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So, then, things are changing all around, and fast. Of course the more things change the more they, like, have to change again ... and here is the news now, just as I’m halfway through this sentence. It’s surprisingly difficult to stay up on things in general when you barely even get to see the sun for three days, as happened to me during the course of this past weekend of production on the new issue of the magazine. In the end, the issue came out – at 140 pages. When I finally left the office, around midnight on Sunday, I hopped on my bike, turned out onto the street, and in the pitch blackness of the road began riding over still ember-ing torches, just like the villagers had when they were pursuing Frankenstein, around 20 or 25 of them lying in a pile spread out over the road, the results of a torch rally that had taken place a few hours earlier by students and others protesting (still) the recent hike in diesel prices. ‘I gotta get out more,’ I told myself as I navigated through and over the glowing torches, feeling, as I do often on late-night streets, that the revolution had come and gone while I was sitting in an office chair.

Actually, during the last few days of production I don’t do hardly any sitting – more like levitating a few inches off the ground here and there and back again. But when you’re talking about the revolution, what’s the difference? ‘I was levitating here and there when the revolution came – and went’? Well, anyway there were results, huge, grotesque results: 140 pages by the end of it, almost twice as long as a normal issue, and at a time when our editorial staff (three people) was down by two, albeit with one new hire, and me off trying to do two jobs. 140 pages! And now, the day after we finally went to press, we just received an interview – one that was a year in coming – from the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, just out of the blue. This happens, you have to remember, at a time when his governing coalition is facing a trust vote, on Tuesday, that will either end or dramatically change his government – all due to disagreements over this semi-continuing deal with the US over sharing of nuclear technologies outside of the auspices of international convention. An odd thing to stake your job on, admittedly, but an even odder time to answer questions from Kathmandu about India’s role in the region. Anyway, this interview has just come in a half-hour ago, and now we have to figure out how to slip it in. But larger decisions have been made.

Indeed, just ten minutes ago, as I was typing this first sentence, the final results of larger decisions were made semi-public, or at least public here at the UNMIN office. After three months of political stalemate, voting for the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal’s first-ever president took place on Saturday. Even out of the massively outsized (like our new issue) 601-member Constituent Assembly, the two leading candidates – one Maoist-backed, one backed by the mainstream Nepali Congress – came within just four or five votes of one another, and thus voting had to be redone today. That took place at eight this morning, and now, an hour ahead of schedule, the results are just about out. Let me back up for a moment and point out that on Saturday the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal’s first-ever vice-president DID win a majority of votes, and he turned out to be a Maoist-backed corrupt judge who failed to win more than a few percent during the elections in early May. His new boss, however, has turned out to be a stand-up fellow, and, most importantly, or most worryingly, not the Maoist candidate. This sets up the following governing structure: prime minister, Maoist; president, Congress; vice-president, Maoist; speaker of the Assembly, undecided. For various parliamentary-rules-based reasons that I won’t bore you with, this set-up will now most likely lead the Maoists – recently voted in by a relatively overwhelming margin, remember – to sit in the opposition in the new government. This is not for sure, of course – and, indeed, things here change by the hour – but would be a totally unforeseen conclusion (if that’s the correct word, which it isn’t) to what has been a completely insane political situation. It would also be incredibly unstable. Most importantly, these sorts of power plays continue to overshadow the fact that all of these 601 members were elected not only to legislate (if they ever get around to that), but, more importantly, to write the country’s new constitution. Technically, even the declaration of the country as a republic – almost the only thing to have taken place thus far, albeit a significant one – shouldn’t be legal until the new constitution is actually ratified. When that could possibly be is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, my office at the UN right now is filled with the pedantic noises of an UNMIN-funded documentary on UNMIN’s two years in Nepal. It’s called ‘Backslapping’. Tomorrow is the 23rd, and is technically when everything needs to be wrapped up by, although I and a handful of folks will be lingering indefinitely (to the horror of the General Assembly in New York). Today everyone is stealing the staplers and, evidently, patting themselves on the back. I won’t pat anyone on the back, myself included, but will self-consciously continue to use my UN desk, chair, computer, internet connection and whatnot else to note down veiled barbs and unrequited follies. Meanwhile, the walls resound with folks melodies and village scenes of happy, brown-skinned folks discussing upliftment, human rights and maternal mortality – all in the English, as there are no Nepali words for these terms.

The Nepali for a torch rally is ‘masal julus’, and is going directly on my business card, next time I need some printed. Once I got through the strewn torches last night, my bike ride didn’t get significantly easier. For the same reason that the protesters had been protesting (though otherwise with very different motivations), the streets, even at midnight, were jam-packed simply because the petrol queues all throughout the city had, evidently, while I was working and levitating around, lengthened to miles upon miles. People are, again, sleeping in the queues, spending upwards of 12, 14 hours in order to fill up their car, cab, truck, bus. There is no other form of transport through the midhills, you have to remember, and so this is a significant thing – a situation that, again, reminds everyone of the foolishness, romanticism notwithstanding, of locating a national capital in a valley in the middle of the high mountains. The Kathmandu streets are already not built to deal with the current volume of traffic, and when every main thoroughfare has to deal with a whole line of cars and trucks and busses, there’s really hardly any room left for one-way traffic, much less two-way traffic, even at midnight. These are times when I’m very happy to be on a bicycle, of course, though others seem to be frustrated by my ease and righteousness. Biking late at night is always relaxing, however, and someone else’s gas-based frustrations can do little to change that. Home again finally, and home itself always looks different after such a long stint away: plants larger, food stores evolved, trash in the garbage that you don’t recognise. And, lo: hundreds of new snail eggs in the water garden, clinging to quivering iris stems, just waiting for the monsoon waters to rise.