It has been a while, hasn’t it? Fellowship has ended. I am back in Kathmandu. Oh Kathmandu! You were once a solace to come back to from the quietness of the village. But here now, I want to go back to the fresh air of Sindhupalchok hills. You have become a hot concrete mess that I did not grow up in. Every day I have to take public transport. It is full of sweat, dust, smoke and the smell of all these combined. Even when I am at the window seat, I do not feel a cool air. As I plunge through the smelly and hot microbus air, I think about how you were once a big lake. What remains of it is probably the dry Rani Pokhari. Then I really pity your people. Most of them have not really demanded any change from this sticky situation. They are ‘resilient’. Ughh…
For a few days now, I had been cursing this situation. But today, it rained a bit. Of course, it woke me up early in the morning at a time when I would still be dreaming; the rain was welcome still.
Today was a weird day. In the public commute, there was standing space and I did not feel suffocated behind a disposable mask. A girl who had come to study in NAME was standing behind me. She kept leaning on to my body as if I was a steel rod there for her rescue every time the driver brakes in the congested roads. I was trying to avoid the leaning along with people stepping on my sandals with their the muddy shoes. Suddenly, this woman sitting by me bent down from her seat and stretched her arm out a few feet away from her. At the expense of my muddy foot she grabbed a fifty rupee note! Hey, good for you! (The back of my mind sneeringly judged her for stepping on me while she was in the comfort of sitting on a seat and becoming 50 rupees richer)
Then I worked through the day dreading my check-in with my collaborator happening tomorrow. I had planned to take a couple of interviews today. Sadly, I had to postpone them. All day I was trying to get some writing done and stayed till late in the office.
Now on my way back home, I was in the small blue microbus. Thankfully it was not too cramped. At 6:50 the people in the micro looked so drained from their day. Oily droopy faces. There was a guy with a short ponytail whose face looked a bit less oily. There were 4 women and 10 men in that micro, I forgot if I counted the driver. I thought maybe I should write about these faces and how they do not even complain.
My stop was here faster than usual. People started getting off bending their backs to walk up to and get out of the small microbus door. Suddenly the pony-tailed guy reached his hand out the moment both of us spotted a crumbled brown 500 rupee note camouflaged in the rusty microbus floor. He grabbed it inside his large fist without anyone noticing it, except of course yours truly (/slowy).