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.