Holiday from Life

On the sixth day of the bandh from the window of the white elephant in a convoy of white elephants -a popular description of our vehicles - six hours before the flight, I watched the sea of red turning restless, and no longer it seemed like an over-reaction having had arranged an evacuation plan and a chain for the children who I now was leaving behind. The red sea was done with dancing, now it was time for bricks. The paralysed country was getting tired and frustrated.

Literally a minute before I boarded the plane an sms told me the unexpected: the strike was drawn. The journey ahead would be a touch more bearable.

I felt I landed into some parallel world, first welcomed by a demand of finger prints and a set of akward questions by an unfriendly customs official, and then by the silhuette of a city the yellow cabs were approaching in a speed that to me seemed like a speed of light, faintly familiar from movies I must have watched, the most striking phenomenon being the hundred traffic signs giving instructions of left, right and centre, hazards of curves, speed, heights and weights.  I smiled  at the biggest one of them all, a wall sized thing warning of a bumpy road ahead: "The whole of Nepal would be littered with a batallion of this particular sign if we had traffic signs, but ha, even in New York they have bumpy roads," I thought exultantly, eagerly sitting forward in anticipation.

It never came. The bumpy bit.

Everything seemed so organised, and yet friendly: "Hi sweetie", they would shockingly say to you at a shop counter and keep talking if you just had the time for a chat, making you feel the most interesting person on Manhattan, and then repeat it to the next one in line with the same passion. In the pub they would ask for your ID for buying a pint, and if it got late enough they'd close the curtains and doors and serve the last crowd till the early hours. After six months of being exposed to constant staring, it felt liberating to realise that not a soul would've blinked an eye had I decided to take an evening walk in a bikini, or without it. 

In between the long hours of the workshop, I shopped for everything from underwear to shoes unavailable and worn and washed out, I ate nothing but bread and cheese all week, sat in the philharmonics, rode public transport, moved as an anonomous among anonomous. All those things that I had missed.

The holiday from life towards the end of the week however grew into a regret that the flight back wasn't the earliest possible. The amusement over the signs started turning into a relief of not having them, or more importantly not having to have them:

"Exit only when the doors open" (in an elevator)

"It's illegal to have a toy gun looking like a real gun and a real gun painted to look like a toy gun"

"Cop Shoot  - $10,000 reward for a witness that leads to an arrest and conviction"

"For assaulting the train staff you can face up to fifteen years imprisonment"

"If you fall ill on the metro, don't panic: You will NOT be left alone"

So much I had started to miss coming back to my life, but before we had even landed I suddenly felt pure despair and irritation with the Nepalis switching their mobiles on well before the plane had even landed, shooting up to retrieve their luggage the minute we touched the ground, creating undescribable chaos and cacophony to the deep desperation of also the flight attendants. But every step along the corridor littered with fallen bricks and planks of wood  leading up to the sweaty, urine-smelling luggage hall began to diminish my irritation again, and by the time I was out in the open and deep in negotiations with the cabby called Prince I was extaticly reliefed to be back, back in what seemed like normalcy.

Logically it should not make any sense to feel joy about being back and stuck on this god-forbidden-god-forgotten elbow of land, where the political drama continues to hold the rich and the poor of this country a hostage from opportunity, where life can really stink and shout in your already half-deaf ear - and most likely you end up dealing with it, whatever it is, in the dark. With a rat.

But in this moment of time, even if I am just a lucky visitor, it is home, and perhaps "home" needs no logic.

We have signs in Nepal also. 

Understood!