Westward

After you pass post the road roughed by the transport of construction materials (and prominent on the right when you exit Kathmandu), you truly leave Kathmandu. Smoke, dust and smell-filled air starts tailing off. The confines of a densely-populated city eases out. It starts opening up.

At the roadside, are huts and houses. Some of them appear as if they were built half-heartedly: naked pillars jut out of the roof, walls are not plastered, they appear as ugly lumps of concrete and brick. Devoid of any grace or elegance, they appear as if they are challenging the whole sense of aesthetics, almost mocking, “this is what I can do to you!” But who knows why they stand? Maybe it’s a tentative act in the larger toil of earning a living by using means never known to them, in a place never known to them, creating structures never known to them.

As I gaze away to a distance, in the hills, a certain calmness  pervades: almost akin to permanence. Also adorned with beauty and grandeur. The ugliness of the roadside contraptions and the elegance of the distance contradict glaringly. Almost suggestive of our society at large: our struggle to seek new has created certain ugliness in the calmness that might have existed (or I would imagine it to have existed, at some point in time).

But you don’t always have to peek out the distance for solace. There are patches on this highway devoid of these businesses. Grass hugs the highway, Trishuli river flanks its side and the hill banking the side of Trishuli is carpeted by greenery kissed by the Monsoon. It’s almost blissful until interrupted by another patch of tentative buildings, huts with tin sheets pressed down by rocks as the roof.

In my journey westward, I get down and change a vehicle. From a bigger urban bus to a smaller village bus. The bus is packed with women and accompanying children travelling for Teej. The cries and wails of children and shouting moms mix with the loud high-pitched Teej songs emanating from loud speakers in the bus. Although a departure time is told, out of a ritual I guess, the actual departure time is determined by how much space is available in the bus and what the potential is for the passengers to arrive. Once the squeezable space has been amply utilized, our bus roars up the hill with deafening noise as if it is a person with lung disease trying to get some air.

I get down before my destination, to walk, mainly because I have travelled to this place walking, in the

past. These roads are new; it would be nice to see things from an older perspective.

Much of the older walking path is taken up by the new road. The road is being upgraded. It has electricity poles on the sides, drains flank the sides where needed, gravel stand atop. It is being readied for paving. Vehicles are rare on this road. It is nice to walk on this road although the sun is scorching.

In the final few hours of walk, I get to use the older path. It seems like people have stopped using these tracks. They probably prefer the road which is more convenient to walk; although a little bit longer. Or, maybe, they hardly walk these days. There were rare pedestrians on my hike up. Perhaps most use the vehicles. In silence, lush green paddy fields still spoke of human activity although humans were scarcely seen. Grasses covered these tracks. In the grasses that covered the ruts, memories were still to be found.

 

A few hours of hike across the paddy fields, rivers, streams, hills, chautaras (rest stops with trees), a small bazaar and I reach my destination. I have to concede, I did not dearly miss the bus.