Paramendra Bhagat
July 8, 2002
DC: Summer 2002
Paramendra Bhagat
July 8, 2002
Toward the end of May I came to Terre Haute, Indiana, for the second time a jobless person. Six months of trucking came to an end, perhaps permanently, perhaps temporarily, and Lara's internship in DC crystallized after she had given up on it and gone home at the end of her school year. A wedding attended, Lara's uncle Charles met for the first time, I got to ride the Greyhound for free by accompanying her. At the Pittsburgh - "less bridges only to Venice" - station, we bumped into a recent Berea College graduate - small world - whose sister and mother, both Berea graduates, were in DC: weeks later we bumped into another group of Berea students, girls, while we were on our way away from the Caribbean festival and they were on their way there - small world - and we met that same group again on July 4th: "You must be following us!"
Many highways I had driven on in the previous months were crossed more passively, taking the landscape in, an occasional conversation with another passenger, grabbing a nap here, a nap there, checking on luggage, a lunch break. Countless weeks and breaks aside, we never had lived together by ourselves for any considerable period of time, day in, day out, week after week, and her trip to Australia in Fall and a possible trip to Thailand the following Spring gave impetus to being together for summer. Then we could look forward to being together again for December, and some of January. On the other hand, some debts have to be paid, some money saved for the planned South Asia trip next summer, possibly, some money sent for my brother and youngest sister's education in Kathmandu. Other than formless attempts at continuing work on a novel, a career forged, the future planned, or lived from one bend in the road to another.
And so we showed up at 3908 Baltimore Street in Kensington, Maryland, to be nicknamed Bamboo Cottage to rhyme with the Flower House in Lexington, Kentucky, where we spent time together for weekends during our first summer together, about a year back. The landlord Ed "The-bank-owns-the-house!" "MoonDancer" Downey, in his late 60s, is an entertainer at children's parties and a dance teacher for the county. "I've held 186 jobs in my life." Others describe him a child of the 60s; he says he is a child of the Depression. The house has a communal living sub-culture. You are supposed to cook two meals a month for everyone, work in and around the house for four hours a week.
Our first evening Ed and Lara went dumpster diving and brought back, among many things, food included, a fax machine. The Victorian House is homely, gives you a social base from which to make forays into the metro area. There is obvious interaction among the roommates.
And the first chance I got to call Kamal Rana Bhat of Baltimore fame, around a mid-night hour, he offered to drive right then to see us, along with his girl-friend Angie, and so we were up until the wee hours of the morning; he had brought some sweet-tasting beer for me, and the bitter beer for the rest of the crowd. Not long after he came to take Lara and me to his apartment, and we stayed overnight. He took us out for lunch at a South Indian restaurant in what is supposedly the richest county in the country. We also hung out at the Inner Harbor. And while we were idling on the hill, guess what I spotted in front of me across the watery landscape: the Domino Sugar factory. "I once picked up a load there," I promptly informed my buddy.
For another Friday, we went to see Kiran Sitoula, high school classmate and founding president of the high school alumni association in the U.S., at his workplace, the World Bank. We ended up at his apartment for a lavish Nepalese dinner and a meet with his parents whom I have known for over a decade, since his father briefly was posted in my district in Nepal at one point as a domestic intelligence official. But before that he took us to a DuPont Circle hotel where some of the Who's Who of Nepal's law enforcement establishment had been housed by the U.S. State Department: the Maoist insurgency is to be contained. It was the reunion of the Nepalese in the Americas a few weeks later when I was to meet Kiran again.
The think tank Lara worked for, Resources For the Future, on 1616 P Street NW, is "among the top ten of its kind in the world" according to her fellow intern, University of Delaware graduate student Kenji Takahashi from Japan. But she had hoped environmental activism and instead found herself dealing with genetically modified trees, productivity, and the bottom-line, a damper of sorts. The DuPont Circle location, though, was a plus. After you had gone to all the big buildings and historic sites, this was the part of town to be hanging out in.
I considered driving a taxi, dishwashing, over the road trucking again, driving dump trucks locally, serving tables - I even bought appropriate clothes at a thrift shop - and jobs to go with my college degree, possibly political work as a career in this most powerful city in the world. I considered baby-sitting. If it were not for the paperwork impediments - change your license to a local address, send us your driving record, blah, blah - I'd probably have gotten into a taxi on day two. Instead, after a few weeks, I decided I wanted to work on my novel full-time, while in DC and again back in Indiana in August. If I am lucky I will have a first draft and a complete first chapter within months that I can shop around with for a possible advance and resumed work on the novel to its completion, I thought. If not, I can always go to another job, possibly even go back on the road and see if I can travel to the six mainland states - Colorado, Nebraska, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont - I have yet to go to. I also ended up opting doing my own legal work for my application to extend my work authorization, and to get a green card, even though Lara's brother curly-hair Gabe has offered to lend some money. He sold some stocks.
We got to house-sit for someone at Lara's work for the final ten days in June, an American University location: finally we were actually living in D.C. proper. Towards the early end of that stay we were close to getting some DuPont Circle lodging for cheap for July, or another possible house-sitting stint for most of that month - we would have stayed at some youth hostel for the off days - but neither options bore fruit, and so it looked like it was Bamboo Cottage again for July, and then, after we had already written the checks, Lara found out a place, walking distance from her work, for cheap, a Howard University location. For the third time in a row, Lara had found a place for us to live. No more commuting: "Doors closing," "Doors Opening." From a predominantly white neighborhood, we moved to one predominantly black. Suddenly the streets were overflowing with people and louder. The Howard University library was close: that got me thrilled, even more so once I got there and saw the coolest iMacs ever.
One day Lara decided, or maybe her fellow interns suggested, or we spotted the Indian restaurant on Connecticut Avenue we would some day come back for a lunch buffet, as we did, and on my way to meet her and Kenji Takahashi, Amy Lamson, and Kit Rogers, I had about ten minutes to spare at the public library on Rhode Island Avenue and 7th Street, and I bought Steinbeck's The Pearl for 50 cents - that is how you become a classic - and got Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf for a re-read, for free, give-away books, as well a book on Zen.
4th of July beckoned when Lara felt "restless" at our townhouse around 1:30 in the afternoon. After an egg curry lunch, some Ben and Jerry icecream, and some cold water, some pepsi, we packed up some water, some mangoes, and left under an umbrella, making our way through the heat wave: the cold front from the Great Lakes was still a few days away according to the Post. We egged on to the performance by celebrated artists, broadcast live on PBS, by Capitol Hill where we stayed on for the 9:11 PM fireworks, to observe they were not necessarily more grand than the one in Terre Haute we attended last year with her sister Geney, and Geney's boyfriend Dustin. But then, after it was all over, and we started walking toward the Washington Monument, we realized we had watched the fireworks from a mile away. In Terre Haute last year, we were right underneath the happening in the sky.
I ended up ringing more than one wrong number before I finally got hold of Kiran Sitoula: I needed a ride to attend the high school reunion. Finally I got hold of him: "Let's meet at 4. I am busy. Dinesh will also be here." Dinesh Prasain, my roommate of two years, first in Kanchenjunga, and again in Gaurishankar at Budhanilkantha School, who had been popping up in my e-mail account, as several classmates spread all over kept everyone on the mailing list posted on his whereabouts in the country, as he navigated his two months in the U.S.: Virginia, West Virginia, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and now D.C. From a distance, as he approached the World Bank building - we later learned we had spent time on lawns on opposite sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, waiting for each other - it took me a moment to recognize him. His now black hair I remembered to have been brown.
Folks I had not met in decades in some cases, I met. Some I had not met in years, months, weeks. People from my high school batch that has given the alumni association its presidents both in the U.S. and in Nepal, at least for now, the senior batches, and scores of junior batches; very few couples. I felt grateful that some younger ones came to me and introduced themselves. The vast majority were in some technical field or another, a bunch of engineers and economists, it seemed.
Mostly I felt surrounded by these hordes of Nepalese none of whom I knew or who knew me, but there was no mistaking the vibrant ethnic pride that was in the air. I went back again Saturday evening with my cousin Bijay Raut - from Middlebury to Silicon Valley to the Mid-West and now on his way to D.C. - and Lara was with me this time, but the vibrancy was gone, and the conference was on its way to winding down. But then Bijay was the man of the day. Lara thoroughly enjoyed the experience of meeting my only relative on the continent. Bijay has had a renewed interest in our Eastern heritage, primarily spiritual. The day after we met we went to the Mall for some photo opportunities: we got into a discussion as to which the front of the White House was. I suggested it was the side on Pennsylvania Avenue. A security officer cleared the fog: "There is no front. There is a North Side, and there is a South Side."
I spent some somber time at the Lincoln Memorial before callig it a day. It had been a wonderful July 4 weekend.
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