Have you ever torn or burnt a photo or many of them? I have.
Come to think of it, it must have been a gross act of a teenager, with no direction home or anywhere, to be precise, to do so but the way the fire gobbled up the photos with its bluish yellow flames, slowly turning them into ash one Saturday afternoon some twelve years back still trigger fresh in my mind.[break] Because I have seen myself burn in them.
My innocent sad little face being gobbled up by the fire. I can’t really say why I did it. I look back but still there are no answers. I tried to. And now I have looked back so much. So much into the void that I feel the void looks back into me.
A few of the photos that remain, which my heart could not come to terms with to put to fire or tear into bits of paper are stacked in the bookrack alongside college-level science textbooks that I never got around with. And there are more photos from the high school days that make me question, “Is that me?” and there are the childhood photos, where my otherwise spiky hair has been ironed out because the night before, mother carefully put me to sleep with a topi on a warm summer night. And the lights would go off instantly.
Darkness was an early friend. An early comfort in my life.
Closing in thirty in a year and the void that arrives as the sun sets is a powerful feeling. I am talking about the night and the knight I am of Kathmandu, where scavenger dogs chase lone riders, where taxi drivers cue up for trips outside hospitals, when drunken heroes and their heroines are looking for their wai-wai and boiled eggs and a last puff for the road, or if lucky, smuggle in an unusually high-priced whiskey bottle to hit on the rocks before they hit the sack as loner traffic policemen in deserted major hubs of cities carry dot pens and registers, logging vehicular movement while homeless people scavenge KFC and five-star hotel waste bins.
Hiding from the police then are the night street food vendors, desperate for some business to support their living. In scattered zones, young innocent girls come out of hotels and go into other hotels. And pimps and valley denizens negotiate cheap deals as heaps of paper are fed into the machine to print tomorrow’s party line while, all along, Kathmandu’s streets transform into runaway for LGBTIs. What else must be on stage in unknown territories as the Bagmati River responds to the unusual heat of March with nose-burning stench?
There are no photos of the Kathmandu I know. Pity, I can’t even burn them or tear into pieces. As streets make way for pasteurized milk packs and newspapers, I am on the road but I am stopping by Prasuti Griha, where a bunch of policemen are braving the chill of the darkness and the brunt of their duties. One more day in Kathmandu, I toast with a cup of tea – Rang kada, chini kum.
Arpan tweets @arpan_shrestha
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