Late last night, with the neighborhood quiet and empty, the trucks came back. Or maybe it’s always the same one, making multiple trips. I’m alerted by the series of whistles and taps that always accompany a large vehicle backing its way down the narrow alley—natural mouth whistles, short and almost pleasant, as the driver’s helper leads him down the road, not the high shrill sound of someone using a physical whistle, which is what the garbage collectors use to announce their imminent arrival, and that some children on a roof catty-corner to me obtained the first summer I was here, driving me nearly batty as they blew it all day, every day, for those school-less weeks of lockdown. But I digress.
I lean out of the kitchen window that overlooks the lane, hoping against hope that it might be a truck carrying barrels of molten tarmac.
It’s not.
It is a full truck, though—one of those ubiquitous, mid-size blue flatbeds—which once it has been maneuvered just right, disgorges its load of stones and dirt before driving off. Soon there’s another load, followed by a bulldozer, moving and scratching, and by morning I see that the delivered heap has been scraped carefully across the surface of the road, and I want to believe that this time it is really going to get paved.
But we’ve been here before—in fact, similar loads were delivered just before I traveled in late February, which led me to optimistically tell my neighbor, also traveling, that maybe there’d be a paved road before we returned…
It was not to be.
When I go to get milk this morning I further note that what’s been laid down and smoothed across is pretty nearly up with the level of the alley’s driveways, which I think is a good sign, and I feel optimistic again.
But who knows?
When I moved here, two years ago, the road was paved—worn away in places and with definite potholes, but still, a tarmacked road. In the months, soon years, that followed, it has been dug up more times than I can recall: for Melamchi water pipes, new electric cables, possibly for internet cables, water pipes again. Who knows? I’ve lost count of the times and track of the reasons.
And yet.
There are so many bigger problems in the world—in my own life, even—and while yes, I will be glad for the reduced layer of dust on everything once the road finally gets paved, I’m grateful for problems that are just logistical, practical, solvable. For the fact that walking down the dusty lane to discover a new hole being dug, for undetermined purposes, is now more amusing to me than annoying.
The road will be tarmacked again one day soon; until then, I am, perhaps perversely, enjoying the saga.
[Note: As I prepare to hit send, I hear the tell-tale clanking that signals the return of the bulldozer, earlier tonight. I think this bodes well, but watch this space…]