Wonderment

This is a dry monsoon. Menopausal women can't walk too far before they consider returning homeward, but abandon that thought too, as their grandchildren race ahead to meet their friends. It is a small patch of grass where someone should have built a house long ago: the plot is divided, marked, mapped into rooms and passages. But this is a big city, and no doubt the wheel of fortune became for some an oil-press and chewed them up. Their detritus is perhaps this square of open space in our concrete jungle. I am dragging a pair of chappals around its perimeter. Grandmothers wiggle their fingers out from damp fists of toddlers and kids and sigh.

On the eastern front sit a row of young men, reeking perpetually of marijuana, staring at the children and women with thick red veins in their eyes, talking too loudly, shouting obscenities at each other. Nobody knows these men by their names here. Soon, one of these days, neighbors will descend upon them with rods and bricks and chase them away, but in a week or two, another crop of young men will take over the patch of green. They trickle away after dark, ambush people near Ranibari for mobile phones and cash, sometimes climb over the walls to steal a water pump or bathroom fixtures and door handles. But, for now, they josh, they kick each other around in the dirt, smoke.

Further ahead along the perimeter, young mothers walk with infants and toddlers. One pregnant woman walks with her friend who smokes a cigarette. The friend drags along a three year old who wants a lollipop in another kid's hand. The kid's mother pulls, rudely lifts the kid by one arm and swings him three paces forward, sets him down on his knees. “Walk,” she says, “Walk of I'll drown you in the paddy field.” The pregnant woman pauses to look at the said paddy, just off the edge of the neighborhood. Fruits hang from lime and persimmon and grapefruit trees, and another tree that is more laden than others, so full are its fruits along the length of its slender branches that it recalls all seasons past and future: the riotous sight it must be while in full bloom, and the satiation it must bring with its ripe colors and smell, sweet taste.

“Do you know what fruit these are?” An old man asks me because, of all the people passing him, I look him in the eyes and smile. I am seeing blossom and fruit on the wonderment on his face. “This is not persimmon, not pear, nor peach or plum,” he says. “Do you think this is apple?” he asks. “No, I don't think so.” I remember green apple growing wild around a small town in Washington, so many different varieties planted just for a few weeks of blossoms every year. “Not apple, I don't think.”

“So you don't know?” he asks, although he doesn't seem very disappointed by my ignorance. No, I don't know. “It is not apple?” he asks himself. “But look how rich it is, how much of it! How green and healthy it looks!” A young girl comes out of a lavatory hidden by the fruit tree. When I turn back from the edge of another grid of roads ready to be boxed in by houses, the old man is still looking at the tree full of fruits. It seems strange to me that he and I are the only two people seemingly touched by the fruits and their potency as promises.

A boy runs into me, slamming his face into my sternum: he has eyes only for his purple kite. I grab and lift him off the ground, make sure he isn't in pain. He is embarrassed: he must be ten years old, just of age that he feels indestructible, capable of flight of every sort. “This kite never flies where I want it to,” he says. “What bullshit you talk, boy,” I say, “Why don't you just admit you don't know how to fly kites?” He grins. Behind him, sitting outside the gate of their single-storey house, a lady who looks like his grandmother bounces a toddler on her knees. The toddler has a lollypop, which it sucks, spits on, holds out to the kite-running brother. The kite-runner leaps and leans forward, offering a tongue on which the toddler swipes the lollypop. Although the kite-runner returns to his kite, he races back to the lollypop and offers his tongue again, and when the toddler swipes the lollypop on it, cunningly bites down on the stem, snatches the lollypop away.

For a second or two, the toddler giggles and claps at the brother's cleverness, but the ruse becomes transparent to the infant mind and the waterworks and wails start in full force. “Bring it back,” says Grandmother, “Give it back!” The kite runner returns to the crying toddler, but instead of handing back the lollypop, starts wailing at the baby, feigning great pain, crying right back, confusing all greed right out of the toddler. It is a trick I have never witnessed before. It is almost political in its genius, praiseworthy. The toddler stops crying, starts slapping the brother's face with small hands, almost in affection. The brother has changed into the court jester, and he can no longer be blamed. The jester leaps in the air, lollypop still in mouth, and tries to flick the purple kite back into the tepid sky.

Back at the perimeter of the patch of green, a boy dribbles a football behind his elder sister. He talks in hushed tones. “Those boys are the Taichin gang,” he says. “They have killed seven people. I heard. They are drug-addicts, tyabeys.” I am tempted to ask the boy if he isn't confusing something he watched on the television with the reality of street gangs around him. Seven murders by a gang of boys slapping on marijuana buds in the evening to get a cheap high? But I don't know enough about street gangs around my neighborhood, with their cryptic, slyly obscene graffiti like “The beauty of Originality is in the O” sprayed on walls. The boy keeps turning towards a the gate of a house we have just passed, so I turn to look.

Landlord watches intently as Painter works on the wrought iron design on the gate painted black: he is applying gold to the relief. Not gold paint, but gold leaf. Real gold, actual gold, the kind for which mines and dug and wars are fought, on the gates of an ugly house. I sit down by the street, not because it is something I routinely do, but because it is something I don't routinely see: gold leaf being applied to the gates of a house in Gongabu. I want this gate to be tagged next, I think, preferably with an obscenity easily translated into Nepali. This gold is astonishing to me, after seeing in the mind of an aged man the promised gold of a tree bowing with an unknown fruit, after witnessing the gold of the political skill of a boy with a purple kite. Landlord watches me suspiciously, but he has to pay attention to the leaf of gold in Painter's hand, lest he sneak the evening's raksi's worth under the nails on his toiling hands. Gold, actual gold, on the outer gates of an ugly building in Gongabu! The wonders we get to witness daily!