“Maybe you are a dragon,” says M.
She wants to know what Mi-malaa in Newa translates to. I say, it is a fire-breathing dragon. And I immediately slide into a ramble about dragons, which is when she says she thinks that I might be a dragon.
I laugh.
…
I am five, sickly, forever dodging all kinds of arrows life darts at me, throwing me into fits of cough that cause asthma. It means I am not as athletic as my cousins or my classmates. I am the youngest in class and the littlest of all cousins. I am the runt of the pack. My oldest cousin sister, whenever it rains, lifts her frock over my head like a broken umbrella.
Stay in bed! I am told that a lot by everyone. Baa brings me Read-it-Yourself Ladybird classics.
One very dry day in March, Yaama, decides I must join the other children for Malaa ja-- the feast of the dragon. Maa is not entirely sure but she helps me put on my pretty pink frock that has a bunch of dolls embroidered to the front. Yaama leads me to the street before the Taleju temple where wicker mats have been spread out and children are seated in rows, like some picnic is underway.
My heart thumps at the sight. I am assigned a spot.
Men and women appear in a file, walking past us, leaving treats, ranging from cookies to cakes to fruits, on the leafy plates set before each one of us. The girl next to me asks me if she can have some of my sweets and I say yes. Drink your juice, she says.
I feel as though I am part of something important, even though I have no appetite.
Yaama brings me home when the feast is over. Maa asks me how it went. I tell her everything. She explains how in the past, it would have been a proper feast of rice and daal and goodies and that the event was a prayer sent out to the dragon to protect the children from itself-- March being a month of storms and strong winds and contagious diseases. Hence, Malaa Ja.
…
Maa has always owned a pendant with a dragon on it. In fact, all her sisters have one, a family tradition of carving the serpentine mythical creature with fins, scales and fire onto little slabs of metal.
While I still had a penchant for jewelry, I used to ask Maa if she would give it to me someday. I would ask her why the pendant has a dragon. “My birthchart warns me against the Malaa. I am supposed to wear the pendant so a dragon can protect me against dragons.”
Whenever it rained, Maa’s elder sister would rush to her rescue with an umbrella and shove her into the house. Stay indoors! She would make her watch the rain from the window. She was not allowed to be outdoors during storms. And so my mother learned to watch the rain from the window and read her books.
And across the sky, she would see the dragons flashing to the background score of thunder, spreading as far as the horizon in its colours, claws, scales and fins-- the sudden outburst of lightning sending shudders through her heart.
…
“On the main entrance of our old home were two massive, colourful dragons. They were beautiful,” Maa recalls. “The house had little attic windows and I would look at the mountains from those windows.”
When they pulled the house down to build a new one, the dragons came off the walls in broken bricks.
Maa has no idea who painted the dragons, but they were a symbol of the great creatures that would protect the house and its dwellers.
…
We have four kinds of dragons, says Deepak Bajracharya Gurju. They are: Mi Malaa, Bajra Malaa, Gongaa Mall, Pa Malaa, each named after their shape and impact.
“A Malaa is truth, but also an illusion,” he says. “It is as elusive as it is omnipresent.” And he shares anecdotes.
In one instance, a Malaa had drowned in a pot of brew and turned to stone. But when the woman who discovered it tried to hold it, the stone quickly transformed into its ethereal form and flew away.
In some instances, Guruju says, when the sky suddenly darkens, rumbles and the lighting strikes, we believe that a Malaa has flown away.
They have been forgotten over the years, he explains, but they are still present in symbols around us. We have seen them carved on to temple struts, to door knobs, painted on walls of old buildings, written by healers on bodies when people fall sick and sometimes inked on the skin. Sometimes, their form stares at us from the ruins of a house struck by lightning.
…
Dragons, Maa says, are representative of who we are as individuals. They are who we aspire to be -- fierce, cold as serpentine scales but bursting with flames that can burn everything to cinders.
She says, there is always that epiphany whenever the Malaa shows across our skies -- the idea of regenerative possibility all humans are. Of how we reinvent and reappear just as dragons do. That was the original hope every parent carried for their children -- that they be like dragons and they protect themselves from other dragons.
Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

Pratibha Tuladhar

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We are fire-breathing dragons

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/2022120710124/6390579b9c7e80680e0ce165jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1480" height="986"/><figcaption>Photo: FREEPIK</figcaption></figure>ChilblainsWinter spills out into my room in the form of jumpers. I happen to call them jumpers. Maa calls them sweaters. Is it because their job is to make you sweat, you once asked me. If so, why are jumpers called jumpers?Maa is always going to insist they are sweaters. Grandmother used to knit them in bright colours and complicated patterns, as though crossing needles all year was a way of mentally preparing for the Kathmandu cold that would arrive at her toes, threatening to bite them off in chilblains.Winters were harsh. Some mornings, she woke up to a layer of ice on top of the water left overnight in the washing tub. She would first crack the ice with a finger and then dip it in slowly, almost afraid.Throughout winter, her toes and fingers would itch from the inflammation caused by exposure to the cold. At night, laying next to her husband, a bunch of babes on the other side, she would turn to him and say: Warm my hands please -- they are prone to chilblains.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/stealing-a-dog/">Stealing a dog</a>, Pratibha TuladharKnitting inSo winter spills out into my room anyway, out of duffle bags and old trunks and the high shelf in the closet. Those are their place all summer. They remain tucked away, their warmth made obsolete by the summer sun. They shy away in different nooks of the house, perhaps sighing and waiting until it's time again.And today is the start of that time.Bring them out and leave them in the sun, Maa says. This should have happened in the month of Gunla, while the sun was still strong. Just at the heels of the monsoon, you know, she says.But Maa, I protest. We lost track of the monsoon this year. Didn’t it rain all the way through Dasain?Right, right.And so today is finally the start of the time. The jumpers are a bunch of colours, ranging from tangerine to black -- a splotch of yellow and blue here and there.Why do you buy so much black? she asks.Do I?And there are three bags of black nylon stockings. Some of them have run ladders from being worn for too many years. Why does a woman need 35 pairs of stockings? Maa likes to speak in hyperbole.I am not sure I need them, actually, I say. I didn’t even buy them. One pair of holey stockings was gifted by Funa last year. But when she was opening the delivery, she accidentally ripped a hole with the scissors into the packet. And so, all of last winter, I walked around in a pair of holey stockings.I don’t know any woman who walks around in torn stockings, you Hippie!Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/memory-of-a-conversation/">Memory of a conversation</a>, Pratibha TuladharWear me outClothing items become worn out when they are worn well. In that wearing out is the residue of the days it has carried our limbs, torso, etcetera. And so they begin to develop holes, collect lint, scrunch up in certain areas where the rate of friction is more frequent.They gather the memory of some wall you were leaning against while you waited for your paperwork to come through in a government office. The loop of wool sticking out of an old jumper is a reminder of how a stray nail gently tugged at you as you stood up to leave your desk one evening to go meet a certain friend.One of my oldest black jumpers has sleeves that hang all the way to my finger tips. In the newsroom, when I worked the late news shift, I would pull them all the way down and roll them in a fist, depositing them on my lap as I watched the late night news, waiting for my turn to get on the air. Gloves and mittens never warmed my hands the same way.Next to me once sat Ram Chandra, asleep on an adjustable office chair, the room heater at his knees slowly eating a hole into his fleece jacket.The almost accident left a charred dark patch on his jacket. Perhaps, if he still owns that jacket he looks at it and thinks of how I might have rescued it by waking him up, instead of sitting next to him gawking at the screen, my nostrils flaring in the air at the hint of something burning.“Not very smart, are you, didi?” Ram Chandra later asked me.Darkness of the streetAgainst an old Kathmandu house, supported by struts, sit three women with their goods spread before them in a molehill. The little hill is made up of fleece items-- colourful trousers, jackets and more trousers and some socks and beanies. Their colours reach you even in the darkness of the alleyway, beckoning at you like winter. But the women do not make an attempt to sell. They merely stare at me, perhaps wondering if I will buy.I have too much winter clothes, I make a mental note.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/the-light-of-feet/">The light of feet</a>, Pratibha TuladharSun-soakingWhen we were growing up, bringing your winter clothes out during Gunla was a ritual, explains Maa. Kathmandu winter demands that you get prepared in time. So, we used to bring it out and leave it in the sun all day before folding each item carefully and shelving it in cupboards where they were easily within reach as the temperatures started to drop after Tihar.No one has that kind of time now, Maa. Also, we have things hanging in the closet all year now, so what would be the point of having the coming out occasion for clothes?But the pile in my room does seem to be having a coming out per se, as warm colours peek at me. I touch an old cholo belonging to my Ajee, which was passed down to me as her souvenir. Bright red with black flowers, she wore it for many years while Aaja was alive and then it went and sat in a trunk in the store. Like we stock up summer clothes at the start of winter, Ajee’s clothes of colour had all been swiftly stored away when she became a widow. None of them ever saw a Gunla sunny day out. They just stayed there.But today, in my room, the bright red and the dark flowers of the cholo catch the sun.Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.Read more:<a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/memories-of-war/">Vignettes from war</a>, Pratibha Tuladhar

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Winter on my skin

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114131156/63723b839c7e80680e0c95c9jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683"/><figcaption>Photo: SUMAN NEPALI</figcaption></figure>The thing about Dasain is that I’m never good enough for it.When I was a child, I wasn’t good enough because I was a girl. It meant I could not participate in certain rituals by the virtue of being female.Over the years, I learned to make peace with it. Rituals were not my thing, anyway.One Dasain, after the main practice of sacrificing the gourd, painted as the demon Mahishasur was over, my sister picked the khadga dagger handed down from our Malla ancestors, and started to slice the gourd. It riled the male guardians in the clan. My sister tried to argue that it is after all the goddess who kills the demon, and the goddess is female. Not like her argument would work.After that, the age-old practice of impaling the gourd in our clan met a sudden end — causing our strand of the Tuladhar men to disperse into nuclear family Dasain celebrations.While my childhood memory of Dasain, or Mohni as the Newa people call it, has always been about the Tika big day (this year on Wednesday) when the men came together to perform the violent act against a painted gourd, the festival has changed over the years. Some of those changes are very welcome, including the one that put an end to the simulation of violence performed by certain Buddhist Newa families in Kathmandu.Growing up, I also experienced discrimination shared by some of my cousins, who were not allowed the tika by certain relatives because they were not Buddhist. But wasn’t Dasain a Hindu event in itself? I never understood that. And while I stood on the other side of the line where I was allowed tika, their sense of humiliation for being refused the blessing was mine, too. We were children together.Over the years, I also learned to stage fake periods when I did not want to receive tika. And while isolation during period is something my family has never observed, I still have mood swings the moment I see the tika tray.Lately, they remind me of the Asur people in certain parts of India, who mourn their dead during Dasain. But the tika is also sticky and leaves a mark on my forehead, reminding me that I have the privilege of it because I was born in a certain family.Also, for women, neither having or not having your period during Dasain is a privilege. Either way, it means you spend the festival running household chores or being banished for bleeding. All things become tied to birth eventually—who you were born to, where and how—your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion, your civil status and your social station in life, to mention a few. They make that everything about you. In this case, they is Dasain and Dasain is they.Once upon a time, I worked in a newsroom. The country was declared secular and we stopped calling Dasain the biggest festival celebrated by Nepalis. We started writing: the biggest festival celebrated by Hindus in Nepal. But every other day, one person would change it back. All Nepalis are Hindu by default, he would say. How? I would ask. And he would say: it is just how it is. In my head, I would say: It is just how a newsroom you lead is. Closed to everyone who is not you.Over the years, Dasain has kept finding new ways to defeat me. When it discovered that I am a woman without a man, it naturally relegated me to the lower-station of social life. You need a husband to do certain things in the society that calls me its own. Doesn’t matter that this time of the year is about a woman who rides on a ferocious animal and is independent.I have met Dasain with an entirely new fear recently, because it’s given me fresh reasons for disdain. It tells me I’m not good enough. My hair is greying, and fast. Dasain wants me to discover hair colour. I’m told my cousins who are in their 50s “upstage” me in looks and it is why I will never “find a husband”. I’m also being told I’m too conservative in how I dress and in the topics I like to discuss. And so, I’m too conservative for this festival.It is never going to be good enough for Dasain that I’ve learned to play kitty to entertain my nonagenarian grandfather. Not good enough, that I let the spindle reel against my thumb, flying a kite with my nephews and my brothers.Dasain is often a reminder that singlehood is not even a concept available to one and that we must make the choice of finding a partner. It doesn’t matter that the partner might have been someone who slammed the door on your face or held you to the ground by your hair, or spent his entire time watching pornography on his phone while you sat up in bed wondering. But you must have a partner because that’s what is acceptable to Dasain.I’m never going to be good for Dasain. And that, is just fine.Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

Reasons for disdain at Dasain

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101136/63720c889c7e80680e0b7875jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1053" height="1012"/><figcaption>Photo: PRATIBHA TULADHAR</figcaption></figure>On nights when things got unbearable, Laxmi Maya always stepped out of the house in the quiet of the night. There was nowhere to go, really, but the <a href="http://archive.nepalitimes.com/news.php?id=7121#.YiRUsy8w3u0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">gully</a>. The gully or galli, as she said it, was the long tunnel that went from under the house on the main street into a courtyard where one of the four houses flanking the square, brick-paved space, was hers. Her husband’s family’s rather.The bickering over the house had gone on for so long. Every few weeks, government officials showed up at her threshold, and asked her innumerable questions. Where was the infamous husband? “I don’t know,” was Laxmi Maya’s consistent answer.As time went by, she had learned to say those words without at all batting an eyelid. And as she said it on repeat, the words became more believable to the government officials, as they did to her. She had started to believe she had no idea about his whereabouts.In her mind, Calcutta was a distant country of which she did not know anything. She did not know what its streets or nooks looked like or how the tram she had heard about operated. And so knowing that her husband was in Calcutta was tantamount to not knowing where he was. So, her statement was not entirely false.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/coping-with-the-patriarchy/">Coping with patriarchy</a>, Bhumi GhimiréThe government officials always appeared in a pair. Laxmi Maya would hurry upstairs to her baiga after asking them to sit down on the wicker mats and quickly poach two eggs and pour a dash of aeila into little copper kholas and present them before the men.“So you do not know where your husband is?” one of them would ask between taking a sip.“I don’t,” she would say quietly.“We are only letting you live in this house because you have three small children. By law, he is banished and so everything he owns is now government property, we hope you know.”“I know, Sarkar. But this house was given to me in dowry by my father,” Laxmi Maya would lie again. It had become a drill.Promptly, the officers would leave after polishing off their snack, setting in motion for Laxmi Maya, the wait for another such visit.Did she miss the husband? She could not say. His presence had been punctuated by his time spent with the dancers, or neighbourhood events from where he always came away as the feared. What was there to miss of such a man, besides moments of imagined intimacy when his limbs were hers to hold? She wondered, had she been a dancer, would it also have kept him from straying? Yes, they said he had strayed.Read also: <a style="font-size: 15px; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/nepals-unequal-marriages/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nepal's unequal marriages</a>, Anjana RajbhandaryBut the women in her clan did not dance. They had not been taught to. Dancing, they said, was for women who were “loose”. They had taught her to speak softly, tread softer and to hold her tongue and restrict her movements to grace. That was who she was-- all those things they said she should be.<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221114101136/63720c8a9c7e80680e0b7876jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="126" height="150">Standing in the darkness of the galli, Laxmi Maya often felt streams of hot tears soak her face. She had never learned to cry before others, so the quiet of the night was a good time. On one such night, she had seen rows of carriages go by, carrying large boxes. They were followed by rumours that the Ranas were getting their belongings removed to India because some kind of revolution was afoot to throw them off. They said that was why the king had left for India.Tonight, though, there was no such activity. It was quiet. As Laxmi Maya stood there, tears finding their way down her jaw, she thought she saw a light flicker near the Naradevi temple. It was followed by the clanking of a door and then of ghangala, the bunch of bells worn by the goddess. Wafting in with the sound was the goddess herself, stepping out of her temple, draped in a long red frock, a <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/getting-behind-the-divine-mask/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">mask</a> on her face. As the deity started doing the familiar dance, lilting her hands in the air, feet shuffling, Laxmi Maya froze, but her tears ran down in thick rivulets. She stared in awe and trembled.…“The wedding was fun?”“The ratyauli was fun.”“The what?”“Yes. Ratyauli. I had heard about it but never seen one before,” says Mamu.I ask her to explain, but she says she cannot because it would embarrass us both. She will not divulge any detail, but tells me how she felt a tinge of envy that <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/parodying-patriarchy-at-tij/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">women had the liberty</a> to engage in that kind of lewd talk without being judged while singing and dancing and acting.Read also: <a style="font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.01em;" href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/boys-will-be-boys-is-never-an-excuse/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Boys will be boys is never an excuse</a>, Anjana Rajbhandary“How come women in our community don’t dance?” I ask.“We have the gods and the goddess, the masked dancers,” she says.“But they are all men wearing masks,” I remind her. Then Mamu goes on to explain how apart from the Jyapu community, women from other clans had never been given that kind of freedom.“Don’t you think that is so unfair? Taking the right from you to revel, to be in tune with your own body. When else do you explore the joy of being in your body as you do with dancing? It is so much to take away from a woman.”“I don’t know, I never thought about it. My movements don’t sync and so I don’t dance.”Mamu often sits in a corner watching others dance. When asked to dance, she will sometimes try, but her footwork never matches her hand gestures or the music: “I guess, I just watch people dance.”Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/editorial/patriarchy-in-an-oligarchy/">Patriarchy in an oligarchy</a>, Editorial…Dance! My senior, who is having a “ragging” session with me, orders. Do the twist, she says, and sings a Rafi number. What is a twist, I wonder. She says, if you do not obey your seniors, you measure the entire campus with a one rupee coin. In my heart, I wished I could just dance and get over it. But I can’t. Like Mamu, my feet are wooden, too. I just stand there, my face burning in shame and fury.Here, she says. Take this coin and now go measure the entire place with it.As I bend down at her feet and place the coin on the ground, I wish I could have told her I cannot dance because women in my community <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/letter-to-a-nepali-aunty/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">are not expected to dance</a>. But saying that, would also require a dance-- of the tongue. So, I bend down and start flipping the coin inch by inch across the campus.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/anger-management-for-nepali-women/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Feel angry? read this</a>, Anjana RajbhandarySuburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

The light of feet

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221110111128/636cd2c49c7e80680e08f931jpeg.jpg" alt="girl with an asthma inhaler" width="1280" height="720"/><figcaption>Photo: ScienceMag.org</figcaption></figure>My aunt would lie on her side on raised pillows, wheezing. She would speak between coughing and wheeze some more. Then she would pull out— what I considered a toy as a child— an inhaler, clamp it in her mouth and press, then suck in for a while before repeating. She would fall asleep when the wheezing eased.I would soon learn her toy was actually an asthalin inhaler for asthma patients. And in the years that followed, I would soon be using them.As a school girl, my bag had a pile of books like most children going to mediocre private schools in Kathmandu do. Nestled between them, always, was the inhaler, reading “salbutamol” on its label. I was likely to forget my lunch box some days, but never my inhaler.My memory of how I first experienced an asthma attack is feeble. But I remember hearing the same wheezing sounds my aunt used to make, from inside me and thinking: okay, so this is what it was. My chest would feel tight, as though it was contracting to squeeze the breath out of me. And I would feel like my nose had stopped breathing in the air.A puff, and I would slowly relax and go to sleep— incomplete homeworks giving me nightmares.During Games classes, I mostly stood under the trees watching other children play. Running around left me quickly out of breath. But not being a participant in the sports my friends played, also made me feel left out. It gradually shaped my personality as a ‘loner’, pushing me into a place of introversion.<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221110111128/636cd2c79c7e80680e08f932jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="2010" height="2635"><figcaption> </figcaption></figure>As a teenager, when I was studying in Darjeeling, India, the attacks suddenly stopped. It felt like a miracle, but mostly like my lungs had finally been set free. I would walk up and down the hills with classmates, or alone, breathing in the pine trees, and the moist air that carried nothing of the hydrangeas, azaleas or orchids, but pure rain. I lived.But the one time we went down to Calcutta for a mock-parliament event, my lungs were clogged again. I felt a heaviness I had not missed. Only, it was worse than the feeling I had experienced in Kathmandu. I longed for the Darjeeling sky.My trajectory as an asthmatic child was shared by my sister. But as someone who has mostly lived in Kathmandu, she graduated from asthalin to rotohalers and occasional nebulizers. As a working woman who rides around on her scooter through Kathmandu smog most days now, she is constantly coughing and wheezing. They have become a part of her countenance. What has it done to her lungs? I dread I will have to find out.I read somewhere that our lungs grow to their best extent when we are children and much of our adult life depends on how much they expand in the first few years of development. At five, my nephew is already experiencing breathing difficulties. I cringe when I think of the possibility of him having to experience a childhood that is shackled by breathlessness, as the Air Quality Index constantly hovers close to 200.Every time I read the index, I happen to think of my late grandmother, another asthmatic in the family. She would climb up the stairs slowly to get to the kitchen on the fourth floor and collapse at the landing every single time, sitting there for a long while to catch her breath before saying a word. In the last years of her life, she needed a constant supply of oxygen, blown into her nostrils through a thin pipe that she wore like a halter around her face. It left a permanent dent on her cheeks.I recall her sitting still on her bed, moving as little as possible, because movement would leave her out of breath. When she passed away exactly ten years ago, Kathmandu air was still not as terrible as it has now become. There were still mornings when we would still wake up to the mountains. Now, we wake up to haze almost all the days.My aunt, who goes on morning kora around Boudha Stupa every morning tells me there is always a layer of thick black particles on her jacket when she comes back from the perambulation. It has become the new normal. And she tells me, “Maa would not have survived the dust that Kathmandu has become. It’s a good thing she didn’t live to see what we have come to.”

Into thick air

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221110111120/636cd1129c7e80680e08f892jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1125" height="1500"/><figcaption>Photo: PRATIBHA TULADHAR</figcaption></figure>Her hair is up in a pony tail some days. Some days, she wears it in pigtails. I rarely get to see her face up-close, but watching her from my balcony I can tell that she is mostly laughing. Her eyes, if not her throat. She is called Jyoti.I have known Jyoti for less than a year.When we moved to Kathmandu’s suburbia, we came to a place packed with three-storey houses that had quickly replaced paddy fields. All houses here look similar. Each is two and a half-storey, mostly built on chaar-aana lands, with pointy rooftops, popularly known as ‘namaste’ in the local construction lingo.The only thing that gives the houses some character is their colour. They come in the brightest hues you can imagine—from parrot green to fuchsia. This is the post-civil-war, new Kathmandu —stretching in whichever direction it can, both horizontally and vertically.Even with <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/a-year-of-living-dangerously/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the lockdown</a>, new houses kept cropping up in our neighbourhood. They went up overnight, sometimes. Jyoti’s father is one of the realtors in the area. His job is to slice the fields into little plots, and find buyers for them.Another of his jobs is to make sure Jyoti doesn’t go out to play with the neighbourhood boys. But the kids show up anyway, and often I overhear conversations like this one:“Jyoti! Jyoti!”“What do you want?” Jyoti’s father puts his torso out the window and shouts at the boys standing below his window.“We want to go play. With Jyoti,” they say.“She isn’t here. Go away!”“We want to play with her.”“She isn’t here,” he tells the kids.“Where is she?”“She’s gone to the temple.”“I know! I know!” says one of the boys. “It’s some festival today when all women go to the temple. Let’s go there and find her.”“No need to go there. Go home!” The father shouts.“I’m going to start fasting, too. Next year onwards,” shouts the first boy.“How old are you?” asks the father.“Nine. And he’s seven,” he says, pointing at the boy in his tow.“And who told you that you would have to start fasting? Fasting is for women,” says Jyoti’s father.“I know. But boys could do it as well. I am going to start fasting next year,” says the nine-year-old. They race off on their bikes.Jyoti returns. She’s dressed in a red kurti and walks alongside her mother, who has donned a red sari. Just like the other women in the neighbourhood. She follows her mother obediently inside the gate and disappears..…“Jyoti! Jyoti!”“I told you boys to go away. She won’t be playing with you all anymore. Badmasharu!”“Okay, we will come back for her later.”….Jyoti tries to wrench a pole from the roadside, employing all her strength.“No!” the boy screams. “That pole is to keep the electricity wires from sagging. They’ll kill us.”“Okay, but we need to find two poles to build us a badminton court,” says Jyoti. And they disappear in the neighbourhood, returning after a few hours with two poles, Jyoti dragging one of them.….“We need to build a kennel for the puppy. I shall get him a box from my house. It will be your job to dig up space, so we can build him a kennel,” says Jyoti.The <a href="https://archive.nepalitimes.com/article/Nepali-Times-Buzz/woof-of-fresh-air-for-street-dogs-in-kathmandu,4132" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">puppy</a>, barely a few weeks old, cuddles in the warmth of Jyoti’s arms. Other children wait their turn to hold the puppy. When Jyoti’s hands tire, she hands the puppy to other children.By the end of the day, a cardboard kennel has been built. One of the boys has brought a piece of foam to serve as the mattress.“We will call this one Bruno,” announces Jyoti. No one contests it.Bruno also has a bowl for milk now. They put him in the cardboard box and leave him in the open space in front of Jyoti’s house, before parting to return to their respective homes.….Bruno has gone missing.The children confirm from some people in the neighbourhood that a woman was seen dragging the puppy towards the wasteland. The day is spent in search, but Bruno is nowhere to be found.Next day, Jyoti deploys her team in different directions. They speed off on their bicycles. Some walk, interrogating random people in the village about Bruno. No one seems to have an idea.On the third day, Jyoti and team interrogate the adult community dogs.“Blink twice if you’ve seen Bruno,” orders Jyoti.“Blink once if he went left. Blink thrice if he went right. DO NOT blink if you haven’t seen him.”But the adult dogs stare at Jyoti and team, huff a little and lie down on the badminton court, turning their backs towards the sun.….Jyoti is sitting in front of her house with Mahi. They are sitting close and talking in whispers. When they walk by my house, I see that Jyoti is holding a kitten, wrapped in a scarf.“You adopted a kitten,” I say.“Yes,” she smiles. Then she asks, “You cut your hair?”“Yes, I cut my own hair,” I say.“It looks nice. I like it,” she says, smiles and then walks away with the kitten snuggled in her arms.….Jyoti is wearing a loose top and her hair is up in a pony like one of those girls from <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/k-pop-in-k-town/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Korean dramas</a>. She clings to her mother, who stands on the terrace, talking to a neighbour. She has not been allowed to leave the house for days. Neighbourhood kids show up asking for her and then leave, disappointed.“Bring your bicycle up to the terrace and keep it there now. You’re a big girl. You can’t be riding around when you have your <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/editorial/that-time-of-the-month/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">periods</a>,” I hear Jyoti’s mother tell her.Jyoti drags her bike up to the terrace, leans it against the kitchen wall, then grabs it and sits on it, astride.Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

suburban-tales

We are fire-breathing dragons

Winter on my skin

Reasons for disdain at Dasain

The light of feet

Into thick air

Welcome to suburbia