Nepalese Notebook: September 11th, 2014

September 11th, 2014

Soti Khola 700m.

Kindness is without a voice and lives in quiet places, and when it is secluded, it is wide-eyed, rugged, and delicate.  We have come to the end of the gravel road that leads from Arughat; behind us lies an unstable bridge and before us a deep gorge with a new bridge spanning its edges.  The donkey caravans pass through, however, loaded with bags of unknowable merchandise for Tibet, and this turns out to be somewhat of a comfort as we sit on the porch of our guest-house and watch them.  The family that owns this place consists of a grandfather and grandmother, their two daughters, one child and one baby, the baby and the child being so well cared for that I could not tell to which daughter they belonged.  Sometimes we want so much to experience something that we forget to be genuine, and it almost seemed in vain to compliment our hosts for their cooking or their care because of how uninhibited they were amongst themselves.  The grandmother carlessly, but with such a subtle amount of tenderness, swings the baby by the arm and leg in a circle and everyone laughs; the grandfather leads me down an unbelievably dark hallway to show me how the light in our room works at night; all of them pass the time without thinking of it, and we were merely given a glimpse of this hidden world.  There were more bridges to be spanned though; the trail is starting to rise and become narrow, and it is with somewhat of a nervous expectation that I look up as evening sets and count the swirlings of cook smoke on the mountain-side, longing already for the kind reception they gave us, and selfishly hoping that they might remember me.

Douglas Thornton