Green

The lady sat across from me, reddish highlights along the front bangs of brownish black hair, she stared out of the window. Studying for her USMLE exams, like many of her colleagues, she had taken a break for a meal with me. She began to speak, and mentioned in her conversation that one of her friends was a Gynecologist. In relating her story, she mentioned that after this friend had performed an operation, a "Gyne" operation, something happened. But I didn't follow. This mind had already been sent to another time and place.

An arching right turn, as sharp as it can be on the highway, led further along a raging milk-chocolate flow of the river twenty five meters below. Grey. Green. Brown. Grey cliff draped with greenery above a brown river. The black pitch road, no longer its usual dry dusty grey, having regained its color after a frequent short shower just minutes before. The left apron of the highway was about ten feet wide. In places, the clumps of grass obscured the real edge, in other places, minor landslides bit into the smooth grassy boundary of the skirting.

As though racing with the river, our white mini van, with twenty people inside, sped along the road, along the river, along the cliff, towards a large metallic bridge made of strong looking iron, through which the road passed. Speed bumps marked both ends of the bridge, which rose up high above the road that passed through it.

It was a larger version of the bridge that we had walked across the day before on the way back home. One of the two companions had remarked that there was a third friend of theirs who climbed up to the top of the bridge and ran across the wide top beam. The bridge was two trapezoids, top shorter than the base, positioned like handles that were pulled up by invisible hands in the sky. In each of the trapezoids, slanted beams of the same thickness and material as the top and bottom beams, formed triangles. And on top of these side beams were plastered posters proclaiming a Maoist victory in the elections. The posters were torn. The riveting on the iron bars, I-bars, lined each bar at equal distances from each other and each edge. The steel dimpled border of the bars looked like a decorative touch to an otherwise ominously dark and unadorned metal structure.


Today's bridge bars forming the trapezoids and triangles were painted blue. The blue looked milky- no doubt from repeated sun and rain over the years. Turning left now, after the bridge, we passed a police station. They used to check vehicles here some years ago- every single vehicle they thought looked suspicious. Today, the armed police officers, still clad in blue and purple fatigues, were unarmed. Only one was visible as he ran outside of his room towards the road with his uniform rolled up to his knees, purple and blue camouflage patterned t-shirt, hatti-chhap sandals instead of boots, and the look of a man in desperate need of something. It was morning, and he rushed quickly out of view and down to the river.

That was the only policeman we saw before we reached a busy intersection. The road merged with another road which came from the Terai. Ours came from Pokhara. On both sides, colorful signs. Restaurants. Marwadi Vegetarian, some said. Tandoori, screamed others. The vehicle moved us forward at a constant, slow, pace before stopping next to a police checkpost. The conductor jumped out with a fistful of pink paper. By the time the car moved again, there was an extra passenger which the conductor noticed, but didn't take notice of.

A young boy, grey tattered pants, green shirt with a faded yellow circle on the chest, dusty hair, sun crusted cheeks, and a string strap over his shoulders- perhaps to replace the broken sling of a bag.

The door slid closed with a finality that cued the engine to gradually rev up and send us coasting along the road. A folk tune started playing, beginning with a Sarangi. The driver seemed to have turned on the radio to keep him awake through the "monotonous turns" , as we were told in our English Reader in school, that awaited us on the rest of the journey towards Naubise and Kathmandu.

As the song progressed, never moving beyond a Sarangi, a boy's voice started singing about pains and pleasures, the things he had seen, the difficulties of life, his confidence in himself, the uncertain political climate, doubts about the future, hope that the listeners could sympathize. Each line was punctuated with a loud sipping for air, as though the singer savored the words, like a tart suruwa of clear and mixed emotions. The instrument, the Sarangi, seemed to cry along the tune.

He repeated the refrains until we reached the large, majestic gate to the Manakamana cable cars. Then the music stopped, and the boy who had slipped in at Mugling asked each of the passengers to be kind and give him a contribution. With his proceeds, he hopped off the white micro bus, ready once again to hop on another one back the way he came.

No doubt, someone else would mistake him for a radio, and then smile when she realized that the lyrics rang too true. Perhaps she would even shed a tear or two upon hearing the unbroken spirit of the young voice rise up in a single verse of confidence in fate after a flood of pain, suffering and hardship that even a young boy of ten had experienced. And perhaps she would feel a sense of pride when she failed to think of any other place in the world where she could intimately share in the life of someone else, so unexpectedly, briefly and movingly.

Rain

It is a constant shhhhh. If you listen carefully, there are many many sh sh sh sounds, individual ones. They come from all distances, as far and as near as you can hear. There is a heavier, flow like constant dripping where the drain drops water down. There is the muffled bhhhhhh where it hits the cement roof above. The metallic clanging tang tang where it hits the corrugated iron. Now, it is softer, like it is only hitting the leaves of plants. Just by listening to the different noises the droplets make. An aural image when the eyes are closed.

Yellow

Its dark blue up there. More dark with a tinge of blue. There are greyish splotches, irregular, patchy, which have also taken on the bluish tinge of the backdrop. In some directions, it looks mostly bluish, and in other places mostly greyish-blue. There were small white shiny specks last night. Today, none are visible. A starless night. A set of lights is moving away from the horizon, perhaps at 30 degrees, yellow in front, yellow in back, three other lights visible- one flashing white under the yellow one in the back, one flashing red, above both and between the two yellow ones. There is a third one which is visible only when the white one in the back turns off and disappears when it turns on. It is followed by a sound, a roar that fluctuates in volume, but is consistently loud. It trails the lights at some distance. Now the blue light has separated from the other two, and moved to the left at some distance, the red is not visible. The plane has turned in this direction and is flying off to the right. Suddenly, like a flashlight beam, a long stretch in front of it, almost as long as the plane itself, is illuminated in a murky yellow light. It is flying through a cloud. Now it is gone. Sounds and lights.

A baby is crying somewhere in front. A metallic clank as some stainless steel dishes are set down to be washed somewhere in the distance. The prolonged hiss and abrupt stop as the pressure cooker weight abruptly falls and shuts off the escaping steam. Five seconds later, another hiss. Another abrupt stop. A shorter hiss this time. A car horn, more talk- some people chatting in a room somewhere off to the right. Dogs are barking at each other, a chorus is building. A motorcycle horn. A slamming door. This time it is one of those wooden framed doors with mosquito netting spread over a thin diamond shaped metal mesh, the frame of which which is held by a spring so that it slams shut when released.

Some silverware, sounds like a bunch of spoons and forks, being set down. The condensed series of clinks. A light has turned off. Some curtains are thin and shadows are visible in the rooms. A fluorescent light, a tube light, shines from behind a tree, patched shadows from the black leaves breaking up the white light. Someone laughs. There is the constant trrrrr of a night insect, the pulsating, higher pitched squeaking of crickets. Unbroken, and underlying everything. Almost ignored. A television throws out muffled sounds. A dog squeals painfully. The whirrrrrr of a motorcycle engine and the beep of a motorcycle horn, closer and to the right.

Another pressure cooker goes off far to the left. The dogs are barking aggressively now.

Looking up, a large patch of dark blue has opened up. Some specks have emerged. 11 dots of brightness. Stars, perhaps planets. Some twinkle. Stars. Some do not. Planets. That's what they taught in "Earth Science" in 10th grade.

The clouds looked immovable, but they are nearly all gone. Even in the night sky, clouds move.

A slight breeze now. Something is chirping. The insects sound louder now. The sound of an owl screeching as it flies by in a blur. It looked white. So perhaps something auspicious is to happen here.

About 30 stars now.

Grey

All the colors are darker now. The greens of the banana tree to my left, down below, in the distance, in someone elses yard, are darker. The leaves, torn perpendicular to the stem, which is standing straight up, bending down a little bit, light green in the middle. Bent like a bow, ready to shoot something into the sky, but without string. The tin roof, unpainted, corrugated, sloping downwards to the left, perhaps two storeys high at the lowest point, along a short workshop where they paint signs and prepare large prints on mounts of metal and wood. Samsung "Taalu ma aalu", from dashain. Bald guy, black sunglasses, goatee, orange shirt, black pants, front part of a black motorcycle in the background. Dangling keys from his right hand, level with his face, smiling. The black of the keychain matching the black of the glasses, contrasting with the white teeth and fair skin. All of this in a bright yellow circle. Taalu ma aalu. An LG electronics sign, perhaps twenty feet across, five feet wide. Red. Torn, just like the taalu ma aalu sign. Discarded. Bajaj, an upright blue rectangle, white letters, plastic sign, metal frame, no doubt fitted and filled with fluorescent lights and hung outside a dealership. The arching blue crescent of the chaudhury group logo is visible, just barely, in the dimming light.

Houses are quiet, like they are meditating. Brahmamuhurta it is called- the moment when night turns to day and when day turns to night. Exactly four lights are on, through all the windows that are visible. Another one has turned on. In the distance, a hill. Tall. The base of which has a famous temple of a god, sleeping on snakes, floating in water. The top of the hill is like an arrowhead, pointing to the sky. Behind it, somewhere obscured by the clouds, is Langtang. Gosaikunda.

Another light has turned on. Some children playing in the distance, the stray car horn, one every five seconds from various distances. Someone slams a door. Metallic door for sure, wooden framed with an iron sheet, so that when you close it it sounds like a sheet of metal falling. It is getting darker. Colors less distinct. Sounds emerging. A bird chirps, again.

A bell, those small ones used for puja. Constant ringing. Ding ding ding ding.....

The rhythmic woosh woosh and squeak of a person pumping a tube well...perhaps he has just returned from a long day at work and is washing up before his meal.

A dog barks. The sun has set. Sounds take over.

Transparent

I am told not to write. It is stressful, and bad on these eyes, and tires out the arms and fingers. They want to keep this body in hospital for another 30 days...they call it observation. What will they observe?

There is so much for me to observe still. Why do they want to do this? I want to run away from this bed with it's green sheets and tilting ends. Turn a crank and it lifts up on the head-side. Turn another crank and it lifts up on the feet side. Nurse visits every morning, and more. Urinating through a tube...blood through my forearm. A device, an adapter, with two openings, one perpendicular to the other, one with a pink lid the other with a white one, the needle of the thing, invisible, but certainly there. I can feel it go along the arm back towards the upper arm, under the skin. She comes and injects things into the arm with a needle-less syringe through one of the holes.

Sleepy. Must be the drugs. Maybe I need oxygen....

That is better. This oxygen tube is thin. It has two holes with horn like smaller tubes coming up slightly into the nostrils. The tube goes around the head, behind the ears. Feels like glasses...

Still sleepy. Will go now. I hope this gets posted. Sending it handwritten to a cyber to be posted... bye for now.

Ochre

The man squatted in the distance. Thin, perhaps just out of his teenage years. Dark gray with a slightly purple tinge was his shirt. His pants were black, dusty and washed. Folded up around the ankles, twice perhaps, forming loose round cloth loops that dangled above his feet. He had stubble on his face, making the lower face nearly as dark as his straight hair. Crouched, hips at ankle level, the upper body hunched over his own legs, armpits resting on the knees. His arms, straightened out in front, hands dangling for a moment downwards, before moving up to his face, covering the two sides, palms at the cheeks, fingers upwards, as his head also looked up.
Anguish.
Perhaps he was crying.
Two floors below, in the distance.

Grass had grown around the slightly raised concrete slab on which he squatted. The ground was concrete, with grass borders, patterns, here and there where it managed to grow between the cracks. Perpendicular to the squatting man, along the vision from this window, there is a metal frame, like a bed, with a platform. Too narrow to be a bedd, wide enough to sleep on without moving. Perhaps a moving tray to carry supplies. White frame, round edges, black wheels.

The wall next to where it stands is white. It is about hip level, protruding from a building. A big OM painted on whitewash, with some other things written below. Not readable from this distance. Now there is someone sleeping on the white framed, too narrow but just wide enough rolling bed. They are covered in a shiny Ochre cloth. There is a van, double doors at the back, opened outwards.

The nurse has come now, these eyes are diverted to the room where this body is, away from the scene outside.

"Tapain lai kasto cha?"

"Thikai cha sister...."

Red

Everything is red. The counting is going to take a while.

Blue

The elections are coming. An election monitor's duty is to make sure that the bluish purple mark of the stamp hits the ballot on the spot desired by the voter, and not by anyone else. Light pink and light blue.

Now, days are spent in vehicles. On days of walking, lunches are popped corn with roasted soy beans. And if one is lucky, maybe even some horseradish pickle. Savory. Stuffed in jars. Lots of mustard seed, the oil soaked up by the chopped vegetable.

Internet access is not scarce, surprisingly.

But entries might be. I will be back after the elections. Maybe one or two posts before then, who knows.

(written from Gorkha)

Colors

White t-shirt, jeans. Both ready to be sacrificed. But there was no sacrifice. I walked down the long alleyway to the main road. Houses on both sides. Around the corner, to the right, along the main road itself, the streets were quiet. Perhaps it was around noontime. Looking up, there were more people than usual on the rooftops. Little children, one or two adults. The houses, some of them, are quite tall- with a more or less square floorplan, cement pillars with iron rods embedded inside the cement, brick filling the space between the pillars. Many are painted, some are just the color of cement. But with black moss around the top, the bottom of the short walls around the roof's perimeter. These are the places where water splashes, and sticks. Where the sunlight hits only for only a few hours during the day. One of them has clothing hanging from lines. The lines sag. A water tank, black, plastic, sits majestically on a circular frame, elevated above the roof. The frame is brown with rust. Then the pipes that stick up around the tank like flagpoles without flags. There are two- perhaps one is for the solar heater and the other one the tank. There are four children on this house. Perhaps they will let me pass.

They do.

A cab. Finally. Up ahead there was a group, waiting for a passerby. I wore white- a perfect target. I stepped in, sat down, closed the door, rolled up the window. The car moved a few feet. SPLAT. Someone hoped to get me at the last minute. The next possible target- a fellow sitting on a wall, in front of a corner store that had shiny colorful plastic packets big and small hanging all over, goods on the floor, along the walls. The store woman in her red flower patterned maxi dress- those that are like hospital gowns but without the string in the back to tie the two sides closed. It is a single piece of cloth with one hole for the neck, two holes for the arms, and one big hole opposite the neck hole for the rest of the body.

The poor fellow was wearing a neon green sports suit with two thick shiny dark green pinstripes along the middle of the arm, from the collar down to the wrist. And a matching cap. Sunglasses. Sipping tea, supporting his body against a short wall, with the right leg folded, the other leg straight. Half-squat. Out of nowhere, his sweat suit was soaked with water the color of his milk tea. Soaked.

It could not have been a balloon. Most likely, a plastic bag. Clear, small, slightly larger than balloons that are fully inflated. They hold much more water. But they are more likely to have holes. And to close the top there are two options. One, you twist and twist. Hold the bag by the twist and spin the bulging bottom. Then, tuck the twist into the filled part as much as possible, throw and pray that it does not open. Most likely, it will open. The other option is to use a small rubber band.

"Didi, euta plastic dinus na!"

That is a taunt that came over and over from a couple of kids on the roof of the next house towards the group on this roof. The plastic bags tend to open before hitting their targets. And that means the target instead of being hit gets an extra bag. She wanted an extra bag.

I had reached my destination in Naya Baneshwor, across the street and downhill from the Everest Hotel, and a left and another left and along the way some. There were about six of us on this roof. The houses were close together. In any direction, there were at least three liquid filled projectiles arching through the air. Some aimed at this roof, some at other roofs. It lasted for perhaps thirty minutes. Incessant. The throwers were not always visible. But the projectiles always gave them away. Varying heights, varying colors. Some red, some brick color, some unpainted cement, some well painted with patterns. All along the slope. The slope was the equalizer. Even houses that were shorter than the rest would become taller because they would be further up along the slope. SPLAT. SPLAT. SPLAT....it continued. Somehow, this roof had become the target.

A friend came. Covered in Abir. Red, of course, but also smothered with some powdered dye perhaps of the sort used for bhai tika. They were multiple colors. He had a tray. Those colors were going to discolor me too.

He had a plastic bag with some things wrapped in newspaper. Laddus. Round, yellow, sweet. There seemed to be two types. The yellow-orange ones, and brown ones. I tried a masala laddu- the brown one. It was softer than usual.

Eventually, colors looked brighter. The abir in the water which was to go into the plastic bags to be thrown changed color from red to neon orange. The roof didn't look so high anymore.

It must have been a bhang laddu.

Happy Holi.

Green

The stairs lead downstairs, and the sidewalk above slopes perpendicular to the steps, downwards to my left. This street, the one I just crossed, has many vehicles, cars that speed up, motorcycles that wind and turn, even bicycles. There are always many more vehicles, both going down the slope and coming up, when you are hungry.

Stepping in, after walking in a door held open by a guard, wearing a dark green outfit, thick black belt, dusty black nepali topi- the hard kind, not the dhaka one. He salutes.

Inside, it is green. Green walls, green window frames, a darker green line about three fourths the way up all the walls and pillars. There are picture frames on the walls, golden frames. Pink lining between the frame and the picture, which is a painting. Birds, done in water colors- some pecking up, some looking down. Evenly spaced and on all sides.

The tables here are brown, and look like paneled floors- thick, and with a thin wooden wooden strip on all sides. The strip looks newer than the rest of the table- this is an old place, maybe fifteen years. But popular. The meals are served on beige plates,which are more brown than gray. They have a green border, and have the logo on it too, to one side. A round logo.

The tea cups are also typical. They have been copied all over this city. Beige, with a green border at the lip, sitting on a saucer which is the same color, and has a green line touching the rim, all the way around. The cup is neither tall nor fat. Just right. Porcelain, I think.

The tables have now been scratched up with the notes of lovers, teens, and who knows who. They are discolored now, and look worn. The table and the chairs are connected. Wooden chairs sitting on metal poles, connected with a painted steel frame on the ground to the table top also on a steel pole. The chairs don't move and you don't usually see the metal frame.

They bring the water first, always. Thick glasses, wider at the top than the bottom. The water is never cold, but just so- almost warmish. But before the water comes the napkin which is also beige and almost looks dirty. And wrapped inside is a fork and knife. The waiter wears pink, a green checkered bowtie, green vest, green pants, and the black topi. Short. Sometimes, they are even deaf.

To my left are windows, but the view is not clear. Lots of trees, bushes and leaves. Along this wall, at the end of the windows, the kitchen begins- white clad cooks mulling about inside. The food has arrived now. A steaming plate of meat wrapped in dough, twisted at the top, very hot. About 12 per plate. This is also distinctive. One plate usually means 10.

Looking out in the distance to the right, and upwards, people walk by. You can see their legs. Or if they are short, more of their body. The eyes move to the food now. I can taste it without eating. I am not sure how much of the taste comes from the yellow achar, served in a small steel bowl, and how much from the dumplings themselves. The Momos here are juicy, but you don't get the juices unless you can put it in your mouth in one go. The other option is to bite a little off, suck the juice out and then dip into the achaar and eat the rest at your own leisure. Time to eat now.

Tailors

You can barely see the entrance, and inside, there is no crowd right now. Is this the right place? Yes. The first attempt took me to the wrong courtyard. Inside, in the distance, there was a kerosene stove with a black Karai on top. But, inside, it turned out to be the wrong one even though the entrance had so many signs affixed above, wooden border in blue or some other color paint, stuck to the cement with metal pieces of aluminum. "5 Star Tailors", this tailor that tailor. The narrow, dark, short walkway even had a suitcase seller with his wares aligned along the sides. But in the end, this wasn't the one.

Next, there it was. "Tip Top Tailors". An open secret to everyone in Kathmandu. The best samosas around, they say. This alley way has many more signs affixed above the entrance, some green borders, some blue, some white. But the golden Stupa painted on the first letter is distinctive. Tip (Stupa sitting on the T) Top Tailors. The two words are in Red, round, bulging ends to the letters.

The alleyway, wooden frame on either side of the opening on both sides, is unsuspecting. The suitcase seller here seems to have many more things to sell. There is traffic coming out and going in. The blue large suitcases spill out into the courtyard, typical in its lack of design. The apron around is cement, the space in the middle is paved with square cement tiles, the space between them a little bit depressed, and also cement. Water collected here and there, dark spots where water has dried, more water where the tiles have cracked.

There is a hindi song playing somewhere. And the sound of pigeons. Their feathers, soft, white fluffs, line the courtyard. The flat white spots are the droppings, the puffy white ones are the down feathers. The pigeons are roosting, peeking out from a corner above the first floor of tailoring stores. Stepping out of the short alley, in the far left corner there is a shop which has extended to line the whole courtyard on the south side. Covered with a blue tarp, stretched by its corners, tied with nylon rope, sagging a few feet above the cooking stoves and buckets and buckets of Samosas. The wet sweets are embedded in the tables, in aluminum containers to the right of the other stuff. The aluminum for the samosas is lined with newspaper. The blue tarp is brown, and white in places. Uniformly dusty, with the corners chalky white- where there happened to be a resting place for pigeons above.

The green trash can, about four feet tall stands directly opposite. There is no crowd today. And the trash can is empty. There is a water tank, about five feet tall and seven feet wide to my left, attached to the wall next to the doorway opening. The sun streams in . The walls behind the counter, with the samosas and the wet sweets is green, brown, dirty. There is a blue doorway, dark tourquoise, metal latch closed, one of those big black "Bhote" locks hanging from it by its silver arch. Plastic bags, filled, perhap with other plastic bags, hang from the end of the latch. There are rooms. Four of them. The far left, closed. The next one, closed. The one on the right has the bags. The one in the middle is opened. Upwards, forming a sort of roof above the kid, maybe 17, who takes the blue tickets and gives you your food. One of the embedded buckets has a reddish Achar. Unbeatable- tangy, sour, tart- perhaps tamarind. It is scooped out with a cup, poured into a dish made of dried leaves and held in place with pieces of bamboo that look like broken toothpicks.

The song has changed now. Much more upbeat, sounds more filmy with periods of soaring instrumentals.

The basket on the table, lined with aluminum foil, lined with paper, is filled with "Kachori".

The opened room, behind the young boy, has a tin tub with handles. The tub is large, and sits on a table. The room has pink paint all over, and blue tiles around the bottom of the walls to about three feet. It is grimy. Perhaps this is where some cooking happens. Perhaps the wet sweets.

There is no sign, but there is a steady stream of people.

Buffalo

Her head tilts slightly to the right as her left hand hand holds a bag, black, plastic, cheap, sagging under the weight of its contents- it must be something soft. Her green petticoat, perhaps woolen, is visible all the way to her wrist, and where the clothing ends and the hand begins, you can see two red and bangles, and one golden one that is just a little bit thicker than the others. She also has a shawl- those woolen ones with the thick threads spaced and coming out from both ends, but it does not come all the way down- it wraps around her upper body to about where the elbow is, just so, and does not get in the way. Her arm is bent at the elbow slightly as she holds the goods up slightly above a meat scale- one of those blue metal, long, iron scales with one platform and one metallic half-basket to hold up the aluminum bowl on either side. The two ends are balanced on two moving, flat metallic rods, which float freely and in opposite directions. They point to each other in the middle, where the flat metal end has become a flat metal arrow pointing at the other.

The platform gets the weights, the metallic basket gets to hold the aluminum which holds the meat. Buffalo. You can always tell because there seems to be endless meat and very little bone on the table. It is redder than goat for some reason, there seems to be more blood and a whitish red membrane covering whatever slab happens to be there. There are also patches of a darker reddish-purple-blue, muted but distinct in the meat. The table under the scale, and under the meat, is coated with a thin tin sheet which also happens to wrap around the edge of the table, come around the bottom and then down a little again before being nailed to the wood. The top frame also usually has nails around it. The surface, dented with marks made when the knife- a heavy blackish metallic object with the tip rolled backwards slightly towards the handle and the sharp edge edge circular. The dents are filled with a dark brown-black like someone had taken a thick pencil and slashed and slashed in short strokes. A man looks at the woman, stretches out his right hand, wearing a black helmet with the clasp undone and hanging down beyond his chin. The right hand, the one that reaches out, also has a set of keys with a keychain sporting a black piece of leather embroidered around the edges and shaped like a flattened water droplet. When he turns his head slightly, the tip of his nose and the tips of his moustache peek out from behind the helmet. The helmet is black but beaten up, not quite shiny. It is perfectly round from the forehead all the way down to the neck, and makes the head look like a ball balanced on shoulders. In front it used to have a plastic protector to cover the opening leading to the face. There is no protector, but you can still see the shiny, round button-like holders on two sides next to the top of the front opening where perhaps the plastic was attached.

They stood at her shop, which stood next to a tall blue corner building with brown wooden frames around the windows and doors which looked taller than usual because it was only one room wide on each side, sandwiched between an old brown house and a new orangish one. On each side - One door, one window on top of that and one window on top of that. The two sides meeting at a corner

With the left hand, comes a small, rolled up pink and orange tube of money. It is picked up by the woman's right hand.

As I write this, an old woman ambles by, curious.

A young boy comes stands behind me, hugging the wooden pillar along my back.

"Ke cha Bhai?"

Silence, he looks on at this screen. I am still typing this.
A moment passes.

"You computer ho?"

"Ho"

A white computer in the brown alleyways of Patan is a rare thing.

At the temple to my right, a girl shakes the brass bells hanging from chains. It rings lethargically. On the road in front of me, there is a wet round patch, near the edge of the road, in front of a doorway. There is rice spread sparsely about on it, Abir, some flowers. I have seen it before but with red-mud spread out below, and usually in front of doorways.

The woman is standing behind me, curious, amused. Her smile causing her to squint. The wrinkles on her face have taken to permanent shapes, not too close to each other, and not too far. She has a golden earring on, hands clasped behind her back, and smiles at me as I leave, a large white arch to my back and a long street in front, old buildings to each side, bottom floor shops, houses merging into each other, entrances marked with the red-mud patches. The distance, obscured by the morning mist.

Waiting

The lights have gone out. The birds chirp outside, there is a light blanket of clouds, and the sun tries to come through in parts. A gate screeches open, and a voice yells- it is a child ad then another. I cannot make out what is said. Perhaps, they are on their way to school. The sun has just gained a little intensity and it brightens up my keyboard. It is a shy intensity, and makes me think that it is going to be covered up soon.

"Chhuti ko din ma ali kati aaraam gara ke," my grandmother says.

Rest a little on a day off. The "ke" is her slight insistence, a strong but loving suggestion.

The lights have gone out. Thirty minutes to go.
The sun is being covered again, its light becoming diffused.

The sound of a wooden plank being hit with a hammer gives some rhythm to the morning. To my right, there is a double window, those small ones found in the old Kathmandu houses made of cement, brick and mud walls. Not very pretty from the outside if it were not for the cement frame around it, taller than it is wide, and with the thick cement arch on top. The glass only covers the top half of the window, and it is split in the middle so that it can be swung open, inside. Covering the bottom half, which is not glass anyway, there is a cabinet. The top of the cabinet has a piece of one of those plastic floor covers that are used instead of carpeting, that are gray on the underside, lined with some sort of rubber, and shiny on the top with an attractive pattern. This one is mostly light red- surely because it was washed out by the sunlight- with red octagons spaced regularly, four opposite sides touching four other octagons and with squares connecting each octagon to four new octagons. The borders of all these shapes are thick white. The squares are purple and have a greenish white flower in the center. The flower has two layers of petals, eight each. The bottom layer of eight protrudes one by one from the spaces between the upper layer of eight, like a two layered sunflower. Except this flower's petals have green marks on a white background. In the center of the circularly arranged petals, there are eight white dots, irregularly spaced and mixed with many more smaller purple dots. The flower hovers in the square, separated from each side by about twice the thickness of the square's white border.

Well, the octagons are also of two types. One has a flower and the other has concentric stars spreading outwards in two layers- dotted purple, then dotted red. And the flower octagon has a thicker border with purple dots- 16 a side, and two end dots shared with the connected two sides.

There is a box resting sideways on the tarp, partially covered by a cloth and partially covering what looks like a plastic card in a plastic case. The box must be empty. It says from top to bottom, "Asthalin" and on the outside of the top flap- now on the side- it has a hand holding a cylindrical object, the long way, between the fingers and thumb. This image, a white hand with a white object, is surrounded by a solid blue circle. Around the top, arching, there are some green letters that are not legible. Maybe the white object in the white hand in the blue circle on the white box that happens to be lying sideways is an inhaler. But I doubt the box contains anything- it has already collected dust waiting to be thrown out.

The lights are back. Perhaps I will go to Patan today as was suggested to me some time back.

Sounds

The birds chirping competes with a radio that seems to have a pretty bad speaker. An engine has just pulled up and is idling near the window. The birds are providing the background noise as the door slams shut, and, I imagine, a person steps out. I turn to my left, and I can see only the sun coming through the fabric, repeating the pattern of the window grill on the curtain, but in shadow. The door has slammed, sharply now.

The accelerator is pushed down, the engine revs up. Clutch, shift into gear, and it is off. The sound gets softer. And now it's only the birds and some people in the distance. And the radio playing a lok geet. A whirring engine now which sounds like a baby version of the earlier one. The sound gets louder, then softer. A motorcycle. There are schoolchildren now, talking and chattering. A man calls out something that I cannot understand, and I hear his slippers- slap, slap- against his heel and swish swish on the sandy road.

A woman is raising her voice, she breaks into a laugh. A man's voice interjects, a child calls out "Mommy!" raising the last syllable like a question. A rooster- it's around 3pm, I wonder what it is doing- does his thing and cries out. Again. Someone has come downstairs and the sound travels up the stairwell. I can just make out what he is saying. He speaks in loud, yelling tones with abrupt endings. It is loud enough to just erase any subtle gestures contained in the voice, but soft enough to convince you that he is not angry. Just deaf perhaps. Maybe partially. He was just told that my uncle lost his mobile phone. He was on a crowded Micro, and stepped off only to not find his phone in the right pocket of his tweed blazer where he had left it. He had called me asking me to check around the house to see if it had been left behind. I had to give him the bad news: it wasn't in the house. So, he said, it must have got lost in the crowd, in the micro, in Kathmandu.

There is the sound of a crow now, and then a strange sound. Like a child blowing a plastic whistle. Or more like the sound that comes from a balloon if you fill it up, press the lips of its opening together and release the air. Not the flabbering sound but the tight whistling sound.

Someone has just started a motorcycle nearby. He has now driven off. Surely it is a man. Women are left with those smaller scooters which weigh less. These days, you can get more powerful ones, but they do not compare to motorcycles. You can tell by the whirring of the engine. It must be the weight of the bikes that makes them so difficult to handle. A scooter is easier to feel in full control of. A bike, however, is hard to hold up if it should get off balance somehow, like when it is stopped at a traffic light. Sometimes, though, its the clothing- there is no way to ride a bike wearing a sari, or a skirt.

The sun on my back lulled me into a short sleep. I just woke up again. And the drowsiness has not left...time to sleep again.

Rain

It is tapping. Imagine a constant crumpling of paper, same pace, same volume. When it started, it came down in a sudden "bang tang bang" and you felt that something had been dropped, like sand, above your head. The sound on the metal corrugated, red, iron sheets was alarming. It gradually rose and reached a crescendo, a maximum volume of sound, and then it died down, to a tapping. Looking out, it had collected. I was on the upper floor, and next to my window on the left, slightly below the window itself, it mixed in with the small particles of dust and a leaf here and there along the corrugation, because it had been so long since the metal sheet was cleaned- or perhaps it had just collected: the wind was powerful before this happened. The dirt particles uniformly sprinkled in a line, the pieces of leaves, here and there . You had to look carefully for the hail- the momentary miniature pearls of a cloudy color, immediately melting and turning the red metal around it into a halo of brighter red than the rest. You know that sweet made of those milky, small, pebble like balls- that is how they looked. Perhaps, of a smaller size.

It is still raining. It is an easing, constant sound. The roof here is made of corrugated iron, just like the building that I was in this afternoon- I can hear the roof although I cannot see it. The droplets are large.

When it first started, there were no taxis. Finally, one came. I got in, already wet. Fifteen seconds- I counted- till I was drenched. The gutters by the road filled up quickly, with streaming dark muddy gray water flowing down to the lowest point.

A temple of the old stacked pagoda style- imagine a four sided temple roof, with clay tiles, partially overlapping, sloping upwards from the sides in a gradual slope, and just before meeting at the center, meeting instead at four walls which hold up the next roof, smaller, of the same shape. This happens three times, and the last one peaks in a Gajur- a metallic shiny, structure that reaches up and points to the sky. All around the three roofs, big and small, hanging down, there is a red skirting with a golden border. It is overlapped, and wavy. When the rain came, it turned the upper portion into a dark red, uniformly, while the lower edge stayed dry. The two striped skirting because three striped: dark red nearest to the roof's edge, then the light red of the original cloth, and the golden border. The temple has been redone a little bit- the walls around it have been painted a reddish orange, and the tent shaped tiles which used to cover the slanted edges of the roof- where two sloping sides met- four per roof, had been replaced by a long, crude looking, cement mound- four per roof.


The temple reached up, alone, against the dark gray sky, colors muted by sunlight that was mostly blocked. Yet, everything was bright enough, and then in the background, a purple flash- lightning. Two seconds later, a shuddering rumble that seemed to come from all sides. And all of a sudden, the "shhhhhhhh" of rain. My eyes closed for a moment, and I drowned in sound.

The rain was heavy. Fitting for rain that had been stored up in clouds for months. Somehow I made it home.

The radio is off now, perhaps as an ode to the rain, whose sound is joyous.

The first rain of the season.

Clouds

"Ghar Hamro Ramechhap/
Dolalghat ma aaaunu hai/
jaamla ekai saath"

The flute leads the tune of the female chorus into a steady stream of alternating madal beats.

The radio has changed now to some other program- I took a break from writing to have Aloo Chiura. It was cooked with some some jira of course, and it was yellow because of the oil, and i guess some besar- tumeric- and cooked and cooked. It can be hard or soft depending on how much water you decide to leave in it before serving. This one was fairly soft. We had it with what we call "Poushe Achaar", the very sour pickle made in water from the month of Poush, instead of oil, but with plenty of spices, and left out in those plastic containers with colorful lids, and perhaps a bit of paper, a strip, stuck hard to where the adhesive- now visible and perhaps with some dirt or other particles stuck to it- was applied to the label. Usually these are Horlicks jars (blue lids), or perhaps Viva (red lids), and Glucose-D jars (usually plastic, with green lids). So in this array of multi colored lids capping jars- plastic for water achaars, and glass for oil ones- the tone of the color comes to indicate how long it has been in the sun. The lids fade. Amongst the jars of lids and sour deliciousness inside, there is always one or the other which is extremely old compared to the rest- it seems to be tightly packed, and sometimes partially full but always made of glass. The other jars would have dark colored liquid with yellow specks floating around- mustard seeds. You can barely see the liquid in the strange one. The odd one is the Tama jar.

I wonder if Pandas would like Tama- they are young bamboo shoots after all- or whether they would reject it as rancid.

Oh, I forgot to mention the best part of the Aloo Chiura: to the hot oil, before you put in anything else, you add some chili pepper, and heat it just enough that you don't get the noxious vapour that is very irritating to the eyes. Then add some chopped onions. These onions, lightly, and sometimes heavily fried are buried under the potato and covered with chiura as the cooking progresses, but they resurface later to add their flavor to the mouth. And of course, if the khursani should resurface, it also adds a smoky, spicy flavor- the spicy often more memorable than the smoky.

The clouds are coming now. Gradually darker and closer, like a soft gray ceiling that sets everything into sharp relief- buildings, leaves, trees, flags, even the occasional pigeon sitting on a decommissioned high tension wire. The pigeon sits, tail feathers down below its red-pink claws- as they gripped the wire. Its neck glistening greenish and purple, and the white separating the gray of the beak from the rest of the head. From this distance, I cannot see the eyes clearly but I can imagine the orange iris enclosing a black pupil. It was alone, no friends in sight, lit from the south by the sun which shines fully from the side of the sky not yet conquered by the clouds. I wonder if it is raining there where the clouds are. If I look south, the sun is bright and I fancy that the sun will stay, but when I look to the other side, north, the clouds seem very determined- determined to rain. Perhaps the pigeon will fly away long before then.

If it does rain, it will be the first of the season. Perhaps, then, as they say, it will get hot.

If it gets hot and rains, it will be easier to fill this

which stands above me and behind, as I write this.

Lagankhel

Approaching Bhadrakali from Ratna Park, the traffic once again slows right around the overhead crosswalk near the Bagh Bazaar petrol pump. Micros stop there, on the left, far enough away from the sidewalk that you could fit another micro and a half between them. It is the last big stop before the Micros move to their destinations, and thus one last chance to fill up with people if still empty, or to over stuff with people if already full.

"La la ! Seat cha. Jaana laagyo hai! Lagankhel Jawalakhel!"

There is a chorus of this, and it is possible perhaps to learn quite a few names of places in the city by just singing along. There is hardly an adult voice- all the voices are children or teens wearing scruffy clothing, some of them wearing those black leather belts studded along the edges with silver beads, and with big buckles. Inevitably, the shirt is a torn and dirty tee with the faded logo of some 80's rock band- maybe Metallica, maybe Guns and Roses.

On the right, a long and thin gate, maybe eight or ten feet high, at the far end of the sidewalk, and the dried dirt visible where the bricks had been temporarily removed from the sidewalk in order to put the gate in place and then left permanently on the sidewalk. Some bricks lying around here and there, dust and the metallic gate reaching into the sky, all adding decoration to the enclosed "Khulla Munch" or open theater. It is a little faded on the outside now, a light greenish-blue- the same color as the thick, short cement railings that line Tudikhel- and a bright, almost neon, orange on the inside. Like a radioactive and extra ripe and extra large pumpkin, cut in half the short way, seeds removed, internals scooped out in a stepped fashion, just enough to allow about a hundred people to stand underneath- and political parties to start rallies- and mounted on a cement platform with stairs on both sides. The giant pumpkin would also have to have faded paper posters with monochrome print- usually blue- stuck to the side of it some way along its arch, and perhaps closer to the ground some political slogans painted in a single color, usually red. These days, the slogans say,

"People's Republic of Nepal's first president, Comrade Prachanda!"
and a little below, right aligned and in smaller font, following a dash: " Ne. Ka. Pa. (Maobaadi)"

And so, we crossed Khulla Munch.

The next road to come on the left, I think it is called Pradarshani Marga, is the one which has the Nepal Tourism Board office on the corner, and Ramailo mela closer to the other end, which meets one of the beginnings of Putali Sadak. There would usually be cars lining this road waiting for petrol, but none today. Perhaps the petrol is becoming regular already. My driver in the morning told me that petrol was rationed still, but that they had come up with a system of getting some to everyone: on even dates, only even license plates got petrol. On odd dates, odd plates. They also designated which petrol pumps would serve which kind of vehicle- taxi, private, motorcycle. And they changed the pumps every day. So, if you wanted petrol, you would have to pick up the newspaper every other day, find out where the pump for your vehicle was that day and go wait in line for them to distribute around noontime. You'd shell out the Rs. 1500 max. allowed, and drive off. I hear the lines are shorter than before, but still take several hours.

As we made the turn at Bhadrakali a bus also made the turn from the other side and sped towards Sahid Gate. It was an old bus of the kind that Makalu Yatayat used.- boxy, big broad sides, tall, small windows, and a long, rack type fitting on the roof. The driver's window was a little taller, and you could see almost his whole body as he sat and controlled the beast. From the bottom of his window, emerged a stripe of three colors which went the length of the bus all the way to the back. The bus was dusty- it certainly was not a local Kathmandu bus. Perhaps it had come from the direction of Ramechhap. Along the side of the bus, rooted at the windows, there were three downward spreading splashes of a dark brown color, irregularly spaced and of different sizes. Covered in dust, and of the same uniformly dusty tone as the rest of the bus, it looked almost like a part of the painted design, along with the stripe. They were probably the remains of meals that did not sit well. I looked at the people squatting on the roof, and they looked at me. I wondered what the pattern would have looked like if they had also thrown up. They probably wondered what it was about me that made me stare at them for so long.

Terai

I couldn't actually see his face, just his eyes which suddenly lit up and his eyebrows which arched. The rear view mirror reflected more of his face when he shifted in his seat, perhaps to press the clutch, and shift gears. He was dark skinned, but a dark red-black: someone who could easily become fair if he stayed indoors long enough. He was delighted- I could see it in his eyes, and then his lips and then his teeth, and when the mirror showed his eyes again, for that moment, I had a picture of his whole joyous face.

The news is on the radio right now. Raaaadiiooooo Saaaggaaarrmaathaaa... they are saying the evening news. I don't remember which radio station was playing when I was in the taxi- I think it was Image FM. Although, the news was the same.

"The government has reached an eight point agreement with the protesting Terai parties thereby ending their revolt."

Right now, the radio says that the parties took out rallies in the Terai proclaiming victory, that this meant that Madeshi's issues had finally been addressed by the nation. My driver perhaps felt the same joy but for a different reason. I asked,

"So the Terai Aandolan is over? They have reached and agreement?"

"Yes! It had almost reached famine here.."

The translation does an injustice to his emotions. He said, "Ho! Yaha ta hahakar nai macchina laagya thiyo."

He was happy that prices would drop, that petrol would be available finally, that he could buy instant noodles for his kids, that he wouldn't have to worry about how far prices were going to go up. Perhaps he was also from the Terai- like my driver yesterday who was at pains to explain to me that he was a Chaudhury and that in his village, everyone of every caste and ethnicity lived together peacefully, that he could not understand why these Madeshis were causing so much trouble.

The radio also announced that the electricity authority will be reducing load shedding by 6 hours a week to 42 hours.

So, we will be in the dark only 25% of the time now.

Lok

Surya astaudai / runa thaaleko
Udaune bela bho / Ajai rudai chu

When the sun set / I started crying
It is about to rise / I am still crying


The man repeats the refrain, then so does the woman. It is sung in a typical "Lok Geet" melody, a folk tune. Perhaps the couple are separated by an ocean. He has gone to work in the Middle East, in the heat and the suffering, so that he can send money home and they- newly married- can start their life better than it was. The tune almost cries, almost pulls emotion out of you. The woman replies, describes how much she is in love with him, how they used to walk, hold hands, the mountains and the moon and hills and rivers. He responds, equally nostalgic, says that if he could be with her this instant, he would leave everything and come. He regrets that he has left her youth, beautiful cheeks and eyes made even more beautiful by the black eyeliner she wears. He asks if she still blushes when she thinks of him and they continue.

Ustai chau ki nirmaya / Jhan ramri bhako chau
Ek choti / Herne dhoko cha

Timrai pir le nirmaya / baaki cha baulauna
Samjhera / yo man roko cha

Are you the same or / even prettier
Just once / I want to see you

Worrying about you / leaves only madness to come
Remembering you / this heart cries

The lights have gone again. And I am on my laptop. The trusty radio is on. It breaks into a jingle- Raaadddiiooo Saaagaaarrmmmaathaaa.

Now it has gone into a different program. Something about children's rights.

Bullets

It was morning time. My grandparents and I like to sit on the roof of our house. Sometimes, my mother is also there. But not too early in the morning: the sun has to be out and strong so that you don't feel cold. It is not spring yet, and the days are warm but the mornings misty. Even at 10am, the time that we go sit on the roof, being in the shade is noticeably colder- not cooler- than being in the sun. We sat there today for thirty minutes before heading in. In the meantime, we had about five mandarin oranges. Their skins were already mostly detached from the part that we eat, and from the outside, instead of looking perfectly round, they looked like partially deflated plastic balls. Stick your thumb in next to the bump sticking up from the top- the part where it hung to its branch- dig your finger in, and pull apart. It's a common ritual which yields sweet and sour rewards. Today's oranges were mostly sweet. My thumb passed close to my nose as I took a deep breath. I can still smell the faint after-odor of orange peel on my fingers. Maybe some of the peel and juices got stuck beneath my nail. That happens a lot.

It happens a lot especially when there are a lot of oranges to peel, and lots of grapefruits to peel like when we make "Sandheko Bhogotey". Imagine a medium sized steel tub, full of peeled and separated grapefruit. Actually, you have to peel the grapefruit first, and about half the volume disappears. Then you take the naked fruit and peel it again, carefully, to remove the fibers- they look like veins. And then you split each little piece of the double naked fruit and pull off the outside skin again. So you are left with just the juicy morsels closest to the seeds. Ultimately, you are left with triple naked grapefruit, de-seeded. It is the same story for the oranges, and would be the same for the lemons too except the lemons don't separate so easily. So we just end up squeezing the juice out. And by the way, the grapefruit has to be prepared in the shade. It gets bitter apparently if you put it in the sun too long. Anyway, then comes the salt, the sugar then come the spices- tumeric, cumin, something we call "Jimbu"- I have no idea what this is in English.. The last two are fried deeply in hot oil, and the pan with oil is dumped, along with the burnt spices into this tub of citrus. A brave soul then decides it is safe enough to stick her hand into the preparation- that the hot oil has cooled enough- and then mixes and mixes. In the end, each spectator- and probably fruit peeler too because there are so many to peel- is rewarded with a small steel bowl full of the very tart, sour, salty, and very very good stuff.

The thing to do is eat a whole lot of that stuff, and then drink a couple glasses of water- because, as they say, the concoction helps to "increase the blood in the body"- and then move away from the crowd, find a warm sunny spot on the roof which promises to stay sunny for the next few hours, and take a nap. It is the most restful sleep imaginable in Kathmandu. Especially if it is the months of Poush and Magh.

The radio, which always seems to be playing in my house, just interrupted the news flash for a more important news flash. "This just received from the metropolitan police: Bullets were moved in the New Baneshwor area. We are informed that police are now on the scene."

Actually, "bullets were moved" is a literal translation. They meant to say that bullets were fired there, perhaps by someone other than the police. Bullets could have moved without being fired of course, and probably do move a lot without it being reported as a super news flash on the radio. For example, bullets move when armed robbers approach to their target near Vishal Bazaar but decide not to rob; or when the army man standing in front of the palace shifts his weight and his gun tilts; or when an armed police officer walks along the streets wondering whether he is really of any use in a city where other groups have become the law givers; bullets move when the container that they are being shipped in is transported; bullets also move when the UNMIN workers accept ammunition handed over by Maoist rebels; or when the real Maoist soldiers hide their guns under their pillows instead of turning them over. So much for bullets moving. It's a good thing they meant "bullets were fired." Otherwise, it would have caused a lot of confusion because bullets move all the time.

Confusion not unlike the confusion caused when I can't publish a post right after it is written, but have to wait until the double coincidence required for internet access happens- first me and the ISP have electricity, and second this period of overlap happens to be when my internet service works- and then give the post a date in the past so that those who had checked for the new post at the date that the post says it was actually posted would not have found it then, but would find it now. That's confusing. I mean that you probably get confused when a post was not there at the date and time that it says it was posted...

You are not going crazy: It's the load-shedding.

Load

The darkness of early morning has given way to the bright sunlight and chirping birds of morning.

My uncle is sitting in front of me, wrapped in a blanket, just his head sticking out from the top. My mother is reading out a list of candidates for constituent assembly elections as printed in the Kathmandu Post. I am not sure which party this is, maybe the Nepali Congress which submitted this list yesterday. And he is either repeating the names or saying "Ani," or just nodding his head and saying "aaa."

It is unlikely though that elections will happen. That is what I hear.

So much for that.

Now there is the sound of drums, clarinets and horns. Someone is getting married. The chaotic sound, you can imagine, people with red coats beating the drums the "Janti" moving forward, eventually dragging the girl back with them after a prolonged ceremony which is different for each household. Technically, it should be the same, but the priests have great leeway. The rest of the crowd does not know really what the details of the ceremony are, and so he can tailor the bulk of it to his own will.

Now the music has become faster paced. I don't recognize the tune.

Dogs barking now. Perhaps the band is walking by the house. No, the music is getting softer now.

There is a mist in Kathmandu, where we live. We've had load shedding for most of yesterday so I went to Thamel. There is a restaurant there which is tall, and from it you can see beauty. It was late afternoon, so the sun was already tilting west. The shadows, looking towards Swyambhu's silhouette, defined the hills. The different sides of the hills were different shades of blue and gray, you could even make out bumps, ridges, slopes of different angles that become visible only when the sun is just so. My eyes moved to Swyambhu, dark, perched on a hill- the only manmade feature visible at that height, looking out over the valley. You could just imagine the eyes, now hidden, staring into your soul. The monkeys, the stairs, the people. the music, the view looking down.

Panche Baja now. So the Janti must have arrived at the girl's place. No, it is actually Bagpipes. Perhaps this is the army band.

About load shedding- two places have to have electricity before I can write it turns out. Last night, I woke at 3 so that I could write. There was electricity, but it turns out there was no electricity at wlink, my ISP. And therefore, I could not type. I went to sleep instead.

Weekends are bad. There is barely any synchronization between the electricity schedule here and the schedule for wlink. Weekdays are better.

The music is quiet. So the girl must be sitting at the jagya now, with the guy, doing their stuff. I wonder if it is a Newari wedding or a Bahun wedding. Maybe it is a "mixed" marriage. This just means that the parents are mixed up about the fact that their racism is not really meaningful to their kids who have decided to get married.

I am waiting for the electricity now, eager to post this. The band is still playing, now mostly drums. The sun streams down, some warmth emerges.

Prabhu

"Hey Prabhu!"

There is difficulty now writing anything at all. There is a pervasive sense of demoralization in the city now, although I cannot speak for the country.

Today, there was no bread in the stores because they did not have LPG for their ovens. There is also no more Wai Wai in the stores, or any other noodles. Perhaps, they have not been transported to the capital.

Petroleum is being brought into the city under curfew, and the lines at every single pump are so long that double lane streets have become permanently single lane. You name it: Sajha, Bhadrakali, Jadi Buti, Sundhara, Tripureshwor, Rangashala, Sashastra, Police, everywhere there are permanent lines.

It has been this way for a week now. You already know about the electricity. A lemon is now 15 rupees. Onions about Rs. 25 a kg. Khasi is Rs. 380 per kg, and the price of buffalo is also high. A section officer in government makes Rs. 10,000 a month. The cost of a taxi from home to work is now unaffordable: Rs. 200.

It was not possible for me to go to Bhaktapur yesterday because the road was blocked.

There is not enough water in the taps, and not enough diesel to power the trucks that carry water.

We are out of rice now, and tomorrow we will know whether it is available in the stores. Perhaps people have started hoarding.

This seems like a design to bring Kathmandu to her knees. But on whose part, nobody knows.

We do not know what is going to happen tomorrow, or the day after. Some in the city must have been feeling the pinch for a while now. We have only just started feeling the shortages.

Tukki

It's the inverter, also called a UPS, also called a big rechargeable battery. The one here is about fifteen years old, and consists of a car battery hooked up to a fancy metallic device with some dials on it. It could be the reason that the electricity bill is about double what it was before load shedding, despite the electricity supply being reduced by about 45 hours a week. The light just flickered. It is a single bulb, one of those energy saver mini tube lights that hangs down from a light bulb socket.

The radio, a small portable black one with the antenna coming out of one corner, plays on:

"There has been a helicopter accident near Everest Base Camp..."
"Uranium has been seized at the Nepal-India border...."
"Political parties have registered their candidates for proportional elections..."
"And now for international news..."

and so on.

It is the only voice in the room, the news reader, slightly rushed, pausing at foreign names, and some numbers, somewhat authoritative. It rolls on.

This is an old room in an old house. The walls are thick, filled with mud and maybe some brick. Whitewashed on the inside, but chalky. Wires running across the walls, an uneven ceiling- plywood, nailed to the beams that formed the ceiling underneath- painted a shiny white. Habitable and quaint. You wouldn't expect this much from the outside. It must be about a century old.

Someone in the room laughs. An old man. An old woman asks, "Ke Bhayo?"
He just laughs, she gives up asking. The question was passively asked.
There is some news about the Pakistani elections, some news about people defying the curfew in the south of Nepal. Some people shot and injured, one woman gravely.

Now they have moved on to sports. The reader stumbles, and says, "Please listen to that again," and gets it somewhat more right the second time. He is on a roll now. He mentions an inter-school basketball tournament. Half of the school names are English words. They are said in English typified by Nepali sounds. Now the boisterous theme song for the news, and the news reader says some of the headlines again. The theme song plays again, the news reader says goodbye. Immediately, the radio starts to play an ad announcing that the water supply in Kathmandu is being improved and for that to happen, people have to control leaks and breaks in the pipes. The ad is a dialogue between a buzzing sound and a person, where the buzzing sound is a talking tap. The tap lectures him to conserve water, and chides him for not knowing that the water supply in Kathmandu is about to improve. The tap can't believe that the man does not know the news: there will soon be water for everyone in Kathmandu. The man is in disbelief and immediately exclaims:
"What? Water for everyone in Kathmandu??"
The ad ends.

So, it turns out that a talking tap lecturing on recent developments, in a perfectly understandable human voice is not as surprising as the suggestion that everyone in Kathmandu will get water.

The room is silent now, the radio off. Some pots and pans are clanging in the kitchen.

The inverter is now off. The energy saver bulb started flashing like a disco light as an indication that power was running low. But there is still light in the room coming from six white led's, mounted on a thin, long, neck of a device which consists of just a battery box in addition. It has a small red switch on the side of the box, and has three of those big round batteries inside. It is about that size- four big batteries arranged flat, 2 by 2- and has a wire encased in a thin pipe protruding out from one end. And at the end of this pipe is a broader plastic encasing, green, just slightly bigger than six led's placed in two rows of three. Imagine, a turtle with its legs pulled inside, and a really long thin neck, looking at the sky. And on the underside of its neck it has six led's. This device is called a Tukki-Mara. A Tukki Killer. A replacement for a Tukki perhaps.

This one faces a mirror so that the light spreads all over the room. Its light happens to fall on a flashlight, one of those flimsy metallic ones with the circular switch which is used to turn it on at will if the longer switch is in the right position, inverted and standing next to it, turned off.

Our stainless steel plates are laid out now, and the Tukki Mara has been moved to oversee the three of them. It is dinner time.

Fruits

Slightly downhill from and beside the main road where the taxi was stalled, squatted two people. They seemed to be a couple- one wearing a bright red sari, roughly donned and the other wearing a dark gray daura Suruwal along with a white and red Nepali Hat. From behind, they looked like they could have been anywhere, perhaps even a shaded crossroads, looking down at fields and into the distance at hills, taking a short break from the work of the day. Perhaps the husband would have just come back from the fields, and the wife come up to give him some water, in a steel glass, water droplets on the outside, some water dripping from the bottom, having just been dipped into a steel Gagri. And perhaps the husband had talked to her for long, and so she also squatted to listen. Perhaps she was listening to the vague talk of her husband as he puffed on the cigarette protruding from the corner of his fore and middle fingers on his right hand which was made into a fist, tilted at an angle, treated as a makeshift bulb of a Hookah, serving to collect the smoke, with the help of a left hand cupped around this one, before it is inhaled.

This was the outskirts of Kathmandu, and their eyes instead met the butcher shop in front of them, fortified with plywood, a nailed-on aluminum sheet adorning the top of the counter, a mesh case with drying, featherless, headless, chicken bodies, a mosquito net keeping away the flies from the meat. A sign above the shop- far enough to perhaps know that it did not belong to the shop, but so perfectly placed as to think it did- read " Hong Kong Bazaar". The letters were neon green, and the face of a man adorned the left while the face of a woman adorned the right of the sign. The inside of the makeshift meat shop was dark, probably cool, and perhaps there was even a plank laid out where the butcher and his family would sleep at night. In the back. It wouldn't have been very different from the row of shops just like this one on either side of the meat shop. There was no end to the stalls

And perhaps they sat down outside, with the sun on their backs, to escape the cold inside one of the stalls. They both knelt on a section of the temporary, hip high, platforms adjacent to the shops which in the morning and evenings perhaps would be full of vegetable sellers, but at this time, around noon, they were empty. Except for some remains of those ocean green and blue, almost greenish torquoise, leaves that protect cauliflowers, and maybe broccoli. There were some nylon sacks spread out on these planks. Here and there, some rectangular sticks pointed upwards towards the sky waiting to hold up a tarp and help to protect that which was below from the elements. Perhaps they even served as divisions of the plank, and between two of them one seller would sit with his veggies in a pile in front of him. He would probably also be squatting like our couple is doing now, and facing the same direction, towards the stalls, but closer to me on the planks. The footpath between the more permanent stalls, and the slightly elevated, temporary planks adjacent was perhaps as wide the taxi I was in, one of those many colored Maruti cars- this one was white.

A little further up, when the empty platforms ended, a row of fruits began. They were grouped in circular shapes, held in place by nylon nets, the fruits placed in round baskets, mounted on the backs of those Hero cycles, old, beat up and burdened. Another basket was placed inside the triangle whose base is the upper bar and whose opposite vertex below has pedals protruding from it on either side. Two baskets per cycle, and a row of cycles. The same colors dominated- the oranges in the lower basket, grapes and apples in the upper basket. The fruity cycles held up by their owners, fruit sellers visibly from the south of Nepal, and who if they were not here would probably be in the side street by my house yelling out what they had to offer.

There were people buying, and bargaining before that. The taxi began to move slowly, the traffic jam had cleared. We made it up to the main intersection and turned left towards the airport.

It is nighttime here. A distant dog barks at the darkness. I can hear the television in the next room, and a door squeaks before rumbling closed downstairs.

Where to Begin?

Where to begin? I stepped out to go home.

The usual walk took me across a large gallery, polished marble floor, steps to the left. One of those stairs that you imagine would form the centerpiece of an English ballroom, coming down two sides of a wall, meeting about halfway and then turning to face you, doubling in width and then coming down to the ground level. Looking at the size of the gallery and the height of the ceiling- three storeys-you could picture a lady and gentleman coming down the stairs, starting at opposite sides, meeting where the stairs met, and coming down hand in hand. Clapping, rapture.

Except, the walls here were adorned with three large portraits of Rana Prime Ministers. Then at ground level, on the walls, you would find framed, black and white photos of Rhino Hunts, and in a corner somewhere, even a picture of a scrawny young to-be King Tribhuvan. These fading pictures, framed in black, separated from the frame with a wide strip of thick white paper on all sides greet you as soon as you enter the building. They guide you around the large gallery, which now serves as the lobby. I looked at each one the day before yesterday when I was waiting for the office to open, noting how similar the poses were, and the action shots. It reminded me of a book I once saw somewhere by a British historian named David Cannadine. It was called Ornamentalism. Maybe one of these pictures had even been in that book- especially the one of the senior queen of Chandra Sumsher. It looked familiar.

One youngish man was standing in hunting regalia over the corpses of five dead tigers, his world war one rifle in his right hand, his right leg bent and mounted on the pile of corpses. In another, a majestic rhino, laying down as if asleep and an adult man, one tenth the size, shorter, even than the shortest elephant grass- about the size of the rhino's front leg- trying to lean on the dead animal. Pictures of everyone from Chandra Sumsher to Janga Bahadur and the Lord and Lady Mountbatton (surrounded by what looked like several mini kings of various heights, all wearing the flowing crowns that I grew up associating with only The King himself.)

In the corner, just as you step up into the building, and behind you just as you step out, is a remarkable picture. It has a Tibetan looking delegation, standing around a chair. In the chair is seated a young, bearded and moustached, bald teenager. The caption reads, "His Holiness The Thirteenth Dalai Lama"

So leaving the Dalai Lama with his Rana contemporaries, I stepped halfway out the door. There were some police officers there. One of them had those red and yellow checkered linings on his hat. There was a police pickup, a few guards, and a black car in the middle with a government license plate. I guessed that was not for me, so instead of stepping out, I walked to another exit.

As I walked perpendicular to the police column, I could see from this perspective that it was a modern day version of a "Sawari". The person who got out looked old, and tried his best to assume the role of an important person. This meant keeping grim and overcast, and nodding passively only once when a high ranking police officer energetically saluted him. His wife was behind him too. She didn't get a salute.

As I walked on, I saw a large gathering of people- playing the role of modern day peasants perhaps- in a parking lot that is filled with cars usually. There were cars too, but they seemed to be embedded in a sea of people. Actually, a small puddle of people. Perhaps they were here to see The Important Person.

The day had become overcast and grim. It had been sunny in the afternoon, but perhaps the sky wanted to be important too. I walked on. Turning the corner, where some workers were either taking something out or putting something into a long hole by the side of the road, I looked for cabs. None to be found today.

I walked on, turning the next corner where a security guard was posted to challenge the challengeable. No taxis. The next corner, still nothing. And I saw why there was such a dearth of cabs. A young traffic police officer was standing by the road, trying to decipher what an armed police officer was saying. He seemed to be asking, with sign language, "Should I let the cars go? Are there more cars?" The armed police officer carried his arms (a stick) in one hand and decided that the best thing to do was to stop this nonsense and run towards the traffic police officer to figure out what he was saying. They must have met by the time I reached the main road. There were no cabs.

Again, a police officer was whistling at any cars that tried to stop. So, I walked on.

Eventually, there was a cab parked and waiting. He asked for 200 Rupees. I got in without a word, and we moved on. I asked him where he got his fuel.
"I've put in Chinese fuel, what to do?"

...pause...

"I put in five liters. They say you shouldn't use this stuff, but I did. The car is running still, but there is a little change in its feel."

"Where did you get the fuel? Black?" (on the black market?)

"Yes. They asked for Rs. 150 per liter. They brought it down from Khasa. They say you shouldn't use it straight up. But I had five liters of fuel left in the tank and so maybe because it is mixed with that, the car is still running."

The driver was young, relatively. Maybe a little older than me. He had a night's stubble on his face, and only the part around the lower right jaw was white. I wondered whether that patch was the oldest. Imagine, perhaps, that was the set of stem cells to differentiate into cheek cells, then hair follicles in adolescence, and the first to grow hair. It was the old patch, and so it had grown white. The rest was black. He was probably in his cab all night waiting for fuel, only to not get it in the morning. His Sahu required Rs. 700 a day, and the fuel had to be purchased by the driver. Our young man had his "Driver Identification Card" mounted below his meter- one of those black ones with the grey lcd screen and black digital characters, the light pink, light green and transparent yellow buttons, the aluminum seal sticking out of the left side, the rectangular ridges decorating the casing on either side, and in the lower right hand corner of the screen the familiar circle divided into many slightly separated slices, which would look like it was spinning when the car moved. The meter was mounted with the help of a tightly folded piece of newspaper behind it, separating the back of the meter from the dashboard by maybe half a centimeter. I wonder when the paper was from, and what was happening in the country when this car officially became fit for cruising passengers about the streets of KTM.

In his photo, in the official identification document, below the meter, he was wearing a tie. It looked like a brown and white tie with thick stripes of alternating colors, the stripes leaning down on the left. His shirt was light green. His eyes looked shocked. And the blood red background stood out most. As always, the writing on the "card" - actually about twice the size of a spread out wallet of the sort that men like to carry in their back pockets-was in red marker, handwritten. His name, etc. by some bureaucrat, or more likely a police officer.

It was about 5:15pm, when the roads around Ratna Park are full of cars. But there were very few cars. The sidewalk leading up to the old bus park was packed with people, five rows thick, waiting for the micros that would stop there in usual times.

We moved on.

Kailash

I stepped down from the sidewalk, across the curb to the other side. There was a taxi parked there but before I could get to it a couple walked towards it, spoke some words and walked away towards me. An older woman remained standing by the driver's side window, looking away from the car as though she were shielding it. Her yellow sari showed many shades in the darkness, it was illuminated in parts by the ATM in front of her, the streetlight, the neon lights from the stores nearby. I wasn't going to get that taxi.

The fuel shortage that has been going on for about a week now was supposed to have made it difficult to get cabs. It wasn't any harder than before for most of the week. I only felt the slight scarcity today on the way to work and on the way back. On the way back more so than the way to work.

I turned back to the other side, where another cab had parked. He said 150 Rupees. It usually costs 85 Rupees. I was about to get into the car when I felt a slight tug on my left arm.

"Dai, can you tell me how to get to Ratna Park?"

I said, without looking, "That way." And pointed South.

He didn't turn to look where my hand pointed. I could see in his face that he really wanted to.

I noticed that he had a thin, tapering walking stick in his right hand. He was blind.

He didn't have sunglasses on and I don't remember what his eye area looked like. He was much shorter than me and wore a grayish brown suit. When I looked down, I could see a blue hat, sort of an ocean blue with a white pattern. The bottom was folded up around the rim, like it was made to collect any raindrops that might happen to roll down the sides of the head. At least it would keep the ears dry in case of a storm.

But maybe it also served to shield the eyes- he did not have anything else to cover them with. I turned him around, and let him go. My eyes followed him as he stumbled, bumped into the brick base of a tree planed in the sidewalk, the ones with red brick that line this street. With the bronze plaques on them which say "Embassy of Germany". He kept stumbling.

After the fourth or fifth stumble, I was by his side and we walked. At first my arm was below, but that was difficult. So I put my right arm above his left and he clasped my fingers as we walked. I don't remember much of the walk, only the things he told me. By the time we reached the roundabout, I knew that he has been blind since childhood. An operation on a cataract had somehow led to complications and he had lost his sight.

"Can you see anything?"
"Yes, I can see light here and there."

He had the walking stick for about two years. It was given to him by an NGO and they had trained him how to use it for two months. He was from Kailali, he had a rough idea of his age- something like 30 or 32, he had been married, he counted his money with help before he left home, and he lived with the people who employed him to sell incense. He had been married to someone like him but she was a little slow in the head. And so, "I gave her separation papers and sent her off." There was an odd satisfaction to his voice when he said it. He had no kids.

Selling incense in Kathmandu, returning late at night to Ekantakuna with the assistance of people who would guide him from one point to the next.

We walked, and asked for Micros, whether any would go to Ekantakuna, or Nakkhu, or Balkhu.

"Perhaps you want to go home now? You probably have things to do."
"No, it's ok."

"Is there a public bathroom nearby?"
This was Ratna Park, on the side where all the micros stop at night, and where people are packed in the streets, in buses, in micros. It is dark, and dusty, and there is noise everywhere. The pace is frantic, nobody wants to miss the last ride. Most of the Micros are Lagankhel ones. I had never tried to find an Ekantakuna one before.
Nor had I ever tried to find a bathroom. The only one I remembered was the one way on the other side, under the overpass next to Bhadrakali.

So I asked him if it would be ok if I put him in a car first. He said ok. Then about twenty minutes later- and perhaps ten laps back and forth across the north side of Ratna Park trying to find the right car- we crossed the street to a corner near the police station next to Rani Pokhari on the Tri Chandra side. I turned him towards the wall, and stepped a few paces away to face the street.
"You can do your stuff now."
And that is where he was finally able to relieve himself.

We crossed back.

Many more cars came. I asked him how he would do this on other days. The usual answer came, "With people's help."

As we walked, and he held my hand, another odd couple passed us. It was a blind man, leading a blind man. Both had their walking sticks. But perhaps the one in front was less blind.

It reminded me of the description of the situation in which one who has not reached enlightenment tries to teach someone else: the blind leading the blind.

They were going from Micro to Micro, asking where the car was going. Kailash, that was the name of my guy, was standing by one of those concrete blocks that are striped yellow and black and stand like inverted T's if you look at them from either end. We settled on that mechanism. I would see a micro coming- the headlights are distinctive- and then tell him to stand there while I ran to find out where it was going.

When we were coming down the steps on the overhead crossing before reaching the Micro universe, he told me about the government's policies towards blind people. They were not doing enough, he had wanted to say. He said something to the effect of "the government could do more to help us." One wouldn't know that he was blind by seeing how he walked. Except when he tried to navigate stairs. He would step up too late and miss the first step, or he would step one step too far, and have his foot come down to the floor with a thud at the top.

I narrated:

Steps are coming up.

Walk slowly here.

Be careful here.

Walk this way.

Stop.

Walk.

Turn.

Wait.

"La, hai ta dai. Ramrari jaanus."

And that was it. A micro had pulled up. The metal sign- black on yellow- read " 21 Nakkhu" and below that "Ekantakuna" and I didn't read any more. I asked the Kid manning the door to find space. And he pulled some people down from the door to stuff Kailash into the Micro. He disappeared into the mass of bodies and I strode away.

Pashupati

I sit with my grandparents now, writing this, thinking that we have about 2.5 hours of electricity left. This is a laptop which can hold enough charge for me to type two hours into the darkness. I don't think it will take me much further than that.

This morning, I went to Pashupati. The morning air was the same as I have always remembered it. Ever familiar was the walk down from the Goushala Police Office, down by a small statue of a Rishi, I don't know who, meditating on a pedestal above me on on the left. It was garlanded and covered with Vermillion- so I wasn't the only one to notice it. I actually hadn't noticed it before. The dark fellow lying prostrate on a blue woven plastic tarp, thin, mangled legs outstretched, feet lightly bandaged around the arch, left hand reaching towards passerby, his head resting just barely above ground while the right hand shook a Damaroo: this man always drew my attention. His dusty hair always seemed to stand out. I don't know his name, but he wasn't there today. Nor were his nearly monotone, crying repetitions of "Jai Sambho!" and again, "Jai!"

I used to give him a blessing, "Jai Bhole Nath!"

Some ladies were setting up their small baskets with Saya-Patri flowers and other things, like those sweet, sugary, lumpy pebbles that resemble kidney stones. Except the three kidney stones that my mother showed me in a jar after her operation at a nursng home in Tripureshwor some years ago were a disgustingly pale yellow. This to-be-prasad was white and usually came in crudely sealed plastic pouches with a paper picture of a god- sometimes vishnu on his serpents, or lakshmi dispensing coins from her left hand- drawn in solid colors and very visble black lines, slipped in before sealing.

A tree passed me on the right- precariously planted in the sidewalk, around which you could walk or even sit because there was a brick skirting around it at about knee level. The pandits who would have their Abir stained Paatro's and books spread out, opened to the sky on yellow "Ram Ram" fabric were not there either. Further down, after the gradual left turn, there were more prasad sellers here and there on the sidewalk. One guy had a collection of necklaces spread out on a dirty red rectangular cloth. He squatted by the long side of the rectangle away from the pavement, his hands clasped in front of his mouth, puffing away the cold in his hands while his elbows rested beside his thighs. The grayness of his pants merged into the grayness of his jacket and then into the grayness of his woolen hat. Only the dirtied dark blue pattern around the base of his hat stood out in the mist. As did the thread which stood up from his hat's peak, where, perhaps when the hat was still new to the world, it used to hold a pom-pom in place.

The walk down, to the final right turn before Pashupati, is still a gradual downhill. And because of the many sellers on the sidewalk, the trees blocking the path and the monkeys grouping around the sellers and hanging from the trees, I stepped down to the road which has become the sidewalk. Perhaps it took this role even before it was paved for cars to use. What was supposed to be the raised sidewalk has remained a natural, sturdy, and convenient place from which to hawk ones wares. The only memory of today's walk is a story I was being told of how the person walking next to me was bitten by her friend's grandmother's baby monkey. Which, somehow, had not been domesticated but had been given rabies shots anyway. An image of a baby monkey hanging by its teeth from the right thigh of a shocked tenth grader remains the most prominent memory as I passed by the grassy, upward slope on the left. I remember that above the whitewashed walls, there would be a swing around Dashain time, and kids would find much enjoyment. Bamboo poles, arched, and a swing hanging down from the arches. But today, instead of the swing and the kids there was a mist which somehow made the air crisp, but kept it moist: it is the early days of Phalgun.

Eventually, Pashupati came. And eventually, it left. Just as it has done for millions like me.