Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

“Do you have any plans for the evening?” Sailendra asked.

“I am meeting Raamesh. Just the two of us,” I responded.

As he sped his motorbike on a semi-circle road next to Shahid Gate, my mind veered off into the thought of my meeting with Raamesh. I wondered if he had finished working on his new book, a draft of which he emailed me to read a year ago. Would we talk about it, and if we did, should I be telling him how I felt when I read it? Would we finally talk about our families, about his daughter, about my daughters, about his relations with Poonam or mine with Reena, about the new things we have explored and learned to enjoy? Would we have time to reflect on the lives we’ve lived so far, or would we dwell in the past, as we have always done in the last 10–15 years?

As we passed the New Road gate, the sight of the Educational Enterprise bookstore right below the Mahankal temple brought back memories of past visits to the store. I suppressed my sudden urge to enter the store. Ah, Tundikhel, my refuge of the past! I used to come here after school every day, run barefoot, forgetting about everything — the school, the (bad) grades, the homework, the scoldings, and the only thing I cared about was how to trick an opponent and score a goal. There, the bus stop — where a bus would come every morning, seize us, and hand us over to the school.

“Without water, Ranipokhari looked like a landfill last time I visited Nepal,” I remarked to start the conversation, to which Sailendra grunted a few words in reply. Soon, we passed Bahadur Bhawan (now the Election Committee office) as I knew it as a kid. How Raju, the rich kid, Surya, and I used to skip classes in school and come here for a horse ride. Raju would be riding mostly, and Surya and I would be sitting on the grass waiting for our turns. Soon we arrived in Thamel, and Saroj was already there waiting for us. We went to a cafe and ordered some coffee. Saroj asked us if we were free to join him for drinks afterward.

“I am catching up with Raamesh in the evening,” I said. “It’s just the two of us meeting today.”

I don’t know why I kept saying that last sentence.

Just when we finished jotting down our plan for the backpacking trip, I got a call. It was Raamesh. I asked him when and where to meet. He mentioned that he would be going to join his friends at a bar and proposed to meet after my trip. Did I just get ditched? How can he do this? I lifted my head and saw Saroj staring at me. He probably read my face and even heard what was said on the phone. To hide my expression, I turned around. All I could say to Raamesh was okay, fine, okay. How I wish I were alone so that I didn’t have to confront Sailendra and Saroj. I hung up the phone, and before anyone said anything, I announced that our meeting was postponed for another day. I kept staring blankly at my phone to avoid their gazes. While leaving the cafe, Saroj inquired about the call.

“I was not a priority,” I replied and tried to regain my composure.

A part of me wanted to call Raamesh and tell him what he did was hurting. But I also didn’t want him to see my suffering. On the way home, I called all the other close friends I knew from Lviv. Their caring voices soothed me to some extent. I was still bitter when I got home.

Whenever my mind drifted to the faraway land called Lviv and the memory of youth tormented me, I often thought about the time I spent with Raamesh. The first time I saw him was at the train station in Berlin. He was with a few other guys. When a friend of ours approached them asking if they would consider exchanging their US dollars for his German marks, it was he who rejected the proposal. He was loud, confident, and brave — everything I was not.

The next time, I saw him was at the train station in Lviv. We were at the station to receive students from Makhachkala, and he stormed out of the compartment door. He came to Lviv to study medicine and I to study computer science. I used to visit Pramod, my roommate from the prep course in Kharkiv, who lived in the same hostel as Raamesh. Soon I noticed they became close friends. Pramod would come to us with him, and when I went to him, they would be together. I liked how they were carefree and enjoying their days. I envied their lifestyles.

Soon, we started to hang out together, and I too became close to him. We both had a predilection for music, movies, cigarettes, and strong black coffee. He used to have a cassette recorder, and we would record any album we could get our hands on. Soon his classmates, Miguel and Dennis from the Philippines, and Masud from Bangladesh, started to invite me to their parties. My friends, mostly from India, from my hostel too started inviting him whenever they held parties. We would be seen together smoking cigarettes, drinking beer at parties or in the park, making spicy fish curry and eating with rice, listening to country music, practicing guitar, or, when drunk, standing in the corridor and singing continuously the same song repeatedly until we got bored with our acts.

The ride to the Carpathian mountain on an open metal chair hung from the thin wire with a metal rod, the whole transport setup looking as old as my grandma’s dowry, was still preserved in my memory as vivid as if it were from last year. The sky was gray and dark, the air crisp, and the ground white from snow. As I ascended the mountain, the alpine trees flowed slowly under my feet. The front view was obscured by the fog, and the only sound audible was the squeaking and screeching of the grandma’s chair with occasional screams from the riders ahead and back.

On our way to our cabin, we ran to warm our bodies. We spent the evening drinking Georgian wine in a cozy, warm dimly lit bar. We liked both the taste and the effect of wine so much that when we left the bar late at night; we bought the whole 3-liter wine bottle. Only when we were out on the street, we realized we were too drunk to carry it. We rolled the bottle on the ice and sometimes threw it in the snow. It was during those acts I mistook the bottle and shouted in ecstasy, “I found a camera.”

The trip to Baltic countries was equally memorable. We planned to walk around the city all day long, eat at expensive restaurants, and take the night train to travel to the next city. Our first stop was Riga. I don’t remember much about Riga except the feeling that I was walking in a beautiful and historic city. Next, we headed to Vilnius. In Vilnius, after the city walk, we went to watch a movie. When we came out of the theater, the sight of an absolutely stunning young lady bewitched us. She was with her friends to watch the same movie we had just watched. We followed her as if we were worker bees following their queen, stood in line behind them, bought the tickets, and went in to rewatch the movie with the hope that she might throw a glance at us. Her power over us was so overwhelming that none of us dared to go near her. We left Vilnius with a souvenir of her face imprinted in our hearts. In Tallinn, we ate our lunch at the Maharaja Indian restaurant and later in the evening went to the beach and saw flickering lights coming out from the tiny houses on the shores of Finland.

Our trip to the lake house to celebrate Dennis’s birthday ended disastrously. In the beginning, everything was going well. Some of us were drinking beer, and watching the lake, and some were barbecuing. Dennis got drunk and went to a cabin to take a nap. We saw a lady running towards us shrieking and crying. We learned from her that a fistfight had broken out with the locals in the cabin we rented for the night when Miguel hit a local’s head with a beer bottle when asked to lower the volume of the music he was listening to. When we arrived at the scene, a man with his face smeared in blood dripping from his head was leading a Ukrainian mob to our cabin. We hid Miguel in one of our cabins and tried to calm the situation. To our dismay, the bodies flew in various directions, the walls of the cabin creaked and fell, and the bottles flew in the air. I saw a guest of ours, an ex-army from South America, come running with barbecue skewers still in his hand, and he started to fling them at the mob, lacerating someone and leaving a large X sign on his chest. Some of us were still confident that we could calm the crowd and were standing not far from the mob. That’s when the lights went out, and everything became pitch dark. Pramod standing next to me whispered in my ear not to do anything, and I wondered what could I possibly do when I couldn’t even see anything. Slowly, the vision came back, and I felt a pain in my jaw. The blackout, as it turned out, was the result of the blow to my left jaw. One by one, we dispersed and went to hide in the unused cabins with lights turned off. At night, we left the cabins quietly and went to the woods, where Dennis’s girlfriend’s brother was waiting in his car to haul us to our homes. I heard later that when they woke up Dennis to leave the cabin; he was still drunk, oblivious of the incident, and unwilling to leave without celebrating his birthday party. For a few weeks, we avoided going to the city for fear of encountering the mob.

After finishing undergrad, I decided to spend my last month watching the World Cup football with my close friends. In our revelry, there were 15 of us camped in 2 rooms, each with a TV. Each one of us contributed $5 to the fund, earmarked for barbecue and beer for the final game. We would start our day at 3–4 pm, eat our food around 6 pm, and talk about our teams or past results until the games started. We’d watch games, eat dinner around midnight, watch games till 3–4 am, and sleep for 10–12 hours. Once Argentina, my team, lost in the round of 16, and Germany, Raamesh’s team, lost in the quarter-finals to Bulgaria, neither of us cared which team would win the title. On the day of the final match, some of us went to the bazaar to buy meat and some to the park and stores looking for beer. In the evening, we started drinking beer while having a barbecue. By the time the final game started, we were so drunk that we spent the entire time shouting and more drinking. The next day, hungover from all the drinking and screaming, quietly we sat and watched the game from the recorder, ending our last month with a whimper.

I left for Nepal in the summer of 1994, and he did in the summer of 1995. In Nepal, we were occupied with our work and family. We rarely met. After getting married, I came to the US. Whenever I visited Nepal, he used to visit our home. Later, we would meet with common friends from Lviv at a restaurant. We would eat and drink, recall the funny moments from the past, laugh, get drunk, and then `say goodbye. We didn’t ask how each of us really has been or about our daughters, or about our relations with our wives, or about the persons we have become. I felt we were slowly drifting away from each other. We only knew who the other was in the past; we didn’t fully know who the other had become. What if one of us got bored talking about the past? Would we still meet? If so, what would we talk about? A few years ago, when I was in Nepal, I expressed my concern in passing. I was elated when he called me this time and fixed the date for our meeting.

The postponement of our meeting left a bitter taste. He did call me a few times afterward, but each time I was with either my friends or relatives. I couldn’t tell if he was calling me just to say hi or to see if I was free in the evening. And I couldn’t muster up the courage to ask. As my departure date came closer, the prospect of meeting with him was getting slimmer. I wondered if our relationship too would get stale, not because we did anything bad to each other, but because we did nothing.

Perhaps we both felt the call from each other. Two weeks before my return, he called me again, except this time, without any lingering hesitation, we set a date and venue for our meeting. He was waiting at the bar when I arrived. We shook hands, hugged, shook hands again, and looked at each other, brimming with joy. He shouted for beer. As we gulped down Barhasinghe beer, we started our conversation on his recent book, then moved to literature, to our kids, our lives, our new interests, our retirements — the phase we both looked forward to. We kept ordering more beer. We talked about the girls we had crushes on or about the girls who had crushes on us, about our past loves, what we have gained, and what we have lost. We shared our secrets and our regrets. The waitress kept bringing beer. We would have continued if only we didn’t have to go to our cocoon, but it was getting late, and, unlike in our past lives, we had to go our separate ways. As I sat in a cab, I wondered if I would still have liked him as my friend if we hadn’t met in Lviv, and my face lit up with joy.