The Street We Walk

Padma Devkota

The Street We Walk

    The street is important to people who have a destination. Loiterers only obstruct somebody’s progress. Today, the streets of Kathmandu are filled with office hour traffic jams, political traffic jams, bottleneck traffic jams, wrong parking traffic jams, or narrow two-way traffic jams; with loiterers defying the vehicles with a see-if-you-can-hit-me attitude, with constant touch and go of vehicles that strike the pedestrian’s arm or elbow with a side mirror or a handle tip; with the undaunted young that shove or strike anyone with their shoulders and proceed without the slightest qualm; with bicycles that ply against the one-way traffic and knock one down from behind; with motorcycles that assume the right to rush along footpaths or to be parked in such a haphazard manner that pedestrians have to descend to the street below to continue their journey; with vendors who spread loads of vegetables or cheap quality items to sell on the footpath; with children trying their tiny bicycles in the public street; with dogs napping cozily in the sun or an occasional bovine seeking the greenery of its childhood amidst a stinking mound of local garbage against a wall or at the crossroad. Might is right in the streets. The traffic policeman looks on at the utter confusion and takes a break at the corner shop. He knows that should he try to move a wrongly parked cab or attempt to take action against a broken traffic rule, the taxi-driver who has the strength of a union behind him or the owner of the red plate who has special connections or a heavy wallet in his inner coat pocket will chide him instead, if not abuse him. Breaking all rules is the game of the day.
    And the streets are like broken rules: here patched with end of the fiscal year budget; there covered with a varnish-coat of tar and road-metal that will yield to a couple of passing trucks to expose their previous self even as they testify to the legally justified heavy national expenditure; pot-holed by nature that derides our national ability to maintain even the sewers and drainage now absent under dirt, stones, bricks, sticks, plastic, polythene, kitchen waste and other solids so that summer may swell the sea inside the ground floor of adjacent houses and winter may simulate the ragged bottom of a sea never tampered by ingenuous human hands; puddled up abundantly during the monsoon to soak and stain fresh-washed clothes of pedestrians with splashes that could have been easily avoided by any decent driver; and broken and jagged at the most unexpected places so that two-wheelers may anytime meet an accident or pedestrians may sprain their ankle or break their legs while walking. Uncovered manholes, or even covered ones that are raised above the normal street level to form humps, have invited many accidents. So have the large rocks and stones left unheeded in the middle of busy streets by trucks that drop them there. The nation does not feel itself responsible for accidents and ensuing physical or financial loss of its citizen (who should look where they are going).
    Neither the nation nor the footpath allows us to hold our heads high as we try to walk with confidence towards our destination. The very footpath images the country in terms of a topography of narrow and large contours, of mountains and hills and valleys and plains, so that the unwary pedestrian will stumble against a cement block that is supposed to cover a sewer but is lying elsewhere, or unexpectedly step into a yawning ditch. The missing diamond block of the sidewalk will never be replaced until it promises financial advantages to some people involved in the maintenance of the streets. All of a sudden there will be a one-foot high speed-breaker lying athwart the sidewalk just outside the huge gate of a dealer in iron rods or the individual whims of adjacent houses will have raised the footpath to two and a half feet above its normal level, which pedestrians then have to climb and descend like hillbillies. The once beautiful fin-patterned bricks of the sidewalks having given away to overuse, now broken and neglected, invite the foot to twist along a torturous angle so that the whole body wobbles with the intoxication of a pleasant evening walk if we are not careful enough to cast our humble eyes down on the ground before the power of the street.
    Yes, the street is very powerful! An emblem of the nation’s mind, it faithfully reflects its maker. After all, human physical environment is a product of the human mind. Therefore, the street is the expression of the nation’s mind. And there can be nothing more powerful than the nation’s mind when a sea of humanity surges in a political collectivity no educated responses can withstand. For collectivity is a power that can determine social evolutions into states other than the present one where the present controllers of the power of the street can remain where they are: right at the centre. For, they have nowhere else to go.
    It is only the people who have somewhere else to go because they are not at the power-centre of the nation. They need the street to walk; they need the footpath to avoid accidents. They have their individual goals and destinations. These people’s strength lies in their individuality, in their creative expressions, in their willful self-sacrifice for the betterment of other individuals who are willing to excel themselves. This is the embodiment of culture. And, human rights are powerful expressions of the significance of individuality without which democracy is impossible. Yet, the mighty street can also violate all civilized decency and tenets of human rights to merely encage democracy in the written constitution.
    That is stagnation. That is a defiance of the street itself as the people need it: to go somewhere. The people want to go away from the miserable wilderness of injustice and impositions to a land of opportunities to bloom into individual human flowers of excellence. The people want to discover the truth about themselves, to discover their potentials, for truth is power in a state of civilization. In a state of savagery this equation does not hold. There is neither civilization nor democracy in the absence of an educated consciousness that guides attitudes and behaviour. But truth becomes a value in the mighty street only when it does not contradict the desire of the controllers of power who pretend that the world can be saved by the light of their consciousness alone.
    The controllers of power would like this outgrowth of the collectivity to remain permanently under their own control. The individual wants to walk a street that is smooth, well-paved, maintained and safe. S/he has no choice but to twist and turn the ankles at every step. Throughout the history of Nepal, the power-wielders have preferred it the other way about: let the street educate the public to keep their eyes on the ground they walk. Let them not aspire to a heaven of their dreams lest another Indra feel a mortal speck of deep concern.
It is a clownish cock that wears its caruncle like a crown!