Being British I’ve been brought up to form an orderly queue from day one at nursery school. And it seems perfectly natural to line-up for everything—for your lit­tle bottle of milk at primary school, right through adult life and queuing in banks, for buses, in shops… for just about everything. No one tries to ‘jump the queue’ and if someone is busy looking the other way when it’s their turn, we will not try to rush forward, but we will let them know now is their time to be served. Here in Nepal I have really only seen orderly lines in two places—the ‘priority’ section of my local bank and in the theaters. Yes, most banks now have a ticket system but that is enforced queuing, not willful wait­ing one’s turn.

 

In the days when the Gurukul Theater Company had its own prem­ises, somewhere near Battisputali, I was surprised and delighted to see they had trained their theater-go­ing audience (of mostly under 30s) to form neat lines and wait patiently until the bell rung and the door opened. This was adopted by other theaters. Perhaps those young drama enthusiasts thought it was part of the whole drama experience. Yet it was not something to be incor­porated into daily life, as if others did not know about this magical thing called a queue, more usually know as a ‘line’ in Nepal.

 

I was reminded of this recently while attending a theater I had not been to before. They mixed it up by having two ways to enter the main stairway to the theater hall. To my mind that would require two queues, flowing together like the slipway of a British motorway. But no, queuing in that theater seemed to have gone the way it is elsewhere in Kathmandu. Chaotic.

 

Someone (no doubt a beddeshi) did a little survey on how efficient was the system of a shop keeper serving several customers at once, rather than taking them turn by turn. It turns out that if there are, say five people to serve, and each one will take two minutes to deal with, then the shop keeper spends 10 minutes to serve the five people regardless as to whether he does this one by one or tries to cover as many as he can at the same time.

 

You know the scenario—customer 1 asks for eggs, customer 2 asks for tomatoes, customer 3 asks for biscuits. While the shop keeper is putting the eggs into a bag, he is throwing the tomatoes onto the scales and asking number 3 what kind of biscuits he wants. Meantime customer number 4 enters and asks for some beer. Eggs are now laid aside while he hands beer out of the fridge and eyes the biscuits.

 

Tomatoes are weighed and head­ing for a bag when customer 5 enters the shop. She’s after onions which she wants to select herself but she needs to have a conversation about the quality first. Meantime the egg customer is finally handing over the money and receiving the eggs and the biscuit customer has made his selection. The beer guy hands over his money and change is sought for both him and the egg customer. Finally the egg customer has got both eggs and change and is head­ing out of the shop while the onion conversation goes on and the bis­cuit customer is patiently repeating her selection.

 

Then enters a new customer, this one is a little influential in the street and of course gets priority. And I’m standing at the back, dizzy and frus­trated by now, and decide to go to the less busy shop next door… Yes, the shop keeper spends the same amount of time but for the quieter, less pushy customer, they can wait eight minutes for their two-min­ute transaction despite being first in ‘line’.