Australian Dream of a Cabby

It is already past lunchtime when we reach the last car wash along the Thimphu-Babesa highway. After failing to find an empty car wash at Olarongchu, we head south along the expressway, peering into one car wash after another. There are about a dozen on the left side of the highway, but all are occupied and busy.

My co-brother decides to leave his car at the service centre and go home for lunch. ‘Bhai, please wash my car and park it properly. I will come and collect it by 3:00 pm’, he says, handing over the key of his Ford Ecosport to a burly boy with a squint in his left eye.

After we leave the car wash, we realize that we are a good five kilometers away from home. With no conveyance.  ‘No problem’, I said. ‘We will find plenty of taxis from here’.

We don’t have to wait long. A grey Suzuki WagonR with a young driver pulls up and looks at us expectantly. We are on the wrong side of the expressway, with a road divider in between. ‘But we want to go to Changedaphu’, said my co-brother, suggesting to the cabbie that we have to turnaround.

‘Las la’, he retorts in the usual politeness of Bhutanese cabbies. ‘But where is Changedaphu?’ he asks.

‘Kala Bazaar, near Azhi Building’, I jump in. The driver nods.

He doesn’t know Changedaphu, but knows Kala Bazar.  A certain part of Thimphu, above the Druk School Junction and leading towards Rinchen High School is popularly known as ‘Kala Bazar’. The moniker has its roots in the low shacks roofed with flattened bitumen drums occupied by daily wage workers from both within and outside the country. That was in the 70s to early 90s, but the name stuck.

My co-brother and I enter the cab. He gets into the back seat. As the paying passenger, I get into the front seat and face the driver. The taxi identity card issued by RSTA betrays some of his personal details. His name is Sangay Tshering. He lives in Dechencholing, a suburb of Thimphu. Physically, Sangay looks like an average Bhutanese cabbie. Slightly unkempt hair and mildly shabby. He has a set of brownish denture. Remnant of red ‘doma’ (doma, known as paan in the Indian sub-continent, is a potent mixture of areca nut and betel leaf with a dash of lime, chewed for its mild kick)  juice is drying up on the far corner of his small mouth. He doesn’t smile.

As it is a fairly long drive, we soon start chatting up. It begins with my co-brother observing, ‘your car is wobbling a bit. Either your tyres are too full or need to be refilled’, he opines. Sangay’s forehead squirms. There is silence for about a minute. Then Sangay decides to be a sport.

‘Perhaps, it is because my car is old’, he says. Then he shares that his cab is about eight years old. He bought a second hand cab.

Then I enquire, ‘business must be good?’

‘Well, it is only enough for rolling, sir’, he said. Sangay doesn’t mean that he uses the money he makes to roll around. He means that the money helps him make a decent living, but not too much to save.

‘I have been in this for six months only.  Getting a job is difficult these days, sir’, he continues.  

‘How far have you studied’, I ask. For a change, he ups his narrow shoulders and responds in a louder voice, ‘I am a university graduate’.

Sangay completed B.Com from the University of Bangalore a year ago. After failing to get a government job that he had always dreamed of, he decided to run a taxi.

‘I know it is very difficult. But doing a business is always better’, I comfort him. Then I look at him enquiringly. He understands my unspoken question.

‘If this doesn’t work, I am thinking of going to a third country for job’.

‘Dubai?’ I ask, perhaps undermining his intentions.

 ‘No, Australia, sir’, he responds.

‘But, I believe it is better to go to Australia with a partner. One studies (or pretends to do so), while the other works and earns’, I offer him the common refrain offered to wannabe Aussies.  

‘My wife is in Samtse’, Sangay informs us.

Sangay is married. His wife is completing her B.Ed from the Samtse College of Education. He tells us that they are already planning to apply for Australian study visa.

The ride from the car wash to near the Azhi building, Kala Bazar takes us about fifteen minutes. As the cab halts, I pay him his fare of Nu. 160.

‘All the best, brother’, my co-brother and I wish him well.

I know I have my story for the day!

Autobiography of a Pothole

Greetings from the depth of the ill-conceived, badly designed and poorly constructed roads of Bhutan. I am a pothole – that’s my family name. Our first names are usually, ‘small’, ‘big’, ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’. I am a Bhutanese pothole and live on the roads of Thimphu.

I hear that I have first and second cousins spread around the world. Indeed, one of my friends was recently given the moniker ‘Maruti Pothole’ because onetime an entire Maruti Car disappeared in it. But that is on a road between Gelephu and Samtaibari in India. Maruti and I are not related. We are simply good neighbourly potholes!

I was born a week after the corrupt, lazy and inefficient contractor completed the road. I am the child of an illegal marriage that takes place on a regular basis between corrupt municipal officials and the equally corrupt contractors and their workers. Depending on the thickness of the tarmac, soil conditions and presence of water seepage, it takes up to a month for me to mature. On the roads of Thimphu City, I am beginning to grow and proliferate pretty fast thanks to the connivance of contractors and the damn-care attitude of municipal officials.

People do not notice me unless I am bang in the middle of a road. If I am on the side of the road, they avoid me with mere twists of the steering wheel of their cars. Life as a pothole is exciting as well as tough. It feels nice when it rains and I get filled up. Each time a car passes by when I am full, water is splashed on it creating music. I like those moments. Life is tough in winter, when it is dry. I cough a lot and blow up dust from my guts. However, once I have my children around me, it is hard for drivers to avoid us altogether. They slow down and pass by gently caressing us and cursing the contractors and municipal officials. Every day, hordes of cars drive over me. As I get older they hate me and curse me with their choicest of words!  ‘Jedha’, ‘Saala’, are some of the words I hear every day, depending on the linguistic capacity of drivers. I am not sure who they are cursing, me or my parents!

In case you have not seen a pothole!

My maternal uncles used to live on the ring road below Druk School and Pelkhil Losel School. Unfortunately, one day a dark automobile with tar and gravel came by. With the machines came equally dark people covered in bitumen. They first washed and cleaned my uncles with hard and soft brooms. Then they aired them. My uncles were excited to get some fresh air, for it was quite difficult for them to breathe deep down there. They didn’t know that the black team was up to something sinister. Afterwards, they filled my uncles up with soil and gravel and applied heated bitumen on top. My uncles took their last breaths when a heavy road roller walked over them. I believe all my uncles on the ring road are dead now.

My paternal uncles live on the road below the Changangkha Lhakhang. They are blessed by the deities living in the Lhakhang, for they remain always healthy. Indeed, my eldest uncle there is said to be more than two years old. He has many children and grandchildren in the area.

Facebook tells me that in some countries people are so frustrated that they plant flowers in the potholes. Some even fish in them! I envy those potholes; they must look beautiful.

I have heard that the municipality has started covering and killing potholes in Thimphu. However, it will not be easy for them. We will fight back. As long as my parents (the contractors and municipal officials) continue to mate and make love, we will reproduce. Perhaps, in another road, another town, but we will be born again. My own wish is to be reborn as the incarnate of my Ring Road Uncle, somewhere on the recently inaugurated Damchu Bypass. I am sure my parents will make love there too!

As a pothole, I am pretty happy to be born in the land of GNH. Or at least I pretend to be so; potholes always pretend here. So much so that we have convinced some ill-looking foreigners that potholes are actually good for everyone’s wellbeing and happiness. That it is sinful to remove potholes as they are full of sentient beings!

However, given the constant cursing I receive from drivers and passersby, I am afraid my soul will not achieve nirvana. I want to renounce worldly desires. I hope the Municipality and the Contractors will divorce from their active unhealthy relationship soon and stop producing the likes of me on Thimphu roads.  Maybe, the Government will one day neuter the contractors and municipal officials to render them sterile!

Until the next bump!

The Sounds of Inhumanity

The sound of

Water taps running dry

In homes around the world

Of empty jerry cans

Dancing in the wind.

The sound of

Drivers ploughing down pedestrians

As if it is a sport

Of wails of the survivors

Wrenching our hearts.

The sound of
Refugees drifting in high seas
For a crime not done
Of newborns sucking on dead moms
Where is humanity gone?

The sound of

A migrant child

Snatched like a chicken

Separated from his mother

Running our eyes dry.


The sound of

Duplicity

Of damn-care attitude 

The loudness in intolerance 
Has humanity turned deaf?

Water Scarcity: Kala Bazar to the South China Sea

As usual Radu drove to work in his aging Hyundai i10 one spring day in 2018. As he caressed the bank of the Wangchhu River to reach his office, the river appeared to beckon to him. ‘Come and drink me. Why don’t you tap me up?’  The river knew that Radu was thirsty. He heaved a sigh, that was neither of relief nor of pain and hit the accelerator, for he could not bear to see so much water flow freely!

Radu was a career bureaucrat. A cohort of 1990, he had risen through the ranks to head the Disaster Management Division in the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs, Royal Government of Bhutan. After twenty years of working in Bhutan’s civil service, Radu had saved enough to book a 3BH apartment in Thimphu. However, after he booked the apartment, Radu was worried that he had probably bitten more than he could chew. But then the sales deed done with the real estate company came with the luscious ‘loan transfer’ option.

‘Pay half between now and the completion of the apartment. The remaining half can be paid through a transfer of loan with Bhutan National Bank’, said the sales deed.  

The location of the apartment was as abstract as they come in Bhutan, which doesn’t yet use the western style of defining addresses using street number, house number and PIN codes.

‘From the Druk school junction, you head towards Kalabazar. After about 200 meters you come to a sharp turn on your right. Take the turn and head towards the Ashi Building. Turn left and then right until you see a cluster of white buildings located right below the Guru Rinpoche painting on a large rock face that you can see from the other side of Thimphu’.

This is quite a mouthful for direction to a residential building. Quite exotic too! However, like other residents in the area, Radu had memorized it. 

Long ago, when Thimphu began its tryst with modernity, hordes of skilled as well as unskilled labourers poured into the valley from as far as Nepal and the southern foothills of Bhutan. They lived in shacks of houses, most with roofs and walls made from flattened bitumen barrels they would have emptied in the course of paving the emerging city’s roads. The long rows of black huts on the upper ridge of Changedaphu earned the place the moniker ‘Kalabazar’, literally Blacktown. 

Blacktown reminds me of a town by the same name in New South Wales, Australia. East or west, human beings fall on the same basics and logic to recognize and accept things around them. Blacktown, a suburb of Sydney is a melting pot of residents from myriad background, most of whom are not white, but brown, grey and black. Hence, the name, I guess!

Besides the loan, two things kept worrying Radu – road and water. Water supply in most parts of the city that Radu lived in was sporadic and unreliable at best. Indeed, it is a pity that Thimphu, the capital city of Bhutan has been grappling with water scarcity for domestic consumption.

The deal was done, but the builder betrayed. What was to be a 24-month project took over six years to complete. When Radu moved into his new house in November 2017, with his two sons and a wife, he suffered from post-purchase cognitive dissonance. On one hand, he had a brand-new apartment of his own, on the other, he was once again reminded of the three worries hanging over him - loan, water supply and the road.

As the last carton box was emptied from the Mahindra Bolero truck, Radu’s wife ran to the two bathrooms and the kitchen and opened the taps. Wonder of wonders! The taps came running out in full vengeance. At first the water was brown, then turned into the colourless and ordourless liquid as defined in grade two science books.

‘Water no problem, hubby’, Dema shouted in excitement at Radu.

Ha! Radu sighed. After all, water is not a problem.

However, the relief was short lived. In the third week of their moving in, one afternoon the taps ran completely dry. The whole colony was without water. People poured to the verandah overlooking each other and shared their frustrations. Some started making jokes out of the situation. By the third day, a lady cracked, ‘my husband is smelling like goondrook’ (Goondrook is a typical fermented spinach, considered a Nepali delicacy). Well, she knew what she was talking about!

Radu and Dema bundled their dirty laundry and went to their friend’s place near the Swimming Pool to wash and launder.

On the fourth day, the water pipes connected to the ground storage tanks started to sing. Everyone ran outside. Adults were excited as kids would be on seeing an ice-cream vendor. Everyone started filling their jerry cans and empty oil jars.

Radu and his wife went down with two of their biggest buckets. They were able to beat the residents of the other block to the pipe, with whom they shared the water connection. From the other end of the block came Rachna with her fat body and a bucket made of emptied building paint. Then a fight ensued!

Not an exaggeration!

Rachna removed the water pipe from Radu’s bucket and started filling her own. Dema intervened and requested that they be allowed to do first as they had already started. Rachna would not listen.

‘You have filled one bucket already. Let me fill one first’, she exploded. Frustration of being without water got the better of Radu, who was normally mild mannered. ‘Our bucket is already half-filled, let me finish it,’ he stared angrily at Rachna.  Similar screaming and swearing could be heard from the other block.

Radu had had enough. It had been a long day and he wanted to forget the water ordeal they had gone through. He reclined on his sofa and switched on the TV for his favourite news channel NDTV 24x7, that broadcasts news in Indian English. The newsreader seemed to talk directly to him:

‘The Supreme Court of India has instructed Karnataka to release 177 TMC ft of water to Tamil Nadu from the Cauvery barrage’.

His thick upper lip parted into a half smile. ‘How I wish, our Supreme Court would instruct the Thromde (Municipality) to release at least four buckets of water daily’.

Life imitates life, he thought as he changed the channel on his Toshiba LED TV to CNN.

‘President Trump has warned China that China’s claim over large parts of the South China Sea is illegal’, read Becky Anderson from her teleprompter.

‘Everyone is fighting over water, it is not Rachna and I alone’. Radu comforted himself, with a sense of regret for the tussle he had with Rachna.

Radu was trained and skilled in disaster management. Every day, he reviewed the Standard Operating Procedure titled ‘Should Disaster strike’. He led a team that was well versed in handling emergency situations during earthquakes and glacial lake outburst flood. Alas, solving his own water shortage was not part of his training or responsibilities!

Radu moved to the kitchen to help his wife prepare dinner. As usual, Dema was listening to music from her mobile phone. And playing at the moment was the popular song by Kunti Moktan, which translates to – Even if you go to the ocean, the quantity of water you can bring is limited by the size of the container you have!