For Palpasa

He didn't care that the police might throw teargas cannisters at his direction if he crossed the line he didn't care if that meant a mob of mustachioed goons in uniform with sticks ready to attack every joint and every bone of his body or the finger warriors with rubber bullets willing to fire point blank at any part of him it didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing. Palpasa was dead and the world was over. The sun would rise tomorrow, the clouds would part but it wouldn't be the same, the warmed would be gone the brightness would be muddled the flowers would be less fragrant. Palpasa was dead and there was no going back.

He knew it. He had always known it. He had warned her. He had tried intervening. Warned her friends made them stop her talked to her family both in the U.S. and her old grandmother in the house that was falling down. That man had absolutely bewitched the old lady, that fucking artist. She would speak or hear no ill of him always going quiet whenever he brought up that he might be a danger to her grand-daughter. And Palpasa...Palpasa wasn't one to go by the rules. Or what she was told for that matter. She was head over heels with the guy, that creep who ran some art gallery and was preying on young vulnerable women. She had fallen for him hook line and sinker. It wasn't just his face she had fallen for it was the whole bullshit persona he had created. She was dead and he had disappeared. He didn't want to admit it but yeah it would be poetic justice if he too had gone in the same explosion that had taken Palpasa. Alas.

The crowd behind him cheered as he took of his t-shirt. He had a pair of trainers with socks, a pair of knee guards and his glasses on now. If they shot at him, he'd be a fucking Martyr, and they'd be the idiots that fired at a naked weaponless walking man. He'd be fine. He had done nothing interesting ever. Perhaps that's whyy... But this was not about him, this was about Palpasa. No this was bigger than Palpasa this was about this fucking republic which seem to require blood tribute every decade. Had this not happened exactly two decades ago, with all the rebels at their posturing and those 15000 lives most of them innocent and resulted in a big fat nothing and now this was coming back to where it had begun from. Back to Mangalman. What to do this country didn't seem to want to leave you no matter how much you wanted to leave it.

The sad part, the saddest part of all of this was that it needn't have been her. It shouldn't have been her. She had only been born in Kathmandu and spent all the three decades of her life in the wonderful Northern Californian coast. She was as American as they got -- she spoke Nepali of course and she knew everything etcetera but only because her parents had made a point out of it. It was them who had told her in no unclear terms to never ever go to Nepal during the conflict. She had listened to them for once. And then the ceasefire happened. She booked her the first flight to Kathmandu after she heard of it, phoned her parents on her way to the airport. She didn't even meet the artist months later in Goa when she was bored. If only she'd just decided to come back home. Or just spend more time with her grandmother.

Why Palpasa why.

Sirens blared in the background, firetrucks ambulances police vehicles. He didn't care. He had nowhere to go noone to talk to. The one love of his life, even if it was unrequited, he couldn't save her life he couldn't do anything about that despite knowing the most about it, what would he tell her friends what would he tell his friends parents everyone. He was a loser. A loser in love a loser in life and a loser in everything. The only way victory would come is if he died for a noble cause. This one. This had to be it, his family would be fine his friends would be fine his name would be written in the history books he would be called a brave man a freedom fighter who fought not just for peace justice and democracy but also for love. That's what he was and he would give his life to prove it.