Truth be told, the title says it all. I almost don’t even know where to start on this post, if only because I still don’t quite understand how I did something so foolish. So bear with me…
The days have been hot. Stultifyingly hot. An entire campus of nappers sleeping through the afternoon, shirts and clothes drenched in sweat as their bodies give up the ghost and sleep it off, hot. And I have been wearing jeans. Everyday. And they make me (more) hot.
So in a moment of not-so-quiet desperation, I decided that I would go to Lakeside, aka Tourist-ville, and see if I couldn’t find, in this country of modestly dressed women, a pair of shorts. As I have mentioned before, one of my greatest oversights in packing was putting aside a small black pair of mesh shorts, which have made every trip before and will now make every trip in the future, because I decided at the time that they were potentially indecent and too…well, short.
What I forgot in that moment at 4am, when I put them aside, was the value of black soccer shorts for two things. The first, for calling them bathing suit bottoms and wearing them swimming with my sportsbra (and now my secret’s out! The shame, the shame!), and the second, for sleeping in. Especially in countries where the weather can get hot. Cue the memory of me looking up the mean monthly temperatures for Pokhara, Nepal, and apparently not understanding a thing I read. Because lordy, it is HOT. And I could have used those shorts.
So I decided that in Lakeside they would perhaps sell pairs of shorts, if only for swimming, on the relatively cheap. Lakeside’s prices are outlandish in Nepali terms, but I find that sometimes in the middle of negotiating a final price for this or that piece of clothing, I realize that the question is of whether it will be $2.50 or $3.00, and am surprised enough to pay the higher price. Lakeside seemed like a safe (and my only) bet for shorts, and so off I went, to track some down, on a day when I had more legitimate errands to run there as well.
But as it turns out, Lakeside is still chaste enough to only sell skirts, and not to sell any that run shorter than just above the knee (which is still pretty inappropriately short here). After a good deal of sifting through faux North Face jackets and strangely humorous Nepali takes on western-style clothing (which I totally plan on going back to buy later for the FES Box ‘O’ Fun), I eventually came upon a very basic blue wrap skirt, which the Dai (older brother) told me was rupees 300, or $4 US. I bought it right then and there, thinking that at least I could wear something shorter and thinner than my cumbersome, stupidly warm jeans, and that at worst I could use it as a kind of easy to grab wrap, in case someone knocks at my door when I was sleeping, and under-dressed.
Pleased with my purchase, and my Nepali, I made my way home to Ban Campus and, I’m embarrassed to admit, put the skirt right on, wearing it for the rest of the day, despite the fact that I knew deep down that the thing was just a tad too short. I was too hot for perfect propriety, I decided, and resigned myself to bending one rule of cultural adherence only on the days which exceeded 100 degrees – which has been most of them, as of late.
Back on Ban Campus I wore my little skirt that first day, and then wore it again the next, although both times with a proper top – never with a tank top alone, for example. Always with a shirt with sleeves, and never one that alludes to the presence of breasts. I wondered as I dressed on several of these days if when I returned to the US I would dress in that much more chaste of a manner, and if I’d ever be able to wear a tank top as a regular shirt without feeling self-conscious, again.
At this point the heat was so horrendous that I and many others had taken to wearing a soaking wet piece of cloth around our necks during the day, to cool the body and also use to wipe off the face every few minutes, lest it start to drip. And so as I sat and typed on my computer in my little skirt, water droplets began to fall into my lap, and onto my skirt. I noticed after a little while that the colors of the skirt where the water droplets hit had run a little bit, but paid it no mind. I was cool, and that was what mattered.
And so later that night, as I prepared to head towards bed from my shower, I wrapped the little skirt around me and tied the knot, donning the now-customary soaking wet tshirt I’d just taken from under the showerhead, and making my way into my room. I sat on the end of my bed for a moment, and then in turning to grab my laptop from the other side noticed that there was now a large, fluorescent blue wet mark under where I had been sitting – like I had peed the color of a highlighter. And I realized in that moment that if there was that much dye on my bedsheet, where I’d been sitting for a millisecond, it was pretty likely that there’d be some long-lasting bright blue dye somewhere else. And oh.my.goodness(!) is there.
I went straight into the bathroom and took the skirt off, looked at my hips and behind in the mirror, put the skirt back on, went right back into my room to get a camera, and returned to the bathroom. There is simply no other way to say it – the skin of my ass, and a thick ribbon of flesh around my waist where the strings “wrapped” most tightly, were a fluorescent, glowing, aquamarine blue.
About twenty-minutes of scrubbing and a lot of muffled laughter and washed out digital photos later, the skin of my lower half is now closer in hue to my well-worn and washed-out blue jeans than to the fluorescent sign over a Miami nightclub, the skirt is taking a long soak in a large bucket of water, and I…am sleeping once again in my cutoff sweatpants, under which if you checked, you’d see a peculiarly colored bit of blue bideshi butt.
Oh Nepal. You do keep me on my toes, don’t you?
-M-
[Editor’s Note: Five rinses in an entire bucket of water later, the skirt finally stopped leaching fluorescent blue the color of food dye. Good thing I didn’t sleep in that sucker, eh?]
