There’s an undefined adventure in taking a galli in the city and walking alone. Have you ever done that? It’s a type of meditation for me, I walk and I notice that my eyes are everywhere.
I notice a cute little girl with her cartoon printed school bag and her colorful tiffin bag clutched in one hand, walking to school. That girl must be in wishes to learn the rest of her alphabets. She must be three. She walks behind her mom her hand glued to the achal of her Ma’s sari. A vague nostalgia comes to my mind, a past my own when I used to be three tailing my mom everywhere. The girl has a cute smile and pigtails with white ribbon-bows on each one. I miss my father, I miss the way he used to comb two bunches on my head on holidays, I miss the sweet glycerin on my lips he would put and tell me not to lick it away( which I secretly always did :P ). Ohhh!! What a life I have lived I thought and I walked away. I was somebody back then!
It’s a fascination to walk in a Newar residence. On those stone paved streets with towering houses on both sides of the street, anyone must feel like a tourist too deep in fascination with the Newari Culture. I myself looked like one. The heavy backpack on my back, water bottle in hand, and the guts to walk in some galli of Kathmandu on a July afternoon!! However, nothing was in vain; I was enjoying everything; people carving on wood, shops with all kind of shiny metal barrels, the jewelry shops after every 5 blocks in a Newari street, the smell of good food wafting out of the houses that have been squeezed in together and the wrinkled faced of the bajais concentrated on spinning cotton wool onto their charkha. And here I am walking, alone. In this street I am nobody. Among the thousands of people walking in Kathmandu I am just another walker with a question mark for a face.
At last I end up on the main street again. It is a feeling of finding yourself again. What a relief!!! Then I walk again; this time I window shop and feel the weight of my empty wallet. My thoughts wander to that one day when I had had a need of weeping over all my broken dreams and assumptions and the-never-to be- true-fantasies. I wonder how many of these people walking here with me must have broken dreams; broken watches; broken finances; broken homes; broken marriages; broken relations. I walk and I wonder. Just right then comes a pitiful child with a limb twisted skywards. With the healthy limb, he waves an empty bowl towards me in plea for some spare coins I must have. And yet again that little guy makes me feel broken. More than offering him money I am in the sorrows of this harsh world and how lonely I feel. That empty bowl he waved at me reminds me of my empty dreams and I run away from that little guy, I run away as if he is some horror movie character and I never look back at him again!
Finally I board a bus; I am nobody on this bus again. Like me, all these people in this bus with me must have places to go to. May be some have a happy place to go to and may be some have a sorrowful destination. I wish I could get on any bus and go to some place I have not seen. But then wishes are only to be wished for, some wise man told me some day. I calm myself and catch the butterflies of my wandering thoughts and put them back into my mind-box. I choose a seat by the window and sit and watch the racing motorbikes as the bus moves out of the city.
At the next stop, the seat next to me gets occupied by a well dressed man. I try to fall asleep as the bus moves on. However my neighbor has intentions of playing a game on his shiny iPhone, and with the familiar sounds I could bet he was playing Angry Birds. And then we drove on, me with my broken plans of falling asleep and my seat partner with his frail attempts of breaking glass and wood to kill pigs for dinner tonight! He was desperate!
As I sat there trying to look as if the scenery that I had looked upon the millionth of time interested me, the conductor came asking for money. “28 kilo, KU”, I say. And pay my money. The guy sitting next to me seems fascinated by the fact. Later he starts talking and I find out that he is a pass out from the same university I am going to. He has been abroad and recently came back to get married. He says he won’t come back to Nepal. Says, there aren’t qualified jobs for people like him. He tells me how talented people are back at USA. He compares the degrading life here with the lives of Americans. He talks about the failing politics of our country and the never ending feuds of the government and tells me that people here are not disciplined. I nod, smile and make small talk to the gentle man. He tells me of his work. Then he takes his shiny iPhone out again and shows me pictures of the research laboratory he is currently working at. There are an array of bizarre equipments on the tables, which he says are for cloning, DNA separation and things I cannot remember at one shot. So there I was, stuck on my seat with a wise man for company.
Then that person talks about my field. He asks me whether the industries in Nepal make Cetamols or not? I felt like hitting him on the face when he asked,” The industries here only do the packaging. Is it not so?” after explaining to him the various things I know about the pharmaceutical industries he spoke again. “Whatever you may say, I have noticed this after my eight year long stay in USA that the medicines there are so precise and effective. After all even a paracetamol costs a dollar back there!!!” I wished I had missed this bus. I desperately wish I had stepped out of home an hour late. He waves good bye and gets down at some stop. “All the best”, he says before going. And he gives me that null feeling of me being nobody. I stare out of the window and in my inner vision I am caught between who I really am and who I wanted to be! My brain drowns in the noise from the honking cars speeding away. I am nobody! I am nobody! I am nobody! And I fall asleep
