Against the garbage, strewn all over the courtyard, Maan Kumari’s combat strategy comprised of a broom and a pair of buffalo ribs. Two large, arched pieces of bones plucked out of a dead buffalo’s rib cage, and dry branches bunched up into a broom, were her cleaning tools. She carried them in her khamu—two baskets, each hanging by ropes on two ends of a bamboo rod. The rod rested on her shoulder, one at a time. She would shift it from one shoulder to another when it got too heavy. 

Her khamu got heavy with the garbage she heaped on it after cleaning courtyards around the old town of Naradevi. Every morning she would arrive in our chowka, the brick-paved courtyard, with her cleaning apparatus. I remember waking up some mornings to the scraping sound of the buffalo ribs as Maan Kumari grated unyielding dirt from the floor. I’d go straight to the window and haul myself up on the sill, so I could sit there watching.

Scraps rustled under her broom as it made noises like the floor was being scratched. They were long-drawn, sometimes angry, sometimes frustrated scratching. Sometimes, hurried. There were paper bits, twigs, mud, shards of broken glasses at times, decaying sal leaves out of which feasts had been relished, bones, decaying food. 

When these objects were being discarded, they made different sounds. Some fell with a splatter, some a thud, others noiselessly.From the four houses surrounding the brick-paved courtyard, all kinds of items would fly out of the windows and balconies—orange peel, mango pits, useless bits from raw vegetables, medicine foil. They would land on the section of the courtyard the residents had designated for dumping. Maan Kumari would continue sweeping without flinching at the objects that sometimes landed at close proximity.

A paraphernalia of household items like shame, absence of pride, boredom, sleeplessness and bile— all kinds of things accumulated in the courtyard. Maan Kumari was a collector of these things. She would sweep everything together and then ladle them into the basket with the buffalo ribs. The buffalo ribs, the colour of ivory and the shape of a bow, appeared like a formidable weapon in her little hands. She would scrape the floor so hard, the tangerine of the bricks would start showing under the sea of garbage. 

Maan Kumari was like a saviour. When she left after her cleaning ritual, she would leave the residents an empty courtyard that only smelled of air. She was a conscientious cleaner and therefore, so much more dignified than the elders in the chowka, who were always squabbling over who threw in more garbage and therefore should pay more.

There was something deeply dignified about the way she held her head up even as her shoulders would stoop under the weight of the garbage in her khamu. Her limbs moved briskly. Her sturdy arms showed from below her blouse sleeves. Her breasts would lean against her blouse as she stooped to sweep.

In winter, she used to wear a brownish shawl that went over her left shoulder and ended in a loop after going under her right arm. She always wore weathered saris, hanging just under her knees and netted plastic slippers that exposed her cracked heels. Her nails were rimmed with dirt. Her large eyes were always watery, like they were permanently on the brink of tears. The sweeping was punctuated with the pauses during which she wiped her eyes with her forearm. She didn’t cry. But she never smiled, either. 

I used to wonder where she came from and where she went away with the smelly heap on her baskets. My mother used to say she lived by the Bishnumati and that she would collect the garbage and discard it by the river. In the 80s, Kathmandu was home to around a million people and the deserted river banks served as dumping sites.

“Ae, Bajaye!” she would call out. Even those younger than her and with a lack of responsibility for their own garbage, had to be addressed in reverence. Some mornings she would go into an angry monologue. “You want your garbage to be picked, but you won’t pay! Shameless people! Don’t I have to eat?” And they would offer her food. Leftovers. Sometimes from the feasts eaten on sal leaves. Sometimes bones from chicken curry, stale curry and beaten rice. Or just beaten rice. She would wrap the food in a little pouch and string it around her waist. 

The coins they finally relented, she would drop into a string-drawn purse and tuck it in her waist.They paid her a rupee and twenty five paisa a month, a pittance of the five-hundred rupee incomes of most of the families in the chowka. And every month, she made around twenty rupees, cleaning sub-sections of the city.

Then the yellow ‘containers’ were installed by the municipality at different junctions of the city. Garbage collectors were employed by the government to sweep the streets, but only so many. Some lost their income because people didn’t need the same services any longer.

Maan Kumari too stopped showing up as often. On days she did, I noticed her wrinkles had started to deepen like prominent scars. Her limbs had stopped moving with the same dexterity. Wisps of gray hair hung over her forehead, disheveled. Suddenly, she had started to wear muted colours, and would wipe her eyes and forehead more frequently during the cleaning. She would sit down in between the cleaning and stare at the stone slabs in the courtyard that had come to replace the old bricks.

While the images are still lucid, when I think of Maan Kumari, I remember the sounds of her boom and the buffalo ribs and her eyes— always large and liquid. The only time I saw her doing something other than cleaning was the day after an eclipse. She appeared with a couple of other women and shouted, “Ae, Bajaye, gaanki!” That which is polluted by the eclipse. And the residents threw out their old clothes. Some, removing them instantly and dropping them out of the window. They said if you gave away what the eclipse had ‘polluted’, the bad luck would pass. And like everything else that we needed to be rid of, Maan Kumari embraced our bad luck, too.