The tea had gone cold and the frost upon the windowpane had started to melt. But Basudai remained lying on his bed. Wrapped inside a thick layer of blanket he was shivering. His wife, Kamala, had spent the entire night replacing wet towels on his forehead. Almost a week had passed since he’d been down with fever, and conditions were worsening every day. The antibiotic had run its course and the antipyretics had done nothing whatsoever to contain the temperature.
Basudai looked dishevelled. His face was wrinkled all over, and every time he tried to speak, his voice rattled. Thick phlegm would build up in his throat, and sputum would drool all over his face. Every now and then, he felt as if the entire ceiling might come down upon him, and eventually choke him to death. Part of him knew he was only hallucinating, but Basudai could not keep his thoughts straight. He was afraid of going to sleep. Every time he did so, he dreamt the same dream, a recurring nightmare, in which snakes came slithering out of eerie tombstones only to find and chase him.
As he was squirming in bed, Basudai heard footsteps outside his door. Kamala entered the room soon after. She was accompanied by a priest. The sight of the religious man irritated Basudai.
“Woman! Have you lost your mind?” he yelled at his wife. “How many times do I need to tell you that this is not a curse?”
“Well I can’t stand around doing nothing, can I? Even if you don’t believe in these things, I do,” she retorted.
“Guru Baa here will fix you dear,” she said to him, this time in an assuring manner.
Kamala went into the kitchen and brought out a large nanglo. Upon it, she dexterously arranged all the necessary puja samagri while the priest unfolded the package he had brought with him and carefully placed it alongside the other things. Basudai caught a glimpse of what was inside. A piece of black cotton cloth, about a metre in length, had been wrapped around what looked like a shaligram and a shankha.
Once everything had been arranged, the priest took out a grey clay-stone chalk and started drawing lines on the floor. An agnostic himself, Basudai couldn’t help but be amused by all this, in spite of his fever and his illness.
The priest spoke in a deep, raspy voice, “Where was the temple?”
Basudai interjected, “It wasn’t a temple. It was only a small stone engraved with a naaga near Dhobi Khola.” As he spoke, sputum sprayed out of him mouth, almost landing on the puja samagri.
“You keep quiet. You don’t know anything, referring to the naagadevata as a stone. God bless you,” Kamla screamed.
“Guru Baa. I had told him several times to leave his job, but he just wouldn’t listen to me. No one wanted to demolish that temple. He had to be the hero for some reason and take the lead.”
“Hmm…This seems to be a case of Kaal Sarpa Dasha,” the priest pondered. “This might even kill you,” he continued. “King Parikishit suffered from something similar in the Mahabharata.”
Kamala’s face turned white upon hearing these words. She began sobbing. Up until that point, Basudai had taken this entire curse explanation as something to laugh about, but when he heard what the priest said about Kaal Sarpa Dasha, he too felt cold inside.
Basudai worked in the municipality as a heavy equipment driver. He was a big man, and in very good health (until now). He had joined the municipality after leaving the army in the late 90s. Since returning home from a UN Peace Keeping Mission in Bosnia, he had saved enough money to start his own business. With the little gratuity and pension he got form from the army, he and his wife had established a little ‘fancy store’ at Maiti Devi Chowk. The sedentary life of a shop manager had bored Basudai soon enough though, and with referral from a local politician, he’d gotten a job at the municipality despite his wife’s disapproval. Basudai took pride in his work, especially since most of his colleagues from the army were now working as door men in one or the other college around Kathmandu.
Kamala, on the other hand, hated her husband’s new job. Every evening, Basudai would come home drenched in sweat, his face, smeared with dirt. What was more, he’d taken up drinking lately, and Kamala secretly wished that her husband would resign.
Things had turned from bad to worse for Kamala when the Kathmandu Metropolitan began its road expansion project. Her husband seldom returned on time after that, and was always drunk when he finally got home. Every day, she heard news of scuffles between local settlers and the police, and her mind could find no peace. Basudai, meanwhile, quite enjoyed the project. Every day, he sat at the helm of his 1968 Caterpillar 824 wheel dozer and steered it menacingly among throngs of protestors, and to their dismay, bulldozed all dwellings the government had decreed to be encroachments. In the process, he felt a high, an adrenaline rush, akin to the one he’d felt when carrying assault weapons meant to protect Bosnian refugees from the Yugoslav People’s Army during the Balkan war.
It had been around nine months since the expansion work had started, and except for a few minor incidents, everything was going on as planned. However, a fortnight ago, while clearing slums along the bank of the Dhobi Khola near Bijuli Bazar, work had stalled. None of the labourers wanted to continue the task at hand, and were all standing huddled together, confused. Upon enquiring, Basudai learnt that there sat a four-foot temple of the Kaalinaaga on a stretch of pavement that was to be demolished. All the locals believed the Kaalinaaga to have divini power, and so none of the labourers wanted to go ahead and destroy the monument. Besides, it was Monday, a particularly auspicious day for Naaga worship, and everyone was certain that whoever dared destroy the temple would be forever cursed. Basudai had scoffed at the superstition.
There used to be a time when Basudai too used to be a staunch believer. He would chant the Gayatri Mantra everyday and visit his local temples. The war had changed everything. The perils of the Serbian massacre and the mass graves of innocent Bosnian children killed as part of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ had deeply shaken his faith. “How can god allow such atrocity among human beings?” he had questioned himself, and since then, had lost his religion. And so it was that on that particular Monday, Basudai pushed his machine into the front line and without so much as a flinch, pulled the lever and dropped the boulder. The temple that had stood there only a moment before had been reduced to a pile of debris.
“You have committed great sacrilege. You’ll die a tortuous death,” an elderly man had yelled. Everyone in the crowd had believed that Basudai’s days were numbered.
“Well old man you’ll certainly die before me,” Basudai had retorted.
Even his peers had been taken aback by his irreverence. They were all concerned about the possible curse. But Basudai had simply shrugged it all off.
Now, lying in bed listening to the priest, and watching all these rituals unfold in front of him, Basudai began having second thoughts. He remembered being cursed once before, during the mission, when nights were cold and lands covered by thick permafrost. He used to frequent Miloska quite often then, a red-haired prostitute known for the carnal pleasures she afforded men in those days. Everyone in the infantry used to visit her. They’d pay her at the end of the month, right after their paychecks arrived. Miloshka used to keep close tabs on all her clientele, and Basudai and a few of his friends were always due.
The day he left the Balkans, he still owed her more than a thousand dirhams. He could hear her cursing his returning convoy. “Djubrejedno!” she had said in her own dialect. “Rot in hell!”
In reply, the army men had simply jeered at her. “If the curse of a poor widow who made her living as a prostitute had not come true, then how might the destruction of an inanimate stone object be a harbinger?” Basudai tried to reason.
The priest and his wife had already started a small bonfire inside the room by then. Upon the priest’s instructions, Kamala was pouring butter, ghee and honey to the fire. The wet coal mixed with briquette emitted a sooty flame, and in a little while the entire room was filled with thick smoke. As the smoke built up, Basudai, who was already having trouble breathing, began choking. In want of oxygen, he suddenly turned pale and fainted. Seeing this Kamala let out a wild scream, and both the priest and she abandoned their puja and called for an ambulance.
After being rushed to the hospital, Basudai was immediately admitted into the intensive care unit. Meanwhile, Kamala pleaded to the doctor in charge to cure her husband, and kept praying to god that his curse be dispelled.
After carefully going through his file the doctor said, “Nurse, prepare a dose of Penicillin. What we have is a severe case of syphilis. Another idiot who didn’t use a condom.”
- Dipesh Karki
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