Incomplete

A danky, poorly-lit room. Rays of light peep in from gaps between the sheets of tin that make the roof. There's no floor to speak of -- it's the dry and dusty ground, with small holes poked into it by little kids playing digging games. A lightbulb hangs precariously from naked wires at the center of the room, the wires snaking out of the cutout in the mud-walls that acts as a door. The walls are the color of Sayapatri when looked at early in the morning during the Summers. Looked from the inside, they are always the color of ripe shit.

The air smells vaguely of shit that has been rotting for years. On some evenings, it actually smells of well-cooked vegetable curry with an excess of turmeric and vegetable oil, and that's when you know a good day was had by the people living in those houses. The wind will often blow in dust in the evenings, and the holes that are windows will be hurriedly covered by newspaper and sheets of plastic. A mess of wood and tin will cover the door, with enough space left to observe the happenings outside.

The baby begins wailing. He wails as if he were on a marathon of hiccup-crying. The cries will stop for the baby to take a rest, and then they will hiccup back into existence. Somewhere far off a pressure cooker whistle goes off. The baby is still sobbing, while the mother is vigorously rocking him on her lap as she puts a kettle of cold water on the stove. She is trying to get the radio set perched on the window sill to work, but all she gets out of it are angry hisses of white noise, the Radio Nepal transmission that she wants garbled into nonsense. She can hear the neighborhood kids on their bicycles, tringing their fat horns at each other and giggling as they try to figure out whose horn is the loudest.

It is hot inside the room. The dust makes it prickly too. You can feel particles of sand and mud settling on your head. During Summer evenings, walking in the room feels like wading underneath a vat of thick soup of the most unappetizing beans. The sunlit patterns from the roof catch eye at unexpected times. Those gleams of outside light and irritatingly painful in a dull way.