There were no fences where I spent my childhood. There were hedges, of sajivani and cactus, of bamboo and stone, but it was understood that a child could make a path for himself through any barrier, so long as he didn't harm the crop. To the north Marshyangdi drew a natural boundary, to the east and the west the valley strangled itself. To the south the mountain rose. There were half a dozen pine trees in that deciduous forest; their brushlike needles stood out in contrast discernible from the window of my home. The feilds blend into the forest. Jackals stole chicken and children picked gooseberries and blackberries the coldest cranny of the mountain. There was no center of the village, nor any limit. Sitting under a tree, it was possible to start a story about a spring hidden behind a hillock: there was no need to tie a story tmporally.
Once letters clumped into meaningful words, and words strung together and very tastefully ended in a period to suggest one whole idea, once epics came to life, once science-fiction became transparent, once the magic of Bruce Lee fighting in Hong Kong without the benefit of subtitles became a favored escape, once the village teemed and spilled over with people of all colors and transformed into a babble of migrant laborers and their newborns, once the tree once at the edge of a child's story became a stop on the way to further flung glades, once the world folded out, unfurled, at once the three dimensions became a more legible flatness, and the flatness of the unfathomed bunched up into an even more complex challenge. The bird that is poised to fly is not the same in flight.
I did, really, I did chase the rainbow once. I reached a place a mile past Marshyangdi on the Gorkha side before clouds covered the sun and there was no more rainbow. That chase took me places I wouldn't have hunted for on my own otherwise.
