Cwapugun khane madu thaya conpin manuta biswas madu

Nepali Proverb

(Those who live in a place from where the Himalayas cannot be seen may not be trusted.) 

At the time of writing, the monkey menace is a lightning rod for a great deal of public anger in the hills. Everyone seems to be perpetually persecuted by them. At the old Charleville, guards armed with airguns stalk the campus to scare off the simians, especially after one of the aggressive rhesus monkeys lunged at one of the Deputy Directors, completely disregarding his seniority, forcing him to take immediate evasive action. He jumped over the railing straight into the defile down below. Result? A broken arm!

Or you could say that Mr Obtuse, a college professor was to a certain extent responsible for the sudden explosion in the rhesus population. Don’t jump the gun and get me wrong. It all goes back to the winter vacation when our dear teacher went off to his home in the plains.

On meeting an old friend, he jokingly complained of a flagging libido. ‘I’ll fix that!’ promised the friend. Later, he gave him some specially concocted sweetmeats put together by a renowned herbalist, who’d made a minor fortune peddling cures for all kinds of sexual ailments, near the Clock Tower in Moradabad. Fortified with a box brimming with aphrodisiacs, our professor came home to his flat in the narrow lanes of our bazaar. On the very first day, he ate one, leaving the box near the window. The rest, as they say, is history— not his, theirs! A pesky monkey grabbed the box, spilling the contents on the ledge below. In the ensuing free for all, the sweets were gobbled up by a troupe of monkeys. Now don’t ask me if it worked. Honestly! I don’t know. But you have my word for it—there was an immediate jump in the population of simians. I hear there were rumours that one of these red-bottomed rhesus’ had a big grin on his face whenever he peeped through the barred windows of the learned professor’s abode looking for fresh supplies!

And grinning were the langurs too at one of the town’s best walkers, a certain Miss Crabbit who, having retired from a girl’s school settled here and has not stopped walking since. Given to the belief that those who walk sixteen kilometres a day are blessed with an eternal life, she sets off on her walk after a frugal breakfast, returns home for lunch, and takes off again to stagger home at dusk.

Things went well for years, that is until one of her nieces brought her a silvery fur coat to keep her warm through the cold winter. Hardly had she stepped out of her flat, when she noticed that she was being trailed by a troupe of amorous black-faced langurs marching in step behind her!

Now! That’s real monkey business.

Up until the 1960s, we had a tradition of doctors who made their way to the mountains from the sultry Ganges delta of Bengal. Foremost among these was a Dr Mitra, who ran a private clinic near the Old Theatre. On retiring, he passed on his practice to Dr Bagchi who, for some weird reason, always wore a monkey-cap. You could tell that summer had come when the good doctor removed his cap and little kids on the road went around yelling: ‘Papu ki topi uttar gayey!’ (Old man’s taken off his cap!)

Dr Bhaduri though had no cap fetish, he specialized in sex problems. Right next to the Electric Picture Palace cinema, he had a garish hoarding that showed an exhausted lion lying flat on its face before imbibing his magical aphrodisiac, while on the other side there was that magnificent pride of Africa, roaring at the tourists much in the manner of the MGM lion. Things were going well for the good doctor, up until the day police came knocking at his door.

What could he have done? He wondered. His medicines were not that bad!

The warrant stated he had certified as dead a man who was alive and kicking, and mad and angry too, because meanwhile his estranged wife had run off with the proceeds of his insurance policy. Off to the police station they marched and into the lock up he went for the night. The barred metal door clanged shut only to be opened the next morning when he was produced before a magistrate.

Lo and behold! As luck would have it, the doctor recognised Mr Tormented, the duty magistrate, as the errant youth whom he had a long time ago treated for venereal disease. Now, seated on his august chair, memories of another day came flooding back, he could still remember the burning sensation every time he had to visit the loo. Bashfully, he now remembered approaching the doctor, and managed to mutter: ‘Doctor Sa’ab, I think my thing has a cold.’

Dr Bhaduri had taken one look, smiled and said: ‘Till it sneezes, may be I’ll treat you with penicillin.’

On this fated day, their eyes met again. Time’s relentless sand papering had weathered them both as the clock rewound to twenty years ago. What mattered was that at the decisive moment, they were partners in crime again.

‘Doctor Sa’ab! What are you doing here?’ asked the judge.

‘Police say I’ve certified the living as dead! And his wife has taken off with his insurance!’

‘How did that happen?’

‘These men dragged me out of my bed at night and into a hotel room,’ he recalled, almost as in a dream. ‘Yes! There was a body. I wrote the name they gave me. Can you ask a dead man his name?’

‘True! Very possible!’ nodded Tormented, saying: ‘A case of mistaken identity. Bail granted.’

For the rest of his days, I am told Dr Bhaduri stopped taking house calls. The word was out that he would break out in hives if you so much as phoned him to take a house call.

[Niyogi Books has given Fair Observer permission to publish this excerpt from Gupp and Gossip from the Hills, Ganesh Saili, Niyogi Books, 2012.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

PHOENIX (AP) — The Arizona Supreme Court unanimously ruled Friday that nearly 98,000 people whose citizenship documents hadn’t been confirmed can vote in state and local races, a significant decision that could influence ballot measures and tight legislative races.

The court’s decision comes after officials uncovered a database error that for two decades mistakenly designated the voters as having access to the full ballot. The voters already were entitled to cast ballots in federal races, including for president and Congress, regardless of how the court ruled.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, and Stephen Richer, the Republican Maricopa County recorder, had disagreed on what status the voters should hold. Richer asked the high court to weigh in, saying Fontes ignored state law by advising county officials to let affected voters cast full ballots.

Read More: Here’s Where Abortion Will Be on the Ballot in the 2024 Election

Fontes said not allowing the voters who believed they had satisfied voting requirements access to the full ballot would raise equal protection and due process concerns.

The high court, which leans Republican, agreed with Fontes. It said county officials lack the authority to change the voters’ statuses because those voters registered long ago and had attested under the penalty of law that they are citizens. The justices also said the voters were not at fault for the database error and also mentioned the little time that’s left before the Nov. 5 general election.

“We are unwilling on these facts to disenfranchise voters en masse from participating in state contests,” Chief Justice Ann Scott Timmer wrote in the ruling.

Of the nearly 98,000 affected voters, most of them reside in Maricopa County, which is home to Phoenix, and are longtime state residents who range in age from 45 to 60. About 37% of them are registered Republicans, about 27% are registered Democrats and the rest are independents or affiliated with minor parties.

Arizona is unique among states in that it requires voters to prove their citizenship to participate in local and state races. Voters can demonstrate citizenship by providing a driver’s license or tribal ID number, or they can attach a copy of a birth certificate, passport or naturalization documents.

Arizona considers drivers’ licenses issued after October 1996 to be valid proof of citizenship. However, a system coding error marked nearly 98,000 voters who obtained licenses before 1996 — roughly 2.5% of all registered voters — as full-ballot voters, state officials said.

The error between the state’s voter registration database and the Motor Vehicle Division has since been resolved.

That number of votes could tip the scales in hotly contested races for the state Legislature, where Republicans hold a slim majority in both chambers.

Read More: Breaking Down the 2024 Election Calendar

Voters also are deciding on the constitutional right to abortion and on a state law that would criminalize noncitizens for entering Arizona through Mexico at any location other than a port of entry.

Though Richer and Fontes disagreed over the status of the voters, both celebrated the court’s ruling.

“Thank God,” Richer said on the social platform X. He told The Associated Press on Thursday that maintaining voters’ statuses would be administratively easier.

Fontes, in a news release, called the ruling a “significant victory for those whose fundamental right to vote was under scrutiny.” Election officials will be contacting voters who need to update their proof of citizenship after the election, he said.

John Groseclose, who was among the voters whose citizenship was in question, said he was relieved he wouldn’t have to spend more time running around to resolve the mix-up.

Earlier this week, he said he waited an hour and a half at a motor vehicle office in Tempe only to find that the employee who attended to him was unaware of the issue and did not know how to update his voter registration — despite him providing an official birth certificate and new passport.

“I’m glad that none of us are going to be disenfranchised over an error generated by the MVD 20 some-odd years ago,” Groseclose told the AP.

Footage shot from the road shows a huge explosion at an arms depot near Tikhoretsk in Russia.

Ukraine said munitions from North Korea had been among those it was targeting.

The governor of the Krasnodar region confirmed it came under Ukrainian drone attack on Friday night.

He said debris from a drone had sparked a fire, which “spread to explosive objects” and caused detonations. Residents nearby had been evacuated, and nobody was reported injured.

Fresh allegations are being made about ex-Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed by a former worker who says her line manager “brushed it off” when she complained about inappropriate advances.

The woman, named Catherine, contacted the BBC after reports this week from other women saying they were sexually assaulted by the late billionaire.

Catherine said she was a 21-year-old Harrods employee when she was called into Fayed’s office where he made “uncomfortable” advances including kissing her on the forehead, inviting her to work in his office and saying he was her boyfriend.

Harrods’ current owners said earlier this week they were “utterly appalled” by the allegations and “victims were failed”.

They said they were not aware of any allegations prior to 2023 but lawyers for the dozens of female complainants say that is “inconceivable” and argue the owners would have done due diligence checks when it bought the business in 2010.

Lawyers allege Fayed’s assaults happened around the world – including in the US, Canada, France, Malaysia and Dubai.

“It’s very much a global case, it’s not just the UK. It happened all over the world,” lawyer Bruce Drummond told the BBC.

For Catherine, she says her experience took place in Harrods’ flagship store in London.

When she told her line manager about her incident, it was dismissed – and she regards it as one example of a wider culture of “collusion” at Harrods which enabled Fayed’s behaviour.

“I explained to [my line manager] what happened… and he just completely kind of brushed it off and was kind of like ‘oh you know, that’s just what he’s like’”, she told the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme.

She had been “in a very junior role” when one weekend she was told to bring store musicians up to Fayed’s office, after which he requested her immediate return.

“So then I went back up and we went into a little room at the back, just him and I,” she said.

Fayed invited her to take a job in his office, she said – an offer she turned down because it was not in her area of expertise.

“He then held my hand and asked if I had a boyfriend and I sort of politely laughed and said yes.

“And he said ‘No, you don’t have a boyfriend, I’m your boyfriend you don’t need that donkey’ – which was strange and obviously I’m more and more uncomfortable by this point.”

She said Fayed then kissed her on the forehead, told her to think about the job and handed her £300 in cash – which she returned shortly after along with a formal rejection of the post.

“He kissed me on the forehead. I know a lot of people have mentioned this whole thing about this fatherly approach but I have boundaries. It was horrible, and you know, holding my hand, being in very close proximity, was not normal,” she said.

She says she contacted the BBC this week to add to the weight of accusations against Fayed.

More than 20 women have told the BBC the businessman sexually assaulted or raped them while they worked at Harrods luxury department store in London.

A legal team is representing at least 37 women who have engaged in civil legal claims. They say they’ve received 150 new enquiries since the BBC’s investigation was published last week.

Catherine said she felt her experience compared to the rape allegations “feels like absolutely nothing – but I think it’s important in kind of building up that evidence of a pattern of behaviour and culture.”

She condemned the workplace environment at Harrods which she said had allowed such actions to regularly happen – claims that have been rejected by the department store. Harrods was owned by Fayed from 1985 until 2010 and is now under new ownership – which said this week the company operated differently to how it had under Fayed.

Catherine told the BBC: “It was kind of known that he behaved in a certain way and preyed upon young women and young women were recruited to work on the shop floor or to work in his office.

“And that seemed to go without any kind of question.”

Her comments have been echoed by other accusers who have said many people in Harrods knew about Fayed’s alleged behaviour. Concerns have also been raised about his conduct at Fulham Football Club, which he used to own.

“I think that there were people at Harrods at the time who were enablers and they are as guilty as Fayed because they were not just passive onlookers. They were actually helping girl after girl into a total nightmare,” Catherine said.

She has called on “individuals” to be identified and “questioned on their collusion”.

“It is essentially grooming as the evidence suggests and they should face justice,” she added.

Catherine’s testimony comes as more women speak out about Fayed’s behaviour. New details have also emerged of failed efforts by police and prosecutors to hold Fayed to account during his life.

A legal team representing many of the women the BBC has spoken to outlined their case against Harrods on Friday.

The store’s new owners have said: “These were the actions of an individual who was intent on abusing his power wherever he operated and we condemn them in the strongest terms.”

“We also acknowledge that during this time his victims were failed and for this we sincerely apologise.”

Mr Drummond, one of the lawyers for the women, said the number of allegations emerging were “huge”.

“This is the worst case of corporate sexual exploitation of young women that… probably the world has ever seen.”

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When Tupperware filed for bankruptcy this week, it put me in mind of a friend who recently asked me to return their biscuit container. No drama there. Man is born free, and if you’ve exercised that freedom to become the sort of man who’d ask for a used tissue back, well that’s none of my business.

The issue was that they asked me without warning, as we stood in the kitchen post-dinner party saying our goodbyes. And so I was forced to open The Cupboard — you know the one — and shatter the thin veneer of sophistication I had spent the evening polishing. Was theirs the container that now bore a tomato stain in the shape of Australia? The one stacked at the bottom of a gravity-defying reverse pyramid? A protracted search confirmed my suspicion that it was in fact the one now home to the laundry pegs. 

If I were to apportion blame for the embarrassment felt in that moment, I would lay it at the feet of Brownie Wise. In the late 1940s, in Florida, Wise started hosting home sale parties to shift Tupperware. She did it to combat technology resistance: viewed in a catalogue or in-store, people thought Earl Tupper’s newly patented containers would smell bad and be hard to seal. 

But the parties, which became Tupperware’s most successful venture, sold more than pliable plastic: a vision of colour-coordinated cupboard harmony. “No unsightly half-used packages!” promised one ad, which showed a fridge in which even the milk was stored in matching pastel. Tupperware would satisfy “the woman’s demand for beauty” somewhere she’d not previously known she demanded it: her leftover lasagne. 

In seeking bankruptcy protection, the company cited a “challenging macroeconomic environment” and consumers moving away from direct sales. One thing they could not cite was waning interest in beautifying hidden parts of the home.

“Smart” storage solutions are a booming sector, driven by influencers who demo ingenious solutions to household “problems” on their social channels: lazy Susans to organise condiments, mini peg rails to hang crisp packets on. On TikTok, there’s a whole sub-genre of “restock videos” in which people decant bathroom, cleaning or fridge products from the custom-designed packaging they were sold in into aesthetically harmonious containers.

Like their party-hosting foremothers, these influencers are icons of a particular sort of empowerment. They have found a way to build status (and in some cases small fortunes) within the domestic sphere. But the rest of us should protect our chaos cupboards at all costs. Storage is the backstage area of the home and it doesn’t need to look “nice” any more than a sock drawer does. 

How could it, when the forces of progress conspire against any attempt at order? Every month brings with it new takeaway containers that it would be a shame to waste, every Christmas a stocking full of beeswax food wraps and silicon bowl lids, every pickling project a new Mason jar. The “tupperware” most people own comes from a hundred knock-off brands, and it is an everyday miracle of engineering that not a single one of them can fit another’s lid. 

I got a lesson in how to embrace this anarchy with style last week, when I spent the day in Angela Hartnett’s kitchen. Hartnett, a brilliant, successful and somewhat chaotic chef, revealed that when the tyranny of mismatched leftovers threatens to overwhelm her she a hosts a “freezer party” and invites the neighbours to help her consume the mystery contents of every zip-lock bag and deli container that’s been playing Jenga in the cold store. There are no grand promises that she’ll do “better” next time — she simply waits for the chaos to build again to breaking point. 

To put it in terms a Utah momfluencer would appreciate, it’s time to give up on ever finding that missing lid and #blessthismess instead. 

harriet.fitchlittle@ft.com

Australia’s Aaron Hardie removes Ben Duckett with a brilliant return catch before Liam Livingstone is dismissed the next ball by Alex Carey’s superb diving catch during the second ODI at Headingley.

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