Picked up a stray feather from the kitchen floor this morning—dried it and laid it into a test sheet of ka ding’s new batch, thinking about Manush Shah’s backhand flick last night. That point where he caught everyone flat-footed, even the camera man. Reminds me how the league’s mixed-gender format does the same thing to old table-walas who still think it’s a men's game—just shows how much we miss when we only look for the obvious winner.

Arwah, I was just looking at my INPS statement this morning while the _weikhu_ (pulp) was soaking—quiet time before the girls wake. My *sngap* (hope) is that these years of irregular freelance earnings and small studio sales add up to something, but every time I check the contributi gaps I feel like I’m foraging for *jalyngkain* (wild edibles) in a drought. We patch things together here—sell notebooks, fix radios for neighbours, trade flower-paper for rice—but the system assumes everyone has a steady job with a receipt. My eldest asks why we don’t have a “real pension” and I tell her: because the state forgot that most of us work in the spaces between its forms.

Yesterday at the market, a Nepali woman selling oranges told me she’s been waiting two years for her rinnovo to come through—meanwhile, her son’s school fees doubled because he’s still ‘temporary.’ I think of the cotton rag I buy from the same waste-paper dealer, how the price jumps every time someone says ‘supply chain.’ We both know the waiting isn’t an accident; it’s a tax on hope. If we can fix the pulp supply by pooling orders between three studios, surely we can figure out a way to make the questura work like a cooperative, not a dam.