by Nisa Sharma – Published by Parent:Wise Austin – June 2005 – copyright

I had a unique childhood. My father comes from the magical, almost mythical kingdom of Nepal, and I’ve heard the tales to prove it. 

When I was seven, I realized my Daddy wasn’t “from around here.” I pestered him with questions about Nepal – he’d break into his tales and I’d stop him – “No, Daddy. Not your stories, but where you come from.” He was pretty tight lipped. He gave me the book, “Lost Horizon,” and told me to come to him with questions. For five or six years, I was convinced that Nepal was Shangri-La. It’s difficult even today to get him to share the reality of his boyhood.

When Tim Burton released his movie, “Big Fist,” I understood it. It was about a man whose father, a traveling salesman, had told him a tapestry of tales as evidence of his life. As an adult, the man questions the reality of these tales and grows angry about his father’s lack of honesty. Until he finds out there is truth in the tales he was told.

It seems my father, in his adolescence, worked the summers as an English-speaking guide up the foothills of the Himalayas. On one such journey, with two British adventurers, my young teenage father and his group turned a corner and came face to face with a Bengal tiger. The Brits turned tail and ran. My father, being curious and impenetrable, stood his ground. The tiger and the boy stared at each other for quite a while. The tiger yawned, looked to the east, and walked away. The boy… the boy hollered for his group to continue, smiling to himself. 

Being home-schooled, the pack of children in the house looked to the oldest, my father, when a teacher was particularly dull or strict or slow. There was the desk chair my father shattered and then glued back together which bruised the backside of the strict teacher. Ending with his resignation. They tied the pant cuffs of the slow, napping teacher and inserted mice into the trousers. Apparently the man never moved so quickly in response. And the trick that sent my father to boarding school – the dull teacher, and the cobra the boy carefully inserted into the desk drawer, which I have to admit, crossed the line.

There was an old ram who would never leave his stables. My dad and the pack of children once dragged the ram into the distance, up the hill, out of sight of the stable. Not knowing what to do next, my dad climbed the “undercarriage” of the animal and grabbed handfuls of wool, locking his legs around the top. He then ordered the pack to let go of the ram. The ride, as the ram ran at full speed back to the barn, was the scariest moment of his life and has never been bettered.

I have a storage locker in my brain of more and more tales like these, only they are much richer in my mind than on paper. As I get to know my uncles as an adult, I steer the conversations clear of these incidents. I don’t want to know their version of events. I don’t want my bubble to burst. I don’t want my father’s Nepal to be any less golden and mystical than it is to me.

I think my father is tight lipped because he wants the same. The reality is that my father’s boyhood Nepal is what HE makes of it, as are all of our childhood memories. The fact that he’s shared them with me in such a gilded way makes them all the more rich to me.

Nisa Sharma is a Cedar Park professional mom and graphic designer. She is currently working on a children’s play based on her father’s stories.