On A Wire

On a wire

Rain surprises Basantapur's milling masses and sends them under ancient eaves, to wait out the thick ropes of water spouting down, it seems for a moment of magic, from heaven itself. Somewhere else in the city, the chariot of Machhindranath is being pulled through ankle-deep slush. The smell of Kathmandu rises, lumbering with its note of shit and dazed by layers of smoke, but it is nonetheless a sigh of satiation, a season signalling its new posture.

By the time the sun breaks through to shine a spotlight upon branches of small waxy leaves, what looks like camphor peeking over a palace roof, the dabali has renewed itself: those that hurried now find an excuse to watch the last, fat drops sliding off the tiled roofs. Those that cowered from the rain sniff the air to gauge how thick or wet it might have become. And, under the wide, interested eyes of Gauri and Shankar, a dug-duggi starts its chest-thumping once more, dragging with its beats the beam of sunlight away from camphor, towards the chant of a child showing off his brother and their heritage of chatak.

For the next fifteen minutes, the children, who can't possibly be more than ten years old, beat their drums without enthusiasm and call out in a series of wails and spitted chants so polished through practice that the sounds seem coated with experience more than imbued with a meaning. Experience of the kind that disallows innocence, that burdens childhood, that world-wearies and deprives of a treasurable idyll which would, in the darker pockets of their adulthood that surely wait, allow them to keep faith in life's genuine worth. A search for their—perhaps assumed—childlike innocence ends with their sluggish throw of limbs as they fake energy and enthusiasm, or the thick glaze over their eyeballs that seem to have been emptied of their natural humor.

It is perversely magnetic, the wringing of small, naked bodies to pass through six-inch hoops, or, for legs to scratch the ears of a boy balanced on the palms of another boy. It should be revolting, this public spectacle, this unchallenged shame of a whole people. But it is magnetic. It stills the eyes—will the boy choke on a snare of his own arms? Will he fall from the wire? Watch his face and its quivering skin: there is no flourish or bravado of a circus performer there.

The cobblestones of the chowk are still dark and wet, still imprinted with the memory of the many floods of animal blood they have seen. It is an easy fall. His brother is bored, thrusts his pelvis forward a few times and chants something in a high pitch which his unbroken voice and the thick coat of function renders alien, and finally makes eye-contact with the throng ringed around their small chatak, spreading the ends of the rag on his head, beckoning with chin-dips and slanted nods. There is a boy up in the air, on a wire, with one exploratory toe offered to the void, the other gripping the wire with condensed terror.

A crowd has gathered, frayed at its edge as some stop and some leave. Even the sight of these bony children performing impossible bodily contortions becomes familiar too quickly, and the eye searches for something else, something more perverse and terrifying, more lustily satisfying. Here is a cultural moment being manufactured for the natives and the strangers in the crowd, stitched into the tatters over the brown backs of the children, riding the carousel of their voices. Wow! Look at that! Look, son—that boy must be your age. You can write a letter to your pen pal for next week's English class about this. Write—public spectacle is a part of Kathmandu's heritage. Do you know what is called a spectacle?

How can a parent bring a child to watch this? It is easier to understand the woman squatting in a corner with the end of her dhoti between her teeth—she is the mother of the juvenile acrobats, she watches without moving an inch, her eyes not registering any fear, her face not betraying any greed. But parents who bring their children to the chatak? Are they schooling their progeny on an art that will blossom into active antipathy towards those dissimilarly stationed in life? Are they showing how from one person's terrible toil can come for another person the nourishing tonic of recreation? Is this an instructive outing on the darkly comedic benefits of inequality? Really, how can a parent not turn away hurt and angry to see a child no different than that which clutches their hand bite into an iron ring from which to swing a smaller child in frenzied spins over hard gray stones? What if the jaws tire? How much strength can that back or those hands have? What if the boy goes hurtling off, like a lump of weak earth, to shatter and spill across the chowk? Isn't the threat there transparent, that to expose a child to the servitude of another is to corrupt the simple notion on which all of modern morality is predicated: that all are born equal?

This is no country for equality, of any sort, between people. There is a tall man in the crowd who wriggles forward to position his camera under the high-flying boy and makes his shins quiver harder as the rope naturally squirms under his insubstantial weight. Another man hoists a boy—better dressed, giggling—onto his shoulders for him to better see the other boy walking the wire. Where there should be a heartfelt objection to the situation there is misplaced awe, a rapid patter of tiny palms clapping. The boy on the wire looks at the other boy, raised to the same level above the crowd, above the chowk. Then he nods to his mother squatting in the corner and gives a little yelp to find courage as he leaps off the wire, rushing to meet the wet gray stones that must be rushing skyward to meet him. Behind him, the wire quivers with its own small yell.