The hillsides echo now to shouts from men ploughing the rice paddies, navigating the teams of oxen along the narrow field lines flooding with water. Women crouch plucking the young rice plants from the nursery plots ready for replanting in the fields. It is pouring with rain, and everything is soaked. The monsoon season marks one point in the annual agricultural rotation, when the maize is harvested and the fields transformed into paddies. This is a real marriage of Eastern and West hemispheres, as rice is a domesticate of Asia and maize of Mexico. Having spent much of my life living and working in South America, it seems odd for me to see them juxtaposed in this way, sometimes seeming like one culture, then another. Shouting seems part of the daily order of things here. With the ripening of the maize come the marauding macaques from the forests to steal armfuls of corn cobs and so you hear the angry shouts of the village folk driving them off. Or else small wiley mongooses sneak up under the cover, of the tall vegetation, intent upon the villagers’ chickens. Now the ox team drivers shout at the oxen as they drudge ankle deep in the mire, up and down the field lines as they have for hundreds of years now.
I arrived into Lakeside Pokhara from Kathmandu two weeks ago,, but already it feels like an aeon has passed. Hard even to recall clearly the city and my time there, let alone the long and arduous journey that brought me to Nepal, now more than three weeks ago. As for the UK, the several months spent there across winter into midsummer have acquired a dreamlike quality, unreal in a trajectory that now feels like it has led uninterrupted from my year in India, to here.
I had arrived into Kathmandu approximately the same time as the monsoon and the weather was already becoming hotter and more humid, but then still with plenty of sunshine. During the five days of quarantine, I was able to swim and sunbathe by the hotel pool, not something I normally do but, unable to go out, there wasn’t a lot else to do anyway. Then, released unexpectedly early into freedom, a few more days followed when I was able to visit some of the ancient sights that Kathmandu is famous for: the Shree Pathupatinath temple and Durbar Square. It still seemed unreal to be there then, particularly as I was one of the very few tourists to have made it into Nepal, just then emerging from a lockdown that had closed the country’s borders. To now, when it seems like I have never really left this part of the world at all.
The monsoon has been very severe these last two weeks with deluges lasting all night, or all day and immense electric storms. Last year sitting out the lockdown in Uttarakhand India it was very much milder, the occasional downpour, the occasional storm, certainly higher tropical levels of humidity, but in time it passed, returning to the intense dry heat India is known for. Uttarakhand is just west of here over the border and on the same latitude as Nepal, and it was of course from there that I made my three sublime visits into the high Himalayas to the Chota Char Dham pilgrimage sites which marked the end of the my long sojourn in India and touched my heart in away that guaranteed I would someday soon return.
