On the edge

On the Edge

Because the dial quivers, the heart quivers with it: on what side of the divide will it settle? It settles on the far side. Four kilos gained in six days. After stowing away the scale I jump without bending my knees, trying to propel the bulk closer to the ceiling, assessing the strain it puts on the calves. Six jumps, clearing no more than nine inches at best, and then thumping down to the floor like lard dropped from a cliff-edge. The heart is sluggish in its struggle as if smothered under a net of fat. Tiny sparks of light ring the head and buzz inside the ears. Phlegm announces its late arrival to the melee. From the effort expended on six small leaps a cold, cold film of sweat covers the body.

It is raining outside, a dead drizzle, no wind, no beam of sun shafting in from the skies, no thunder stirring the distance, just a drizzle that alights more than it rains. I rush outside, walking in a large circle around the neighborhood, envying my friends who are walking in Changunarayan, from where Rakesh will betray Yagya on Facebook with an embarrassing photograph. At the wrong chowk, of course, the wait for a microbus to Tokha is fruitless. At the right chowk, the microbus is crowded and mud-splattered.

At Tokha, I am the only person standing in the light rain, unsure about where to go next. Whim is no magic carpet. The village is at once new and ancient: lime-green paint climbs six stories on a skinny house under which water-pumps whir under strain. Paved alleys twist around low houses. There is the fine black squelch of muck in the streets that smell of an old settlement. I had always imagined Tokha to be further north, a small village peopled with temples and aged men with cataract-clouded eyes. But there is nobody in the streets. From an unseen workshop comes the regular screech of a mechanical saw splitting wood. My plastic slippers normally reserved for the roof slip over the bricks. I look into shops to see what might keep me from leaving Tokha after barely touching its edge. Nothing.

School bell and the shouts of children brings out a Sahuji to the street. There is a sheer drop just outside his shop, a cliff where, he proudly tells me, a hospital building is planned. A hundred meters away is a school from where children spill in twos and threes. Two little girls hold hands as they run uphill, all the way to the village. Two older children arrive at Sahuji's shop where I sit on a low chair, looking out. One buys fife-rupees worth of broken noodles and daalmoth. Her friend buys three-rupees of dry coconut. They run towards the school, still holding hands, not worried about the rain or the steep gradient of the slippery road. From the Sahuji's shop, the children in sky and navy blue uniforms looks like an army of ants.

Sahuji makes small talk. I am amazed that it is still possible to buy a piece of dry coconut for three-rupees. Dates and coconut and rock sugar, the stuff of rural childhood, from Narendra Dai to children in Tokha! Sahuji worries about Prachanda being denied the time to work. We talk about the price of vegetables: it is becoming impossible for a poor family to buy food. “If only politics didn't interfere with livelihood,” he says. If the capacity to interfere with people's livelihood, their ability to earn a meal or breath a lung-full of clean air is taken away from politics, what glamor is left to it? Why would anybody want to become a politician, if not to exceed the truth of history in order to put a foot on the throats of one group to promise a feast for another group? We bond in our immodest claim of insignificance, as citizens lamenting, despairing, spicing the view with cautious hope.

An old couple pauses to let me pass northwards, although there isn't a fourth person in sight. The ground is slippery and sleeked over with a tint of green, only recently awaking to the rain, not yet pliant enough to dig into with naked toes. At Chandeshwori stands a many-limbed, many-headed form of Kali, her red cement tongue lapping up the rain. Most names on the donors-list are from Doti. I find a name I think I know—Sunil Maskey, from Gorkha, a man who owned a rice mill in Abu Khaireni. It is a small world, I marvel, not pausing to examine the truth behind my assumption, hurrying towards the wet pine needles and chalky crumble of Shivapuri. Sting nettle slaps the shins and ainselu scratches the arms, but there are goat-trails to climb, the mist around the corner to dive through. If there is such an urgency, there must be a wonder fast dissolving. There is a sudden, short drop ahead—a bluff, not really a cliff, certainly without the perils of a precipice—and my plastic slippers go tumbling down.

Like Banquo's apparition, a man materializes on the streambed below, giving form to the thin mist to gaze at me before looking for a way up the opposite wall of the gully. I am seized with the desire to reach the streambed, to stand in the depressions left in the soil by his bulk, to check how I must appear to that man as I stand unshod and wearing shorts, wiping a pair of spectacles, teetering at the edge, a lump of lard about to drop off a cliff. The rain has made the chalky soil crumbly, gritty. Only after kicking and packing the dirt can a foot test it for hold; clods with green grass hold but dry clumps fly out in fistfuls, spraying mica behind eyelids. The moment comes when a leap is necessary, not over an impossible distance, but any loss of control will send this corpus careening, tumbling. There is no need to think. Aim with the eyes, jump, think after the fact.

The bag of guts jiggles with a hard shock of rebound. Banquo has long disappeared. There are no witnesses, not even the self, which seems to have tumbled on, leaving behind a deflated, disappointed body. What is the nature of this very personal triumph or failure? Nothing significant, nothing unique, nothing substantial. What is the victory of a body languishing in the depths? The climb up, the climb out, the climb back to the edge. The hope that the next time a body is projected over an edge, it will not fall, but soar over the mist, over the wet sheen over the world. To over-leap the limits of a mind deposited in a chair. To color the world with the flesh and dulcet gold of a mouthful of date and coconut. For now, I wonder how Banquo affected his disappearance.