There are peculiarities to every journey. In most cases, travel is defined by its purpose. Few have the luxury or peace of mind to travel aimlessly. Even as a tourist, such abandonment is a rare experience. When one travels in a big red bus filled with books, the books form the pixellated vision of the places you travel through. The pleasure in such a mode of travel is the immediacy of curiosity and the conversations it results in. Mind you, not all experiences are pleasant, but each conversation unpacks a layer of the foreign and intimates a sense of similitude.

It took the BookBus three days to reach Dhankuta, in the eastern hills of Nepal, a heavy load and road conditions limiting our pace. It also gave me the opportunity to stop over to visit relatives as I made my way east. It is only after you travel around Nepal that you begin to appreciate an extended family spread out across the country. There is really no substitute for food cooked at home and the comfort of a bed reserved for guests. Hotels (within a certain price bracket) in Nepal are mostly satisfactory along the non-touristy routes but the food is highly unpredictable.

The first night we ate and slept in Narayanghat, on the second day we made it up to Dharan, and finally, on the morning of the third, we made our way up the winding roads to Dhankuta. People usually do the journey in one overnight haul. It had been a long a time since I had traveled east. I had not passed my SLC when I last visited this hill station. Back then, it was a town of around 15,000, but the recent 2011 census suggests it has grown to somewhere around 26,000.

I remember a small town and a grand silence during the nights. Things have not changed all that much, but the bus park area, where the bustle of the town is centered, looks busier. The presence of people – and movement – has a feeling of semi-urbanity, a sense of going places. The bus park is made for wayfarers. But Dhankuta retains the peculiarities of Nepali hill towns. My relatives still wake up well before dawn. Morning rituals are intact. The shops open by seven and you find women hunting for high heels at seven-thirty. Lunches are incredibly hard to come by unless your schedule matches that of the cooks. Nights come early and hoteliers are grumpy when you keep them past their bed-time. Meaty dinners need to be planned during the day. The drinks flow in some bars but come to abrupt ends. Arguments are not a feature of the drinking culture.

Dhankuta rests on a ridge. Its old bazaar is one long street that gradually moves up from the bus park. It takes a good 15 minutes to walk up from the bus park to the other end of town. My father’s sister and her husband live at the upper end of this street. From the top of their house, one can see how far the town has spread; habitation is scattered throughout the slopes around the ridge. The going rate for land just off the main bazaar road is Rs. 3 lakhs (US$3000) an anna (31.79 sq. meters). Everyone from the villages is going abroad. Everyone is earning to buy a plot of land in town.

Just above Dhankuta is a pine forest, a legacy of the whims of one Rana or the other. One day, I walked with my Fufaju (my father’s sister’s husband) through to a village nestled on the southwestern ridge beyond the forest. One of the first houses in the village belongs to a Madan Puraskar-winning writer. She is an oddity in Nepal’s literary pantheon, not just because she is a woman, but because she has cerebral palsy, cannot speak, cannot use her hands and writes with her feet. Jhamak Ghimire, in all senses, represents the peculiarities of the mind and the body it comes confined in.

My initial concerns were that I was journeying as a spectator to a freak show. This preconception was quickly erased when I started a conversation with her. Her responses came through the words she scribbled on her notebook. Her body language, so foreign to me, was hard to read, but her pen was strong. Her eyes reflected her intelligence.

The book that won Jhamak the 2067 BS Madan Puraskar was a touching and honest autobiography, titled Jeevan: Kanda Ki Phool (Life: Thorn or Flower?). She is only the second woman (along with Parijat) to win the prize. I handed her the two volumes of La.Lit I had with me and mentioned the editor had once come to interview her, four years ago. We talked a bit about poetry and her bestselling autobiography. She was humble. She said she was still learning the craft of poetry and would probably always be a student. She also suggested that her autobiography was successful not because of her, but because her story speaks to many Nepalis, that it is their story as well.

Later, as I walked back down to the market area, my fellow companions shared their experience of humility. That her achievements dwarfed their own, what she had done with a pen and a dysfunctional body, outshone their own. She was heroic.

There was also talk about how Jhamak does not credit Saraswoti, the goddess of wisdom, for her creative talent. She takes it to be her own. Her ego extended beyond her crippled body, they said. It made sense to me. You can’t become a writer without thinking you are better, that your thoughts have more value than those of others. It’s central to the act of being a writer. Yet, the ego and the writer are both not limited to just thinking of themselves, they are intricately involved in the social, in the act of being human. It is perhaps this broader sense that opens Jhamak up to visitors and allows people from all walks of life come and see her, meet her, ogle her.

Back in town, children of all ages browsed books and read around the BookBus. These books were not available in the small stationary-cum-textbook stores in town. The libraries here are few and small, inadequate for the population, and inaccessible for geo-spatial reasons. The limited diversity of reading material stunted their reach. It made one ask: can a mobile library address any of these problems? Or is this as quixotic as things started with good intentions but driven by ideas often are? Programming. Programming. Programming. A well planned, well-targeted program focused on delivering specific skills and knowledge would add value. Establishing linkages for schools to tap into networks of support and assistance to build their libraries would be equally important. But first, the schools would have to see the benefits of having a library. Our design and structure will be tried and tested.