Tung tung...tung tung...tung tung. That’s the sound he had learned to sleep to for four years now. But today it kept him awake. That dance of metallic fan couldn’t work its magic this midnight. As he lay there awake beneath the rusty fan with eight other companions in the dimly lit room, he relived a conversation with his wife. He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t, for ‘men don’t cry’. He wanted to scream his lungs out; he tried, but not a sound came out of him except the dull, gut wrenching pain oozing into his consciousness. He tried to picture, as he had done countless times before, what it’d be like when he returned home from this god-forsaken nation. A new home in the heart of Capital, a new car, a school for his princess and all the happiness money could buy. But today, as he reached out to his dream, all he could see was rubble where once a castle stood tall.

“...” “What happened? Is everything all right, Kumari? Why are you crying?” he asked his wife as she sobbed, “...Our daughter...Our daughter...She...She is no more.”

“What! What did you say? I didn’t get you.” Truth is her sobbing didn’t muffle her words, but the meaning it conveyed was something he just didn’t want to register.

“Our daughter, our daughter, Sapana, is dead.” He had been shot at more times that he could count but the pain that rung now easily surpassed them all. “Hhhow?” was all he could muster to say. “...There was an explosion at her school, someone blew it up.” As she began to wail, all he could hear was the giggles of his young daughter, her smile as he held her body in his embrace.

“I got to go, find her, I got to...”

The bright factory floor suddenly darkened, his knees buckled, and all he could see were a pair of feet approaching him.

“Scoundrels, murderers, bloody terrorist, I am going to bathe in their blood, tear them limb by limb, and make them regret the day they were born.” He kept thinking of the ways he’d make them pay.

“But what did they do different? Did you not bomb, abduct, extort, kill in your time?” His other self questioned.

“Yes, but that was for a cause, we didn’t bomb schools, take innocent lives, extort and abduct the impoverished. We fought for a New Nepal, a greater Nepal, a better Nepal, and an equal Nepal.”

“And who are you to decide that they didn’t do it for a cause? Did you not recruit children just a year older than your daughter from their schools amid their study? Did the bullets between the guilty and the innocent? Is the nation you fought for any better now than it was before?”

“What cause justifies this inhumane, barbaric act? Ours was a just cause. It was war-time. This is peace time. War demands drastic measures, steps taken for victory. And lives lost were collateral damage.”

 “How can you say for certain that theirs wasn’t a just cause. What is just? To each his own, is it not? So the blood spilt, relations severed, souls lost have different value assigned to it depending upon the times and place?”

“Our action brought revolution, brought the regime to its knees, brought people to power.”

“Where is the revolution you speak of? Is it tucked inside the protruding bellies of your revolutionary leaders or has it been swept into the sweltering heat of the Gulf? The people you speak of are either wriggling underneath the boot of the regime or toiling away their lives for a nation that they owe no allegiance to. Why are you here and not living your dream?” 

“Here? To realise my dream of a better future.”

“But did you not fight for your future at home. You do have those shrapnel still lodged inside you as proof. What did you get for the blood you shed? I’ll tell you what you got. You got deemed unfit for the new coalition army and received a stipend which amounted to nothing when the party took its own cut. You obviously couldn’t toil in your fields, for neither your body nor the villager’s scornful eyes that had witnessed their loved ones taken right in front of their eyes would let you. So you tried this hell hole. Even then, the manpower company screwed you, turned you over as a slave—a well-paid slave with no passport and means to return home.”

“Revolution takes time, change doesn’t happen overnight, and this is how the world works.”

“Change did come soon for some.Why should change that didn’t need time for the status-quo,need it now?”

“Just leave me, let me be.”

A week passed but he couldn’t a replyfor the inner self.

He was trapped here, unable to cradle, cremate his daughter. The bomb wasn’t supposed to go off; it was just a scare to extort from the rich private schools for a new revolution, a true revolution. This is what the news quoted the captured members of the party. But he couldn’t point the fingers that had once itself pulled triggers.

 Man Bahadur BK realised money he has amassed in these years would buy him some respect but what good would the riches do if he couldn’t bring his daughter back?

He got up and drank some water.It tasted like boiled urine. How he missed his streams, his river, his home, his daughter, his past.