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  ‘Those are cash,’ I replied.

  She laughed heartily.

  She was probably happy that a Marwari son was showing an interest in money at such a tender age.

  We had a domestic help called Lal Bahadur. His son used to live with us. We all lovingly called him Kanchha, or the youngest one. I called him Kanchha too, even though he was older than I. We became firm friends.

  He would regale us with his colourful accounts of life. He was a movie maniac. After watching a movie, he would emulate the style of the protagonist. I was already more into games than studies, and after Kanchha joined the household, I got into movies too. Now I would skip school to go to the cinema. If a new movie had not released, Kanchha and I would hang around town together, trying the food at various cafes.

  I got so used to Kanchha being around and so at a loss if he had to leave me to go to work that I even decided to provide for him.

  ‘You look for a room for yourself,’ I told him. ‘I’ll pay for it.’

  I was hardly ten then.

  He found a room at Tebahal, a stone’s throw away from our neighbourhood. I bought bedding and everything else he might need. If I needed money, I would sneak into my father’s store, steal things and sell them at another shop. As I was still a boy, I would take Kanchha along with me to sell the stolen goods. I also helped him become a vendor. He ran the business for a while, but then gave it up. He had become a parasite, but I was too fond of him to realize it at that point.

  Once, I lifted a whole box of lighter stones from the shop. A box of imported lighter stones would cost around Rs 100, which was a huge sum in those days. We approached a shop at Bhotahity at the other end of New Road trying to sell them, but the shopkeeper figured out where we had stolen the box from. That type of lighter stone was only sold at a handful of outlets. The shopkeeper also happened to be a friend of my father.

  ‘Aren’t you Lunkaran Das’s son? You stole it from your father’s shop, didn’t you?’ He scolded me. ‘Should I tell your father?’

  I pleaded with him not to, and promised I would never steal again.

  He was a man of principle. He did not tell my father about the incident, being of the view that it was my first mistake. The incident was an eye-opener for me. I realized I was in bad company.

  Father never realized what sort of bad company I had fallen into with Kanchha. However, he knew that I was not taking an interest in my studies and that I spent a lot of time fooling around with my friends. This worried him a lot. Damodar Lamichhane, a son of one of my father’s friends, had just returned from Germany after completing an engineering degree. He had started working at what was then called the Technical Training Institute at Thapathali in Kathmandu. A man of discipline and integrity, he is currently a senior advisor at our Chandbagh School.

  One day, father invited him to our home.

  ‘My sons are poor students,’ he said. ‘Would you tutor them?’

  Damodar agreed.

  He started to tutor me and my younger brother, Basant. Our youngest brother, Arun, was still only a toddler. ‘Damodar Sir’, as we called him, was shocked at the level of our education. We hardly knew anything. He told my father, ‘This is not going to work. You have to put them in a better school.’

  ‘Do as you wish,’ father said, and handed over the total responsibility for our education to Damodar.

  Damodar found a new school for us—DMPS, at Sanothimi. The school, founded with American assistance, had just opened. The National Vocational Training Centre (NVTC) was located to the right of the road leading to Bhaktapur, a historic town close to Kathmandu. The school was just across the road. He got me and Basant enrolled there when I was a sixth grader.

  Our school was far away from home. It did not even have its own bus. We had to walk all the way up to Ratna Park to catch a public bus to school. We had to board it by 9 a.m. to make sure we would not miss the first class, which started at 10 a.m. It was almost an hour’s ride. The time we left for school more or less coincided with the time the farmers from Bhaktapur returned home after selling their produce in Kathmandu. Not only that, the civil servants based in Kathmandu but working in Bhaktapur also boarded the bus at the same time. It was rush hour. As soon as the bus arrived, the commuters would rush in and grab all the seats. Kids like us did not stand a chance to get a seat.

  I came up with an idea. As soon as the bus came to a halt, we would climb on the tyres and get in through the windows. While the grown-ups would be scrambling to board the bus, we could easily find seats. The idea worked! Never again did we have to travel standing.

  In addition to academic subjects, four vocational subjects were taught at the school, and every student had to choose one from among them. Under Industrial Science, the students were taught carpentry. Home Science was about the culinary art, sewing and gardening. Most of the girls opted for it. Agriculture was concerned with farming. The fourth subject was Secretarial Science, which included touch-typing and practical classes on entrepreneurship. I chose that subject.

  Jalpa Pradhan was our vocational subject teacher. She told our class, ‘I will form a group of students. All you have to do is collect some money and open a small shop at school.’

  We were quite bewildered.

  ‘You will learn a few things and make some money too,’ she said. ‘Who wants to lead the team?’

  Silence descended on the classroom, as though it were an examination hall. I promptly raised my hand.

  We could not ask for money from our parents to open the shop. As we were day-students, we did not get money for our lunch either. We were at a loss about what to do. I came up with an idea. We would all contribute the money our parents gave us to buy snacks. That way, each could contribute at least one rupee a day.

  My classmates accepted the idea, and a Save Money campaign was launched. I would collect the money from my classmates and save it in a piggy bank at home. I had written ‘school project’ with a red marker on the yellow-coloured, clay piggybank. We also collected money to buy a ledger to maintain the accounts of our investment. Each entry was posted in front of everyone.

  We broke the piggy bank open after a month and collected more than Rs 150.

  The teacher had told us to stock our shop with items that were in high demand. We bought peppermint candies, colourful erasers, different types of pencil sharpeners and a few other things.

  At lunch break, we would gulp down our food, rush to the classroom and drag a few benches and desks to the playground. We would take our stock out and display it on the desks. Initially, other students wondered what we were doing. Some of them asked, ‘What are you up to?’ We replied, ‘Project work.’ Then they would look at each other and dig deep into their pockets. We had displayed items that we knew would tempt them. We would sell as much as we could before the bell rang to signal the end of the break.

  After the final bell, we would have to show the accounts of our transactions of the day to ‘Jalpa Miss’. We would show her the entries posted in the ledger book that we had bought for the purpose.

  This was my first baby step into the world of business. Forty-five years later, I do not see any real difference between the business I do these days and the business I did back then at school. Only the scale is different.

  I feel that what I learnt at DMPS kindled in me an inclination for business, which had been lying dormant in my subconscious. Deposit mobilization, capital generation, demand and supply dynamics, the margin between purchase and sale . . . are among some of the fundamental principles of business that I learnt from that thirty-minute shop at school.

  The school, which believed in imparting practical knowledge without adopting a ‘one size fits all’ approach, brought about a 180-degree change in my life. I started to love the school environment. At home, Damodar Sir was there to tutor us. I drifted away from Kanchha and the other kids in the neighbourhood who were not so keen on studies. I threw away all my marbles and cigarette packets.

  For the first
time in my life, I started to focus on my studies. Instead of throwing my bag down and running out to play, my first priority on returning home would be to do my homework. My results at school improved so dramatically that I became the dux of my class.

  When I passed out of the school in 1972, I was ranked among the top five in Nepal in the School Leaving Certificate examinations that year.

  Two more students from my school featured among the top ten—Bishwombhar Chitrakar in the sixth position and Krishna Bahadur Napit in the seventh.

  My stint at that school was the most important turning point in my life.

  My marriage

  Barely six months after my engagement with a girl from a business family in Patna, I changed my mind. My family was shocked.

  ‘I will not marry that girl,’ I said in front of my family. ‘If I am to marry anyone, it has to be Lily or nobody else.’

  What shocked them was not my decision not to marry the other girl but my insistence that I would only marry Lily.

  ‘Lily?’ father retorted. ‘This is not possible.’

  Lily was Sarika Sharma’s nickname. Her family and those close to her called her Lily. We were old family friends. Her father, B.L. Sharma, was close to King Tribhuvan. Once the king opened a treasure chest and told him, ‘You had told me that you want to visit Kashmir, didn’t you? Take as much as you need.’ He took out Rs 500. Sharma invited my father to go along with him.

  The same cordial friendship had extended to the second generation. As her brother and I were of the same age, Lily and I were close friends. Every other day we would play antakchhari (a game based on songs, where one team starts a new song from the syllable that the preceding team ends their song with) at their place at Bhotebahal or at ours. As I loved to sing and had a good voice, I would steal the show.

  They were four sisters, and all four were nervous when they were around me because of my strong personality. Lily, the third of the sisters, was the most timid. However, they were also fond of me as our families enjoyed a long friendship and I was a close friend of their brother too. Perhaps Lily enjoyed my company the most. So strong was the bond between our families that each would buy two sets of anything when they went shopping. Whenever my father would go shopping, he would never forget to buy something for the sisters, and their father would always remember us when buying something. Whenever our parents went abroad, they would buy similar gifts for both sets of children.

  I had opened a discotheque in Kathmandu with a group of friends. It was called Copper Floor. This brought about a sea change in my life. I would come home at midnight, frequently travel abroad with my friends, wear fashionable clothes, and wore my hair long . . . all this while being a boy from a Marwari family, that too during an age of conservative thinking. My parents feared their eldest son might be slipping out of their control and, in such a situation, the best solution they could come up with was to marry me off.

  They started pressing me to get married. To keep them happy, I visited many places to see potential brides. As father had trusted his best friend B.L. Sharma to find a suitable bride for me, Lily would be present at most of these functions. I always found her by my side. She was an intimate friend whom I could share my feelings with. Our formal antakchhari meetings started to turn informal.

  Just when Lily and I were getting close to each other, I became engaged to the girl from Patna. She was modern, fashionable and forward-thinking. Lily’s mother was present at our engagement, but for some reason I was not happy with the relationship. I felt I could not adapt to her lifestyle. Having been born into and brought up in a traditional family, I could not impose such a lifestyle on my family, even though I had opened a discotheque and given many sleepless nights to my parents. As the saying goes, gentlemen prefer blondes but marry brunettes. I was one of those men.

  When I recall those days, I sometimes feel the girl from Patna too might have been just pretending to be ‘forward’, copying my lifestyle. Kathmandu of the mid-1970s was like Hong Kong or Bangkok in the eyes of Indians. To add to that, I was operating a discotheque, frequently flying abroad, besides dressing fashionably. Was she trying to come across as a modern, fashionable and forward-looking lady so that I would find her attractive?

  Anyway, I was not comfortable with her attitude and behaviour. The more she tried to get close to me, the more I tried to pull away. Quite some time had passed since our engagement, and she would frequently call me from Patna, but I just wanted to avoid her.

  I had agreed to marry her, and now I felt trapped. I wanted to break off the engagement but was worried about the impact this would have on my family’s reputation. However, I was also painfully aware that if I married just to make my family happy, I would live the rest of my life to regret it. A relationship based purely on a social contract would not have lasted long. A newly married couple are lost in themselves, as if there is no world beyond them. As time flies by, the boundaries of their world expand, and mistrust grows. The contract is breached. Moments, which once flew by when they were together, now weigh on them heavily.

  Disquieting thoughts started to swamp my mind. I felt suffocated and torn by the conflict between what my head and my heart were telling me.

  Lily! Her image flashed in my mind like lightning. I realized it was Lily who had been drawing me towards her, and that she was the reason I did not want to marry the girl in Patna. I looked around, and even my own room suddenly looked different. My heart felt lighter and my head clearer.

  Without realizing it, I had fallen in love with Lily.

  ‘They say that you have found another girl,’ Lily, who sat next to me by chance at a movie theatre in Patan, whispered in my ear. ‘Who is she?’

  When I declared that I would marry Lily or no one else, it had sent a shockwave through my family. Her family had no objection, however, and I think they felt reassured at the thought of Lily marrying a young man they knew well. But my father was adamant: ‘I would rather accept Lily as my daughter; this marriage is just not possible.’

  The caste system was the sticking point. Though we both belonged to the Marwari community, her caste was Sharma and mine Chaudhary, and father was quite strict when it came to this matter. However, I knew him well—he was outwardly strict but soft within. I was confident that sooner or later he would accept us. However, the sword of ‘marriage’ dangling over my head had to be removed urgently. I eventually managed to free myself from this trap, even though it hurt my father’s feelings.

  I had told Lily’s family, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll talk my father into it.’

  Lily, meanwhile, was oblivious to all these developments. I had not found an opportunity to discuss anything with her as she was staying away from home at a school hostel. Her family had also said nothing to her. When she came home for the winter vacation, a group of us had gone together to the cinema.

  ‘Come on, who is this girl? Won’t you tell us?’ Lily again asked, trying to break my silence.

  ‘You,’ the word simply slipped out of my mouth. The darkness in the movie theatre had boosted my courage.

  After my reply, Lily sat staring at the screen as though she found the movie riveting; however, I guessed that though her eyes were glued to the screen, her heart was racing and her mind was elsewhere. I suppose she must have been thinking about me.

  I was so distracted I could not follow the plot of the movie. I even forgot what the movie was called.

  Lily told me later that when they got home her sisters asked her, ‘Did Binod babu say something to you?’

  ‘He did,’ she said. ‘Why would he say that?’ Her sisters told her about everything that had been happening. ‘How is that possible!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a surprise!’

  ‘Why were you surprised?’ I asked her later, when we were out on a date at Godavari on the outskirts of the city.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be? I’d never thought of you like that,’ she said, looking at me lovingly through slanted eyes. ‘How do you feel when you suddenly realize su
ch a thing?’

  ‘I hope you think of me like that now?’ I asked romantically.

  She blushed.

  I consider the moment we shared at Ashok Cinema as the starting point of our love, which grew deeper through phone calls and dates in the following days. We made good use of the winter vacation that year. I would feel tormented if a single day passed without us seeing each other, and Lily felt the same way. When she went back to the hostel after the vacation, I visited her many times with her brother. But it was not easy for us to meet while she was there, and eventually Lily found the situation unbearable. She became a day-student, using the pretext of a minor ailment that bothered her.

  I owned a white Toyota Crown in those days and would wait at the gates of her school by the time her classes were over for the day. We would drive up to the hills of Godavari, Nagarkot and Kakani to steal private moments together, with Lily still in her school uniform. Sometimes she even skipped classes, but who cares about things like that when you are young and in love? You only want to be with the one you love all the time. We would spend hours talking, listening with rapt attention to each other. Even if the sky had fallen, we probably would not have noticed. We wished that time would stand still.

  Looking at her watch in the evening, Lily would realize that she had to hurry home. Once there, she was good at making up excuses for being late, such as ‘we had an extra class today’, or ‘we had a dance class’. I would always drop her at Tripureshwore, a few minutes’ walking distance from her house. Every day, before we parted, we would exchange letters. We were not only seeing other and talking endlessly, but also writing to each other every day. And every night, we would talk on the phone too. After everybody else had gone to bed, Lily would sneak into the kitchen, and we would talk on the phone into the wee hours of the next day.

  ‘My sisters know about us,’ she told me. ‘And they support us.’

  Her parents supported us too, but as my father was yet to give his approval, they were under a kind of duress. I too felt the pressure. Our families were at odds with each other because of Lily and me. Our fathers, the old buddies, were no longer on speaking terms, and the two families had stopped visiting each other. However, Lily and I continued to see each other as often as we could.