He feeds those who are in need of nutrition, in need of learning to eat, in need of nourishment, in need of gentle loving and in that healing. He feeds anyone who shows up at his doorstep. There's always warm rice, hot daal, all kinds of vegetables. And mutton for those who like their meat.
For me, it's mostly daal-bhat and vegetables. And ever since I first stepped into the boy's kitchen, I have been going back for second helpings. Several. This is the daal-bhat I want to always get to eat. I don't even mind being put on this earth again if I get to eat the boy's cooking again. And again.
Stumbled upon a site by a foodie that's all about photos of things that look delectable. It's just what I sorely need but do not need on a hungry Sunday morning. But how much I agree with her when she says:
This is my outlet to share two of the things I love the most: breakfast + morning light.
Sometimes, I've dragged myself out of bed, only at Baa's offer of the lure of a good cup of peppered/ginger tea and cheese omelette and soft, warm toast and potatoes in their crisp jackets.
P.S. And this prayer was answered! My colleague Srijana ji just shared a huge tub of vegetable momos and cheese and mushroom pizza! Yes, it's only 6:30 am :)
and now i find writing is increasing becoming a pain. a royal one, at that.
for a whole week now, i've been hinged on my food security story. all the madness that drove me as far as Dolpa to get a story on what i think is such a big problem, doesn't flow in writing the way it should. it gets crammed in my head in the form of too many names of all the people i interviewed. too many details.
i can't tell a feature from a story. and yet it is all so simple. the problem is "only food". (i wish i could imitate that tone.)
when so much appears on the dinner table on days like Mother's Day, i forget how many starving stomachs of humans and animals i walked past last week.
this writing thingy is painful because it doesn't make sense of so many things i've experienced, even as the only thing that does makes sense.
Dhauli Nepali: Rice, lentils, spinach. Reporter: How will you get it? Dhauli Nepali: Exchange it for clothes.
That's Dhauli Nepali talking to my colleague Bijaya Adhikari.
Dhauli, a resident of Doti in far-western Nepal, hadn't had a proper meal in days when this video was taken by another colleague Deep Rayamaji. On this particular day, Dhauli had just been sitting around, not knowing what she could possibly cook to feed her family. There was no food.
The story arrived at my desk for repackaging on the evening of June 14th, 2010. So, my job is to subtitle the sound bite, write a script, do the voice-over and set it as package for the English bulletin. And Sanim Singh rushes to my rescue, if the program 'Purple' for some reason stops responding to me.
Doing the story was like deja vu.
Eight years ago, fresh footage had arrived from war-ravaged Rukum, about the victims of the Maoist insurgency. My job was to pick out as many stories as possible from the raw footage.
I had picked then eight-year-old Devendra Pandey to begin my story. His father had been shot by the police, alleging him of being a Maoist informant. I started the story with the child talking about his father and then choking up. I choked along with him and ended up taking longer to do the story and consequently wrote a piece on The Kathmandu Post, about the "Children of a lesser God".
The tears, the tight chest and a throbbing temple, all came back as soon as Dhauli Nepali started talking. Thankful for the silence and solitude of the "Subtitling room", I let my tears fall, and replayed the story for myself till I felt soaked in it.
Dhauli's is among the families that haven't had a proper meal for days. And she has children. The local produce (rice) only suffices the district for about three months. (Much of the land here is barren.) Rest of the months are a struggle to find food. The UN World Food Program has been distributing four kgs of rice and half a kg of lentil to the families in this region in exchange for a day's labour, to build road, school and irrigation canals. But that does not provide a long-term solution. The government has been criticized far too often for its "ration distribution" program, which has not done anything significant in all these years to help these people.
My tears shed in an airconditioned office in Kathmandu is of no significance to the people in Doti. They continue to suffer.
There's something about the way Dhauli, numbed by hunger, looks at the camera and then looks back at the reporter that continues to haunt me and makes me want to do something to take away her hunger. Yet, what?
