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.