Category Archives: Aamaa

Aamaa, Aidan and Pascal, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

Stone Paths

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Yesterday, I went with Aamaa and Neru and Didi to carry 40 kg of cauliflower up the mountain from Pokhara, because, as we know, that’s the kind of thing I do to relax.  Why, you ask? Fair question. At Milan Chowk people are selling cauliflower and potatoes at seasonal wholesale rates, and because our relatives are there, we got an even sweeter deal.  Tell me you’ve ever purchased cauliflower for less than 6 cents per kilogram, baby.

What are we going to do with 40 kilograms of cauliflower? Ah, I thought you’d want to know. First, we’re going to schlep it up to Kaskikot. Then we can chop it in to thin pieces and dry it in the sun to eat later in the fall. And that brings us to yet another day of long steep stone paths, ropes, and heavy loads.

We took the forested footpath on north side, a walk I regularly make in about 35 minutes going down and one hour going up. It leaps (or drops, depending on which direction you’re going in) directly from the flat valley to the spiny ridge top.

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As we neared the bottom of the trail, Didi was walking a short way ahead when Aamaa pointed to a lone man in an empty rice paddy on the valley floor.

“That’s the field where Didi was born,” she said.

I’ve always known that Didi was born during rice planting season, when Aamaa went to work and returned home instead with her first baby.  But I didn’t realize the field was so far away from the house. It belongs to a relative, and I’ve never been to it.

“That one?” I squinted and pointed like I was on safari in Zimbabwe.

“Yes.  And then we walked up this path that afternoon.”

“…What?”

“I came here the night before to plant rice, but I had Didi at 8am the next morning.  And at 4pm we walked back up this same way with the baby.”

“…THIS one?! How is that possible?”

“I know.  Can you believe it? I couldn’t do it now.”

I might as well insert here that my brother and sister-in-law welcomed my niece Eliza Jane Spero in to the world just a few days ago, on March 6, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Running around here in Nepal, my mind has been largely preoccupied with thoughts of soft blankets and white linens and wrinkled baby feet at home. So maybe it was just the way the moment came together. But I looked at Didi chasing Aidan and Pascal down the stones in front of us, and all of a sudden it seemed impossible all over again that all of us were there together.

IMG_7151Aamaa was 20 years old when she had Didi, and she endured many hardships after she hiked up this long, unforgiving path later that same afternoon.  I can only imagine how birthing a child must have been then, when medical facilities, telephones, basic shops, and decent roads—to the extent any of these existed at all—were at least a day’s walk away.

Now, 35 later, here we were walking on the same stones. Standing on them, it’s hard to comprehend that millions of people in the world still live in that kind of poverty today, when it seems like an unbearable situation for one single individual. Every once and a while, all those millions are suddenly the one person in front of me, and today, it was Didi. She seemed like a miracle. And the path – which I’ve skipped down and climbed up hundreds of times – just stays there while people go up and down it, carrying their stories from one decade to the next.

It was 6pm by the time Aamaa and I got home with our 20kg loads of cauliflower. We have a lot of slicing to do.

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Aamaa, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life

Another Relaxing Day Off

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Yesterday I did what I usually do to relax on my day off: go with Aamaa and about thirty neighbors to chop and haul firewood for six hours.  As Aamaa and I were headed down the hillside in the morning, carrying our ropes and sickles, a buffalo was baying loudly in the distance.  Aamaa stopped for a second and listened.
“…Oh, it’s a buffalo,” she said.
“Of course it’s a buffalo,” I said.
“For a minute I thought it was a cell phone.”
“You thought cell phone before you thought buffalo?”
“Sometimes cell phones make that noise…bzzzt, bzzzt.”
Cultural moment.
Woodcutting is highly regulated and occurs en masse, and it is a brilliant example of the chaos and color of rural Nepali life.  Today there are about 35 people in the steep, unruly forest shouting and singing and chopping with axes and saws and sickles.  Every now and then there is a loud whoop and a huge tree falls over.  Then you have the random American running around in the middle of this scene.  I am wearing one of my old “work” outfits – a hot pink and green kurta sulwaar from 8 years ago that’s got a rip here or there.  I am ready for action, baby.
I get assigned to a group of women bundling wood and carrying loads uphill to a clearing.  I would like to say that, after twelve years of voluntarily putting myself in these situations, I’ve actually earned a fair amount of respect – I do pretty well for a foreigner.  But there’s just a baseline level of awe that comes along with having a 5’8” white girl waving a sickle around in the woods a tuesday afternoon in the hills of Nepal.  Also, it’s the obvious topic of conversation.
IMG_7056For one thing, “Laura” is, exactly, the Nepali word for “stick.”  This is an endlessly entertaining point.  I look like a stick and I’m carrying sticks and my name means stick.  Unfortunately for me there is also a lot of discussion about actual sticks (after all we are in the forest chopping wood) and I am constantly answering “Yes?” in response to people saying things like, “Hey, give me that stick.”
After a few hauling trips, we’re resting in the clearing when the ladies get to talking about how nobody should submit to pressure from the choppers to carry too much at once.  Loads should be adjusted to the size and strength of each person – after all, it’s really hard work and we have people of all ages and levels of health among us.
Lady one: “I mean look at this foreigner here from Japan.”
Lady two: “It’s America.”
Lady one: “Whatever.”
On most trips I get paired up with Saraswoti or Aamaa, who I follow around like a baby cub. And I appreciate that all the wives look out for me.  However I do get a little fed up with being babied on tasks I’ve sweated significantly to master, such as carrying stacks of wood slung from a rope on my head.  So late in the day, when fatigue and disorder have evolved to a stage where I find myself momentarily separated from the group as everyone is bundling their loads, I find a huge log and wonder if I can lift it.  I manage to get it upright but can’t sling from my head because it keeps falling over.
“PUT DOWN THE HUGE LOG!” yells a guy from across a ravine.  I call this guy Michael Jackson, but that’s another story.  Michael Jackson makes the mistake of shouting across an entire forest that the log is too heavy for me to lift.
I set the log up again.  Michael Jackson abandons his first strategy and calls to Barat to come hold the log so that at least it doesn’t roll away while I’m making a bad decision.  I manage to stand up in the steep underbrush with this huge chunk of tree slung from my forehead.  It’s added at least 75 lbs to my bodyweight.
For future reference, putting DOWN a 75 lb log slung from your head is almost as hard as picking it up.  So I just start walking up the hill with it.  I have no idea whether I can carry this thing all the way up to the clearing, which requires climbing over terraced fields on narrow footholds.  But so far, Michael Jackson is losing, even with my Japanese disadvantage, and that is all that matters.
I plod along until a line of women with their own bundles of wood catch up behind me.  They begin scolding me to put down the gigantic log, and to be fair I kept thinking that, over the next ledge, I would give it up.  But everyone was moving forward as a group, and it was never exactly the right moment to stop, and each time I hit a ledge I would think I’m putting this stupid log down on the other side, but then the other side would be flat enough to take a few steps and I’d find myself at the next ledge.  So we just kept moving up the hill one ledge at a time.
We get to a particularly difficult terrace that has a narrow foothold and a large height difference.  With the added weight, these high steps are treacherous because I literally can’t lift myself.  So instead of stepping up over the edge of the terrace, I put my knee over the top and get myself over on all fours.
For the record, this is a fair tactic.  I watched Sandrakali didi do it earlier in the day.  But it is super awkward, and leaves you waving your butt over the edge of the field at all the people behind you.  Which is really okay in most circumstances, but as it happens, my work pants from eight years ago are ripped right at the butt crack.  So I am waving my underwear at a line of women behind me carrying bundles of wood, while I am crouched under a 75 lb log that is attached to my head by a rope.
This actually happened in my life.  Yesterday.
“Laura, PUT DOWN THE LOG,” all the women are chastising me.  Out of love of course.  What would my Japanese mother think?
“I’ve got it guys, I’ve got it,” I reply, from under the log.
With a burst of leg strength I stand up and make my way up to the clearing, which is now close at hand.  As I approach, Michael Jackson has his cell phone out and is taking a video.
I put the log down and throw my hands up in the air in triumph.  For the rest of the afternoon, everyone is talking about my wood carrying prowess, while simultaneously scolding me for my poor judgement.  THAT log, everyone says, pointing to it.
Also, Srijana tells me to take Aamaa’s shawl and wrap it around my butt.  My pants are ripped and the entire world knows.
We’re off for the next load.  I’ll be ready for the office again tomorrow.
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Aamaa, Between Worlds, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

If I Can’t Say Namaste

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Last Saturday evening I came home with a fresh bundle of vegetables from the market, but Aamaa said we’d be cooking without salt. A man at the house near the water tap in Rotepani passed away yesterday. Aamaa and I ate plain rice with ghee for dinner.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realized I knew the one of the bereaved daughters. “Malika,” Aamaa said, “Don’t you know Malika?” Of course. I remember her hanging around with Didi and Bishnu back when we were all in our early 20s, before anyone was married. “The really skinny one?” I asked. Yes, that Malika. Her father, in his sixties, had been ill for about a month.

This has given me an opportunity to pay respects during a traditional period of kriya, when a man with grown children has lived an honorable life and passed away at an age that, in these parts, is considered decent.

On the sixth evening of kriya, after Aamaa and I had eaten dinner, I rounded up Neru and Kanchaa from next door. Lighting our way with flashlights down the stone path toward Rotepani, we left for Malika’s house.

As we approached the house, a warm mist of voices bubbled up in the cold black night. We found a tarp stretched out over the yard from the edge of the roof, to shelter the stream of visitors from sun during the day and provide some warmth at night.

Three men were sitting on the mud-smoothed porch, leaning against the wall of the house. I recognized Krishna dai, who I’ve known since the first week I came to Kaskikot twelve years ago.

“Namaste,” I said, raising my hands.

“We don’t say Namaste now,” Krishna dai said.

“Sorry.” I looked down.  I had trouble figuring out where to replace my hands.  Lesson one, of many.

Malika’s brothers were peering through the door of an attached room on the small house – I’m guessing that at some point it was used for goats – sitting on the ground with white blankets wrapped around them, like bowling pins. Until the thirteenth day they will only wear new white clothes with no seams, and they’ll wash these clothes daily.

We talked quietly with Krishna dai and the other men outside for about ten minutes. They are all friends and relatives of the deceased. Their role is to sleep on mats on the porch and guard the door of the house, because the sons are not to touch anyone or anything during kriya.

“For example, if a chicken comes by,” Krishna dai said, “we shoo it away. So it won’t touch them.”  This seemed awful and gorgeous.

Krishna dai asked about our mourning traditions in the United States. I said they vary a lot according to religion and habit, but that I am Jewish, and our rules mandate a quick burial – strictly speaking, we don’t cremate. I explained how we have a gathering where people stand up and tell stories about the life of the person who has died, so that everyone can share and honor these memories in one place. The sons leaned in closely by the door of the goat room to listen to me. I said we bury our dead in a special place that’s marked with a stone, where we can return to do puja and be with our loved one. That we return from the cemetery and wash our hands and fill our stomachs with food, and people stream through our houses with flowers and food while we sit shiva – a mourning period when we keep our homes full of life, because we must keep living. By contrast, kriya imposes strict and challenging rules on almost every movement of the bereaved: fasting, washing, praying, isolation, burning. In some ways, everyone has died.

It occurs to me now how little I know about the orthodox dictates of Judiasm and mourning. Is there a period of purification? I have no idea. I could look it up easily for this post. But it’s more interesting that I have no idea.  So I’ll look it up afterwards.

As we were talking, a slight woman with her uncombed hair falling over her shoulders came out of the house. Malika and I haven’t seen each other in about eight years, but she heard my voice from inside the house. Despite the circumstances, it was a really lovely moment. There wasn’t a lot that needed saying, other than, “I heard.”

We entered the small house. Malika’s widowed mother was sleeping by herself on a bed of straw – she too must observe kriya for thirteen days. “Say ‘Aamaa,’” Malika said.

“But what do I say if I can’t say Namaste?” I asked.

“Just say ‘Aamaa,'” Malika said.  So I softly said, “Aamaa,” and her mother sat up.  There wasn’t really much more to add after that.

But just on the other side of a low wall, a crowd of women was gathered around a fire, where a kettle of tea was brewing for all the visitors. Mourning customs for daughters are lighter than for sons and wives: Malika and her two sisters observed kriya for four days, and on the fifth day, they added salt to their food and were allowed to touch other people.  Their straw beds, upgraded now to straw mats, are still arranged on the floor of the house. They’ll sleep there together and continue cooking their own food and eating only once a day for thirteen days. Their hair will stay uncombed until then.

Neru and I sat by the fire for about an hour. Between other chatter, the huddle of women asked me all kinds of things about death rites in the U.S., and also about my family and what I’ve been up to. There was lots of quiet laughing. We spent a long time on the topic of marriage, which, in these parts, is almost always arranged by parents. People here are endlessly enthralled by the concept that I am tasked with finding my own spouse.

“Love marriage,” I said by way of explanation.  Here the phrase has an illicit undertone, like eloping. “That’s our culture.”

An old lady next to me was having trouble following. The expectation she’s always known is that you are paired with a spouse who is astrologically compatible with you and socially compatible with your family, and then you sign up for a life together, and then you go from there. A younger auntie jumped in to help out.

“Love,” the auntie said, looking up at us from her seat by the fire. “When two people make things work between them—that’s love, right?”

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Aamaa, Between Worlds, Family, Nepal Life, Reflections, Uncategorized

Between Worlds

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Read this series here.

IMG_2479Over the years, I have witnessed many passages in Nepal.  Marriages, coming of age ceremonies, births of animals and people, and deaths of many kinds. The weather itself has a careless drama about it, demanding reverence for the seasons and relentless passage of time…when it is hot, it’s time to plant millet; when there is a full moon, it’s time to fast; when a distant glacier becomes heavy, it’s time for it to break apart, time for the river it lands in to overflow in a torrent, time for an entire village to be swept away.  When it is morning, it’s time to get up and cook breakfast.

The intimate relationship between people and cycles in this part of the world is one of its most moving qualities.  I think it is a hard thing to see if you have always been inside it. But I am outside of it.  And peering in, I am endlessly preoccupied with how a single human existence can be subtly accepted as a grand and meaningless expression of a larger constellation of forces and relations and nature, awesome because it is small, not because it is unique.  I only notice this because I learned to see myself as separate from the moment I came in to the world.  In the West we gain power, intelligence and purpose from our individuality.  But it’s something I can’t explain to Aamaa.  There simply isn’t a vocabulary to say that my life possesses a greater idea than the idea of the universe itself.

I know I’ll never be comfortable with this fact.  Instead, I am perpetually drawn to these rites of passage, which integrate our small lives with those of our ancestors, with the cosmos, with God and with the future.  Perhaps it’s like continually trickling cool water into a wound that will always burn.

This winter I’ve decided to start a project that has been some time in the making. Since I first began coming to Nepal in 2002, young men have flooded out of the country for migrant labor in gulf countries; last year, over 300,000 people left for that purpose alone.  A surprisingly large number of these young men die abroad, and when they do, normal mourning rituals are turned completely upside-down.  Many of the essential features of customary mourning become impossible.  My project will document the way that families have adapted ritual grieving when their sons die overseas.

Nepal’s funerary customs in the weeks that immediately follow a death are called kriya.  There is great intelligence and beauty in these rituals, which provide a structured role for the community and extended family in sharing grief, reaffirming ties, and placing the life and death of the deceased in to a coherent cosmic story.  Many aspects of kriya are austere and demanding, putting physical and mental purification above comfort, and imposing isolation as a sanctuary for the emptiness that follows loss.  When the kriya period ends, other rituals last weeks, years, and in some cases, forever.  Aamaa, a widow since age 23, hasn’t worn red in 35 years.  Anyone who meets her can immediately know without a word that she is widowed – if they are attuned to this custom.

Stories of grief and loss in other places have immense importance for us. Ritual grieving in American culture is increasingly short-lived and mainly the private domain of the bereaved.  Death as a matter of politics or policy or violence is in our media every day.  But mourning, the outward expressions by which we integrate death in to the un-ended lives of the living, seems to be on the periphery of our inquiry, at best.  In some ways, mourning is treated as an obstacle to our collective concern with affirming and carrying out our individual significance.

But mourning is a choice we make to ascribe meaning to our grief. It is a willful sanctification of our mortality.  We hope for the grace to extract from this some kind of redemption, something beautiful about life.  Or perhaps simply the courage to keep living.

In the course of this series, I hope to honor the beauty of Nepal’s kriya traditions, as well as a generation of young people caught in the ambiguous place between a world that has shattered and one that does not yet exist—at the threshold, in that empty uncertainty, where we are reinvented.

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Read this series here.

Aamaa, Family, Reflections

Outsiders

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I woke up inside the mosquito net and thought, as I do every year, that it was going to be a shame to leave that delightful hiding place.  And for the first time, I found myself filled with downright resistance.  Usually on this morning, I lie in bed and enjoy the mini-world inside the net falling around me, its soft waking sounds and obscured view, and I feel the stretch of my existence from one world to another.  The sun peeks under the ruffle of the corrugated tin roof and draws a squiggle in the mirror. The prospect of departure highlights the distance and the miracle of my life’s cartography, and I float for a moment in an expanse of sadness and gratitude.  But today the other end of that fishing line felt so far away and tenuous that I just had to get out of bed and not think about it too much.

IMG_2785 - Version 2Leaving Aamaa is always the single hardest part of leaving at all.  I’ll call from home, but it’s hard for us to chat on the phone.  So much of our relationship is a physical presence; it’s moving together in this space.  When our communication is reduced to words and sieved through my imperfect language skills it becomes thin and stilted.  It’s hard for me to explain my life in Connecticut, and to understand life in Kaski through an update over the phone.

But even more important is that as I get older, Aamaa and I have a simple and innate perception of each other’s aloneness.  So on this morning, we orbit like two electrons, knowing this great force is about to separate us, and it seems like the loneliest thing in the world–because we sense each other’s singularity in addition to our own.

Sunrise was grayed out and respectfully subdued.  As the clouds gathered, Maya bouju came over and she and Aamaa and I sat on the porch drinking tea.  Soon a thick fog had rolled in and I could barely see out past the faded tomato vines in the garden – we were literally sitting on an island of yard inside a cloud.  And in that new configuration, looking out at the blankness, I felt the stretch at last.  That’s how exactly how it was: the three of us sheltered from the chaotic world in our temporary clearing, putting off the imminent moment when I would have to set down my tea cup and walk back in to the unknown.

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Aamaa, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

Rice Pot Literacy

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IMG_2668A year or two ago, Aamaa starting making noises about getting an electric rice cooker.  Of all things, right?  I am constantly baffled by the perceived awesomeness of this contraption in a place with no plumbing, no heat in the winter or A/C in the summer, no political system, and widespread illiteracy, where the one thing that people have been doing for hundreds of years with no problem whatsoever is cooking rice. In pots. And never mind that in the winter, there’s load shedding for up to 16 hours a day.

Nevertheless, it is a thing.  By some mysterious process, the rice cooker has become the iPhone of the rural Nepali woman, just like TVs became standard in Kaski’s mud-and-stone houses when so many kids left the village to work abroad, where they send home just enough money to cover a few celebrity amenities.  Now a TV I can understand.  But a rice cooker?  I used to say that about cell phones – remember how we used to just call each other on landlines?  And that worked fine?  Aamaa used to cook rice in a pot, from 56 years ago until last June.  It’s not about whether it’s fine.  It’s about having a celebrity rice cooker.

So last year when Bishnu was visiting, she picked up a rice cooker for Aamaa.  And of course, Bishnu went for a large, impressive looking one – even though Bishnu should know better than that by now.  Because first of all, when you put rice for one or two people in a large, impressive rice cooker, you get a wide, unimpressive rice pancake.  And let’s not forget that there’s no electricity half the day.  So I arrived this year to find that when the electricity comes on, the first thing Aamaa does is rush to plug in the big electric rice cooker.

No matter what time of day it is.

IMG_1042This is how we have found ourselves eating a room-temperature rice pancake as our 2013 featured dinner entrée.  And the thing that blows my mind is that it’s not like Aamaa doesn’t know what hot, properly prepared rice tastes like. It’s the only meal she’s eaten for her entire life.  But this rice-cooker-chilled-pancake-system inexplicably retains its a status of superiority in the face of damning evidence that it is terrible.

“You know, Aamaa,” I said as we were eating the rice-pancake the other day (for the record, it can literally be cut like a pie), “the rice cooker is too big.  You should have a little one, like I have in Connecticut.”

Aamaa’s expression widened.  “Really?  Do they make small ones?”

Sometimes life is so strange.

“Yes Aamaa, they’re just—they’re just like that one, but smaller.  So you can cook less rice in it and it won’t come out like a roti.”

“Ehhhhh,” Aamaa cooed.  “If you see one of those, will you get me one?”

I wasn’t sure how serious she was, but the next time I was in Pokhara, I decided to get Aamaa a 1-liter rice cooker.  Like the one I have, in Connecticut.

I brought the small rice cooker home the other day and we unwrapped it on the front porch.  It was like the Second Coming.

“Look at this pot Laura got me!” Aamaa has been telling the neighbors.  “It’s the perfect size.”

The fourth beloved grandchild of the family is introduced to all visitors. Aamaa takes it out and points to its dainty circumference and shiny exterior.  Then she and I regale the neighbors with stories about the failings of the large rice cooker – it makes rice like a roti, for goodness sake – and swoon over the shimmering, earth-shattering perfection of the small rice cooker.  Which is just right for two people.

Or one person.  Like my rice cooker, in Connecticut.

As we were eating our fluffy rice today, I couldn’t help being re-amazed that Aamaa, as my protector and general knower of all things, had no idea that the big awesome rice cooker was too big and awesome.  For somebody who can build anything, cook a complex meal over a fire with no measuring devices and not a single taste test, detect subtle changes in the mood of the buffalo, and nurture soil and seeds with a nuanced literacy that is invisible and incomprehensible to me, it seems completely incongruous that she didn’t look at the rice cooker and think, “That’s too big.”

I am so used to Aamaa’s highly technical and nimble mind that it never stops surprising me to run in to the boundaries of her experience. I remember during my first year in Nepal, I got first-grade primers so that Aamaa and I could learn to read together.  I started copying new letters and sounding out the phonetic alphabet.  It turned my world upside down the first time I watched Aamaa try the same thing and saw that she copied letters slowly and awkwardly like a child.  Why wouldn’t she?  I sifted grain like a child.

The rice cooker more than anything has reminded me that we simply have different types of literacy.  Most of Aamaa’s life has been extremely repetitive, and she moves in it with a technical and intuitive agility that I think few people in my world ever have the chance to know – if only because of the much wider range of experiences we have to integrate.  I think that makes us more adaptable across novelties and habituates us to thinking relationally; it’s what allows me to look at a new situation or task and decode it or try out variations in my mind.  But Aamaa just doesn’t encounter nearly as many new situations in her life, so instead, she knows the ones that are familiar to her with a level of subtlety that maybe only Olympic athletes and ultra-dorky mathematicians ever encounter where I come from.

So much so that even the rice cooker, which seemed just a few degrees removed from Aamaa’s mainstream world, turned out to be a static event for her, not something to be adapted or improved the way the millet seedlings can be tended to in the garden.  Now I’m trying to get her to use the “warming” feature, so that when dinner gets cooked at 3:06 pm, it stays warm as long as possible.  I mentioned this the other day when Aamaa rushed to unplug the cooker rather than leaving it with the warming light on.

“Aamaa, it’s going to get cold,” I said.

“I don’t want it to overcook,” she said.

“It’s just…” I sighed. “…Warming.”

Right.  It’s warming but not cooking…that makes no sense, does it?

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Aamaa, Around Town, Nepal Life, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Boxes and Glass Cases

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It’s been a tough arrival.  The monsoon is still clinging to the hills, thick and cloistering, and each afternoon it dumps an unremitting rain that I swear to God follows everybody inside.  The air itself is full of water; there’s no place to be dry.

And the truth is, I am also a drop suspended in mid air.  I’ve moved out of my apartment in New York, but I haven’t moved in to a new apartment in Connecticut, so all my things are in boxes in my parents’ basement.  The plan is that when I get back in two months I’m going to be working in a manual therapy clinic in Hartford…but it hasn’t actually happened yet.  It’s an idea, hovering in good faith around some boxes in a basement, waiting to be taken out and used.

That feeling has trailed me all the way to Pokhara–the hint that my life is full of theories.  Even IMG_2479though my contact with my projects in Nepal has increased a great deal in the past year through Skype and regular written reporting, and I have files and files of documents proving to me that these creations are real, they still feel like experiments when I re-encounter them on the ground.  Plus, there’s a big disappointment right off the bat: our first program director has left unexpectedly, after growing the Kaski Oral Health Care Project much less than we’d hoped since last fall.  I’m tired and frustrated and it’s enough with the freelancing.  I am ready to feel like I know what I’m doing, and some of this fits together, and it’s leading somewhere that matters.

Today it led back up the road to Kaski.  I went to Vindivasini Temple this morning to catch the bus on its way down, so I could save a seat before the bus arrived at the park, where a crowd  gathers around the door and starts pushing in to secure real estate for the ride up before people can even get out.  As I waited, I sat on a stoop with my duffel by my feet, watching a man selling vegetables across the road.  And I wondered again if this is all some kind of act.  I’m just doing the same thing over and over.  I can’t keep my grasp on what it’s about.

Other than a story.  The word comes to me again, and then again: Story.  Right out of the blue, at nine in the morning, I’m sitting on a stoop waiting for a bus, watching a man weigh a cauliflower, and the next thing I know I’m watching a story, and my identity is divorced from my soul.  Poof!  I am a character.

It must be natural that when you go through enough repetitions of something, even something incredible, it becomes unmoored from any particular episode.  And with that goes its singular miraculousness, because it’s just what it is: a cycle.  How profound would the sunset be if you only saw it once in your life?

Sometimes the sense that everything is just a series of events, with nothing transcendent to tie them together, seems like the most awful thing possible.  Even the leaves clinging to the trees look worthless.  But in certain moments, that same arbitrariness erases the perpetual burden of discerning the purpose of each passing instant, and my role in things is set free from an anchor that, in truth, may never have been there.  What a relief.

This morning I watched the vegetable vendor.  The story settled around me, like snow in its glass case, shaken from the sky.  I waited, again, for the bus to take me up to Kaski, where I knew Aamaa would be waiting.  Again.  For me.

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Aamaa, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections, School, Work

An Eclipse For Small People

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P1010918My first solar eclipse was in sixth grade.  Our science teacher, Max – I went to a progressive school where we called our teachers by their first names, so I actually had a real science teacher named Max – took us outside and we sat in the grass, next to a blacktop, near the soccer fields.  In groups, we held something up in the air and peered through it, a notecard with a hole in it, or something like that.  I don’t recall exactly.  The entire memory is just an image of us, kids, sitting by the blacktop, holding a thing up in the air and squinting.  I found it rather tedious.

My second solar eclipse fell on the festival of Maghe Sakranti.  Before the solar eclipse, there had been a number of times when Maghe Sakranti had coincided with the day of my departure from Nepal, so over time, during visits when I found myself still there for this festival, Maghe Sakranti and its associated rituals had taken on a special flavor of celebration.  We were still together.

In the days leading up to the eclipse, I was at school from early in the morning right up until dusk, painting. Govinda and the kids and I were rushing to finish a mural before yet another departure.  It was a picture of their community: haystacks and houses, the whipped-cream shaped Kalika Hill with its little temple at the top, a paraglider sailing overhead, and road winding around from one place to the next, with a dominating school at the center.

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As the day of the eclipse approached, there was a great deal of anticipation.  Everyone was talking about it.  Once, Aamaa said, she’d been out during a solar eclipse and, just like that, it had turned to night.  They’d been forced to wait for a few hours until it got light again so they could go home.

Now that was something I wanted to see.

I went to visit Thakur sir, the astrologer, to get his opinion on a gift.  Back home, a great healer and teacher of mine was losing her eyesight.  I had purchased a necklace with the symbol kali chakra on it, and I wanted to ask about taking it up to the temple to be blessed, or infused, or something of that sort.  I wasn’t exactly sure, but I thought Thakur sir would know what I meant to ask.  A solar eclipse, he said, would be a very auspicious day to bless a necklace, even though it wasn’t allowed to do a puja during the hours of the eclipse itself.  And, once the necklace was up there at the temple, at the top of the Kalika hill, I couldn’t take it away until the eclipse was over.

The movement of necklaces was one of many things couldn’t happen during the eclipse.  Everyone would fast, of course, from exactly 12:36pm to 3:30pm, and many people would fast the whole day.  Any water in the house would have to be poured out after it was over, and replaced with fresh water from the tap.  It is wood cutting season, and trips to the forest were put on hold for the day.  And Maghe Sakranti was, for all intents and purposes, cancelled.

In the U.S., a solar eclipse is, for the majority of busy people, a science project for kids.  But here, where astrological charts are consulted for even the opening of businesses and choosing of brides, everything seemed to slow down as the days spiraled towards a grand and humbling halt.  Gazing at the top of the Kalika hill against the sky, I could feel the world catapulting through the solar system to a particular magical position—a great thing getting closer and closer to us, small people, standing where we would witness the movements of the galaxy.

By the prior night, there were three buses waiting to take people all the way to Chitwan in the morning so they could bathe at the place where the Trishuli, Gandaki and Kali rivers meet.  First thing in the morning, Aamaa repainted the floors with a fresh layer of mud.  It would be a day filled with ritual.

Like the rest of the world, I had hoped to stay put for the solar eclipse…but the mural wasn’t finished.  We had painted and painted that week, trying to finish in time, but when we pounded the lids in to the tops of the metal paint canisters the night before what should have been Maghe Sakranti, our creation still wasn’t complete.  So I departed for school early in the morning, swearing to Aamaa I’d be back by noon so that I could eat before the fast.

I met Govinda in the road with the necklace in my pocket.  When I’d taken it out that morning, I’d been surprised to see how mysterious and powerful the kali chakra looked, separated now from the rows of silver and symbols in the glass case at the shop.  When we passed Thakur sir’s house, I put it in his hand and he gave it a long look.  I wasn’t sure if I’d actually end up giving it to my teacher back home. I thought I’d send it up to the temple during the solar eclipse, and then give it away later if it seemed appropriate.  I was afraid it might seem kind of silly, and ridiculously enough, decided I would ask the priest at the temple for an opinion when I went to retrieve it later; after the solar eclipse.

Govinda and I arrived at school to find the kids waiting anxiously, and out came the paint. I had stayed out past the witching hour, painting a mural, many times over my years in Kaskikot.  But there was no thought of that today, not in the quivering air, under the glare of that acute collective focus on the cosmos.  I was incredibly P1010864excited.  It felt huge and magical and a little ominous, and made me think about what it must have been like for ancient cultures that didn’t know the science behind such events.  It must have been incredulous and awful to see the sun – so reliable! – disappear in the middle of the day!

And that’s how we found ourselves rushing to complete our masterpiece before the stroke of noon, small people painting small people, the sun under the brush racing the sun circling in the sky.  “The eclipse is coming!” passers-by admonished us.  What were we doing out?

At 11:15, we decided we were done, and with terrible haste threw remaining paint in to boxes, picked up old gloves, ran and locked the office, forgot something in the office (Unlock the office!  The eclipse is coming!) and, at last, set off running down the road to get home before the eclipse struck us dead in the road.  Kids peeled off at their homes.  As we raced by in the dust, people called to us from their houses: Hurry!  The eclipse is coming!  There had been conjecture that we would see stars.  The entire world was about to evaporate.

I made it home by noon, in time to eat. One o’clock in the afternoon, twenty-four minutes after the official start of the eclipse, brought a subtle change in the quality of the light.

Bhinaju and Bishnu and I decided we would climb up the hill behind the house and watch from the resort.  We set to discussing what we should bring along.  A flashlight?  Poncho?  Extra sweater?  Rubber bands?  Camera?  (Would it be too dark for photos?)  We rummaged around and put some belongings together.  We climbed up to the top of the hill. And there I was, surrounded by a Himalayan panorama during a solar eclipse!  I wondered if I would be permanently altered, perhaps suffused with some kind of wisdom?

We sat in the grass.  We waited.

We stared earnestly at the sun for 30 minutes before admitting that we could see nothing.

We came home and sat on the porch.  It was a devastating disappointment.  I took out my journal.  I became impatient for tea.  As I looked a the water vessels and thought sullenly that we’d have to fetch new water before we could make tea, I considered the idea of “touched” water – that’s the word, chueko, “touched” water, the same word used for the impurity that a menstruating woman imparts to the things she contacts – and it occurred to me that all of these rituals – abstaining from pujas, fasting, dumping touched water – were fundamentally based in a fear of the awesome, not a celebration of it.  Too bad I wouldn’t see anything.  Even Maghe Sakranti had been cancelled.

For some reason, some of Aamaa’s old, beat-up x-rays were lying in a large envelope on the porch.  I have no idea why.  She’d had them taken when she was first sick, eight years ago; one of the slides showed her ribs and abdomen, a faded spine in the background, and another, a ball and socket joint.  Maybe they’d been deposited in this random location during a recent tidying, or while we’d been arranging articles to bring on our failed observation mission an hour earlier.

I was writing when Bhinaju suddenly said, “Laura, come here.”  He was standing in the yard, holding up the ribs and studying them.  I thought he wanted to continue a recent debate we’d had about the number of vertebrae in the spine.

“Why,” I mumbled.  “Vertebrae?”  I was in no mood to be proved wrong.

“Just come here.”  He switched to the ball and socket.

I got up and went to stand beside him.  And right there in Aamaa’s humeral head was a clean outline of the sun with a smooth bite out of the upper left-hand corner.

For the last twenty minutes of the solar eclipse, as the bite of shadow moved eastward and the sun became whole again, Bishnu and Bhinaju and I leaned together, small people, holding the x-ray over our heads and squinting.  We exclaimed and pointed and cried to each other: “The x-ray!  The x-ray!  It was here the entire time!  If we’d had it on the hill, what would we have seen?  What??”

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Aamaa, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

A Story

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Back in Kathmandu, Tom and Jerry ends, and we turn off the television.  We eat our rice.  I mush the grains between my fingers but resist the temptation to try to give the meal special attention.  You can’t grasp a thing at the last minute if you weren’t paying attention along the way.

I repack my bags, and don’t get in bed till after midnight.  With the heat and mosquitoes it’s a long time before I fall asleep.  I toss and turn, thinking about watching Bishnu and Bhinaju get in the bus back to Pokhara, and about the strange idea of being even farther away than I am now.  It seems like, for the rest of my life, I will keep getting farther and farther away.  Which is strange because, even from Kathmandu, in a big bedroom where I can hear Nepali music videos playing on TV, Kaskikot feels like a memory, a separate universe where I once was.  I was there only a few days ago.

You know, it never has been missing it that I dread, or the thought of loneliness that fills me with worry.  It’s the shift from real to remembered, from substance to recall; it’s that the absence has no bulk when you get far enough away, and that life goes on and—even if you can remember to miss it, it’s so disconnected, so unreal, that it’s mostly just a story.  And what of the part of you that has become the story, the skin that has touched this world and walked on it and dug fingernails into its mud?  When all of it is farther away than the moon—which at least your eyeballs can see at night—is that part of you just a story, too, that only exists to the extent that you still believe you were there?

Wouldn’t that be something, if after all this, all I could bring home with me was a story.

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