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Leaves christened with hues of gold reckon with fall knocking at our doors, but they to me signified something more awe inspiring, largely magnificent. Kites criss-crossed each other in midst of the vast blue sky, whose horizon was time and again breached by the back and forth swaying of bamboo swings.
Little girls with foreheads adorning red tikas, their giggles reverberating alongside bleats of slaughtered goats. Hymns of harmony alongside chaos of madness.
An aroma wafting out the little thatch house of my ‘mamaghar’, the aroma being of my grandpa’s rice flour sweets, which he amusingly called “my little bunes.”
Every single year I looked forward to those sights of bloodthirsty kites, of packets stuffed with cash, and of my grandpa’s signature dish: his bunes. Looking back, it was my very grandpa with complaints of his back “killing him” every time he had to enter the cowshed, who sat down for six hours amidst white fumes to stir the great blob of white inside the gigantic pot.
The blob was later molded into little, round balls of delight, which my old man carved with his cracked hands every single Dashain without fail, and which I devoured with great relish every time as well.
Having served in the military for a glorious amount of years, my grandpa was, and is, a man of strictly adhered discipline. Admired by many, and feared by twice as many, he was the sole male to have left the 8-year_old me in utter awe.
Such amazement was directed less at his laudable character, and more at the rate at which the old man could change his face. One second he was beside the bed with hands folded behind his back, his gaze piercing my male cousins for not leaving their beds even after sunrise.
The next second he would turn to us, his eyes turning into little crescents from smiling, and his tone gentle as he probed- And why have these little angels not rouse yet?
Such benignity of his was, perhaps, what permeated through my bones, and imprinted the aroma of his little rice sweets so firmly into my mind.
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