Exit, chased by a bear

Shout Out to Lily Weed!

I visit your blog whenever I need a laugh. Then I go "Weeeeeeed!"

My Kolkata visit is coming to an end. I will be in Kathmandu by next Sunday, so that I can start meeting with people beginning Monday. I feel lazier, fatter, more dull now than a month ago, but I have spent a fabulous month here. The heat is bordering on unbearable now. I don't want to stay back to experience the truly unbearable heat of March and April, before monsoon kicks in.

I have been checking the little cluster-map thingy to the right of the page. It seems more and more people are visiting, although "more" rarely goes over ten, or fifteen at most.

I enjoy having a captive readership. It is feeling nice-nice only.

Rajiv Bartaula, now a doctor in the US, posted [on facebook] a few pictures from our last days/year at Budhanilkantha: I am a lean, already balding boy. I saw a photo Elena had printed of me visiting a school in Dhapa, north of Kolkata, where kids swarmed me. Some called me "Aunty" because they were accustomed to the women volunteers who often visited. A bit perplexing at first, but easily forgotten once they start chatting in Bangla and asking questions, absolutely non of which I understood. In that picture, I am a fat, bald man with broken glasses. Time does change a few things.