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.