Morning Walk- Dolpa

Morning Walk-Dolpa

"Grandfather, take out one of your eyes." The command was imperious and insistent: its deliverer was a tousle-haired nine-year-old Nepali boy, with authority well beyond his years, clearly leader of the cluster of kids with him. Surrender or walk on regardless? I was two hours from home and not quite halfway round one of the circuits of my morning walks. I looked at them, all with eyes button bright and overflowing enthusiasm: how many other midoctogenarians would be similarly challenged? I suppose the morning-walk habit started when I was in Laos, living alone. On high days and holidays I would take my dog, Singha, my pedometer showing me that I walked between twenty-one and twenty-eight miles. In my early days I would take language cards and I would ask people I met a question from the top word in the pile. They would be surprised to be asked if they caught crabs in the swamp or what noise their buffalo made when scratched. I was only accepted without hostility or suspicion when people learnt I was neither French nor American but a 'khon Añgit', an Englishman. I met Pathet Lao patrols as I ranged far and wide. After the Communists had taken over, every morning, everywhere, the ritual of political indoctrination would take place. One Saturday morning, early, miles out 'in the sticks' and still a bit chilly, I saw an armed group of young Pathet Lao soldiers - looking for all the world like our Gurkhas as to visage - sitting cross-legged in a circle in a harvested rice field on the outskirts of the village they were garrisoning, being lectured by a hard-faced 'cadre'. They were directly in the line I was taking. I did not deviate but kept on towards them. I talked to Singha, in Nepali, telling him not to chase the goats or the pigs. The soldiers saw me coming, then heard a strange language. The cadre stopped talking, turned and stared at me, as did the soldiers, scowling severely. I sensed tension in the air but, having committed myself, chose to ignore it. I walked into the centre of the group and told the dog to sit, give me one paw and then the other. He obliged me. In Lao I said to the group, "That's discipline. That's how you won the war. Without it that's how you'll lose the peace."I pointed to Singha. "You can call him the 'little soldier' but don't call me the 'big dog'."

Blank amazement greeted this utterly unexpected stricture. Nothing existed in the book of rules for such behaviour that was neither hostile nor rude, merely eccentric. I wobbled my hands and knees, then my eyebrows and ears, asking the soldiers if they could. They burst out laughing, all semblance of severity gone. I put my arm round the shoulders of the cadre, a Vietnamese, my hand on his head and made a squeaking noise with my mouth. He gave a start but stayed silent. Such an occurrence was evidently not yet a common experience. "You've got a mouse in your head," I said sympathetically and inanely. "I hope it doesn't hurt. And you teach politics?" By then I had gone as far as I dared so, telling the dog to follow me, turned and left without looking behind. For a brief moment I felt it mighty cold on the back of my neck. I never heard anything about that trivial, unnecessary and entirely unrehearsed incident. Once I had started living in Pokhara, in 1986, I only started walking after we began to keep dogs. With dogs, the morning walk habit set in really properly. The dogs loved it: we had two. Three neighbours' dogs joined us to make five and the most I ever had trailing behind me was seven. 'Morning walk', along with 'half brain' and 'love marriage' are Nepali neologisms - 'paper wedding', to aid foreigners' citizenship process, is another, fairly new one. No, I will not put words into your mouth by conflating the first two. By now I have, on a conservative estimation, walked over a hundred thousand kilometers, more than three times round the world at the equator. It was on one of our earlier walks when Buddhiman and I were wondering how much or how little the countryside had changed in the past five hundred years did the idea of historical novel writing occur to me. When I was struggling with any passage in the book I was currently writing, for instance when I had nearly had the hero killed halfway through, I felt I had to have him rescued even though the scene I had set did not allow it. 'Winking little thoughts into my toddle cup', unquote Lolita, I would drift for two or three hours mulling over a number of possible scenarios. Then suddenly, bingo, an answer would come. On one walk in an unusual place in my early days I was called, rather rudely, by some schoolboys.4 I was, as normal, wearing shorts and traditional Nepali headgear. I did not answer them. I was chi-hiked again and did not answer. I then heard an interesting comment from one of the boys. 'I thought he was a foreigner but he must be a Nepali because he refuses to talk to us.' Twice I have limped back to the house bitten and bleeding, once when attacked, from either side, by two dogs and once when I found myself in the middle of our dog and a neighbor’s fighting: anti-rabies jabs both times. "Grandfather, you haven't been listening. Take one of your eyes out." … and, by sleight of hand and a popping noise made with my tongue, the mission is completed to hoots of wonderful laughter from some and a look almost of reverence from others.
source:-khukuri_2011