The old grandfather who lives in the house just behind ours has phlegmatically announced his presence—that and the bucket of urine he nightly dumps out of his upstairs bedroom window; yes, chamber pots are still in vogue… He’s actually one of my favorite people among my neighbors although his personal hygiene habits leave a little bit to be desired. He wears thick bottle eyeglasses, one of those paper thin dotis or waist wraps, and some sort of orange colored top (or doti) that older men who turn toward devotion and meditation are fond of in their later years. He has a big, toothy grin that he flashes my way when he sees me coming on my bicycle and he is out squatting on his haunches by the road tending to his goats or water buffaloes. When we first moved in here, he politely asked if he could cut our grass with his small curved scythe for animal fodder. Take as much as you like, is what I think I said. It’s a rarity when someone would even bother to ask about taking something like that, since usually people take whatever vegetation they like. Each day I see at least 20-30 totting large bundles—in woven wicker baskets on their backs, on the backs of bicycles, on the top of their heads—from some unknown and far away field.
Mercifully, it’s almost the end of august although I’m not sure why I say mercifully since the weather has been about the same here since april, but we are hopeful for cooler days and, with it, a bit of renewed energy. I believe that the monsoons are (almost) technically over; mostly now we get hard rains for one to two hours which is considerably better than one to two days nonstop.
Maybe you’ve heard about the Maoist blockade of Kathmandu—it’s actually the first international news (BBC) that we’ve picked up about the insurgency although here it is sort of old news and may actually help these villagers make a bit more money if shortages start to take place in Kathmandu. It matters not much to us of slim pickings anyway… The bright side of the Kathmandu blockade is that I have heard more sincere rumblings for the resumption of peace talks emanating from His Majesty’s government since the time we arrived here coming up on six months. But I believe the whole affair has been mostly blown out of proportion by the news media; indeed, a lot of the news out of Kathmandu itself has focused on how the foreign media doesn’t understand the situation and how HMG has total control of the situation and can handle its own affairs. What pro UN mediation proponents have been saying for months now is that HMG can’t handle the situation (absolutely true outside of Kathmandu) and I think the State’s vociferousness over the most recent affairs is to squelch that sort of commentary from resurfacing. Anyway, as of today the so-called siege has been called off…. Now we are back to district-level closures—you’ll hear nothing of this from BBC or VOA.