't even have glass. Some had electric wires, others were bleached at night by the bright white light of kerosene lamps. Each house contained, in this way, an archaeology of its own, its artifacts bearing testament to Khaireni Tar's growth and development.
At the centre of town was a sacred twined-together bar-peepal tree which concealed, with its dense banyan and bodhi foliage, the fumes of the trucks and buses that rolled into the bus stop at all hours of the day. Every morning vendors gathered on the stepped platform beneath the bar-peepal tree to sell seasonal fruits and vegetables, ready-made snacks, candies and biscuits, hair oil and hair threads, and aluminum and plastic trinkets. On days when it wasn't raining the Musalmaan bangle seller set up a display of glass bangles of the latest designs. When people got off the buses, all the vendors vied for attention: \'Bananas so cheap they're almost free!' \'Cheeseballs-chips-a-locket-for-your-daughter!' \'Peanuts? Peanuts? Peanuts?' The bangle seller alone waited in peace for her customers, bargaining with no one-\'Fixed price, baba'-even as people around her haggled, made counteroffers, cried foul and defended their honour.
After the announcement of elections, a few changes took place around the twined-together bar-peepal tree. A few more passengers than usual disembarked from the Kathmandu buses. After looking around uncertainly, the newcomers asked for directions to their party offices. The bazaar thickened each day with unknown faces.
One morning the communist UML party office, which stood next to the bar-peepal tree, hoisted a tattered red hammer-and-sickle flag above its door. The next day the party assigned its workers to repaint its sign board so that it could be read from afar: Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist Leninist). From then on, a number of UML workers began assembling in front of the office each morning, some sporting Lenin goatees, Marxist beards, Castro fatigues and Che Guevara t-shirts, and others more ordinary in village homespuns or in ragtag student uniforms. As more and more workers arrived at the UML office, they spilled into the adjoining crockery store, talking politics in hushed tones among the store's displays of aluminum plates, iron pots, stainless steel utensils and plastic buckets.
Next door to the crockery store was a cloth shop which carried fine Indian cottons and Chinese rayons. The Nepali Congress Party office was beyond this shop, and the current Member of Parliament was often seen in front of this office-till the day the party abruptly announced that it was fielding another candidate. The new Congress party candidate, a tubby Bahun man whom no one had ever heard of-but who was said to be a member of the dynasty that ruled the Congress party-then showed up at the office, constantly surrounded by hordes of young followers he'd imported from Kathmandu.
The small conservative Rastriya Prajatantra Party had no following in this electorate, but it had decided this year to field a woman from here-because the five per cent quota for women candidates had to be filled somehow. The RPP office was located a few houses from the Congress party office, between some fruit stalls and the Himal Lodge Restaurant Bar. But the RPP's lady candidate was too shy to come to the party office, and the lone office guard, nodding off at the door, gave the building an abandoned, dispirited look.
The blind shopkeeper Shankar's grain store was next to the RPP office, its spacious airy interior displaying stacks of rice, daals, grain, spices and oils, as well as odds and ends like cigarettes, chocolates, biscuits, cheap dolls, plastic earrings and Chinese umbrellas. Next to Shankar's grain store was the radio and watch repair shop, a canvas stall dwarfed by a two-storey yellow house decorated with stucco pineapples. (The ostentation of the yellow house always prompted newcomers to guess: \'A former British Gurkha's house?') For its first two meetings the People's Party had gathered here, relying on the hospitality of homeowner Om Gurung. No such meeting had been held in the past few years, and the People's Party didn't even have an office in town.
Beyond Om Gurung's yellow house was a wood mill, and past that, the arid uncultivable plains which dried like dung as soon as the monsoon rains ended, giving Khaireni Tar its name: ashen flatlands.
Inconveniently for all the political parties, Khaireni Tar's Telecommunications Office was located on the north side of the highway, away from the bazaar. All day, political workers were seen scurrying across the highway to this one-room office to place STD trunk calls and telexes. Everyone knew that the operator was efficient at her task; they also knew that her supervisor listened in on conversations from his rented room above the office, where he spent half the day lolling in his bed with stained yellow sheets. People talked cautiously over the phone:
\'I'm calling about that matter.'
\'That one or the one before that?'
\'That one, that's the one I mean.'
\'Not the other one?'
\'No.'
A little distance away from the Telecommunications Office was Binita's teashop. Binita was a retiring woman who-everyone knew-had never recovered from the shock of her husband's death in a bus accident. When his mangled corpse had been brought home, the whole town had watched her change, almost before their eyes, from a brash youth to a recluse. The more conservative Chettri-Bahun families of the town shunned her for her unseemly decision to continue living alone, with only her little daughter for company till the arrival of her young cousin about six months back. But the more liberally inclined townspeople, and those who appreciated Binita's fragrant milk tea, tended to frequent her shop.
Binita's teashop served no alcohol, and it didn't attract men in search of raucous exchanges to pass the evenings with. Such men went to other places at the southern end of town, shabby bamboo-and-thatch stalls erected overnight by landless settlers from other districts. These settlers' backgrounds were sometimes hard to determine-some had dark southern faces but ethnic Gurung-Magar surnames, while others had rounded features but Chettri-Bahun caste names. They seemed to bring with them no past, and sometimes no qualms or strictures. Their radios were always on, their food was cheap and their alcohol strong. Their clients included government employees addicted to card games, bus and truck drivers staying the night, unemployed men, local hooligans, youths who hadn't made it into the army, and boys just out of school. In these dens talk now veered to the elections:
\'Let's see who wins this time.'
\'It's UML's turn.'
\'Congress won't give up.'
\'Doesn't have a choice.'
\'Did you hear about the People's Party? That party-remember?-of intellectuals.'
\'Eh them. Are they fielding a candidate?'
\'Giridhar Adhikari-the son of Baburam Adhikari.'
\'Hah, he'll never win.'
In his house in the hills north of town, the chairman of the People's Party district committee, Giridhar Adhikari, knew that the bazaar was whispering about him, laughing, saying, have you heard, did you know-insinuating, spreading rumours, implying that he'd been fired from the bank due to incompetence, and he deserved it, he wasn't capable . . . There was no place for him in the world. Giridhar's Khaireni Tar was an intimate one where everyone knew him and talked about him in demeaning ways, declaring him to be a hollow man. The town crowded him out of its space.
Years ago Giridhar had been dismissed from his position as bank manager. It wasn't his fault: there had been civil service reforms, and everyone who'd worked for more than twenty years had lost their jobs regardless of capability, regardless of qualification. It was a matter of regulation. It didn't reflect on his ability. For he'd been an excellent bank manager, hadn't he?
These past few years, Giridhar had begun to spend long days lost in the unsteady grounds of his mind, in cracks and crevices that led back past a day's memory, past a week's, a month's, a year's, to areas sown thick with catastrophe. Today he sat despondently on his front porch, looking out at the terraced rice fields below his house. The silver rains of the monsoon had drenched the town these last few months. The fields had turned a succulent green. Giridhar owned a plot of land at the bottom of the hill: its harvest was his only income now. Beyond that plot was the path into Khaireni Tar. He could make out the bazaar from here, a scraggly row of houses along the highway. His friend Om had invited him for dinner tonight. But he didn't feel like waiting till dusk. He wanted to be in the bazaar now, amid its stone and cement and cracked plaster, its spat-on walls and dark rooms, its shifting people, the new faces arriving on buses, telephone messages, the push of bodies, talk of the latest, men whispering-have you heard . . . But they never made room for him there.
Once, Giridhar used to oversee hundreds of thousands of rupees' worth of transactions. He used to know what happened in the power centres of the district: who was spending money for what, and how. He used to know. But now here he was. His days embarrassed him with their idleness. He spent all afternoon straying into the past and scrambling back to the present. He did not feel he had the courage to venture onto future grounds-ambitions, achievements-all too precarious to support him.
SYNOPSIS
The Tutor of History is an ambitious social saga, a compelling tale of idealism, love and alienation, set in contemporary Nepal caught between tradition and modernity. The events of the novel unfold against the backdrop of a campaign for parliamentary elections in the bustling roadside town of Khaireni Tar. At its heart the book is about four main characters: Giridhar Adhikari, the chairman of the People's Party's district committee, who suffers from a serious alcohol addiction and strange, violent manias; Rishi Parajuli, a lonely, under-employed bachelor and disillusioned communist who gives private tuitions in history to disinterested middle-class boys; Om Gurung, a former British Gurkha determined to bring love into every life in his hometown; and Binita Dahal, a reclusive young widow who runs a small tea shop and is careful not to demand of life more than the meagre pleasures it brings her. As the election campaign reaches its peak, the crisis in each character's life mounts, and the eventual rigging of the elections becomes a metaphor for the flawed, imperfect choices that ordinary people must make to get by in a world beyond their control. (Penguin)
