cement this

8.30.2012

The rain fell heavily through the night and into the morning, bright skies in the west while gray-blue darkness and fog hang over the Annapurnas, patches of blue sky above Pokhara on a cool Thursday. Walking up to the dining room, gasp!, the wall behind Ramus and his wife’s new house collapsed, right into the garden, again thankfully no one was hurt, but what a job to clean up. 

The coincidental woman walks down with her new sister-in-law and quickly glances to where I stand, half covered in mud from pulling stones off flower beds.  I don’t know why she bothers to look this way.  She knows, I  know, the community knows, I was wrong three years ago to have followed another’s well-intentioned but misleading leading.  I was so sure Grandma Ranagan’s spirit had brought me to her feet and nothing could have been more wildly insane than to have assumed one night she’d show up in Al-Ain with an entourage of blind assassins and we’d escape through Pakistan, up into Tibet and to Turpan, where the Caucasoid Shaman’s bones lay and then finally to New York, where the greatest story ever told would shock a world into prayer and fasting and we’d wait for the end together. 

I don’t hope nor expect any union between us.  I think the look she gives is one more of how long is he going to keep showing up.  Well, I’m not here for her and come 2013 she won’t have to worry no more, for I will be gone and will leave this misguided faith of mine to the jungles of Sarangkot. 

Didi is most likely the strongest woman I have ever known.  She shoveled cement onto a bag I held that weighed over a 100lbs, then she harnessed a rope around her forehead while I guided the bag onto her back as she slowly stood up, and then the woman in her early forties climbed a narrow spiral staircase that goes to the tower situated on the roof of the building that includes the kitchen.  I helped her do this three times, and I don’t know how many times she had carried such a weight before I came around. On the roof she mixed the cement with water for the fella who chiseled away to make room for rows of bricks that would give the roof its rail.  Yes, Didi carried up all the bricks too.  She definitely earned an imported cigarette for such unmanly efforts.  

Borough size black clouds drift by; before last night’s rain got intense, white lightening flashed in the dining room under construction like God’s paparazzi, followed by pop-corn crackles and booms.  The two towers have never been hit I am told.  In May of 2009 lightening came close enough you could hear zips and sizzles of electricity and I ran around giving everyone little Virgin Mary pendants expecting all of us would fry wherever we were on that mountain, the bolts would come right into the rooms and under the beds we because we were just too close, too close to God I once thought foolishly.

The rains came and then Suman came and then Baba came, and with the rest of the family and seven workers in the dining room, the children sought refuge in room six, mama follows with a plate garden grown cucumber slices and says everyone is sleeping in room five tonight.  Suman must return tomorrow for a math quiz and he’ll return again.  Baba came out of the fog, sat for a minute to eat a few rotis and some curried squash then went into the darkness of dusk, cut down corn stalks and then carried a huge stack of stalks on his back, back to the homestead where his pregnant buffalo doesn’t do much at all except shit and eat every day.