New fiction by Prabin Moktan…

AMALA AND THE WORM
Nabin Limbu lead as normal an existence as any 23 year old freelance DTP professional who dreamed of landing a government job before he crossed the age limit for such luxury. He did not smoke but occasionally hung out with his friends to binge-drink with them at the neighbourhood chaang joint run by amala, a middle-aged Tibetan hag who had come to Kalimpong during the early sixties.

This woman had one daughter who was majoring in American studies from a university in the US and a son somewhere in Dharamsala with His Holiness’s government in exile. Both were acutely embarrassed by their mother’s present vocation but they could do little to convince Tshering Nima to take up an alternative career. Her daughter a pragmatic girl who valued the entrepreneurial skills of her people suggested that she sell noodles while her son would rather have her live a quiet religious life spent counting her 108-beaded rosary. But Tshering Nima would have none of it. She had struggled all her life and she would not suffer these upstarts to tell her what to do. So she religiously got up at five every morning to visit the beef stalls to fetch her daily quota of ox-tail bones, lungs and a general assortment of other bovine appendages from which she could conjure up a tasty side dish for Nabin Limbu and company.

Nabin loved the spongy lung curry that went down so well with Hit beer. Tshering Nima had a little secret up her sleeve as far as the beef lung was concerned. The dish that she prepared was like no other and Nabin Limbu and his friends would feel a nagging incompleteness in their lives if they stayed away from it for more than three days. The lung curry did not cost much and was perfect for the conscience- whatever guilt they felt in squandering their money on beer and chaang was considerably allayed by the protein rich nourishment that they imbibed from Tshering Nima’s delectable lung fries.

Today once again Nabin Limbu found himself being drawn by an inexorable force towards amala’s establishment. This time however the call was not so inexplicable. He knew exactly why he was moving with such great sense of purpose towards amala’s bedroom that also served as a makeshift pub and prayer room. The simple reason was, he had failed the primary teacher’s exam for the third time in a row and although he was no escapist he really needed the consolation that a bottle of Hit and a plate of lung curry would provide before he drowned in that inevitable avalanche of self pity that was slowly building up somewhere inside him. He had in his pocket about a hundred rupees that he had earned from a designing job for a local daily. The rest depended on amala’s mood.
Amala seemed a little surprised to see Nabin at 10 in the morning but she kept it to herself and instead asked him what he wanted. Nabin told her that he needed the usual and then sat on the wooden bench quietly contemplating the prayer wheel that rotated in the thermals of the butter lamp that flickered obsequiously before the scarfed idol of Buddha. He could sense that he was alone and this realisation made him jealous of all the lucky folks at the government offices, folks who would be at this very juncture, pushing files, typing letters, sipping tea and engaging in sundry other useful acts that would guarantee them the reassuring comfort of a salary at the end of every month. It was too bad that in the greater scheme of things he was out of this loop of welfare and would remain so if he kept failing in these little exams that were meant to test whether he was good enough to teach something, anything, to kids of class one or lower. The more he thought about it the lesser sense it made and he had almost reached the breaking point of this cognitive endeavour when salvation arrived in a bottle of Hit beer and a plate full of lung fry. He took a sip of the beer and then nibbled stingily at a tiny morsel of the fry. It tasted just divine and he then realised just what he had been missing. All that negative emotion began to simply melt away. He was once again filled to the brim with a brave confidence that all was not lost and that his time would yet come. Amala sensing that Nabin had regained a measure of good humour decided to launch her own little investigation into the probable causes of his early morning melancholy. Nabin rudely interrupted by the down to earth nature of amala’s query opened his heart out to her. Somewhere in his mind, fogged by the potent vapours of that noxious fluid, he reasoned that amala was genuinely empathising with his predicament and that she would really do something for him, like ask her daughter to take him to America or something as wonderful. She was after all his own age and maybe there were things written in his karma that promised him rewards far greater than the government job that he so desperately sought. Amala indeed empathised but in a manner different than what Nabin expected in his inebriated optimism. Amala wished the best for Nabin but knew that he was too much of a loser. A sense of overpowering pity welled up in her bosom and she felt she that she had to do something for him. It had to be something more compelling and effective than the lung curry which so many thought was the pinnacle of her culinary accomplishments.

And she knew what exactly it was that Nabin needed.

Nabin’s hurt meanwhile had turned a full circle and that artificial high that the beer had generated was now slowly giving way to a quiet, simmering, nasty, indignation that he felt not just towards the world and the government and his life but more immediately towards amala who stood there in front of him in that confident, rich pose of hers with her good life, so successful, so carnivorous and commercial. His money was now running out and it would need just one indiscreet remark on amala’s part to let his latent rage spill out in one violent fit that his limbu blood made him genetically capable of. Amala understanding everything about what was going on inside Nabin Limbu quietly strode into her kitchen and opened the lid of one of the giant vessels in which she kept her stock of chaang. She unfolded the blue polythene that was responsible for keeping the stuff airtight and with a pair of pincers took out a wriggling pair of maggots that had gorged themselves on that over-fermented mixture of millet and wheat and were now tumescent and heavy with the richness of white maggoty protein. She put them inside a glass full of water and watched them sink in a short white cloudy burst of disintegrating worminess. Tshering Nima then stirred the organisms so that they were completely subsumed into that swirling syrup of turbid potency.

Nabin Limbu was swimming in a confused, blurred fluid of emotions that he could barely comprehend, when amala served him that wormy concoction with such a sweet, innocent beatific smile on her face that the last thing that he remembered as he slumped on the table was a fuzzy image of her countenance perfectly at peace with itself. Nabin Limbu, DTP professional, who dreamt of a government job, quietly disengaged himself from consciousness and enjoyed at the courtesy of an empathising amala a few hours of a wormy nirvana that was to say the least very organic and spiritual.