Miracles Happen

My six years old son was accumulating his playthings in the waiting room, which I had been watching passionately. The television had been running aside, BBC News, nobody of us had been really paying attention to it, aimlessly. Asim had lost a brick, maybe, that he was unable to complete the plastic house with the bricks I had bought for him more than a month ago. I was passing my instructions, I had no idea myself, to help him accomplish his little task. Furthermore, we heard this on TV - “Sarbari Astabakra from Nepal won the Nobel prize for literature for his book Miracles Happen….”

I just noticed the word “Nepal”, ceasing my involvement with my son, and turned towards the TV, to know what the Nobel prize had to do with Nepal.  A guy from Nepal had actually won the Nobel prize. Really? Incredible.

“Oh My God!”

“What happened, papa?” With curiosity at my expressions, Asim solicited.

What would I tell him? Did he even know what the Nobel prize had been?

“A Nepali has won the Nobel prize for literature. Do you know what that is?”

“Of course, isn’t that the greatest prize awarded for writings?”

“How do you know?” I responded with surprise.

“Come on, pop! We study that at school.”

“Oh!” I could make sense of it now.

 

Both of us focused on the television to find out who Mr Astabakra was and his identity. This name, a Sanskrit word representing a Vedic saint with a distorted body because of eight bends, did not even sound Nepali. Christiane Amanpour, the chief anchor, still was sticking to the award report. Nevertheless, she hardly said anything about this person but his work. CNN did not even show the picture of Astabakra, and this must be a pseudo name of a real author. “Nothing has been revealed about the author yet but his nationality”, Amanpour ended the topic.

 

I googled his name, and nothing came out except the news. I observed the news, television, print, and online, as per my curiosity to know about this Nobel prize laureate for a few days that followed. However, that did not help.

 

Two weeks after the news, Asim ran to me and gushed, “Papa, this is it.” He had browsed a picture on his Ipad.

“Who is he?” I enquired.

“Sarbari Astabakra”.

“Really? How did you find it?”

“The prime minister tweeted it with a congratulatory message.”

“Do you use Twitter too?”

“I was just scrolling your account, paa.”

 

I glanced at the picture, Mr Sarbari Astabakra. A man in his mid forty, big dreads and beards like a sage, and spectacles in his dark sunken eyes hardly made him appear an author. I experienced Deja vu, and it was a familiar face. Did I know him? Maybe. I could not recall where I had seen him before.

 

“Do you know him, papa?” tendered Asim.

“I can’t say. But I bet I know him”, I responded.

“I have seen him too”, he smiled.

“Where?”

“In our photo album. The old one.” Despite the young age, Asim was brilliant, at least more than I was. He rushed to the drawer, pulled out an old photo album and quickly turned it into a group photo. It was taken on the last day of my college at the University. Asim pointed his finger at the middle row third from the right side and exclaimed, “Here he is! Isn’t he Mr Astabakra?”

“He is”, I sighed, “but his name is Sandarva. Sandarva Lama from Dolpa. How the hell did he become Sarbari Astabakra?” A chilled air passed through my forehead, which took me almost 22 years earlier, in those University days.

 

A crowd had gathered at the notice board for the entrance exam result that had been published a bit earlier. Two hundred and sixty-two students had competed for two hundred seats, a fair competition. The main reason students would prefer colleges rather than the University was its day classes. A master’s level student generally needed a job to survive in Kathmandu, and day classes would take the prime time for a job. Most of the students there were from middle class or even lower-class families. There had been several alternatives for people with money, and they could go to study abroad or enrol themselves within the expensive colleges within the country. Only the University had been the cheapest for those students who would not need a job to manage their expenses.

 

I was among the top thirty, therefore happy too. The top thirty students from the entrance result were supposed to get a $50 worth scholarship from the entire semester fee of $150. Almost everyone was happy with the result as even the sixty-two students who had not been selected in the University could choose its constituent campuses. Nevertheless, one guy with dark, medium-length wavy hair, a red checked shirt, old jeans, and slippers in his feet seemed restless. He was rushing in and out of the administrative building, maybe, seeking somebody to pose some of his queries.

 

He drew our attention as he appeared strange to us, me and Himal. Later, we heard him complaining to the administrative officer, “If I have to choose the constitutive campus over the University, why would I come to Kathmandu? I would rather join Dhaulagiri Multiple Campus at Baglung or Prithivinarayan Campus at Pokhara. They are near to my village, Mukot”. He was the 201st student on the list, which disqualified him from enrolling in the University against his expectations.

 

We had five sections with 40 students in each, and I came to be in section B. Miraculously, the guy from Dolpa, Sandarva, too, was in the same section. Someone had left the merit list, and therefore he got the chance to enrol. Nobody really noticed him until one day, the day he had a great debate with Professor Subedi.

 

Professor Subedi had been running the discussion on H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. "This novel embraces the colonialist attitude and actually justifies the European's capture of the African countries. The white men, with various excuses, robbed the year's old treasures preserved by native Africans. They said it was their burden, white man's burden, to educate and civilize the ethnic group of South Africa".

"But Professor," Sandarva interrupted, "how can we generalize the entire Europeans with the acts of some mere explorers?"

"That's symbolic," said Dr Subedi, "many scholars have critiqued this novel for its colonialist attitude".

"But they might have made a mistake. I think we should not put the whole Europeans in a single basket of explanation. Isn't it the same attitude as the people who regard all Asians and Africans to be uncivilized? We are flipping the coin, not balancing it, professor". This response baffled Dr Subedi for a while. We did not get whether he made any sense of Sandarva's response or not. However, he was indignant when he bellowed, "Shut up! You are not that smart to understand these things. They are way more complicated than you think. Simply get out of my class! Go out!" We were speechless. Sandarva silently moved out.

 

There were rumours in our class that Sandarva would surely fail Dr Subedi's subject. Forty percent of the internal assessment were purely dependent on the Professor's grace; however, there had been several titles for the assessment- Presentation, Attendance, Research Paper, and Classroom Interaction. We suggested to him, time and often, to remain silent in the class, which he never obeyed. Occasionally, he would have such arguments with professors, of which some of them would take it emphatically, some would regard that as an insult.

 

Sandarva was not intelligent in a traditional way, like recalling the things exactly as the teacher had taught and scoring good grades, but in different ways. He would think innovatively, with different perspectives, and liked to challenge the existing thought system. The books had taught us to do the same things which we studied and scored good marks writing the same in the exam, but he practised in real life. We would memorize others' ideas, and he would innovate his own. Nevertheless, in the theoretical exam, he had poor scores. He hardly passed the first semester.

 

It was not because of Dr Subedi's assessment, and in fact, he had got good grades in his subject. Neither was it because of the internal assessment nor for his frequent arguments with professors. It was all for his poor performance in the written exam. Once I asked him, "How do you come to get such low grades in your finals, Sandarva?" "I studied all my life in the government school. I cannot express in English what I think inside. That's all," he responded. I offered him a couple of suggestions to improve his English.

"Thanks! I will do my best this semester," he assured me.

 

Eventually, we became good friends, but not the best ones. I was still befriended with Himal, shared a room and a lot of secrets with him. Furthermore, at the university, Sumita, my girlfriend, would be with me all the time. Sumita, too, had been in the same section and everyone in the class was well aware of our love. I did not have many talks with Sandarva, but sometimes we shared the same table at the canteen.

"Where are you from, Sandarva?" I informally asked him.

"Chharka Tangsong rural municipality. It's in Dolpa," he replied.

"It must be a beautiful place. What do your parents do there?"

"It is. By the way, I don't have parents. I am my own parents," he giggled. This response made me more curious.

"Why? What happened to them?" I posed another question.

"To whom? My parents? I do not know. I don't remember. I do remember my grandmother, and she too died of illness when I was in grade 9," he was calm while saying this.

"How do you manage all the expenses then, to study, to live ?"

"I work," he remarked. He did not show much interest in participating in my interview anymore.

 

One late evening, I saw him selling vegetables in the street down to Gumba road along with several other street vendors. I tried to talk to him, but he simply ignored me as he had been busy dealing with the customers. "Oh! This is the work he does," I told myself. Furthermore, it did not surprise me much. What surprised me most was when we met him working as a gatekeeper at the Lord of Drinks, a nightclub at Thamel, Kathmandu. We had been there on the occasion of Sumita's birthday. Himal and two more of our friends had joined us. We were shocked to see Sandarva at the gate.

"What are you doing here?" I babbled.

"I work here," he stuttered as if he was suddenly found guilty of something.

"Don't you sell vegetables?" It was Himal this time.

"I do many things," he was very comfortable saying this.

"Why are you working so hard?"

"I am planning to buy a farm at Dolpa," he explained his plans.

 

We had the party that night and returned from there so late. It was four in the morning. We did not find Sandarva at the gate, and probably, he had left beforehand. It was too early to return to the homes; therefore, I proposed to the others to spend time on the university premises. Five of us entered the university in a taxi, a hired one. We entered the garden in front of the clock building below the fence as the gates were locked. At the verandah of the clock building, it was something moving. It scared us to hell at first, but we went closer after we realized it was a human. To our surprise, it was the same guy, Sandarva, sleeping under a shabby blanket there.

"Oh, hello!" we stirred him up. With a baffled and dizzy look, he responded to us.

"What are you doing here?" It took a bit of time for him to realize that it was not a dream.

"We just trespassed, after returning from the club," I replied, "do you always sleep here?"

"I sleep wherever I get space," he uttered without much explanation.

"Don't you have a room on a lease?"

"No, it's so expensive here in Kathmandu. I just have two semesters left. After that, I will be returning to my home town. Why would I be spending so much money on a room where I would scarcely be spending time?" he elaborated. All of this amazed us and left us speechless.

 

One day during the break, I asked Sandarva about his aim in life. "You said you wanted to buy a farm and rear ruminants. So, what's the purpose of studying? What do you wish to achieve through this Sandarva?"

"I am not studying to make money or to have a decent job. I just want to help the people like me in my village, making their lives a bit easier. Besides, it gives me satisfaction. It helps me know how the rest of the world thinks," he responded wisely, "I want to write a book too, namely Miracles Happen, to inspire lonely people like me". He had no family to accompany him like us. He had no big dreams like us, but he desired extraordinarily, as none of us would.

 

In the last two semesters, he did terrific except for his thesis work. In the theoretical exams, he scored at least an A-minus in all subjects. However, the department rejected his thesis dissertation three times. Most of us had graduated, but he was still pursuing his research work for the following three years. I met him at the University, waiting for a professor, after two and half years as I have been there to enrol myself in PhD.

"I cannot believe you are still here at University. Aren't you supposed to accomplish your degree yet?" I catechized him.

He smiled and murmured, "they did not like my idea. Now, I am doing what they like."

"Why? What happened?"

"At first, I wanted to research on the miracles that happen in people's lives because of their thoughts. My thesis guide simply rejected it, saying it was not scholarly enough after it was fully done. I had to change the topic. This time I tried to work on the gaps of Derrida's deconstructionism. My professor again denied this idea saying there are no cons in deconstructionism," he whispered.

"What are you planning to do next then?"

"I think I will analyze a novel like everyone else," he declared, "but I have no regrets about what I have done earlier".

"I will work more on the first idea to develop it in a book. I will name it Miracles Happen, that will change people's thoughts and also lives," he continued, "I am just trying to elapse this time".

"Who is your thesis guide?" I asked eagerly.

"Dr Subedi", he retorted wittingly.

 

"That was the last time I have ever seen Sandarva. I have no idea if Sarbari Astabakra and Sandarva have been the same person till now. I knew this guy will achieve something great". My son, Asim, was listening to me attentively.

"Oh, that means you are the best friend of a Nobel Prize winner, aren't you?" he grilled.

"Kind of," I answered.