Light Bulbs

Periodically, after dinner, the young Sherpa’s mother announces that it is time to do the household accounts. Each month the ritual repeats: going over the amounts that have come in and the inevitable expenditures. In even-numbered months, it’s his sister’s turn to help. But March is the domain of the young Sherpa. It is now, and it was back when he was nine years old and talented at algebra.

So their mum would put on her glasses, and he would hold on to the calculator. Their mother would hand him the notebook, the spiralled spine of a Precambrian animal, and he would sharpen the pencil with a razor blade that had been kept in the medicine cabinet since the incident with the Caterpillar. Then he would listen, record and add and subtract, trusting in the graphite that ran over the page like a herd of bison.

‘We need to consume less electricity,’ their mother would admonish. ‘I don’t understand how it can cost so much if our bulbs are always burning out.’

Nobody answered her; they took it for granted that she was right; who could understand, after all, the breakdown of the utility bills printed in Kathmandu that the mail would leave sporadically, unpredictably outside their door.

The rite of accounting completed, the young Sherpa would place all the bills in a moss-green folder, and he’d place the folder next to the notebook in the dresser drawer. He’d ask if he could take to school that same pencil he still had in his hand because the one in his pencil case was already very short, having been so used up that now his fingers all came together around the point, to the detriment of his handwriting. His mother would nod, already half asleep, so the young Sherpa would rummage around in his backpack until he hit upon the pencil case and put the new pencil next to the consumed one. Just in case, he would not discard the older pencil: who knew, academic life worked through the accumulation of imponderables.

‘Isn’t your backpack too heavy, son?’ his mother would say, rising from her chair: she was always worrying about a cervical deformity befalling the young Sherpa.

‘But I have to carry it; I’ve got everything in there.’

‘You’re going to end up a hunchback,’ she’d say, but the admonition was already losing steam, more formal than programmatic.

‘No, mum. That’s because my mat is too soft,’ the young Sherpa would repeat something his older sister had told him.

‘Fine, take a bath,’ his mother would say, and go into her room to put on her light blue nightgown.

‘Yes,’ the young Sherpa would answer and go into the bathroom, turn on the shower, a vague and lukewarm stream, with no digressions or conical expansions, thudding onto the ceramic floor tiles. Something to do with the pressure, or lack of pressure, or the malfunctioning of the shower. A hypotensive bath. First he’d wash his hair, not too efficiently. He would lather up his body and try not to make noise. In spite of everything, the water was warmish, and he had no desire to leave it.

That was why the young Sherpa dallied in the bathroom by the light of the filament of a small bulb that would be the next one to burn out. One of the household chores he’d been assigned since earliest childhood was changing the light bulbs. And putting away the dishes his mother would wash after dinner. His homework always came last. He’d do it already on his mat, with the light that came in the window from the street as sole illumination. But he hadn’t got to that part of the day yet. For now, he was taking a shower. The scenery in the bathroom matched his mood: lunar tundra amidst flashes of quasars.