Pleasant Valley Sunday
Dave says:
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Clint Eastwood rode into Parbatipur on his way to chasing down some guy wearing a black stetson. I could imagine him squinting through his cigar smoke and tipping back his hat as he approached the edge of town. Parbatipur is where we’ll be volunteering and it looks as if it were lifted from a Hollywood western movie set and transplanted a few miles from Chitwan National Park. That’s not to say this is a theme town, on the contrary, it is a hardworking rural community whose principle source of income appears to be maize and, oddly enough, school exercise books.
Parpatibur is a one horse, one road settlement. The road is dust and gravel and the horse comes in the shape of an over-crowded and noisy bus – strangely, a welcome relief because Parbatipur is wonderfully devoid of cars and their associated unnecessary horn honking. Transportation in descending order of size is as follows: public bus, tractor, motorcycle, bicycle and goat. To be accurate we have yet to see anyone ride a goat however plenty of people seem to leash their goat and take it for walk. Ironically, this town has, as usual, a large number of stray dogs who would gladly succumb to the leash, walk for hours and, unlike their horned counterparts, wouldn’t stop every 10 meters to consume a piece of garbage. If however, this reversal of quadrupedal walking companions was to occur, the town would loose it’s greatest asset: it is, by far and away, the cleanest town we have seen since leaving home – a fact the goats play no small part in, I’m sure.
Commerce here is situated along “main street” and is performed from the ground floor of the two story, Clint Eastwood inspired buildings feebly alluded to in the first paragraph. The upper floors have wonderful balconies and patio space which provides yet another contradiction in this Twilight Zoned town. Nobody makes use of this balcony space, even to escape the heat (and it’s really really hot here). Between the hours of 11am and 3pm the whole town is deserted – you can almost hear the tumbleweeds roll down the middle of street. But I digress: commerce is as follows: 2 tailors. 2 pharmacies, 2 CD/music merchants, 1 general hardware store and a store that appears to sell nothing but a solitary strand of bananas which hang from it’s doorway. We have aptly named it “The Banana Store”. For as diverse as shopping here appears to be, every store sells one thing in common: school exercise books. They are stocked up in every store front as if the Parbatipur Chamber of Commerce secured the entire town a great deal on a bulk buy of 3 million 30 page, blue lined, red margined school books. If this had happened it would have been a well intended but unresearched gaff for, at 3pm when hundreds of uniformed school children spill from buses and alleyways and rush to the shops, it is not books they want but WWF trading cards. The 3 million books remain wrapped in dust protective plastic save for one stack which was ripped open with great aplomb when Sarah purchased the very book into which she is now taking dictation whilst I pace back and forth, metaphorical pipe in hand, like the Ernest Hemingway I so clearly am not.
Just one hundred meters from the center of town lie it’s outskirts and beyond those are miles and miles of corn rows interrupted by mud houses similar to the ones described in previous posts. In a surprising twist, everyone of these huts has the most immaculately kept front yard. I doubt Parbatipur has an Housing Association but then it apparently doesn’t need one. Neatly swept dirt lawns and rows of beautiful flowers adorn every house. Perhaps they have landscape gardeners here!
Another wonderful little quirk of Parbatipur is it’s very own radio station. Well, it’s not really a radio station, it’s one the CD vendors who, probably through implicit agreement with the rest of the town, starts playing music to attract customers at 5.30am as long as what he plays doesn’t offend anyone. Volume is of no consideration here; there are only two volumes of music in Nepal: on and off. If you have ever watched TV’s Northern Exposure (or have visited Roslyn, WA) then think of the Chris In The Morning Show. It sounds quite dreadful but actually provides the town with it’s own soundtrack, it’s own theme tune, a lite-motif by which the Parbatipurians can live their lives. Here’s the program breakdown:
5.30am to 7am: Wake up to the world with Nepali NPR
7am to 10am: Uplifting Nepali pop to start your day.
11am to 3pm: Sophisticated Indian tunes to cool you off in the heat of the afternoon.
3pm – 6pm: Arise from your nap with a selection of vigorous bicycling music (at this point the whole town appears from side alleys in riding bicycles in a bizarre and not terribly synchronized Busby Berkly style Hollywood/Bollywood musical number – I am not exaggerating)
6pm to 10pm: Indian spirituals by which to eat and rest well.
And so, another night draws in on this, the most bizarre little place on earth. I hope this provided you with an illuminating picture of the place we were to call home for three weeks. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Read Sarah’s upcoming post of trouble in the paradise they call Parbatipur.