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.