I remember when I was in about the fifth grade, and Kathmandu had become my new city of residence, we had been asked by our teacher to rote the first poem in our Nepali book. It was the epic “Ma Ko Hunn” by Kabi Siromani Lekhnath Poudel, whose sketch (with the long beard and angry, piercing eyes) covered one half of our first pages.

I remember this because, as my memory seems to put it, I was the only boy that day who recited it, head to tail, in a few swift breaths. It’s a moment I cherish a lot and come back to again and again. Not because I feel the pride in being the only guy in my class who had done the homework (although I do occasionally, even now, brag about it), but primarily because I am still amused by the gravity of that piece compared to the simple stroke of remembrance I had recited it with. I can reflect now that I had no idea whatsoever what that poem meant.

“Who am I?

I am where?

Where, what is my situation?” (amateur translation)

I had no idea of course, then, that these were to be some of the important existential questions that would come visit me many years after I had recited them line to line by heart. Without doubt childhood is the simplest of times. But even as children we had been surrounded by all the complexities of human life we were about to face, growing up.

Those poems whose elaborations we made on our answer papers every four months, with the half hearted praises we gave to the “great” poets (every of whom added a brick to the wall of our literature), I can only now fully comprehend where they were coming from. I only now know that these were produced by writers whose own lives were not perfect even in the normal human scale of things and what they had written down had so much of context, history and relevance to those times and the general human condition.

It makes me feel older now, to think like this. What had I actually thought of everything that went around me when I was little– did I perceive it the way I do now (given that memory has erased upon the everyday of being a kid) or did I not care at all? In some ways it is sad that we all grow up.

There is so much reality to everything as an adult, it can be exhausting. But in many other ways it’s a new opening, a new kind of chance entirely. There are so many lenses with which to see the everyday and it is exciting to be aware of that, to be able to choose and to understand more and more of what had come to us during childhood as fleeting glances.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.

www.parakhi.com/blogs