She loves talking about ‘those days.’ “Aankhako najarle na bhyaune…paaniko taal,” she says, describing a lake she had once walked all day uphill to reach, with a group of friends and pilgrims. She had taken along my father, who was still a small child then and who had to be carried in turns by her friends. She becomes animated when she talks about the trip—she remembers every tiny detail, the force of the wind, the salt she fed to the cows, the long walk and her accompanying travellers. It is amazing how the brain works—the memory of her past is etched in her brain but she constantly forgets what she had for lunch today, or whether she took her medicine or not, or whether the afternoon chiya tasted any good. Therefore, the loops.

My grandmother is a healthy 92-year-old; and by healthy, I mean she doesn’t like to be supported or held while she tries to cross the road. I envy her self-reliance, how, for example, one fine day, she decided to visit, on her own, a relative living nearby. Kathmandu is not a friendly place for the elderly. For them, its roads are mapped with uncertainties, its buildings painted with absurdities, and its people lost in transition.

“Kathmandu ta basne thau hoina,” my grandmother complains every morning and every night. She talks about the village she was born in, that she grew up in, that she married out of, and that she longs to go back to. She always mentions the four subba brothers, each by their names, and the house next to the jhulunge pul. She promises me that if I were to go to her village, I could get as many guavas and oranges as I wanted—for free—if I identified myself as her granddaughter. She has told me this, with a proud smile on her face, more than a dozen times. Therefore, the loops.

“Aankhako najarle na bhyaune…paaniko taal”—the moment she said this, I was taken aback because the sentence did not just paint the unfathomable vastness of the lake but because it showcased her impeccable ability to tell a tale. When listening to her life experiences, recollected in bits and pieces like misplaced photographs, I try to create a mental album of what her life must have been. I have heard too many stories of forgotten childhoods, lost youth and adulthoods full of obligations. During a field visit for an anthropological research that I was a part of, I heard women talk about how much they wanted to go to school, about their sangis who sang while they collected salla, their miscarriages, of unborn children and aspirations, and of sending their children and grandchildren to school. These are the narratives that are generally reported when it comes to women. To an extent, these stories are true, but there is the other side to their stories that is usually forgotten, or ignored. The stories that have to do with someone’s stealing a handful of rice to attend a class; or the time when someone won the cultural dance competition; the moment someone discovered that she could run away from an unhappy marriage; the first time someone rode a bicycle; or stories like my grandmother’s, which are about moments filled with the exhilaration of finally discovering the lake.

My grandmother loves travelling, meeting people, listening to their stories and telling her own. I sometimes joke that she has the disposition of an anthropologist. But when I give it serious thought—and no offence to those who have dedicated their lives and honed their skills to become one, including myself—I realise that my grandmother is an anthropologist: because she holds the life experiences of being and becoming a woman. She has an equally valid and legitimate set of life experiences and aspirations that no one has bothered to ask her about.

And even though her memory deteriorates into fragments—fragments that are repeated in loops, loops that are narrated to me, me who desperately holds onto these loops, loops going off on tangents, loops made up of fragments—I understand those fragments make up a memory. And that memory is what an anthropologist is always attempting to construct and reconstruct, in order to make sense of our lives and cultures. Those are the strands of memories that we, as human beings, try to piece together to create a perspective on the way we live in this world.

And therefore, the loops.