Bringing it back

The carpenter's machine sounds somewhere, like the wailing of a depressed man and somewhere near-by is a loud-loud hammering. Constructions- such a vibrant side of Kathmandu now. Concrete, iron-rods, sacks of cement freezing into blocks as workers step over them to get to another flight of the unfinished staircase. Concrete.

There's something very lifeless about these fast-growing buildings, these quickly cemented roadsides. They give my mind a picture of the grass being mowed-down ruthlessly. It also makes me long for the Kathmandu I used to know, that had clear, white frost on grass on winter mornings such as today. The mornings would be about people breathing-out wisps of fog when they spoke. But the fog is swiftly killed now by the speeding cars, motorbikes and trucks that clog the narrow streets of the city, even before people are out walking the streets.



I know nostalgia best when the gradual yearning for Kathmandu kicks up inside me. It makes me want to weep, run, pull down the walls and change everything back in time, so that the spaces are wide-open again and I am a child, walking about pocketing loads of marbles in a temporary pouch Mamu stitched-up on my jumper.

I know nostalgia best, when something in me is so mad that I want to tear down the city and see around me once again, fields that are barren just after harvest, with loads of hay staked like little huts. It drives me almost insane- this longing. You know, this yearning for the Kathmandu that used to be, is almost, almost as intense as the need to see you again.