Spring in Pokhara is mostly just pre-monsoon. Gently throbbing sun makes for the perfect background lighting for the indecisive, unstable clouds ready to burst, instilling into your stagnant life, just the commotion you need to feel your breath again. You never forget your umbrella when you’re in Pokhara. Or so it goes.Unstable, indecisive and unpredictable clouds burst as they please. Silence often follows after a storm. Or so it goes. But things do not work that way in Pokhara. The clouds here are unforgiving. You see, the clouds looming above this city are apathetic.

There’s this place I’ve been frequenting a lot these days. A cliff. And for reasons I cannot find explanations to, it reminds me of you. Your apparition illuminates back to life beside the tree I sit under to look at the river below. So the river… I look at the river below, at the gigantic shadows of vultures circling around one particular rock in the bank and turn my head above to look at them tailing each other. If you look closely enough, you could almost see another vulture gliding way up above them, the one whose shadow seems to have lost its way to the ground. I look around to see if I can catch the sight of anything amiss but there’s nothing that seems particularly dead. Just the remnants of the pyre, way upstream in the ghaat; of a funeral I watched from the very spot the day before. And then there’s you on my right and calm patches of white clouds grinning at me from above.

Though only a feet away from where I sit, you seem to be in some far away place. Almost like there’s something calling you again and you cannot stay with me there any longer. The longer you would stay with me, angrier would the clouds become and turn purple and black and all sorts of violent and agitated.

And once again like the other day and the day before and the day before that, the cotton grasses begin to dance with the winds. A swarm of dragonflies arise from the precipice and disperse with the first gust of the evening wind. You stand up and start walking away. All the while I can only but look at you and at the charcoal bed of the pyre below the cliff behind you being washed away by the river.