Good Fences
Must sleep.
Stories in this – second – series, Fog and Light, were written between November 2008 and October 2009, and originally published in The Kathmandu Post. They are works of non-fiction.
There is no struggle more lonely than the fight for respite, the battle against myriad forces for the opium of sleep, for a descent into quiet so smooth that nothing is remarkable the next morning, and for an awaking so complete and abrupt that an entire night passes in the blink of an eye. That is luxury, that is heaven. The body knows it in the reserves of energy bulging in the limbs and the acuity of mind. Daylight makes everything brighter and more saturated in color. There is no kink in the neck, no arm twisted into pinpricks, no sheet dislodged and wrung around the body’s twisted labor through a long night. A man in this manner renewed instinctively practices empathy, the golden rule, social graces: he smiles, he picks children to make them laugh, he feels noble and acts on that feeling.
Until reality knocks his teeth in, that is. Across the street, the neighbors are evicting their tenants, a bunch of boys who have every day of the past six months grumbled about the lack of water. It is past midnight, but they have managed to procure a small truck. An argument breaks out about what the last month’s rent ought to amount to: the boys say they need a thousand for the truck, and therefore five is all they have. But the rent is six, and there is no way in hell they can just pick up their beds and toss them into a truck, the neighbor shouts. The boys try to hoist a second bed over the corrugated-iron gate, kicking the gate open, kicking it shut, banging into it, banging out of its prison. Long after the argument about money has been forgotten, one of the boys starts about the water, the lack of it, the expenses that caused, how the new house has water three hours everyday instead of never. The neighbor needs to answer, but she has nothing to say, because this truth hurts her more than anything else the boys said all evening long, because there are three other families living in that house, surviving on no water whatsoever.
Barely a minute passes between the truck’s disappearance and the arrival of a rival nuisance: idiots in the neighborhood have taken a motorbike and modified its exhaust pipe. It screeches into the neighborhood, comes to a halt, revs its engine. There has never been a louder noise in the neighborhood, not even during a wedding around the corner, from where a brass band played terrible renditions of Bollywood songs all night long. The blacktop in the neighborhood is unspoiled, without surprises, and for most part, straight. It is an exciting course with gentle curves, wide, stable surface, well-lit enough that there is no danger of being surprised by a stray dog or a drunk on his way home on a motorbike. The idiots run their motorbike all night long, attracting unfortunate admirers, other young men, mindless idiots who are satisfied even just to twist the accelerator while the bike stands stationary.
It is impossible to sleep. Fantasies begin to rise: what if a bottle of flaming kerosene Molotoved their shining youth as they raced past the window? What about a line, tied to gates, blackened with grease, set at the level of their necks? Let them roar then, let them yell with excitement. What about a long pole that suddenly shoots through the dark to lance through the spokes of the motorbike and sends the delinquents in flight, brief, coarse, not quite murderous, so that the job can be finished with bricks and bloody sacks of gravel? A noose that catches the one in the back, the one with the loud mouth, yanks him right out, and by the time his friend turns around, dangles him from a pole?
Sleep, with its dark trickle of villains, spills from hair-roots and the involuntary shuddering of the eyelids and sits on the chest like in Goya’s frightening painting. There is light outside, the darkness becomes an unsightly gray before turning a luminous, crisp blue. But bad sleep sits on the chest, reaching into the brain, clawing through the mind for the small and beautiful moments of rest and illumination, and slobbers as it feasts, shifting on its heels occasionally to remind that this is no nightmare, neither a reverie, nor a wisp, not abstract, not ether. This is real, this beast of discomfort, slowly eating all goodness away, pushing its own kernels of the abominable and vile into the roughed-up bed of the conscious.
Morning means more neighbors awoken into a new day with the imprint of thousands of older days: the rattle of a bicycle returning from Ranibari with drinking water; middle-aged men grunting after the shuttle-cock at the community badminton net; Amala didi on her roof, complaining about water, a hand pump getting scratchier and angrier as nothing arrives, nothing but stale air poisoned with the stench of watery rust. Suddenly, the hated motorbike starts again. A boy with a broken arm is revving the engine while his friend holds the bike. I scream from the roof, but they don’t hear me. Another neighbor marches down the street swinging a large iron rod. “All night long,” he says, and twenty heads come out of their windows: “All night long! Not a minute of sleep!” The boys who thought the loudness of their motorbike gave them immunity from community policing, seem taken aback. The big iron rod rests lightly atop the motorbike headlight as the boys are advised against repeating last night’s racket.
Twenty windows close. So it is morning. So what? Must sleep. Now. Now. Now.
—
Prawin Adhikari is a writer, translator and editor. He is the author of Budhani (2025), Folk Gods (2019) and The Vanishing Act (2014). He has also translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian into Nepali. He recently translated Narayan Wagle’s Koreana - Coffee Guff into English.
 | A guest post by
|