The Bread Box, along with other cafes with pretensions to modernity, has a large flat screen on the wall. On one or two occasions, it has varied from its regular offering – pictures of Kathmandu’s floods, three minutes of Barcelona being beaten in a Champions’ League game – but for the most part the offering is unremitting Nepali pop, illustrated by lavishly shot videos.
These vary a fair bit: some are modern, some in traditional cultural dress of one kind or another (one of them features guys in skirts, like kilts – who knew?). Some are shot in some sort of fantasy village setting, some are in what appear to be modern night clubs; some are decidedly weird – one was just on which featured some sort of musical cross between The Sound of Music and ET, with weird aliens dancing around with a large family of young guy, younger woman, and a small posse of gurning, smiling, dancing kids (with one of their routines a straight lift from Madness, circa 1980.)
But, of course, in other respects they are all the same. All feature elaborate dance routines in unlikely locations: hillsides, cornfields, lakesides. (I think we would call them all Bollywood, but that’s just our ignorance of such matters.) Nearly all have pouting, preening women and their most unsuitable love interests, heavily dominated by older, overweight men with moustaches. None of which appears attractive, and true, for the most part I seat myself so that I cannot see the screen and allow myself to be distracted.
But every so often, one of them catches my attention, usually because it is a little different from the run of the mill. There was one, heavily influenced by Rebecca, with a new wife in a mansion, with hugely disapproving mother-in-law, and a painting which kept coming to life.
And there are some which are on some sort of loop, so that they come around on a regular basis, and this includes my favourite, which I have caught bits of on a regular basis. Somewhat unusually, it tells a complete story, which even I have been able to fathom, despite never seeing the whole thing through from start to finish. There is a teacher – you can tell she is clever, because she wears glasses – who is being wooed by a slightly tubby guy with his creepy friend. There is quite a of of what can only be described as stalking to start off, the two of them hiding behind bushes and spying upon her at work. Though work seems to consist of her on a hillside pointing prettily at a blackboard, apparently with a class of half a dozen village women (while also coyly glancing at her stalker/would-be lover.)
We see his courtship in stages. He gives some money (or something) to an old woman she knows, maybe to prepare special food for her (that bit escaped me a little); she gets a thorn in her foot when walking to work down a hill, and he pays for the path to be improved (not exactly tarmacked, but definitely de-thorned); and he keeps pressing some sort of shawl on her, which she demurely refuses. And all of this is interrupted at regular intervals by dance routines, each one of them leading a chorus of villagers in a series of bizarre routines, very energetic, faintly ridiculous. And in the end, consummation! Well, she accepts the shawl, and matey seems to think his job is done, high-fiving his creepy friend.
All astonishingly silly, I know, but it makes me laugh, so job done for me too.
You will have gathered I am rather scraping the barrel when it comes to blog topics, and it is true, in terms of its diary function, today was pretty much a washout. I had intended to visit the Hare Krushna temple, but discovered at the dairy that it was kids afternoon, and that more suitable activities would begin at 7.30. I had intended to go, until I realised that this might put me in danger of being locked out of my room. So I abandoned that and stayed in, keeping an eye on the football scores. Just like old times, really. Except I those days, forty years ago, I was actually able to listen to the commentary, before the introduction of “rights”.
