home is ware(the)house(is)

I am minding a room in a warehouse. It is small and cold, this room, and it feels more like home than any of the rooms I've lived in for a long time. It is waxing midnight, and outside, now and then, the boomgates go down, and the bell goes 'ding ding' for a really long time. About the same length of time as the bells that the people outside my house used to ring at 5 in the morning. Until three days ago, when I left Nepal.

Yes, the bells ring at the wrong time, and they are mechanically timed. And the cars don't talk here. I miss their obnoxious honking voices. It is almost midnight but I can still hear them driving around, just the sound of tyres on smooth road, no bumps. It is a sound like wind or surf, but with a distinctly human shape. More than ten years ago, I was in a physics lecture, and the lecturer explained about static friction and dynamic friction. He was a man called Max, and he liked to talk about how stupid we probably all were. You see, static friction is that thing which makes it hard to move a stationary object along a surface, and dynamic friction is that thing which resists the motion of a sliding object, causing it to decelerate. He told us that a wheel, a tyre on a car for instance, could only roll because of static friction. When rolling, the point on the wheel that is in contact with the surface is, actually, stationary. Everywhere else on the wheel is moving, except for that point. In a geometrically perfect model, that point would be infinitely small, and it would be stationary for an infinitely short time. Max drew a very lovely diagram of the whole thing, and then told us that we were probably too stupid to understand. I didn't stay in that course for very long.

If a wheel was light enough, it could probably roll along the surface of water.

I've been back for two days, and I've become one of those interminable "when I was in Nepal" people. Really, it's a way of validating the experience, proving that it really happened. I lived there for almost a year, and now I'm back in Melbourne and everything is so different and strange, and yet it feels so normal. There are no barking dogs, no goats or monkeys. Even though I would decline, I wish someone would offer to polish my shoes.

Meanwhile, back in Nepal, the deadline for the new constitution has passed, the constituent assembly did not complete their homework, and so now the government will have to either resign or ignore the supreme court. For a government to ignore its own legal system is brazen, even upon the matter of an extension, and it doesn't seem like the general public has enough love for the Nepali government to let it slide. Static friction. I think they've gone for a "we're going to have one last extension to finish the damn thing and then we promise we'll resign" option. Things are likely to get hairy.

Here, though, no such problems. Someone tells me that Australia's prime minister is on shaky ground, and that the previous prime minister might come back, but it is hard to care when life is so quiet and predictable. One politician goes, another one comes, neither of them are particularly inspiring. The holes in the ground get bigger, the people and wildlife above the holes get pushed away and cut out. The things get more expensive, the economy grows, and then it will diminish again.

three days left

Our visas are expiring, we are all leaving Kathmandu, back to Scotland, America, Norway, Germany, Australia. I walked with my friend to the airport shuttle bus this morning, at the small hour of morning when the bandha has not quite set in, and people rush around shopping and doing the necessary things before all momentum is halted.

The word bandha, meaning 'close' or 'obstruct', is used for a kind of enforced mass-strike,  where no businesses are allowed to open and no vehicles are allowed on the roads (not even bicycles). And people walk around waving flags for whichever political party or organisation was responsible for it, or using their sticks and threats to make sure no-one breaks the bandha by, say, opening up their little grocery store. Now that the deadline for the new constitution approaches, the bandhas are coming in thick and fast, as everyone wants their piece of the pie. 

The whole thing just seems especially stupid, since I've just returned from a week in a beautiful village called Archale, where the 'Nepal bandha' was just a kind of distant murmur, only causing trouble for people who were trying to get a bus somewhere. Emma and I were there for a week, running a week of shadow-puppetry and theatre workshops in a little school. I wrote to someone about it recently, here is part of that letter.

(the journey there took about 6 hours, most of which we spent on the roof of the bus)


We wound up and down, round mountainsides and through valleys and little towns, ducking under branches whilst butterflies and swallows danced around us. The air is so clean out there, the water so clear, it's as though all of the country's pollution has been concentrated into one city, such a joy to escape. 

We arrived, burned and bruised, a quick chiya at the bus station in shanti bazaar, and then one last push, a 30 minute walk up the hill with unnecessarily heavy bags. I would have packed lightly, if only I'd known it would be so hot, it would not rain, and there would be little time for reading, writing and the like. Up and up we walked, until at last we reached Archale, a quiet place with no dogs. Red and clay and straw coloured were the houses, green green were the trees, the sky was a vast rich blue and the sun added a subtle bleach to everything.

Every house had buffaloes, cows, goats, or chooks. There were supposedly about 400-500 people in the village, but it was so spread out that it felt like much fewer. We'd long since heard about the river, I probably even talked to you about it when you were here, so excited I was about it. On that first day, we met with the principal, outlined our plan for the week of workshops, made timetables, met our host families, put our things down, did all of those necessary things with as much haste as possible, and then made straight for the river. It was a short walk around the mountain, over the bridge, past the mill, and hopping up the rocks, and there it was the little paradise. I made that journey almost every morning, the cold, clean water more than made up for lack of coffee. I didn't miss coffee at all, cloudy and vague and headache-prone as its absence made me. 


I drank in the silence greedily. I would wake around 6 or 7, drink chiya, go to the river, come back to the house for breakfast, and then by 9 or 10 walk down to the school. There were 6 classes a day, from 10am. until 4p.m. and the children were aged from 3 until about 10 years old, although age categorization is not so strictly adhered to. We had a lot of work to do, when we realised what we were up against. We sadly dropped the youngest class, and cancelled the idea of doing a big show for the village. It was enough just to get the 5 classes a day to play games in the hot sun(the classrooms were tiny), draw animals, make shadow puppets out of them, and then play with them.


We came home to our different families each day, beaten, welcomed by the most delicious chiya. Most evenings I would drink chiya and then drink water and just stare out to the mountains in silence, a common pastime in the village. Most people would wake at around 4:30, so there was not much going on at night time. It was a Brahmin village, which meant that no-one was supposed to eat meat or drink alcohol. Lucy, a girl from the UK who had been volunteering as an art teacher there for some time, told us about how people would sneak down to shanti bazaar to get drunk, or have clandestine night time chicken-slaughterings. The night I arrived back in Kathmandu, I found myself at that private party where I juggled with the circus kids (this, by the way, was so lovely), in front of a table heavily laden with different meats, and found myself voracious for it after a week of dal bhat. I am so impressed with highly-active vegetarians, it's hard to get what you need.

I still don't know the names of my host family, only the daughter, Ambika, who teaches at the school. Whenever I asked them their names, they would just say 'mother' or 'father' or 'sister'. Names in general were hard, they're just not used so often here. We had a lot of trouble initially, playing 'name jump' with the younger ones. The most popular game by far was 'fire on the mountain', which was unfortunate after a few days of the heat, and with a headache, I would have much preferred grandmother's footsteps.

What else? I could not stand up straight anywhere. I banged my head several times a day, dazed as I was, and had to constantly stretch out my back from all of the stooping. Most of the time when I walked around outside the village, I would come across people with baskets ridiculously laden with grass and leaves and other such things. Sometimes they resembled nothing so much as walking trees, and yet, seeing their expressions, I realised that I was the strange one, the great lumbering whitey, clambering up and down the steep-paths, too used to flatness, whilst they stepped deftly, like mountain goats, from purchase to purchase, unheeding of the giant weights on their backs.


Back in Kathmandu, we are in day 3 of the worst bandha I've experienced. The effect of coming back from the village to this has been profound. Today people are hot, bored, and subdued, but yesterday was bad. Ambulances and media vehicles were stopped on threat of violence from excited mobs. As I walked, I saw several people forced to get off their bicycles and let the air out of their tyres. Men with sticks yelling at the daughter of the family who run my favourite grocery store. They waved their sticks and yelled at the poor girl until she closed the shop down, after which they marched on with self-satisfied smiles. I wanted to scream at them, "What are you doing, and why? Do you even know?"

In three days, I will fly back to a more developed city. How developed? Problems are more developed, as is the general notion that everything's ok. I will miss Kathmandu, the ramshackle kingdom that is too untidy and disorganised to be anything but honest.

Buddha's birthday, natural disasters, devastating beauty, etc.

I have started many blog posts in recent times, only to stop halfway through, put off by the sheer inanity of them. There is a purgatory of blog-post-drafts piling up, but I cannot bring myself to fix or finish them.

So now, for better or worse, I'm just going to go back to writing whatever crap and then pressing that orange button labelled 'publish'. So they say, publish or perish. I just wanted to let you know, in case you were hoping that I would end this constant obsession with the mundane, and write instead about the many-coloured chimaera, the dancing, farting and honking beauty of Nepal, the mountains which mock the clouds, the smells which defy all comparison, the rich mythology, the threats which lurk like feet under the curtain, political-instability, the great earthquake, the collective rage of a country which has, as an emblem, two crossed crescent-curved knife. My late grandmother could have told you what crossed knives means. Anyway, I will not write about these things, they're still cooking. Forewarned is forearmed.

My newish phone, the HTC Wildfire, has some interesting features. It stores up all of the alarms you've ever set, in case you'd like to use them again. I once had an afternoon nap, and used the alarm to ensure my nap would fall within the recommended bounds of the power-nap(15-30 minutes), so that I would wake up feeling empowered, rather than claggy-mouthed and groggy, as is sometimes the case. I forgot to disable that alarm for so long that ultimately I grew to love it. Now, every Monday afternoon at 3:47 my phone patiently chimes away until I stop it. It is a welcome reminder of just how different each quarter-to-four-on-Monday is from the last.

Just over a week ago, my love-from-afar came to visit me. She left today, and now I find myself looking for her everywhere. About her arrival I was forewarned, but not forearmed. How to prepare for the surreal power of it? A figure bursting out of a picture frame, and into the real world. Words disentangling themselves from the soft glow of laptop screen, and finding sweet voice. Real fingers, real toes, real beauty! At first I struggled to keep my cool, almost to the point of being cold, until I found my bearings. I took her to all of the places I go: the office, the cafe, the circus-training, the places I like to eat, the refuge, and all of the pathways in between. Everywhere we went, she just marvelled at everything, the buildings, the people, the dogs, and I remembered. Strange that it has become mundane to me now, and stranger still that I like it, the mundaneness. Gosh but I miss her though.

Now that I remember the magic, I try to hold them both together, the banality and the wonder, two conflicting notions here in the land of paradox, where it is simultaneously the year 2012 and 2069, where people can contain the abovementioned pool of rage alongside a demeanor of genuine compassion and warmth. Where, on the same day as the country celebrates the birth of Buddha, a flash flood kills dozens of people and whisks away countless homes.

Oh, one last thing. In my last post I mentioned the chariot which was being built on the side of the road. Well, shortly after writing that, I caught them, the builders. They were all dressed in regular clothes, jeans, some with glasses, just as though they'd all been walking past and decided to help. On the rarest of impulses, I took some pictures. I thought I should show you one.

They just kept adding and adding to it, until in the end, it resembled nothing so much as a 7-storey Christmas tree on giant wooden wheels. Then people pulled it around town for a few days, for a festival known as Machhendranath. Then they took it apart again.

That's all,

Love Ivan