Land of the free, home of the brave

An excerpt from Bullets and Waiting Rooms, a memoir-in-progress

When Barack Obama was elected American president in the fall of my first year in New York, my friend Tom said to me, over the earshattering cheering, The world will be a better place now. Back then, I believed him. More than a year, and a Nobel Peace Prize, later, I’m not so sure. The rich seem to be getting richer; it’s mostly the poor who are unemployed. While ordinary citizens languish, corporations get bailouts. The War on Terror continues. Guantanamo Bay remains open. Don’t be so pessimistic, my friends say, it’s too early to tell. But I like to be pessimistic, it’s how I live my life. I always expect the worst. If the worst doesn’t happen, everyone’s happy, if it does, I’m prepared for it. But how can one be prepared for America? The greatest and best country in the world.

America is an escape. As third-worlders, we like to think of America as a magical, happy place. A place where if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. America fulfils dreams and makes millionaires. Every year, thousands of Nepalis apply for Visas to the US. A Visa application costs $100, for students, there is an extra $100 fee and once you’ve been granted a Visa, you pay another $100. Out of thousands that apply, maybe 10 percent obtain Visas. Three hundred dollars is a lot of money in a country where the average working person makes less than $100 a month.

I live near the greatest and best city in the world. My friends live in it, in Queens. There’s quite a few of us. One takes the bus down from New Hampshire sometimes, another comes down from Bufalo every holiday and another drives over from Chicago sometimes. Everyday is a hustle, getting to school, getting to work, getting the rent together, paying the phone bill before T-Mobile disconnects it again, getting together 10 bucks for a pack of cigarettes. They’ve developed a method these days, they ask for subway swipes from people exiting the station. Unlimited? They ask, in pretend-broken English. You have unlimited? Most of the free swipes seem to come from people of my phenotype.

During the weekends, we try to meet up. We mostly end up at a bar in Manhattan, the Lower East Side, the Village or West 4. We play beer pong with strangers, loser buys a round. We make strange friends and stumble home after last call. We end up waiting at the subway station for hours, just waiting for the train to arrive. When we reach Queens, it is already light and people are on their way to work. We collapse on beds and sleep the day away. Come Sunday, the hustle resumes.

I was on the train to Long Island once, to visit a girl I was seeing. A black man came to talk to me, a bunch of CDs in his hands. I’m a rapper, he said. Oh yeah? I said. You want my CD? He said and I thought, why not? He even offered to sign it for me, writing out my name carefully on the shiny CD. He handed it over and said, 20 bucks. I told him that I didn’t want it if it was 20 bucks, I had thought it was free. But he’d already signed my name, was his argument. He couldn’t sell the CD to anyone else. What a scam. I rummaged through my pockets, shoving the 20 dollars that I did have into a dark recessed corner. Instead I pulled out a 50 rupee Nepali note that I had. I explained that I didn’t have any American money but that my home country’s money was worth as much as the dollar, if not more. I would give him the 50 if he would leave me alone. He didn’t even think about it, snatched the 50 out of my hands and left the signed CD on the seat next to me. USD 1 = Rs 75.58.

The dollar holds such allure, the king of currencies. Everyone in Nepal wants dollars. You work illegally in America as a dishwasher and when you go back, you’re a king. You can afford most things that Nepalis cannot. You buy a washing machine, a dish washer, an air conditioner. Ocean city and Atlantic city will pay you five dollars an hour. You will live with three others in a cramped room above a Chinese restaurant but you will spend very little time in there. Mostly you will work, aiming for 15 hours a day. When you board the bus to work, you will see that almost every face, bar the driver, is a Nepali face. You will hold parties with your hardearned cash, buy booze and drugs, but you will always save enough to pay for tuition, to send back home, to buy that motorcycle for your brother or that washing machine for your mother.

I was ready to go to California for college, until Sarah Lawrence beckoned. My friends somehow naturally migrated to New York; they transferred to New York from the mid-west, from the west coast, from Long Island. I didn’t choose New York, Sarah Lawrence chose me and New York just happened to be close by. The rest, they made a choice, and New York was it. Maybe it was the romance of New York City, the impossible dreams that Hollywood crafts. There is myth in New York City, of modern-day hustlers and big money-makers. New York City makes its own legends.

New York City makes a hustler out of you. My friends have picked it up, they’ve learned to slip through the cracks. They know which subway stations have cameras in them, where you can jump the turnstiles without anyone noticing. They know where to go for the cheapest drinks and easiest women. They know that when they buy a gram, there is never a full gram, only 0.8. Only in New York is a gram not a gram. I have yet to learn, but then again, I don’t live in New York City.

We’re all in our early twenties now. Not the same people we were. It’s a different person that goes out to bars these days, a different person who comes home. There is less bravado, less bluster. When a group of young black kids, maybe 16 or 17 at the most, came up to us once, almost touched noses, pointed to a group of girls standing behind them and said, These girls think you’re bitches, we didn’t do anything. There were maybe eight of them, mostly bigger than us. We looked away, didn’t say anything. They walked away laughing, calling us bitches over and over again. Maybe Nepali blood doesn’t run as hot anymore. Or maybe we’ve just grown wiser. It’s not wise to pick a fight with eight kids bigger than you. Just like it’s not wise to drink heavily and speed through the streets of Kathmandu.

We have concerns now. How to eat, how to live, how to go to school. There is more to everyday now. We have to deal with bed bug infestations, identity thieves who’ve emptied the little that we had in our bank accounts, tickets for public intoxication, tickets for subway fare evasion, the rent and the struggle of trying to get through it all. When we meet on weekends, it’s not so much about the novelty of getting intoxicated anymore. We meet so as not to feel alone. We’ve picked up and left, our homes thousands of miles and thousands of dollars away. We miss our beds, we miss our food, we miss our motorbikes. I miss most things. I miss the foul streets always piled high with trash, the rickety houses just looking to fall down, the congestion, the pollution, the loadshedding, the mile-long queue for petrol, the mile-long queue for cell-phones, the mile-long queue for passports, driver’s licenses, or any government-issued document for that matter. I miss my family. My mother, my brother, my grandparents.

We’re all waiting for something. I don’t know what. Sometimes it feels like a little too much. To think we roamed the streets of Kathmandu like kings, and now we roam the street of Manhattan like bums. We’re brown in a city where everyone longs to be white. We belong in Queens, the immigrant borough, where there are so many more like us. And like everyone, we wish to one day move to Manhattan, an apartment in a nice building, maybe a girlfriend, something akin to a life. No more vagabonding, no more hooliganism, no more bumming around. I’m tired of this life, my friends tells me a lot. My cousin looks different now. He’s still the insolent, aggressive drunk but now, he’s warier, like a dog who’s been struck repeatedly. I think we all have that look. That something out there is trying to get us.

We’ve lead charmed lives so far. Just last year, an acquaintance overdosed while going to college in Delhi, his parents told everyone that he’d died in a car crash. Last summer, another acquaintance (one whom I’d never liked) died in a motorcycle accident in Bangkok, driving while drunk. Another acquaintance picks pockets I hear, even from his friends. He’s addicted to brown sugar and he will steal anything. They could so easily have been us. We thought we were something special, something different. But we were just the same as every teenager in Kathmandu and now we’re the same as any other international student struggling to pay their tuition.

I keep expecting us to die, to stop, to drift away. I hate them sometimes, the careless way in which they treat people, even friends; the way they speed through life, never taking the time to enjoy anything; the way they demean my tastes in music, movies and entertainment, mockingly calling me “arty.” Sometimes it gets so bad that I hide from them, dodging calls, ignoring Facebook messages. But come Friday, I’m itching. The campus suffocates me; there is always pressure to behave a certain way, to do certain things, to be a certain way. America was my escape from the drudgery of Nepal, and these friends become an escape from the drudgery of Sarah Lawrence. And so, every Friday, I make my way to Queens, and we make our way to Manhattan, to Brooklyn. We go through the week, looking to the weekend and go through the weekend, looking to the week. I keep expecting myself to stop, to get accustomed to life, to glean myself away from these friends who are remnants of the past. I try to talk to them sometimes: You can’t drink like that, you’re not 18 anymore; you need to save some money for your college fees; don’t smoke too much, you have class tomorrow. I play the wise-one, the one who knows better but really I don’t. It is my arrogance that allows me to write this memoir. I try to tell their story, hoping that it will tell mine. But really, this is not a story about them. It is an endless infinite spiral, a reflection of a reflection.

I go through the motions, barely understanding what I’m doing, where I am. I read Kierkegaard and lose what little sense I have of myself. Kierkegaard calls for a blind leap of faith, to step from the knowable finite into the unknowable infinite. I think of all the times I’ve leapt, not knowing where I’ll land. But there has never been any faith. Faith implies trust and I don’t trust anything. I tell my friends to think of the future, not just the now, not even a long-term future but just tomorrow, or the day after. They have no faith in the future and I understand that I don’t either.

I like that Japanese term, mono no aware, I like to say it, letting it roll off my tongue. It has no English equivalent, not a Nepali equivalent either. Claude Levi-Strauss calls it the poignancy of things. I like to think of it as a description of autumn, the beginning of the end, when you know that things are about to change and yet the nostalgia of the past refuses to pass. It stings like a wound, and disembodies you. My mono no aware came early for me. And I like to think that I understand it completely, my poignancy of things. I know I don’t, no one does, not even Levi-Strauss, but I pretend like I do.

~ Photography by Sam Kang Li. Text by Pranaya SJB Rana.