The blue October sky rolled down successively?into the white Himalayas?the indigo mountains?the triangular pagoda roofs and into the flat of the school-yard under Surya?s feet. Or it rolled back up to the sky, if you really looked at it that way because this was a valley, the Kathmandu Bowl, surrounded by tall mountains topped with white canine Himalayas? so really, for every roll down from the sky another went right back up. When perceptions of polarity obliterated this way, it was as if orientation also paroled Surya, and in that buoyancy he felt the onrush of the sky rolling into the ground or the blue cascading around him as he stared into the limpid sky. Sometimes he even woke up befuddled from crystalline clear dreams wondering whether he was still sleeping somewhere far away and in that life dreaming this life. It was almost like watching a movie, carrying oneself with those avalanches of feelings, yet Surya stood on the ground only watching himself in the vignettes of his mind.

But, here too was Saka, in his gray school pants he had outgrown, sky blue shirt, hair slick with pungent mustard oil, explaining undaunted ?you see?it is made out of a long sheet of cardboard.? Next to him Bajra, uniformed like them, stood in dignity hands folded, nodding in agreement. Saka produced an upturned palm??that?s the flat surface where the chakka rests. ? His other hand rode up at an angle to the upturned palm, ?see?bends up like this.? The rising hand fell, ?so this part that drops has a needle here, fit that needle into a grove on the chakka, spin the chakka and?that?s how you do it.? ?Looks like this? Like this?? repeating the triangular schematic of the device in the air with his hands.

This happened a long time ago?before Surya walked along snaky alleys of Thamel, thumped on by the beats and barks of Ice T, the rhymes hooking him from one store to another, in search of ?you know the tapes, with lots of cursing!? he asked every shopkeeper. He walked back home with a ghetto tale inside a shiny Bangkok-bootlegged album of the Ghetto Boys. By then the music had become an obsession and boys coveted glossy magazines from the West, a rare find in Kathmandu. They read every scrappy magazine they could lay their hands on circling every place they saw their favorite bands mentioned. Murdoch was slogging across the Atlantic round the Cape of Good Hope; he?d eventually bring them MTV but that Christmas was still too far away
This was long before that, though in years it was the early eighties, when people referred to all the tunes with English lyrics as disco in the mystic din that is Kathmandu. Stereos were still novelties, more a sweet coincidence, like that of moisture, dirt and a wind dispersed seed ?a bloom on the belly of an impossible cliff. But even in villages, where the yards were rubbed with cow dung-gobar and the villagers spent the day harvesting golden paddy with a sickle and carried it home on their backs, you could hear disco. After wedding feasts which they all ate in leaf plates, seating in a big circle in the front yard, someone cranked up Boney M? much like their city folks who borrowed amplifiers and loudspeaker to crank up disco in weddings. It was irresistible? if you could hold your own and dance while the synthesized beats tweaked your nerves and juggled the recesses of your mind, it did not matter that you did not understand the song. It didn?t matter that the Brahmin, who had just finished reciting ceremonial Sanskrit hymns, was looking at you askew. You felt that you belonged to something edgy and the looks on the faces of those attempting to catch on prodded you, making you wonder whether you were already as sophisticated as the city folks. So they said let us danas to the music in their village accent, and the tunes went? Brown Girl in the Ring Shalalala la, Brown Girl in the Ring Sha la la la la la

Haddock, spooky indeed but ludicrous as well perhaps that's black comedy


Hey Cleopatra, no spookiness intended, BTW those lines I referred to about the "nose" are lifted from Asterix and Cleopatra, I thought as long as we were free associating

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A tour to serene Patan and eventful Ason was magnificent. Enjoyed it throughly. Thank you Mr. Aesop

Hope to hear more from you in the coming days!

Flipflop,
Thank you for enjoying the meanderings and musings, oh of not so distant but a bygone era!

Certainly commendable that you stayed through it all!

You have way with words Svengali!!
You can let us feel like traveling through those streets and then make us feel nostalgic about those good old times!!Way to go "Aesop"!!
Wish for more, if wish is to be granted!!

Thanks Juggy, for indulging this rustic bard! we shall see if I got more in my bag of tricks

you write beautifully.......waiting to read more.......please keep on writing.

one observation i would like to make though is that.....maybe u should come to the point a bit sooner......this kind of prolonged background (or is it foreground) is more suited to a novel, not a story. That is just my opinion.

You have brought a very refreshing style to sajha. You have command over the big words that you use so that they dont seem out of place. Please keep on writing

nepalonmymind,
Thanks for liking my writing. your observation is on point. the piece got longer because once i pulled on a strand the whole noodle factory issued forth in an avalanche. the attempt is to dwell on the place and make it alive as much as possible, to the extent that sometimes the point of the story took a back seat. But then i guess the place itself is a character as much as any one person in it.

in the end, what is it? but an indulgence in the vistas of your mind, rein in the narrative that just keeps going, compromises and deliberately construct an ending.

Hello,Humble writer.When will we see you again?