“Where do you think is more fun, here or back in Kathmandu?” Almost everyone in that small village of a hundred people asked me that and it always made me pause and reflect. I never wondered about the actual answer to the question. It was always that two-storied timber-built structure made home by my grandparents. I only wondered how I could throw the life my parents built for me away and call the one place I was a one-month vacation guest of ‘more fun’.
No achievements back home could surpass the fascination for the smallest things I saw there. The gentle aroma of different delicacies I struggled to even pronounce, the visits of people from all around the neighborhood with their little peak at me, the look of surprise in their faces upon my growing up with each passing year and the constant questioning made quite an exquisite place in my mind every single time. Even now, when I smell the distinct sweetness of Buniyas, Thekuas and Anarashas, I go back to that headspace when my only concern was how to answer the question diplomatically.
Perhaps it was the horizon that ran along the far extended farmlands that made the sunrises and sunsets over there more interesting than anything. Every morning, the sun rose right from where the house stood facing and set just some foot away. As the house filled with people by the days, bursts of laughter and narrations of stories never seemed to cease. Each person had their own stories to share, own narrative tales, and individual memories in the house to look back at. I suppose, it was exactly the people jogging back to their memories that made the place so fabulous. My Mamu and Mamas had their fair share of memories while my siblings and I were there making our own in those walls.
I could go into details of that house, with a betelnut orchard standing guard around it, the scattered sheds and farmlands, the ever-welcoming courtyard in the front, and the sugarcane field where I learned to expect sting even in sweetness (I once had a horrible experience while trying one of the chilies from the only chilly plant in the field). But what makes me nostalgic isn’t the house itself. It is the emotion it carries, the look of genuine love in my grandparents’ faces, their smiles upon me asking the simplest questions about their life, the chits and chatters, the secrets and the gossip, and the scoldings they gave my mom, in attempts to protect me.
Towards the end of the vacations, I always made feeble attempts to take all those moments with me and that is how I ended up with a collection of some peepal leaves, and countless dolls and playthings purchased there. Though I don’t go back scurrying through the collections now, these things were what made me feel like I was taking a part of the place with me just so I could have its essence. They aren’t just things, they are the carriers if all those moments and memories, the running and the shouting, and some nineteen or so journeys back home of which I remember only the bucket of tears I cried in my mom’s arms, her cuddles and the eight or nine hours of long sleep which worked like a kind of teleportation from that lovely village to my mundane life back home.