Iih – The lone foot traveller from Nepal

    21-May-2022
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S Balakrishnan
Probably Mr Iih, the lone footloose traveler from Nepal, took Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry line “Ekla cholo re” as if penned with forethought keeping only Iih in mind. Because Iih has been travelling … travelling alone and traveling alone on foot! I am sure he was bitten by the travel bug, like the Hollywood superhero Spiderman, for he has been travelling since his 16th year.
This youth from Kathmandu has crisscrossed his own country to reach every nook and corner of that Himalayan Kingdom …oops! For a moment I was taken back to 1986 when I visited Nepal from Sikkim where I was posted. Nepal then was a Hindu Kingdom, the world’s only and the last Hindu Kingdom that was lost in the Red Revolution of Maoists and is now a democratic republic country. He was shocked that I completed the nine-day Nepal trip on a shoestring budget of 955 INR (1625.50 Nepali rupees). “What a different time !”  Iih repeatedly exclaimed, unable to believe my words. I showed him the expenditure statement of that trip that I had maintained and he took a snap of it with his mobile but he was still unconvinced. ‘Kathmandu Valley has changed so much that you will not recognize it’, he told me and showed a few shots of the sprawling city. It showed a conglomeration of multi-storeyed buildings all the way to the horizon. Because of the tough times during the revolution, people from the villages – both the rich and the poor - migrated to Kathmandu valley; caught between the army and the rebels, they all shifted to Kathmandu to safeguard their riches and for bare existence, respectively. So, now, the fields around Kathmandu have all turned into crowded living places, he narrated those troubled times.
Well, Iih was at our house in Chennai after a footloose travel in Sri Lanka. You might wonder if Iih as well walked over from Sri Lanka to India across the Sethu Bridge built by Lord Ram’s vanara sena (moneky army). Definitely he would have had not the Sethu Bridge submerged (as revealed by NASA’s satellite image; it is called Adam’s Bridge). He was to reach the previous evening but landed only the next morning. We were really worried because of the explosive situation in Sri Lanka due to economic crisis. But Iih explained that the situation there was almost normal and curfew has also been lifted; even though services and supplies are abnormally costlier but when converted into INR they seem normal for that situation. Curious to know more about that Nation we probed him like sleuths to gather as much information as possible.
He showed a few of his clicks of that beautiful island country which though I would never visit because of ill-treatment of the minority Tamil population there. The Tamil spoken there is quite different from that in Tamil Nadu, he said; with a laughter he added that for that matter even within Tamil Nadu State itself the dialect differed so much from district to district that, exhausted, he had given up learning Tamil !  Iih presented a pack of special Sri Lankan tea. Unfailingly we served him a cup of that aromatic tea the next morning.
We welcomed him with a cotton shawl (bombastically called ‘ponnadai’, i.e., golden shawl), similar to the ‘khada’ cloth piece in trans-Himalayan belt, including Nepal.
(To be contd)