Sustainable Friends

In reference to the previous posting, it's only appropriate to wish Happy New Year again, today according to the Yale Sambat Calendar. The first day of this year 5070 saw an amazing partial solar eclipse, and was the first one of the upcoming 44 public holidays in the next twelve months.

But, to me it seems that the festive season has drawn to its end, life returning to normal with colleagues returning from home leaves, giving us left behind ones the comfort of having more variation again in lunching company, the season's visitors flocking the departure halls of the airport, school busses one after another returning to jam the morning's traffic.

Coming home one night last week to find our belongings had doubled was, however, marking the beginning of another festive season, one of good-byes.

For the second time already I am left with bits and pieces of odd items of furniture, table-ware, bedding, arsenals of medicine they never needed after all, their shampoos, mosquito repellants, pastas and strange food items they once in anticipation of starvation brought all the way from somewhere previous, their bits and pieces. I have to question the level of  my shallowness when I can't quite decide which overrides: sadness of seeing one more go , most likely never to see them again, or the joy over the content of their liquer cupboard and the precious few hundred grams of real coffee powder.

The vividness of social life in Kathmandu would surprise many, the speed of creating friendships even more.

I have a while back exited the somewhat tiresome stage of meeting an endless seeming flow of new people and entered the stage of normalcy of knowing pretty much everyone and their dog, which after all is not that many, and begun to realise the strangess of spending my life with people I would most likely never have met nor hang out with under 'the normal circumstances'.

These odd people just sort of become your friends, not exactly because you decide so, but if you fancy a social life of some sort, there isn't really much choice.

Before you know it, they are there for brunches, lunches, dinners, night-caps, house-warmings, "One year in Kathmandu"-parties or any other obscure reasons they gather for in Mexico, France, Iceland, Kazakhstan and from where-ever else they migrate from. You shop with them, you sit through bandas with them, trek with them, laugh in fits with them over the bizarrest experiences you randomly go through together, do them the weirdest favours. And begin to like them.

And yet, they slip away. Like the light fades during that solar eclipse.

"Why here?" and "For how long?" is the very start of every fresh conversation. The answer to the last enquiry determines the level of commitment, which there cannot in any case be very much of - one of you will have soon be gone anyway and sooner or later they disappear from your Facebook. It's called unfriending, by the way.

"A couple of years" I answered. A happy-ish response of "Did you hear that?! A sustainable friend!" made me laugh, but also miss the real best friends out there somewhere, those I saw three hundred+ times less often but knew would still stay.