towards nightfall

in the old town the days work.

and how odd it seemed walking through the old wooden buildings, recognising and being recognised...it's been almost three weeks, through the cherry harvest into this period of threshing where the crop is spread across the streets, driven over by all traffic, stepped upon by all sorts of 2 and 4 legged beasties and then worked on into the night. this blip was just before nightfall, when i returned, three or so hours later it was still going on...the only difference being that the children had been changed into an electric light...

there's a definite chronological wobble here, a cultural thread both entwined and seperate; so many traditional aspects, from dress and housing to methodologies of harvest and seasonal work, i imagine that only the fan, and later the light, distances this photo from one taken fifty or a hundred years ago. techniques remain, technology as an aid...ages superimposed upon the moment, the echoes of generations...and three weeks later you feel, at points however peripheral and temporary, as if you are part of the mechanisms of the place, adrift upon that slight tangent of difference, less of a stranger, less of an intruder....

and then you realise how much you like it here, in this enclave of wooden houses upon the edge of town...an apparent archaism, a weave of tradition and modern but with an obvious social identity...a feeling of community, the constant gathering gossiping whilst others go about their tasks...there's a lot of laughter here, from the tones of voice i would guess much humour, good natured piss taking as we say....and it is lovely to be able just to sit on a wall and watch, or take an occasional photo, and be met with smiles or nods of the head, namaste...and i, mostly, watch now...just finding myself drifting with the flow of the place, adrift in the quiet chatter of the hour...wandering through the alleys, down the paths through the orchard underneath the cherry trees, now devoid of all but a few drying fruits...the molten jade of the river racing, white maned, beneath the deodars....and the day's gone...another..

and then leh...where i should be halfway to as i write this by the banks of the river in old manali...a last minute cancellation...result of a chance conversation...i can get to spiti...i just have to go the long way round, by local bus...and get an inner line permit...and, if i get lucky, the road to manali might be open and come back here the short way...

and for today's/tomorrow's blip, the possibility of the train of thought that the above paragraph set free upon me....