9.13.12
I wake up
congested, Suraksha and the family slept with Ama in room five, she comes in,
no time for Uris now, let’s play Uno and she wins three out of four, I don’t
understand the luck, we go up for tea and in a matter of minutes I am sneezing
and my nose is running and I best stay away from the last coat of paint and all
the dust stirred, in addition to the floating algae all the way from Dhaka, so
it’s wash the clothes in the loo and then wash the floor, shave, and then we
will say no more about it. I could
shower.
Henna in my
goatee lasted a few weeks, henna on the hand should be the same.
The room is
quiet. Outside my window bed the broken door buzzer bird I remember so well
last year buzzes away and it is a pretty yellow and white with a long two
pointed tail bird to make such a New York apartment kind of call. Standing at the front door fog flows by; at
night with the head lamp the I note the composition of the fog, every white
Bengali dot has something that makes me sniffle and itch. The sun tries to fight its way through, the
dog who was almost hanged last year for being accused of biting a neighbor
barks away, chained at the banyan tree rest stop below.
And the
sneezing and the blowing continue unabated so I go up and Laxman’s friend
Dig-ge arrives. He went to the Annapurna
Base Camp two years ago and lo and behold he has a bottle of rum which he
shares and we finished the darn thing and my nose stopped its nonsense but
there came a wicked headache and it was too ferocious to converse with two
engaging Tibetan travelers who said they were Sherpas, Laxman suggested they
had got their immigration papers illegally and the Sherpa caste was a
front. In any case I headed to bed and
that was it. The painters were doing
their last coating, the carpenters had left, and there was just a mess, in
every corner you see something that has to be cleaned or scrubbed, or rubbed,
or scraped. There’s a lot of work and
it’s just right for this white dude to do.
Once the dude’s nose clears up.
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