I popped my head inside Musician Nhyoo Bajracharya’s DoReMi Pathshala office to tell him I was done with my lesson for the day—I was leaving.
An elderly man, with a burst of thick gray hair, seated on the sofa inside the office, looked at me and asked, “Cha Uraay ni khaa la?” Are you the daughter of an Uraay?
Nhyoo Sir told him whose daughter I am and then introduced us. The man was Dugalal Shrestha. Poet.
As we connected dots, identified non-familial but social ties, I became adopted instantly. I was asked to sit down. I asked the poet how he could tell I was Uraay and he said the way I speak Newa gives it away. Only a poet who can read the lilt in one’s voice.
I sat there listening to them chat for a while and then left. In the days that followed, if I was in the building, I would always make sure to go into Nhyoo Sir’s office to listen if Durgalal Taaba was visiting. I had learned to call him Taaba quickly. In Nepali Thulo Bua. Someone like a guardian.
Nhyoo Sir would sit there strumming his guitar and Durgalal Taaba would sit near him, weaving words into the music. Sometimes the other way round. Some days, I got to listen to a stanza taking shape and some days, completed songs.
If I was passing through the corridor, and if there was the sound of Nhyoo Sir’s guitar and the voice of Durgalal Taaba, I would always knock and step into the office. I had never before met a man who spoke Newa like Taaba did. I grew up in a Newa-speaking household, where we fling the language at each for its utilitarian purpose, never thinking too much about the way it is spoken. Except when my father sings. But when Taaba spoke, it was something else. He spoke in Poetry.
As a teenager trying to use up my time between schools, I became interested in new hobbies and soon dropped out of DoReMi and so my free sessions with the artists duo was over.
In 2004, my father had a call from Durgalal Shrestha, asking if I would be interested in translating his poems. As a child, like many of us do, I had aspired to write poetry. But at the time, I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to translate his works. Still, the lure of being near the poet made me say yes. And so began a small chapter in my life, when I would go to Durgalal Shrestha’s Thamel home, eat the baji prepared by Taama (his wife), read his poems, listen and translate.
A couple of times, we rode in taxis from Thamel to Tahachal, to Writer and Translator Tirtha Raj Tuladhar’s house, to get help on the accurate interpretation of nuances. An octogenarian then, Tuladhar was beginning to lose focus, as we all do with age. He would grope for the right word in his mind and falter. One time he said: “Durgalal, ji khatam jula,” I’m over.
Taaba told him the words would come back because that is the nature of words. They always find us, he said. I remember that moment like now because there was despair in that moment, but there was also the offering of hope. And it is hope that keeps us still.
I translated 223 of Taaba’s little poems and Poet Rajnimila translated about a hundred. They were eventually edited by DB Gurung and published in the form of a book —a story for another day.
I didn’t see much of Durgalal Taaba after that. I would run into him at events or I meet someone in the family and would inquire after him and that was all.