Nepali: The Free-Flowing River and the Dark Detour of Destiny

 **July 2006**

He is nicknamed Nepali in the village.

Not that he is from Nepal. He is a local son of the soil, as much Haryanvi as anybody else in the village. But maybe his features have fetched him this nickname.

There are a few swift-flowing, free personalities, the flow of whose lives is not put to deceleration by the drags and anchors of life, conscience, morality and social conventions.

But despite the absence of such holders, which prevent us from turning into beasts, they are decently tolerable in the society they live in.

The absence is most often masked, or rather takes the garb of bubbling vivacity and unsparing charm, mostly ebullient in pranks, etc.

From his childhood, Nepali was chubby-cheeked, fair-coloured, healthy, and all such things which could have definitely taken him to the destination of the sort mentioned above.

His adolescence was terribly shaken by torrents of lust.

His growing years were marred by a few blots of transgressions on the modesty of a few not-so-classy females in the neighbourhood.

Then marriage came, and so arrived the responsibilities.

But all along the twists and turns of these happenings in his life, the sheen of bubbly vivacity was not lost upon his character.

His sentences very rarely came unaccompanied by his grinning, even though the economic circumstances were cramping.

Though he had all the qualifications for entering into small-time crimes, yet he had, till then, warded off all such temptations.

But then we have to reach our destination, like a river.

Most of us take a detour along the spaces of sanctity during our journey. Some, however, take a shortcut at great social and religious costs to go ahead with great guts and daring.

So this very sort of aberration arrived in his life.

A property dispute between a lady on the one side and her husband and son on the other presented him with a chance.

It was a case of contract killing.

So, securing himself a sum of ten lakhs, Nepali, in his free-flowing, unchecked demeanour, as if he was not a criminal but rather a mere worker, walked into the house and shot her from point-blank range.

He was behind bars for a few months.

His unmarried brother, dying of consumption—or was it AIDS?—was chronically addicted to narcotics and drugs.

The brother came to his redemption.

Surely, on his deathbed, he owned up to the crime in lieu of a death with dignity.

So that chubby fellow is free now, with the amount from which he has built the fortune of his small family.

No other cases have been reported for the last few years.