With malice to none

The pathetic tale of a panicked daydreamer

N.P. Upadhyaya

I don't know why my telephone bell rings all the time these days more so after the CIAA conducted raids on the houses of a few corrupts last year. The fact is that my telephone number is a changed one since a year and a half but yet people keep on ringing me as if I were a minister or for that matter a high official seated in the Finance Ministry. I am not that but a very simple media man.

The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority headed by yet another Upadhyaya, not a relative of mine, indeed committed a crime of Himalayan order. It should have left the men now under its custody to enjoy their lives in a manner they wished. The CIAA's intervention in their day-to-day business of amassing wealth has suddenly come to a halt. This was not fair. IN our Hindu tradition, it is said that one is not entitled to interfere into other's businesses. If one does so is liable to penal action not here but in the heaven. Sounds funny indeed!

Now let me come back to the continuous ringing of the telephone bells in my house. Though different persons call me but then one commonality is in their voice: all voices appear like an appeal; all requests appear that they all were in a constant panic; all statements appear that they wish some substantial help from me; all hint that they can support me financially should I reciprocated their feelings; all voices, at times some tender and ear-pleasing female voices, also gives an impression that me and only me can help them to come out of the mess. But am I that a capable person? Perhaps some one who could be close to my enemy must have shifted his or her burden onto my heads.

The gist of their saying or say requests or even one could take it as an appeal is: "For a few weeks and months please keep with yourself whatever property we possess that is disproportionate to our official earnings".

Listening to these heartrending requests, I have become as usual sentimental. For sure, as and when some one is in trouble or even posed to be mired in problems of such gigantic dimensions, my heart goes to them and I wish that I could be of some support to their pressing causes.

However, this time around their causes are not so "legal" ones and hence I fear that if I exhibited my intentions to be of some support to them one fine "late evening or even in unearthly hours" the CIAA chief Upadhyayajee might send some of his active boys to raid my own house which is not very far from where the Chief some time back resided.

Listening to the tempting suggestions of the telephone callers, my better half is almost excited. She says Upadhyayajee! grab this golden opportunity. God appears to be in your favor. Grab as much as you can from the telephone callers. She opines that we later might not return the wealth thus deposited by the telephone callers saying that what was the proof of it all? Understandably, the telephone callers will have no such proofs and hence time permitting, more so after the CIAA's terror subsided, the money or the wealth thus deposited in our house will be hundred percent ours.

Take it for granted, when my consort convinces me, I get convinced easily. I don't know why so easily I get convinced by my wife's expressions. Is it due to continuing terror or her convincing capabilities, this will take time to ascertain? But yet I think it should be the first reason. I know how I have faired with my wife in the past decades. The wearer knows where the shoe pinches!

This means that I got convinced and accepted to heed to their requests. After a few months when the CIAA leader got changed, the whole affair came to a grinding halt as is normal in Nepal.

Understandably, the men who had deposited their wealth in my house came to take their wealth back.

But lo! My wife denied having taken such money from them at any time in the past. I supported her claim. Finally, the persons considered it to be a sunken money. My living standard suddenly took a new height and my wife and me enjoyed the life in a fashion we should have done it much earlier.

One evening after attending a party, I got tired and went to bed early.

In my half-dream and half-asleep condition what I see around me some five men from the CIAA.

I am told that as per the laws of the CIAA, any person who helps the corrupt officials in any manner or form is liable to stringent penal actions. I had helped them and hence I am now liable to penal actions. Later at the CIAA, one official came and told me that since I was a journalist so the CIAA has decided to penalize me in a different manner. The penalty came to me in the form of an order that had it that I should pen articles by being in the prison praising the present activities of the CIAA and its Chief for all along five years and that too without a break.

The deposited money was confiscated from my house. I am serving the fourth year of the punishment. One more year left.

The last day of my coming out of the prison, the CIAA chief came himself to see me and congratulated me for my superb job. He then assured me that he would appoint me as Press-Officer at the CIAA after my release.

Suddenly my telephone bell started ringing. I received the call and mechanically told the caller: "No I will not deposit your corrupt money any more. I am sorry. I have had enough of that and the accompanying punishment also".

Listening to my abrupt reply, the caller from the other side tells me: " Have you gone mad? What deposit? Which money? And which punishment?

I recognized the pleasant voice. She was my wife calling from her office to enquire whether I had my afternoon tea or not.

Slowly and slowly I came to my senses. Now I could guarantee that I have become a daydreamer as well.

Keep it up to you. Don't tell others.

Headline | Opinion | Dateline | National |  5 Question  | Editorial | Letter | Views | International | Tête-à-tête with Amandine | Past