Long before I knew the term déjà vu, a specific flash of imagery would visit me without consent throughout my childhood. It was a mythical fragment: an unidentified flying object with blades, roaring like a gasoline generator, straining to move towards us but forced to retreat. The air was thick with unrest, with unseen people hurling rocks and logs against the sky.
This phantom memory persisted until I was about ten or twelve. By then, I had learned that some memories aren’t truly your own, but stories planted by family lore. So one day, I asked my mother if it had ever happened to me.
Her response was a smile that felt like a key turning in a lock—a conspiratorial grin, as if she was part of a committee that had deliberately planted this memory in my mind.
She spoke in fragments to me, her ten-year-old. “That was the old ex-prime minister of Nepal… he had come to Palpa for a rally, to drum up support… near your maternal uncle’s home… there was a town fair… the enraged communists, a force of peasants and laborers, they threw rocks… they wouldn’t let his helicopter land. You were in my arms, still. Not even three or four.”
In that moment, a box was checked in my mind. The mythical image snapped into sharp, historical focus. I felt a profound sense of being heard, a wave of relief. The puzzle was solved. That was not a dream; it was my first memory of this life.
The Echo
By the time I was twenty, a decade after I’d solved what felt like the greatest mystery of my life, the world was waiting for an end in 2012 that never came. But in Nepal, the old unrest wasn’t over yet. The communists had tested power through an armed insurgency, yet the very peasants and laborers they claimed to represent remained unhappy. The fight against authorities that descended from the sky in unidentified flying objects was a story on repeat. For many, the helicopter was a vessel of suspicion. In Nepal, a politician arriving from the capital can feel like an alien power—is this one a puppet of a foreign power, a trainee of Jawaharlal Nehru University, an American dollar agent, or an EU missionary in disguise?
I realized then that this stubborn spirit of defiance was not an anomaly; it was perhaps the very force that had kept Nepal a proud and untouched country for ages.
A little over two decades after I solved the mystery, a new question arose, bringing a faint rage to my face. Why, in this god’s green earth, would my karma place me in such a scene? Why plant a fragment of rebellion in my mind as my cherished first memory, witnessed from the ultimate safety of my mother’s chest? Was this a hand gently pulling me towards a life of questioning?
By then, my journey had turned inward; the passive child was gone, replaced by a man who had learned to sit with the silence until it spoke. I had come to understand that life teaches you what you truly crave, often through lessons your conscious self would never choose—a logic both obvious and oracular, which we must eventually accept.
And so, armed with this hard-won introspection, I looked back towards that long-ago sky and demanded my answer—I had learned that not all questions are for our mothers to answer.
This single question tore open a universe of others. Why does life choose to discard a thousand mundane moments and preserve a select few, as if curating artifacts for the future museum? And why do people take decades to realize that the nature they had as a child is the very self they were born with—a core they must confront again and again, each time pursuing achievement and identity, only to be seized by a brutal clarity and shown how the very ‘unaccomplishments’ we carried from the beginning are the primal curriculum our soul was enrolled to master this life?
The Fire
This September 9th, it all came back; the memory didn’t just return—it shattered into a thousand live streams. My eyes were constantly filled with tears. The mythical fragment was no longer a relic; Nepal was burning. And my tears were not just for the fire, but for a more selfish, aching question, watching from a safe distance in America: Why didn’t the committee conspire to have me there?
Was I still hanging on a safe chest, just witnessing history the way I had three decades earlier? This thought provoked one I had previously overlooked: Why would my mother, hardly more than a girl herself at 26, go to the barricades with me in her arms?
After the government chose to answer their voices with bullets, a young new generation—the final alphabet Z, between 13 and 28—turned an autumn season of festivals into a season of wildfire. The 360-view left no doubt: it was the screams from the streets, amplified a million times through screens, that summoned everyone—adult and child alike—to the fight. Among them were children I had babysat myself, now spearheading a revolution. Behind them stood a hesitant, tired, and beaten alliance of their elders—generations who offered warnings from a place of deep scar tissue, which the young had respectfully heard, and then chosen to defy. They threw their hearts out, not just rocks and flaming timbers, at an unidentified object of power that had never felt like theirs. Not for their grannies, who fought against the regimes. Not for their mixed parents, who fought for a fragile, multiparty democracy. And certainly not for their brothers and uncles—my aged generation—who came of age learning fear amidst civil war and celebrated a hollow peace, only to choose to drain away.
I watched from the sterile safety of a foreign land—a digital exile trapped in the horror of Instagram reels as a fire of change, beautiful and terrifying, consumed the heart of Kathmandu.
In a twist that felt like karma’s dark punchline, the politicians of this era were fleeing the very streets they could not control: some dragged from their homes, others clawing over their own barbed-wire walls, onto a dusty field, escaping on helicopters to the same sanctuaries they had perhaps flown to from Palpa on that sunny winter day in the early 90s.
The helicopter’s thrum fades, but the roar of the crowd remains—a sound passed down through generations who clung to a superstitious value: that an offspring is the answer to their ancestors’ prayers, and the payment for their debt. Generations who clung to the idea of Yagya, a fire ritual that could bend the very fabric of their lives. Now, their children, the land’s most beloved, have revived a primal human truth in the form of a smartphone meme: when the gentleness of water can no longer wash the earth clean of its sins, it is fire that must answer the call.
And so, I understand now why my mother stood at the barricades with me in her arms. It was to prove that life, and the fight for it, cannot wait for a safe arrival. The child on his mother’s chest became the man watching from a screen, both bound by the same sight of a helicopter fleeing the people’s will.
With her truth resonating within me, I finally understood my own role. My rebellion was to turn inward, to seek the answers she could not give. I was chosen not to throw the rock, but to remember the arc of its flight across thirty years—Theirs was to turn the streets to Yagya. My first memory was a lullaby of rebellion. Perhaps the committee knew exactly what it was doing, gifting me not with the fury of a participant, but with the aching, eternal love of a witness. My first memory was a lesson in watching. My life has been learning how to do it with a heart both broken and full —a bittersweet blessing from the committee of my life, ensuring I would never, ever forget the price of the ground we stand on.
