It seems like I’d just gotten better before coming down with something else again. Being confined to home, though, has made me more aware of my surroundings, grateful for the life around me, the neighbourhood goings-on: there is always something to see.
The holiday season is coming—Sunday was, in fact, the first day of Dashain. Flashback to when, years ago—many—there were 10, 12 or more days of holiday in a row. Now, after Sunday, there’s a gap before the official days of holiday pick up this Saturday. But the children are already out of school, their voices rising and little feet pounding the newly-paved alley.
Five or six houses away, a duo is attempting to launch an orange and blue kite from their roof, the first one I’ve seen this season. They don’t seem to be very good at it—no shade there, neither am I—but they are endlessly optimistic; she throwing it in the air in an attempt to get it airborne while he maneuvers the little spindle. I get tired before they do.
Speaking of kites—the avian kind, this time—every so often the birds go wild, circling raucously on the air currents, high above the trees they normally settle into quietly each evening. Last night there so many black kites soaring they were uncountable, hundreds at least, a spectacular, mesmerizing sight.
Later, much later at night, a strange, unfamiliar yelp heard while I was in the kitchen; opening the screen window I leaned out in time to see what looked to be a jackal loping off with a slight limp away and out of sight; a first for me in the alley.
Two houses over that family has had workmen in, fixing or building some sort of doors spread out on the roof, where carpets have also now been laid to air or dry. The mother, pregnant when I first moved in, has long since had her baby; it’s now grown into an active toddler who often joins her two brothers at play out on the balcony. It’s strange how familiar people who you’ve never spoken to can seem.
Today, again in the kitchen, a noise that made me look down; it’s the family two floors below me: the man opening the front door of a taxi to carefully help his wife out; she is a little wobbly and I know what’s coming because I saw a crib newly built through the open door of their flat when I was walking upstairs a few days ago.
He leaned in through the vehicle’s back door and lifted a tiny baby from his own mother’s arms before she, too, climbed out. Her husband, his father, died not long ago and I can only imagine the joy this little one will bring them all.
And the marigolds on my balcony: wild-seeded a few seasons ago they now come back annually, symbols of the holiday, reminding me of fields chock-full of yellow and orange I traveled through on a trip taken in 2019 around this time of year, to Bhimphedi on the old road to Kathmandu.
Everywhere, new life.