of everything and anything that concerns me

I was thinking these sentimental things won’t come from me anymore.  I was desperately trying to resort into the “I am a rock, I am an Island” status – but it’s difficult.  Yesterday I had to go to Baneshwor to get the rent. I wasn’t looking for it, it came my way.

I guess I wouldn’t have had the heart to go and see the old house before I left but I guess god finds ways of reminding us of those that we hold meaningful. The house I grew up was rather large. After my father returned from Hongkong finished with his high School, he built the old house so that he, 2 of his siblings and 4 of his cousins could comfortably go to college in Kathmandu. After the gang of then “young kids” stayed in rented rooms in Lazimpat and Gyaneshwor, they moved into the spacious house with 6 rooms, a dining, a kitchen, a living room, two bathrooms and two spare closets .  A neighbor at Baneshwor, while the house was being built had remarked, “Tapaile ta gazab ko ghar banauna lagnu bhayechha” (you’re making quite an astonishing house). What Gazab Uncle (the same neighbor) had said was rather true. The house almost 30 years old is still architecturally modern with trendy Chinese bricks, balconies and a new garage. And even more special for me because I grew up in that house.

My mother married into that house. The youngest daughter of the royal priest, my pampered mother found it astonishing to see young adults, living on their own, doing all the household chores and finding time to excel in college. In the beginning she had to take painkillers to numb the pain of all the housework and put her to sleep at night. But her brother and sisters in law have and had quite a close affinity to her. She was their age, went to college with them and as the eldest after father and the newest member of the family, important.  I was the first child in the family, the eldest kid.

My mother recalls that I was quite an excitement in the house. The “kids”, my uncle and aunts as my mother refers to them went off to college in India, almost all of them and everytime they’d return they’d bring me clothes and toys.  Later, my father’s uncle built his own house and the girls they were married off. My grandfather retired from the British army and came back, when I turned one.  Ours has been quite an aflluent family but the first child everyone says gets the besta nd finest. I had a yellow scooter from hongkong I’d play with on the terrace. There were gold bangles that were malleable by hand and cute little baby clothes from where ever there were relatives. The structure of the house changed over time but in the open space on the first floor, we had a television (now this was 22 years ago and televisions were rare). I remember TV shows like Toophan mail while i recall a young aunt back from India hooked on MTV (then broadcasted in certain hours on NTV).

But the most imprortant place in the house remained the landaing of the stairs. My mother would feed me on those landings when I was small and tell me stories about Monkeys eating crows (now it sounds hilarious but then it was some really serious matter) and Meena who didn’t get to go to school while her brother did (later father brought a Meena Video Casette, that triggered feminism quite early in me). It was on the landing that I played with my dolls and pots and pans and later through the windows on the landing I’d watch the airport. When the 1 pm Thai Airways landed I’d want to be on it for I knew it would take me to America, where it was open and one could play outside all day. When I was older I hated to watch airplanes land. It would remind me of how one always had to to have one’s feet on the ground and couldn’t keep flying with the clouds. Watching planes take off was always a delight and it meant that the rest of the day however long would go great. Watching a plane take off at night would mean beautiful dreams. There was always a close connection between living in that house and a longing for freedom.

Somehow we were constricted despite the cycles of comfort and discomfort. Comfort were the times when sweets would come in from Delhi, clothes would come from Paris and chocotales from Geneva and people would fill the living room on the ground floor to see my father to speak two words with him, and the prime minister and diplomats would crowd at my sister’s rice feeding ceremony. Discomfort was when we’d have to eat chapatis and tea for lunch everyday and the daal was water thick and a distent relatve with an unpleasant smell would snuggle next to you on your own bed.

The old house was a familiar place for all relatives from the villages. 14 was a familiar number of diners at the house. For young bachelors the house was a temporary hostel, for people in Kathmandu for treatment, a comfortable nursing house and for visitors an open home. Something in my mother died in that house, some sort of hope for freedom from obligations, the longing for self and the need for time alone.  The few precious times that I had my room for myself  were paradise and the room and I were happiest when we were by our selves.

I read almost all the books I ever read in that small room. It could only fit in a study table, a set of drawers and a twin sized bed, but it was my world. It had a tiny balcony, hardly opened and windows on two sides. I learned to dream there, laugh and talk to myself there, sneak in chocolates and eat them all by myself there and feel the awakening of a woman in me there. There were crushes I thought of it that house and friends I’d talk to over the phone in that house. Became an exemplar student by working hard in that room. The first night I spent alone in that room I remember being unable to fall asleep and taking out my books to read. I remember falling sick from reading too much late into the night in that room. Thousand others too much to recall.

Eventually we moved from there and this house here in Kapan became my house. But not as close to my heart as that house I grew up in. The first few nights I dreamt of being back in the old terrace and sitting in the old living room but that faded away and a million new memories were created in this house. I know many mre memories will be formed and some of the old ones will fade away but even if memories die, something familiar about what we leave behind will remain. Like how I felt yesterday when I walked through the landing of the stairs and looked around from the terrace. It wasn’t the same but it was familir and it was deep and it was a part of me.