Just now it is still. A kind of silence which I have not experienced for how long now? Five months? One minute past midnight, there are no barking dogs, no enterprising mosquitos, no car horns and no unfathomable lack of ease. There is a hum from my computer, and a hum from the cicadas, and that is all.
I am of course returning to Nepal in a month or so, to continue working with the circus project, but nonetheless it feels like I have reached some kind of conclusion. Today has been a bookend, a day full of reflected moments, a conclusion to the first Nepal experience. I walked that piece of road by Southbank station where I first had a phone interview for the Nepal job:
"I'm sorry but I have to ask, do you have any history of mental illness?" She asked with tangible displeasure.
"Ha! No, but I probably wouldn't tell you if I did, would I?"
Shit, I thought shortly afterward, I don't know this girl, she may not have a sense of humour. Just like that casting agent back in Melbourne, when I said that I loved kids, but couldn't eat a whole one. Both of these jokes are now filed away firmly under "jokes not to use in job interviews"
In the airport today, the internet kiosk spurned and tormented me, just as it did five months ago. This time I tempered my frustration. Maybe the constant car horns have galvanised my patience. Maybe I was just in a good mood.
Back then, I waited for a volcanic ash cloud to pass, so that planes would fly again. Nobody could say exactly how long the volcanic ash cloud would take to leave. The meanderings of clouds are unknown to the likes of us, they would tell me, in their own way. I had given up my room and so I slept on the couch at my own house. Now, here I am at the conclusion, sitting on a futon in that space where the couch lay. Not sleeping, I mean to savour this delicious silence for a bit longer yet. Once upon a time I went to Nepal. I found a taxi to take me to Sanepa. My hands instinctively reached for the seatbelt and pulled, to no avail. The belt refused to move from its retractor (see A). Another taxi driver, seeing my continued attempts to unroll the seatbelt, laughed and said "Welcome to Nepal". It would take a long time before this, an immobile seatbelt as an analogy for Nepal, would make any sense. But now, if I were ever to see a foreigner in a taxi, attempting to use a seat belt only to find that it was in fact useless, I would say "welcome to Nepal". If they asked me why all of the taxis had some variety of broken seatbelts, I would explain that it would require needless effort to take them away.
Today at the train station, I thought about another metaphor which always sounded a bit odd. Many Nepali folk refer to their homeland as a "yam between two stones". The two stones are China and India, today's threatening new superpowers, and because of Nepal's location, it cannot grow. It is even, some claim, being kept poor by world powers in order to maintain a buffer zone between these two hungry, dangerous stones. I have understood this stuff for months now, only today did it occur to me that Nepal does actually resemble a yam.
It was an exciting moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment