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.