Just another Saturday morning

What was that song about "Sanibaar" when I was in school? The day sounded special, even while the week was on the roll. Everyone talked about "Sanibaar", every day of the week. It still makes me nostalgic to think how the heavy school-work seemed lighter, the moment you thought of a Saturday at home.

Saturdays are not much about rest and fun anymore though. You still wake-up, anxious about assignments or chores. You still feel tempted to turn off the snooze alarm, so that you can get another wink of sleep. But then you have to be up, run about, wait for the sluggish internet to respond, wait for people to understand you're making something work- feel like grovelling before them to rise above the petty. Ughhhhhhhhh!

Give me one more Saturday morning to love.

In anger and haste

"Teej: The great festival for Nepali Women"

This is what we hear it being called over and over every year. But when the festival is here, I always feel a sense of slight nervousness for the way the streets start getting clogged with women clad in ghastly red and loud jewelry. But most of all, the fear is for turning on a Nepali TV channel and having to watch the same Teej songs every year.

I have nothing, whatsoever for the "oppressed" women who take this day as a means to let their pent-up emotions out, who think it's okay to sing their woes and complain about their in-laws in songs, because it's probably the sole occassion to be able to do so in public. I have nothing against women who look forward to this day because it is an opportunity to visit their parents' home (knowing how our society frowns upon a married woman, should she even think of going to her parents).

What I do seem to have against this festival is the way it has begun to be a predominant show of new saris and jewelry and a way to spend on bangles, poteys and bindis that will eventually be stacked in dressers and forgotten who it came from as they stop being special when the month has passed. What annoys me is how some of us are still fasting for husbands who have absolutely no respect for their wives and how we still make a show of being the "woman in love" for a lifetime, when these are just shams. It puts the life out of me to think about it.

Why so much hue and cry about Teej when it doesn't change a thing about a woman's aspirations about the "ideal" husband and a happy marriage?!

On the bus

On the way to work yesterday, I took the Ring-Road bus that I usually do. These buses are always dirty and with every passing year, they get more crowded- thanks to the influx of people in the capital, which started during the "People's war".

I keep thinking that every passenger must have a different story to tell. I look at them and wonder how many are displaced citizens, how many have lost their near and dear ones, how many heart-broken, how many just won a lottery or how many have nowhere to go.

It's a recurrent theme in my mind.

But I'm getting tired of taking this bus now. I wish there was a faster way of getting to work. I wish there was a way to avoid the Kathmandu traffic, the congestion on its narrow streets. But that will only be wishful thinking for now.

The journey was made lighter by a little school-girl yesterday. She was half asleep, when she noticed that I was reading. (I was actually struggling with THE LINE OF BEAUTY- given my limited knowledge of the homosexual world, among others). She waited a long while before borrowing it from me. Then she scanned though the first few pages and gave the book back to me. There was a point of time when I worried that it would be time for her to get off and she would just leave with my book :). But I probably inspired her. Because what she did next was, got her notes out and started reading. And I noticed she had beautiful neat handwriting.