Workstations

Well, since I stopped having inspiration for writing, all my creativity went to some other, more involving activity. Involving in the sense that I still use my hands, but differently: right now both my hands are bruised, battered and scratched, and everything to do with them involves Band-Aids and a lot of care because…

Well, because Nepali people don’t have dice. And because I wanted to play some dice games, I really needed dice. The only dice I’ve ever seen for sale in Nepal also comprised a curious child’s game with small colourful plastic coins and that sad-looking, pink (!), solitary dice. And I needed six!

So, I resolved to make my own dice. Which is not nearly as easy as I thought. First of all, I needed to find some wood, specifically – if gods marginally care about my personal well-being – some wood conveniently cut into small cubes that can be easily carved. My wish was granted in Bhaktapur, one of the prettiest places I’ve seen so far in Nepal, where some genial woodcarvers constructed (rather destructed) some cube-like shapes for me, this after ogling me as if I were completely mad. ‘Dice’ is a pretty unknown word in Nepal, so I couldn’t really explain what I wanted to get. But pieces of wood that have the same size however you look at them did push a button somewhere in their brains. Unfortunately, the artist’s feel stood in the way of me having six identical cubes and I ended up having seven small pine-wood pieces of unidentified shapes which I subsequently had to sand down to cubes. Or cube-ish things.

This only had me rough-sanding the would-be cubes to a common shape for, oh, let’s say almost a week, all the while annoying anyone within earshot with the wonderful noises of my constant activity. Eventually, I got as far as this:

From here on it got only more difficult. I’ll spare you the details and only emphasise the commonalities of the different workspaces, and you’ll note that most have contain the same things: the carving knife – Opinel’s finest; my faithful lighter, which didn’t go out yet (although there’s one thing to say about Nepali lighters: never buy them, as they’ll last one day at most); cigarettes (Surya Lights keep getting harder and harder to find); and beer, which, even if it’s not obvious, was constantly involved in the making process. Trust me, for this type of work, alcohol is needed!

This just so you can admire my Angry Birds bedsheet

As my mother would say, these dice are unique, not just by way of shaping and polishing them, but also because of the fact that none has the exact same shape like the other… Nepali-unique, I’d say.

Don’t even ask about the other on-going project!