Bliss of a Routine

The lights are on and i feel faintly grateful over it. To whom should I be grateful for, I am not quite sure, maybe a guy whose job it is to pull the switches, maybe the departement of electric affairs if there is one, maybe no instance in particular.

The dogs have stopped barking, although I don't believe it is for long before they go on with their normal nightly racket again, resulting in gangs of dogs somnolently loitering street corners tomorrow morning. Down in the dark garden the landlady's adolescent daughter is burning twigs and leafes in a great fire that is more of thick cloud of smoke than a fire, and she's quietly singing while clearing the field. The sorrowful song sung in a clear young voice seems like a fresh breeze in the falling Kathmandu night. She would win the the heart of any Idols competition follower and come famous.

But, she is just singing in the garden, and thank god, it is in my garden.

Life goes on. It goes on all around me, in all its shapes in a breath-taking volume and intensity. And despite it, or maybe exactly because of it, I feel like my own life is very quiet and calm, even serene, at the moment. Two months mark is just days away and I realise a certain level of routine has been established.

Every morning we get up and make a statement of how desperately cold it is. Because it is. Little later every morning me and the team member A stand in a cloud of dust lifted into the air by, amongst other vehicles, the Future Star High School bus and the landrover in which the children always wear swimming goggles for a reason we cannot figure out (it being the cold season), and observe life spilling onto the streets while waiting for our school bus.

We check the time not from a watch but from an arrival of the tiny old lady in a cute red knitted hat and a brown dress, who appears from a lane, where the heard of sheep eat noodle packet wrappers among other left over things, and who disappears again to a lane where the baby cow wanders accompanied by a flock of jackdaws on her back. We watch the lady of the corner shop make sweet tea for the family, the daughter brush her teeth and her long black shiny hair. We grow wary of the soon flying dish washing water landing at our feet. Then we check the time again, from still not a watch but from the two old men walking by, carrying stones and gravel in their baskets, always cheerfully chattering with eachother, always smiling like two happy little boys going on a camping trip. They make us smile and that's when the bus comes.

A little while later, every morning, we walk the busy streets and the opening markets with the other one. We bend down to peep into an old sewage tube to see the homeless puppies growing day after day, learning to use their wobbly little feet and their weak little voices. "Namaste!" to the beggar on his spot, some rupees into his bowl, or a bunch of bananas or whatever we have managed to purchase on the way. Pop into the post office, let the nice postal lady inquire something new about us, post a letter, check our box, cross the street, buy the Himalayan Times, or Kathmandu Post, or both if the girl does not have any change. Have a good day, we say at the gates and hug and off she trots and off I trot.

Every morning I then nip into the bakery and buy my breakfast to go, decide to cross the street so I would not have to walk past the butchers shop that is not really a shop at all but more like a kiosk with the business spread all over the street in front. But then  - crossing the street takes a lot of effort, time and effectively eats up one's sense of security, so I decide to hold my breath while I speed up through the undescribable smell, step over the feahers and puddles of blood. I can't make my mind up whether the goats tied to the pole waiting for their turn look depressed or am I just imagining it.

Four blocks later I remember I needed to cross the road also to be able to take a picture of the one and a half a mile queue of mopeds and motorbikes leading up to a gas station. Almost anything that is part of a human life goes on in that line which moves on as fast as grass grows. But it is too late for crossing and stepping off the beaten track.

And so the day goes on, following its routined course that gets interrupted only by strikes, protests and road blocks, attacks of vomiting and diarrhoea, appearances of armies of head lice, shortages of whatever it is at the time, a song sung in the garden. But even interruptions have begun to seem somewhat inevitable and unsurprising. The strangest things happen and we accept them as normality, realising that they probably happen for a reason, but as outsiders we don’t understand the reasons. We become blind: The Kathmandu we saw on the day of our arrival from the Tribhuvan International to the city is not here anymore.

Routine and normality resulting in blindness are insulating, protective covers into which we wrap ourselves in order to stay sane when facing the cruel and the strikingly unfair, in order to stay sane when facing our own inadequacy in front of it all. I see little shadow like creatures warming up around burning piles of rubbish every day at a street corner, but I just cannot really see it, not every single day I can't.

Over a routine Tuesday night activity of wine drinking when a friend said "Hey, the highlight of the week will be the Christmas Fair on Friday" I thought I should have felt like screaming and running off to do something explosively exciting, breaking the insulation. But I just said: "Brilliant" and I did not want to change a thing.