ELECTION DAY: KATHMANDU

Traffic-free election day, Kathmandu.

At first there was only silence. Not the familiar quiet that comes before a village stirs, but something altogether different.  This was a city-silence that seemed to have settled over the morning long before I opened my eyes. Only then did I realise how unlike it was to the mornings of the previous week, when voices drifted across the road, motorbikes spluttered into life, dogs barked at passers-by or other dogs or at nothing I could ever see. Now there was silence. It was as though the sun had risen but forgotten to bring the world with it.

A curious thought came to me—not as a surprise, but with the calm assurance of remembering something I had always known. I've been here. Not here exactly, but in a dream. It had manifested before, this peculiar stillness, carrying with it the faint conviction that what was unfolding had already happened somewhere beyond memory. I found myself waiting, not for anything in particular, but for whatever it was the dream had predicted what would come next.

The absence of sound became strangely persuasive. Without the usual chorus of engines, voices and barking dogs, even the smallest details acquired an unusual clarity: the pale light resting on the roadside; the leaves suspended as though the breeze itself had been interrupted; the empty stretch of road receding into a distance that seemed somehow greater than it ought to have been. For a moment I wondered whether I was recalling the dream, or whether the dream itself was quietly arranging the morning around me.

Eventually, almost too faintly to notice, a car announced itself from somewhere far off. The sound travelled slowly, detached from its source, as though it had wandered in from another landscape altogether. A little later came the soft scuffling of bicycle tyres on the roadside. Neither sound disturbed the silence. They seemed only to confirm the existing world, details returning one by one to a canvas that had been left untouched for years.  And the soft footsteps and murmurs from two passing monks on the road below brought me back to an  ever-existing present.