There’s a concert going on, on a rooftop I can’t quite spot, but from the sound of raucous cheers he’s either very good or very famous; hopefully both. It’s just after one pm, but it is a Saturday. The crowd are currently engaged in a who—o—o chant, interspersed with cheers, the sound of drums and, occasionally, the vocalist.
Sometime in the middle of last week—it was a weeknight—there were dueling live shows, one atop a newly built and purportedly snazzy chain hotel off to the right, the other, somewhere on the left, could have been coming one of several lit up rooftops. From Hindi to hip hop, the juxtaposition of styles facing off from their respective parties shouldn’t have been annoying, but it wasn’t.
I’ve mentioned before that aside from a siren here and there, noise from the main road is mostly deafened by the time it reaches my stretch of the alley, but coming from above, say from the roof of a high building, is something else: with nothing to stop it, the sound soars across distances. And that’s even without the amplifiers and so on.
My sister’s last visit to Kathmandu coincided with my moving in here, and she slept in the room that is now my bedroom. One morning, very jetlagged, she awoke to ask why I had held a party without inviting her, when she was right there.
There had been no party in my apartment (it took a while to convince her of this) but there had been one on a neighbouring rooftop, I’d heard it even from where I was sleeping on the far side, and in the still night air it felt like it could have been in the next room.
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There is no live music tonight, no dance parties echoing across. The weather has been providing its own, marvelous entertainment for the past few days and when half the sky goes black while sunlight from the other lights up the city, one feels very lucky to live here indeed.