This morning I want my grandmother, who died two decades ago, to boil rice and cook eggplant curry for me. I have visited my parents’ home in the village many times since her passing, and she is missed every time. But this time, it feels different. The sun has risen as it always does, but it seems to have acted anachronistically. I haven’t had my meal prepared by my grandmother yet, and I’m about to leave for my high school. It does not matter that I’m not a fourteen-year-old schoolboy anymore, nor that I’m visiting my school as a guest, not as a student.   

“It’s easy to go to school these days,” my mother says, handing me a stainless steel tumbler, carefully, with both hands.  

“That’s good, Aama,” I say.  

In the last few years,  tracks have opened in the mountains. A new road is under construction along the Kali Gandaki River, and I’ve heard three-wheeler tuk-tuks are in operation from my village to the place where the old high school, the village administrative office, and a health center are. I can understand how easy the newly opened road must have made it, for those who need to travel to that area, though children from my village don’t attend that school anymore.

When I was an eighth-grader, it took me two hours to walk to my high school. The school started at 10:00, but those who wanted to occupy the front row seats scrambled to school much earlier. As a routine, I used to have my meal at 6:30 and leave before 7:00. My grandmother cooked my meal at dawn, while my mother ground corn, cleaned the buffalo shed, and prepared to feed the buffalo before milking it.  

My grandmother is not preparing the meal for me today, but the other images from my school days invade my mind as I sit on a bench drinking black tea: the giant mango and banyan trees along the village trail, guava and lychee trees, the rocks and cliffs, the streams, the storefronts, the houses and buffalo sheds, cattle in the grazing fields, stray dogs, the pictures we drew on slates with chalk stolen from teachers, tea sellers boiling tea, farmers plowing fields.  

“But I plan to walk, Aama,” I say to my mother, who has started sweeping the yard.  

She laughs briefly. “You can easily walk,” she says. Then she adds, “Why should you waste fifty rupees on the tempo?”

I am about to say it’s not the money. Fifty rupees is less than fifty cents, but then I tell myself she doesn’t really mean money. She is giving me an excuse to walk. She knows me. She knows well how nostalgic I can be sometimes.   

My distant cousin and a childhood playmate do not understand me as well. 

“Why shall walk on foot all the way, dai?” Ramu asks.  

Ramu was one of my close playmates until I went to high school. He was a shy boy, who didn’t show much interest in schoolwork and never finished high school. He spent many years in an Arab country before settling in the village a few years ago. I have asked him to join me today, the way we used to ask each other as children to come along when we wanted to go anywhere, decades ago, even when we went to urinate.

“Any problem walking?” I ask him casually. 

He has a motorbike, too, he lets me know. But I insist we walk.  

“This road has changed our lives, dai,” Ramu says as soon as we leave.  

It is not hard to understand. They have tempos to travel outside the village. They have motorbikes for the narrow trails where tempos cannot pass. They have tractors to cultivate, and the number of families with pairs of oxen has gone down dramatically. (“Why would anyone keep them now?” Ramu asks.) The plowmen are not needed, either. The brahmans who would be considered too dignified to plow the field using oxen have taken to plowing with tractors. Ramu himself has bought a hand-tractor, and he not only plows his own land but also helps neighbors. My mother says, “We don’t know what we’d do if Ramu wasn’t here to help with his tractor.” 

I am reluctant to use that road today. This, on one level, feels like my defiance to the development that is much needed for the progress of the village. I tell Ramu, sure, it is a much-needed development, and I’m glad to see how everything is changing in the village. “When we went to school,” I clarify, “you know, we walked for two hours.” 

About half a mile ahead, I halt. This junction has changed a lot. The old mango tree has become almost unrecognizable because of its proximity to the new road. Many of its branches have been chopped off, I believe to make way for the road.  

“The tree has changed, Ramu,” I mumble. “It looks different.”  

Scientists claim that a mere alteration in the size of landmarks is enough to disorient bees on their way to a food source. B.A. Cartwright and T.S. Collett found in their studies that to return to the source, bees “move to a position where their retinal image matches their remembered image of the landmark.” I wonder if the alternation in the shape of the tree has had the same effect on me. I think of the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa who, we were told as children, cried at seeing a smaller, thinner version of the letter “क.”  

Ramu is not interested. Many a tree in the village must have been chopped away or felled in the last few years. What is surprising in it?  

I start realigning my worldview in relation to the tree that looks dislocated, displaced from where it had to be as I walked to school. In my world, when I’m going to school, the tree must make a certain angle to me when I take a turn from this junction. The branches must sway in a certain way when I walk past the tree, waving goodbye.  

The newly opened road does not follow the old trail all along, which is understandable. There are streams and gorges and cliffs to be avoided; there are houses and villagers’ livelihoods to be protected.

I am still looking around for the trees I used to use as my signposts. As schoolchildren, we used to say, “I’m late today, they must have already reached Dhaleko Bar,” the fallen banyan tree; “I was already past Kamale Anp when it started raining.” Those trees have either been felled or the road has taken a different route. Even the ones that stand on the roadside look different. Their shapes have changed; parts of them have dried; branches have been chopped off.  

The old storefronts have disappeared, and the new ones with shiny, corrugated iron roofs do not interest me. I am missing certain stones that seemed intimate for no reason other than my seeing them every school day, twice. I am missing water springs where we sipped water every time we passed, even if we were not thirsty, more as a way to play than anything else.  

I tell Ramu I want to follow the old trail.  

“Why, dai?” he asks.  

Good question! I think like a dork. But I understand his concern. No sane person would choose an old, difficult trail while they have the luxury of using a motorable road. I feel a little foolish, justifying why I want to walk the old trail. I find myself a little too sentimental, which, I remind myself, does not suit me. I am an educated person. In the eyes of my cousin, I am supposed to be guided more by reason than by sentiment. But I’m pandering to the irrational demands of my heart.  

The road has gravel at places. At other places, it has freshly dumped, loose soil. When the monsoon begins, I briefly tell Ramu, the road will become muddy. The bare mountain slopes will be scarred with landslides.  

“The road is on the Red Book,” Ramu says, meaning that the road is part of the national infrastructure planning. “It will be blacktopped soon.” He says they may start direct bus services to Kathmandu from the village within two years.

I am not enjoying the talk. Everything looks different from what I am looking for. I feel increasingly distanced from Ramu, who keeps praising the road. Kevin Lynch, the famous American urban planner, writes, “Common memories of the ‘home town’ were often the first and easiest point of contact between lonely soldiers during the war.” I am looking for landmarks that Ramu would not care about, and it hinders our communication. We are speaking less and less. 

We have covered about one-third of our distance. There are two big ravines, next to each other, that we need to cross. When we walked to school, we would climb down the slippery steps that were often swept away during monsoon season. We would cross the first stream, pass a small hill, climb down to a second stream, and climb to a plateau-like paddy field. The new road follows the mountain base, understandably. When we reach the point where the road veers to the mountain, I ask Ramu, “Shall we go down the steps?” 

He looks at me in surprise. Why, dai? I see the question in his eyes. “Are you sure you want to go that way?”  

There is disbelief in his tone. I can only imagine that he must be wondering what kind of a man I have grown into.  

“You don’t like it?” I ask.  

I know he does not. There is no reason why he would.  

He smiles. I follow the queue and take the new road.  

“Nobody walks that way these days,” he says, relieved.  

Why would they? 

Further down the road, I miss the houses where we stopped to drink water. I miss the resting places where villagers gathered for the summer breeze. One widow used to sell us jaggery around here—where’s her house? One Maldai sold us Orange biscuits—where’s his store?  

Landmarks help us create our own space, a reference point for our existence, our identity. In his seminal book The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch explains the city as “a construction in space.” He writes, “At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.” Without landmarks, we cannot meaningfully interact with our surroundings. “A good environmental image,” continues Lynch, “gives its possessor an important sense of emotional scrutiny. He can establish a harmonious relationship between himself and the outside world.” Landmarks give us a “constant direction.” Unable to find the landmarks I expected, I feel lost. The place does not seem to be leading me to my school.  

Ramu is grinning, having nothing to tell me, or just surprised to see this new me. When we were children, we understood each other even without speaking.  

We walk quietly for some time, and he asks unexpectedly, “Dai lai daktar bhanna milne ho?” Can we address you as “doctor,” dai?  

 I’m looking for the guava trees that we climbed on our way back from school, tired and hungry. I am struggling to identify the stones over which we tripped if we were not careful. My cousin doesn’t allow me to be the fourteen-year-old schoolboy I am missing.  

Ramu must have heard that I can be called a doctor because I have a Ph.D. He would not understand how it all plays, but the idea that I can be called a doctor must have stood out to him, even though I am not the kind of doctor the villagers, including Ramu, would revere. He has not asked me about my education, my work, my life in America. This is all understandable. In our relationship, that is unnecessary.

We have met after many years, some two decades, even though we are next-door neighbors in the village. I left the village for college after high school, and he left for India and then for the heat of Arab around the same time. When we returned to the village, our visits never coincided.

Two decades have changed us into who we are today, but I am refusing to grow. His question challenges me to come to reality, to stand where he is.  

“Huh?” I hesitate. “That’s in America.” I laugh, unsure about my answer, and I feel a little preposterous. “Yes, actually,” I say. “That’s true.” I am lost between the two lives I am living.

I also become a little jealous of Ramu, secretly. He has no worries about what has happened to all the trees, the stones, the water springs, all that has passed. He is happy, instead, that things are changing. A lot of things in the village must change.  

The school is where it is supposed to be. I pause at the first sight of the buildings in the distance. “So,” I say, “we are finally here.”  

Ramu smiles. And this very moment I begin to configure new images on the canvas of my cortex. I realign my location in the play of old and new landmarks. I remind myself that time changes and so do we.   

“Are we walking back, dai?” Ramu asks after the event at school is over.  

“No,” I say. “Let’s get a tempo.”  

As we ride back, I prompt Ramu to speak: “Does the new resort get enough customers?” “When will they complete the construction of this bridge?” “Will these tempos run throughout the year?” “Can the villagers sell their produce easily?”  

Ramu has a lot of hope. After spending two decades as a migrant worker, because the village hardly provided him with the means of sustenance, he believes he can earn a decent living growing vegetables on his own land.

“This is a different village, dai,” he says.  

“It is and it must be,” I say.  

It has been years since I graduated from high school and moved away from the village. It is selfish of me to crave walking the same trail I walked as a schoolboy, climbing the same trees I climbed during halftime breaks at school.

We can do nothing but readjust ourselves to changes and accept new landmarks, notwithstanding their power to alienate us from what and who we once held dear to our hearts. My grandmother’s absence early this morning was a bigger reminder of it than anyone would ever need.

Landmarks are bound to change, and as they change we become strangers to the lands and people that we call our own.   

– Khem K. Aryal