“…Before this bridge eats you up and spits you out,” he thinks but does not say. With white gloved hand, he escorts us to freedom, Go, Go, Go! Chito, Chito! “Fast!” yells the policeman. The traffic cop is wearing a mask and whistles stop, stop, stop, go, go, although we cannot see him clearly until the bridge’s end. Of course, I could invite them into the pickup too if that were possible. I feel terrible that I would consider leaving them there breathing from the exhaust pipe of the bus ahead of us, for the chance to save my own tail. In a survival scenario, aren’t we supposed to help ourselves first before we can help others? And my family is eating salty snacks and staring out the window. If Rama had asked me what I was thinking, I don’t even know if I would have felt shame. What if I jump out of this car right now and hop into the back seat of the truck? Is the door unlocked? How could the driver say no to a middle-aged foreign woman whose cheeks are now the color of ripe strawberries. An air-conditioned pickup truck drives up tall next to us, I crane my neck and see that there are no passengers there. We sit for an hour (or is it ten minutes, I don’t know) jockeying forward and changing lanes, as if in slow motion. They do not show much discomfort, but my claustrophobia and fear of being hot has kicked into overdrive. I look around for signs of distress but I see few, except for drivers blinking their eyes and fanning their faces with their hands. It is a miracle that I have not offended them yet, at least not irreversibly, in our thirty year friendship. Of course they do, “What, do you think we are animals?” Rama laughs and translates into Nepali for his wife. I feel the grit in my teeth, and ask my family if they feel the same. But on the bridge twenty minutes later, the air is sepia, hanging with sand. The sky had been relatively clear when we left the house, a light grey.

Is it that they are used to this living hell? Or maybe I am low on oxygen and misinterpret the conversation completely. You would think we all would laugh awkwardly, but we don’t. I try to joke with them, “In the States, we would say, ‘It was nice knowing you!” The men up front argue about how to translate my joke.

My brother Rama is next to the driver, a family friend, who is distracting us with jokes and songs. I am lucky to have the window seat, even though the window crank pokes my left-side love handle, squashed as I am next to my plump sister Sabithri and her adult son Sushant. My homestay family and I are packed in a tiny taxi with no air-conditioning. Micro-vans are packed with uniformed school children who look at me expressionless. Old trucks with Che Guevara bumper stickers spew smoke into the faces of families on motorcycles. It is noon, in summer, 80 degrees and humid. But on this special day, a combination of rainy season mud and construction has brought traffic to a halt. That year, Nepal was number 100 on the list of most polluted cities. It is June 2018, on the day the air-pollution at that spot was measured to be the worst in the world. Today we will live in the moment unless it’s unpleasant, in which case me will eat a cookie.

Deer reflection lake