Driving, and change
some flowers for your new year
Yesterday I pulled out the scooter for the first time in several weeks. It has a brand-new battery, but it’s properly cold at nights now, and the kick-starter is stiff. Getting it going on such a day is a guaranteed single-leg full workout.
Beginning the long (but fortunately level, this hasn’t always been the case) push to the mechanic’s around the corner, I was surprised to see the man himself at the little store just metres from my house. He lives in this area, but I’ve only seem him outside of his shop on rare occasions, so this was a delightful bit of serendipity. You may think I’m making too much of it, but listen: his expertise made quick work of something that would have started my drive off sweaty and grumpy.
I’ve mentioned my joy of walking several times already, and it is indeed a delight, but yesterday I remembered how lovely it is to whiz along on a scooter on a near-perfect day, awash in winter sun. I love the small details I notice when I’m on foot, but conversely, driving, particularly when I don’t have to do it daily, brings its own pleasure: the city unrolls like a reel, a selection of ever-changing still photographs that you want to stop and look at, but there’s another around the next bend, so on you go. It’s a kind of vibe.
By Kamaladi, opposite Kathmandu Plaza, a new building has materialized as if by magic. Has it been that long since I’ve driven this way? No, it really hasn’t.
While having goodbye drinks with a friend earlier this week, they speculated on how much the Kathmandu valley will have changed by the time they return.
It’s a valid point, and one that has been on my mind recently; sometimes it seems revisiting an area after an absence of just a month or two can result in something you considered a feature of the landscape being totally altered. If I don’t visit Thamel for two months, there’ll probably be a new hotel when I do.
Some changes seem positive to me, others less so. Bemoaning how wonderful things used to be way back when is something I actively try to avoid, because of course it’s true that Kathmandu used to be greener and the air was fresher and I remember when there was a rice field on the main Lazimpat road, just minutes from me now. However, I think that can swiftly become a slippery slope, where you end up finding yourself a truly annoying person for whom the past is always better. And there are still green oases in the city, for which I am grateful.
But yeah, I’m not gonna lie, seeing the valley’s physical landscape change so much and so regularly used to bother me a lot. I’m not sure when that frustration changed but it has, to some sort of acceptance of the motion. And maybe a more honest reckoning of how little we really can control and the futility of wasting energy and emotion on things outside that small circumference.
Sometimes, however, the changes uncover something magical. A couple of years ago, driving down a road that I took almost daily at that time, the surprise of seeing, beyond a field of tall weeds, what looked like an old Rana palace, there all along but completely hidden from view.
And earlier this week, what was once a cavernous storage area/parking lot by a favourite cafe has been torn down to reveal this: less stately than that other day’s building but just as lovely a surprise, orange trumpet vines spilling down in celebration.
I hope you’re having a wonderful first Wednesday of 2023. Thank you to those who commented and emailed me with some of your favorite book of last year; I very much enjoyed reading about your reading!