The Line in the Sky

Came up here for the view you know.

Everybody does. This view of Kathmandu is crazy, I have to tell you it seems to stretch out forever.

The roofs.

Blue ones, red brick ones, white ones, all crammed up against each other, I don't know where one neighborhood stops and the next one starts.

It's really pretty in a messy kind of way, though.

All of Kathmandu, the city I grew up in, laid out like a picture. But look at that sky. There's a line.

You can see it, can't you? Where the blue ends and that sort of brown haze begins, sitting on top of the city like a lid.

That's not a cloud.

Clouds don't sit so flat, so even.

And that's what it looked like sitting on the roofs. That's just us.

Down there.

All of that traffic, that construction dust, that burning, those brick kilns that are out there beyond where we can see - that's all just rising up to form that line. Up here on the hill it almost looks serene.

Like it’s quiet, peaceful.

But you know what that is like standing down inside it.

That brown haze is just the air that everyone in there is breathing right now, and I'm standing up here on the hill, like that brown haze is just scenery. That brown haze isn't scenery, really.

That's just all of our heads.