Mero Charpi Explode Chha

My Nepali teacher visited on Wednesday, and, as is his custom, enquired how everything was. Lacking the liunguistic acumen to explain that I had a party the other night and invited 5 Europeans I had never met before, as many AYADs as can fit into my flat, an American and our Nepali friend Jaya, and that the first of them to use my toilet created a chaos only before seen when the aliens blew up the White House in Independence Day. I started to explain but after a few false starts, a couple of giggles and an illness fried barin I simply said "Mero charpi explode chha". Meaning "my toilet explode is".

It was bound to happen. I mean, obviously, we all knew, it was only a matter of time. I'm surprised he made it this far.to be honest. Perhaps over the course of my three months in country I have become familiar with his habits. I know that when he is flushed he likes to have the flush handle raised back into its regular position. He doesn't like exceedingly large downward pressure applied to the tank and when there is no water in the building tank to refill him, he knows that I am more than willing to use my precious hot water (filled from a seperate tank) to flush him.

Danielle however was not aware of this. She was not aware of the history. Of the pain. Of the three weeks I spent effectively toiletless last time he exploded. She does have a good ear for humour though, as she picked the best time to hatch her dastardly plot. Most people had arrived, and we were all sitting down to a few warm glasses of beer (which the Italian girls claimed to prefer over cold [which has to be a lie, why would anyone PREFER to drink warm beer?]). Danielle sat back down from her visit to my friend the temperamental toilet and I was in the kitchen doling out the warm Everest beer packed in bottles clearly printed with the word Tuborg (a different kind of beer). There was a horrible crashing sound like a ceramic sink smashing all over a ceramic tile floor.

Immediately I had images of what had happened - knowing how much the sink also dislikes downward pressure. Before you knew it, 5 or 6 people were crammed into my bathroom to witness the scene making it impossible for me to get in to see the damage. It was not the sink, as I had feared but poor Charpi. His tank had suicided off the wall, the filling hose had torn itself right off (a brand new one too) and water was shooting out at a flesh damaging rate*. Grabbing the hose I bought for fixing him last time that turned out to be the wrong size but I kept for a moment just like this I put Danielle in charge of holding that while I grabbed Jaya and ran to find Danesh while still having my wits enough about me to grab Jaya to help translate.

Turned out that Jaya had had a little too much rum to speak him own language intelligibly, Danesh managed to work out what was going on and shut off the tank but not before we lost a good 100 litres of water mainly depositing itself on Danielle and myself.

I decided to do the fixing 100% myself this time, not wanting to "bother" Danesh with it and I am happy to say that Charpi is back to 60% functional.**.

*not quite as strong as the Stupid Pressure Hose Incident of 2005
** He's actually only ever at 60%, so I take that as a good effort on my part