Last night at 11:30 pm, Prem’s mother passed away.
Aidan and Pascal stayed over at my apartment, and in the morning we went to their uncle’s house for the funeral. When we arrived, everything was still new. Aamaa was still upstairs where she had been alive yesterday evening. Besides our Aamaa, the only other person in Nepal I call simply “Aamaa,” instead of “small mother” or “big mother” or some other aunt-related mother-qualifier, is Prem’s mother. She spent most of last summer with us at Didi and Prem’s, sitting quietly cross-legged on the bed, head bowed forward over her ankles, while the kids dangerously hammered a football against the indoor wall of the house, screeching with delight. Many evenings I would come sit next to her, even if there wasn’t much to talk about, to make sure she was part of the fun. Aamaa has been frail for many years now, and often her whole day was spent in near-stillness. Sometimes on those summer evenings I would rub her back, to make movement. At first she’d simply sit while I made circles over her ribs. And then she’d say udo, udo – a little up, a little over. And then she’d say, esari, and lift up her cholo above her shoulder blades, and I’d run my hands back and forth over her papery skin, the half moon of her spine bowed toward the floor like a stone path.
At Narayan’s house, Prem pulled a sheer red sari back from his mother’s face and I passed a spoonful of scented water between her parted lips.
As the yard began to fill with callers, Aamaa was moved downstairs and laid on the porch. Her body was wrapped in sheets and covered in garlands, and as they arrived, her adult children and their spouses leaned over her and let out piercing cries. Prem and his brothers shaved their heads, pouring water from brass vases, shivering in the cold. I was transfixed by the first pale stripe of scalp that appeared, like a gash between walls of black hair, which too fell away and curled bodiless and foreign on the ground. A bamboo gurney was prepared in the yard, and Prem’s mother was lifted on to it, her tiny body barely wider than the edges of the narrow stretcher.
We walked four kilometers, along a length of the lake, and then through the bazaar, where a trailing white sheet pinned to wooden poles announced our procession and was swallowed close behind by vehicles and diesel swirling around our knees. Death in the middle of the mundane. An entire lifetime borne on her sons shoulders through the bus stop, where vendors were selling oranges.
Pascal had gone home to help Didi pack her things. Didi and Prem will sit kriya for thirteen days back in his home village of Piodi, where Aamaa raised her six children. Pascal would have wanted to walk in the procession at his father’s side, but he was more urgently needed to help Didi prepare for the ritual mourning period. Pascal is our serious boy, a mercurial, old soul, and I felt the sting of his loss at not being able to accompany his grandmother to her last. Bethy and I followed behind Prem and Aidan and his cousins, Suman and Nalin, all roughly 12 years old, all steps behind manhood. One becomes finally a Brahmin son, in some ways, when performing the death rights for his parents.
Although I’ve been present for the preparation of the funeral procession a handful of times over the years in Kaskikot, I’ve never followed it from house to river before, and I hadn’t realized that it is customary to jog. When I stop to drop off my backpack at a shop I frequent on the corner, where I can ask the proprietor to hold my things until I get back, we are quickly left behind, and we have to sprint to catch up.
Once the pyre is lit, Prem will not touch anyone for thirteen days. But now, as we make our way toward the banks of the Gandaki River, Aidan is close by his father’s side, watching as men in the family take turns carrying his grandmother, their shoes pounding the asphalt. His cousin Suman is a sensitive, perceptive boy, who wept as his grandmother was lifted from his own father’s home to begin her final worldly journey in this lifetime. But Aidan is as shimmery and light as ever, energized by all the activity and people and the cousins he so loves to play with for endless, exuberant hours.
Then: “I want to try,” Aidan says suddenly.
The running stops for just a beat. Carefully, the back of the gurney is lowered on to Aidan’s still-childlike bony shoulders. Instantly and without discussion, Suman has taken up the front. Their fathers and uncles stand around them, and my gaze captures this sudden and fleeting coming of age. The two boys struggle slightly under the weight of their grandmother’s body, but the whole rest of the world has fallen away as their only focus becomes carrying her home. After only a few meters of progress, the gurney is handed back, and Aidan is a boy again.
At the banks of the Gandaki, an enormous furnace has been recently built to provide a more efficient and eco-friendly form of cremation than the traditional funeral pyre. All of Aamaa’s jewelry is removed – the gold rings through her earlobes, the bangles around her tiny wrists, which cut in to flesh slightly, producing no blood. She is covered one final time, and Prem and his brothers circle her with copper vases and pour water around her. Then she is lifted in to the furnace, and the door is closed.
Now the thirteen days of kriya begin.
Aamaa, you birthed eight babies and never got to raise two of them. Your 20 grandchildren held each other today as you were carried away to the river under garlands, and your grandsons lifted you beside their fathers.
Bishnu had baby Dali six weeks early, on August 2nd. We got the news while we were all finishing dinner at Didi and Prem’s. On the English calendar, Pascal’s birthday is a day earlier, on August 1st, but by a twist of the planets, on the lunar Nepali calendar Pascal and his cousin share a birthday of Saun 17. This convention-defying-cross-cultural-intercontinental-astrologically-phenomenal-birthday-coincidence —a shared birthday in Nepal, but not in America—has us thrilled. We texted Bishnu and Youba and Dali a Welcome to the World picture, marveling over a coincidence, fourteen years plus eternity in the making, that has initiated our Dali’s life.
Dali’s name is actually: Serena Subedi Bhatta.
Aamaa is coming back with me to the US to meet her granddaughter, an American citizen. We’ll fly directly to San Francisco, but we can’t leave Nepal until after summer professional development the last week of August. So we’ve passed the weeks talking with Bishnu on the phone, and each Friday I download new photos and ferry them to Kaski where Aamaa and Hadjur Aamaa and the neighbors pore over them. Aamaa’s favorite is the one with Youba holding Serena just minutes after her entrance in to the world, shiny and swaddled. Aamaa likes to pull this one up on my iPad and zoom in and stare at it for ten, fifteen minutes at a time.
“It’s like, the longer you look at it,” she says, “the more you want to look at it. You can just look at it and look at it.”
Bishnu had a difficult and sometimes unnerving pregnancy. Serena was born six weeks early, at 3.9 lbs, less than 2 kilograms of sugar, I told Aamaa. She spent a month in the NICU. Bishnu wouldn’t bring any baby shower gifts home until it was almost time for the baby to leave the NICU and join her there. I’ve found myself thinking back to the day fifteen years ago when I stood outside Gandaki Hospital with Didi, right after she wasn’t able to see a doctor at what was supposed to be her last prenatal checkup, when we ate cel roi at a roadside stand. A week later Didi’s first child was stillborn at full term.
For a long time after I moved to Kaskikot, I didn’t know that Aamaa had little a sister. One day Aamaa was reclined on the bed, lying sideways with her head on her arm and an elbow pointed out at me, when she mentioned that her sister had died in childbirth, along with the child.
“Wait,” Didi said the other day, her eyes widening when I told her about Bishnu’s baby shower. “People her gave her baby presents before the baby was born?”
The day of our departure for America gets closer. We are scheduled to fly out on Teej, the festival of women. In the strange way that our lives here seem to cycle back like knitting stitches, it was Teej when I arrived in Kaskikot in August, 2003. I had stayed in Kaski for two months, gone back to New York, worked as a waitress, and then called six months later to say I was coming back to Kaskikot. I arrived under the hot gaze of summer and found Didi and Bishnu dancing in Maula, where the whole village was gathered for the festival of women. Didi was newly married to Prem, and I realized she was pregnant. And that is how our year together began, with dancing.
Our summer is a theater of rains, curtain after curtain, a production that will eventually deliver the harvest. By then we will be in America. Teej begins from Sept 1, when Aamaa and I will leave Kaskikot, and goes to September 2, when we’ll fly out of Kathmandu. It’s funny how people attempt to impose order over the unknown when they are about to embark on a long journey. I like to leave my living space robotically clean and organized, and I will compulsively sift through 5-month old stacks of mail and fix wobbled stools that have been committedly ignored for months. Aamaa’s strategy appears to be getting fixated on the cucumbers. They are ripe and fat on the the vines around the house.
“Laura,” Aamaa says, “we’ll bring cucumbers to Tulo Mama in Kathmandu.” The breed of cucumbers Aamaa grows in Nepal isn’t like little American cucumbers. They can grow to a foot or two long, and the circumference of a coffee can.
“We’re going to bring cucumbers to Kathmandu with our luggage for America?” I ask. Tulo mama is our Aamaa’s eldest brother, our ‘big uncle.’
“…Is it allowed?” Aamaa asks a bit sheepishly.
“Sure, cucumbers are allowed.” I realize this is happening no matter what. “Let’s definitely bring cucumbers to Kathamandu.”
Aamaa has just a few outfits to take to America, but food items are another story. Provisions are sorted over the entire month of August. We pick all the ripe cobs off the corn stalks, roast some in the fire for snacks, give some away, and hang the rest all over the house to dry by winter. Last time we left for America, we also cut down the empty corn stalks, leaving only the milletto ripen by late fall. But this time Aamaa skipped planting millet altogether, and she said we’re not going to cut the empty corn stalks down because they will dry out on their own. I keep surveying the gardens and feeling that the tall scraggly corn stalks are going to look a bit like an army of tuxedos at a beach party by October, when everyone else’s fields are left only with slender waist-high millet and rice plants. But that’s her plan and she’s Aamaa, so we leave them be. The house remains hemmed in by walls of stripped corn stalks.
A sack of rice is sent to Didi in Pokhara. Periodically we revisit the cucumber question.
“We’ll take a large stash of cucumbers to Didi, and a smaller bag for Tulo Mama in Kathmandu,” Aamaa revises.
“Ok.”
“It’s allowed right? To take cucumbers to Kathmandu?”
“This will be my first go at taking a bag of cucumbers to Kathmandu, but I think it’s allowed.”
“Just a small bag.”
“Ok,” I assure her.
One evening Aamaa ponders: “How will we get to Pokhara when we leave here on Teej? Because, see we’ll have luggage and we need to bring the big sack of cucumbers to Didi.”
“We’ll call Hari Bhaai in Caragaun and go in his taxi.”
“Will it fit all the cucumbers?”
“Um….” I search for the right answer. How many cucumbers are we talking about? I decide to gamble. “Yes. Hari bhai’s taxi will definitely fit the cucumbers.”
In addition to a little baby outfit, I want to bring something special to San Francisco for Bishnu’s little Dali, who’s acquired about twenty times her bodyweight in baby clothes during her short life so far. I make a plan. Pascal comes with me on the expedition.
We spend Saturday afternoon hiking up the Kalika Hill, and I film him leading the way, finding berries and hidden water springs, waving a stick of bamboo around at the skyline and narrating our journey until we reach the Kalika Temple. We ring the large bells at Kali’s door; the clanging and echoes out over the trees, the familiar houses below, over the valley. I pan my camera over sheets of rain that have blanketed the foothills, and frozen into a bruised mist on the north and south horizons. We search over the laid stones of the Temple ground and choose a rock that Pascal holds in front of my camera, little chips of flint gleaming under a stormy and imminent sky. I will bring it to a silversmith and have it made in to a necklace. Our descent is fast under gathering clouds, sandals pounding and tapping over the brambles.
As the summer draws to a close, relatives stop by to bid Aamaa a safe journey. Aamaa sends them off with cucumbers or ears of corn. A few days before the buffalo calf is due, some men from Parapani come to purchase pregnant Isabella, who nobody calls Isabella except for weirdo foreigners like me and Ann. Aamaa has cared for Bella during her whole pregnancy, cutting her grass and watering her and keeping her living quarters clean. I am grumpy that Bella will be taken just before having her baby and providing us a week of delicious milk. But four days later, we find out that Bella’s calf was born dead. The buyers withhold $40 of the remaining amount they still owe to Aamaa.
Aamaa is sad about Bella. All that work for nothing. “What’s wrong with her?” she asks nobody. We won’t know now. We are quiet over Bella’s loss for a few mornings.
“We don’t need to bring any cucumbers to Kathmandu,” Aamaa updates me later. “Tulo Mama has to leave for Nepalgang before we get there.”
I’m disappointed; I was excited to see Tulo Mama. He is the oldest of Aamaa’s three younger brothers and the one who dotes on her. But he lives in the far West and even though he always asks to talk with me on the phone when he calls, in seventeen years I’ve only met him in person twice.
The last two weeks of August I don’t get up to Kaskikot, because we are completely consumed with our summer professional development training. I take Dali’s rock to a jeweler and search through gems before finally pairing it with a fiery pink ruby. The week ends on a breathless and exhausted August 30th, Friday afternoon. Bethy helps me pack up my room all in one go, throwing things in to bags over just a couple hours, cleaning the kitchen, ferrying items between the office and my apartment. By the time we get in to a taxi to go up to Kaski it is 8:30 at night, and we arrive at 9:30 to find Aamaa sitting in the house surrounded by friends. Swirled up in their saris and shawls, Saano didi and Parbati Bouju and Mahendra’s older sister are there, and an aunt has come to visit – Aamaa’s sister in law, who would have grown up right here with these women and her brother, Aamaa’s husband. The old friends are sitting on stools in the old main room of our house, by the kitchen, where I have fallen asleep to the chatter of so many women. As we organize our things in the outer room, a wave of gratitude rolls over me, carried on the familiar soothing sound of their muffled voices on the other side of the wall.
“Tulo Mama delayed his travel so he could meet us in Kathmandu,” Aamaa revises when Bethy and I take up seats on a bed. “So, we can bring him cucumbers.”
“Great.”
“Tomorrow we have to pack the cucumbers in a sack.”
“Right.” I reply. “I am ready for cucumber packing.”
Night brings brings a steady rain that clangs on the roof long in to a lazy Saturday morning. It bathes everything, washes away the work week, the summer, the soil around curling roots that are retreating beneath our feet as we prepare to walk away from this village and into another world. It rains as we get up for our last day in Kaski, as we have our black tea, as a man and woman I don’t know arrive and sit on the porch and begin talking with Aamaa.
Bethy and I are ready to spend Saturday helping Aamaa pack up the house—but it is unclear what this involves. Before I can identify a plan of action, Aamaa has disappeared with one of the morning’s visitors and they’ve returned with armfuls of voluptuous cucumbers. The cucumbers, each a foot or two long, are dumped in a pile in the middle of the yard, slick with rain, and the two women disappear again. Then neighbors start showing up – Saraswoti, Saano didi, BAA! – all with more rainy cucumbers. It turns out the visitors are vendors from Pokhara, come to purchase cucumber stock. Aamaa’s yard is transformed into a cucumber staging area. It takes an hour to pick the rest of our cucumbers and combine them with cucumbers from contributing neighbors. The female vendor sorts them in to excellent and sub-excellent status cucumber piles while the male vendor chats with Bethy about countries he’s traveled to. When the yard is fully covered in piles of cucumbers, an amazing ghetto-fabulous hand scale is brought out, made of two plastic tubs hanging on a hand-held balance. Aamaa produces a collection of rocks.
“Wait a second,” the vendor says cautiously.
“This rock is one kilogram,” Aamaa announces, picking up a black, smooth river stone. “And this one is a half kilograms if you combine it with this other little one.”
The vendor tries out the rocks in different combinations, weighing them against each other.
“Huh,” she says. “Well there you have it.”
Weighing and calculating against river stones commences on the ghetto fabulous plastic tub scale. Some 100 kg of cucumbers are weighed and sold. Aamaa makes about $15.
“Now,” Aamaa says to me shortly thereafter, “we still have to pack up the cucumbers for Didi and Tulo Mama.”
“Yep.”
“The big sack of cucumbers is for—“
“I think I’ve got it.”
The afternoon passes. The evening arrives. The cucumbers are packed in to a large sack for Didi and a handbag for Tulo Mama. Dinner comes and goes. We have taken the cases off all the blankets and put them in the only dresser in the house. The floor has been repainted with a smooth layer of clay. Aamaa’s single bag sits in the window. Our last night falls.
I slip out of the house to brush my teeth, and there is Kali rising above the empty uncut corn stalks, a wide triangle of hillside, holding the village in her lap. The damp summer air has cloaked away all but her gray glow in the night sky, revealing only a broad a density etched into meager starlight. I stand facing her familiar outlines, and feel suddenly, like a darkening storm, the women who have come through this house and have sat by this fire and grieved by its ashes and made nourishment over its flames. The inexplicable, inevitable certainty of the four of us draped over the blankets after sunset, while she presides over us, immutable divine feminine, creating again and again from dust.
Watch over us, I find myself asking.
I see us in my mind, walking out to the road. I see our hands holding Serena in San Francisco. I see us moving from place to place, but with a sudden and forceful clarity understand we are tied together here, under her gaze, where we have always been.
Stay with us.
It is time to go to bed.
The next morning neighbors trickle in to see us off to America. BAA! arrives, and then goes home again to retrieve tikka powder to put on our foreheads. Aamaa still can’t stop talking about the cucumbers. After Saano didi’s husband has taken the large sack of the cucumbers out to Deurali where Hari Bhai will pick us up in his taxi, there are still cucumbers lying about and we’re not sure who they are for. I end up with three of them in my bag and we eventually remember these were gifts for my office.
Today is the beginning of Teej. In a few hours when we are in Pokhara, we’ll see off Prem’s cousins who will come to take his porcelain, wrinkled mother back to Piodi, her snow white hair tilted forward as she is carried away piggy-back down to the road, so she can celebrate the Festival of Women at home in her village.
But now we are waving through the taxi window, and driving down, down, down the switchbacks while our house disappears behind us. The driver and Aamaa make small talk over the weather.
“All this dry hot summer, and the last two days, nothing but rain,” Aamaa remarks.
“Didi bahini rhuera hola,” the driver replies, talking about Teej. “Maybe it’s the tears of our sisters.”
“Maybe,” Aamaa answers offhandedly. The hills roll by. “It could be.”’
This week, my cousins Lynne and Neil came to visit from Chicago. We usually see each other once a year at a family holiday gathering in December that Lynne and Neil have been hosting since I was in college, when they took the job over from my Aunt Peggy. Our Spero family reunion is usually about three days of of extended family bonding in Chicago: walking the dogs by Lake Michigan, making our grandmother Gaky’s icebox cake, spending lazy afternoons sitting around while the Bulls play on TV, and long evenings talking in the kitchen until one in the morning. We’ve been having the annual family reunion in Chicago our whole lives.
But when Lynne and Neil said they were coming to Nepal, I was thrilled by the idea of getting to have my cousins see me in my natural habitat. In the wild.
They arrived on a Friday afternoon just as we were finishing up at the office. It was a bit surreal to see them transplanted from the suburbs, sidling up the walkway past Maya didi’s garden, and then sitting in our common room. They unloaded a collection of toys and books to keep under the coffee table (between the small people attached Sangita, Muna and me, we are badly in need of some kid-friendly distractions for workdays when school is off). They produced a jar of Nutella and then five gourmet chocolate bars which I immediately transferred to a secure location.
Then Neil pulled out a pair of oversized plastic glasses. “So, while we’re here, I need some photos of people wearing these glasses,” he said.
“I see,” I replied.
Next thing I knew, Neil and Lynne were excitedly talking over each other about this guy Harry Caray, who apparently I didn’t know about only because I live in a village in Nepal. Harry Caray is a superfamous Major League sportscaster for the Cardinals and the Cubs whose statue is erected at Wrigley Field, and every year on his birthday, fans celebrate – mostly be honoring the way Harry Caray liked his booze and sang drunk tunes off key and, furthermore, my cousins explained breathlessly talking very fast almost at the same time but somehow not directly over each other while our medical coordinator Rajendra tried to figure out what to do with the slinky on the coffee table, furthermore, Harry Caray had a mysterious connection to Nepal, for example (Neil pulled out his phone and began reading), he was the first major league sportscaster to say “Holy Cow” on air and in Nepal cows are LITERALLY HOLY.
“I don’t really understand how this slinky works,” Rajendra puzzled.
“Hang on, we have to take it outside to the stairs,” I said.
“–AND THIS MONTH IS HARRY CARAY’S BIRTHDAY, AND–”
“–PICTURES ARE BEING SHARED ALL OVER THE INTERNET–”
“–THE CUBS WON 108 YEARS AFTER THEIR LAST WORLD SERIES AND 18 YEARS AFTER HARRY CARAY DIED AND IN HINDUISM 18 IS A LUCKY NUMBER AND–”
“–SO WE HAVE TO TAKE PICTURES OF PEOPLE WITH THESE GLASSES–”
“–IN KASKIKOT, AND IN AMAZING MOUNTAIN PLACES IN NEPAL–”
“–LORD KRISHNA DIED ON FEBRUARY 18 AND HARRY CARAY DIED ON FEBRUARY 18–”
“–HOLY COW!–”
“–AND ALSO OMGOSH ALSO–”
–Neil produced a handful of full-size face cutouts of Harry Caray, who’s head then began bouncing around excitedly as my cousins completed their explanation.
“–AND WE HAVE TO SEND THE PHOTOS TO OUR FRIEND GRANT DEPORTER–”
“–AND HE’S GOING TO SHARE THE PHOTOS ON THE INTERNET WITH EVERYBODY FOR HARRY CARAY’S BIRTHDAY!!!!!”
“Rajendra, don’t tangle the slinky, or it will be ruined before we can do anything with it,” I said. Harry Caray’s shock of white hair and full-toothed smile sat perched on Neil’s hand, waiting.
“Ok, got it. Big glasses. White guy cutout. Take photos with mountains. I think we can make this happen fairly easily…all the components seem to be available.”
Then we moved on to the business of introducing the cousins to my natural habitat. We packed up a some snacks and wine, picked up Aidan and Pascal and Didi, and spent the afternoon on a paddle boat and visiting the Barahi Temple. The next day we had planned to take the jungle path up to Kaskikot and hang around carrying and chopping things and getting astrology readings all day. But at the last minute, Aamaa called to tell me that we absolutely had to change our plan.
“There’s a family picnic,” Aamaa said. “Everyone will be there. Like literally everybody in the whole universe. Two or three thousand people.” Ok that’s an exaggeration, except for the two or three thousand people part. That’s actually what Aamaa said.
“So it’s like a family reunion?”
“It is going to be so much fun,” Aamaa cooed. The picnic would include descendants of five brothers – The Grandfathers. One of The Grandfathers is Didi and Bishnu’s grandfather. That Grandfather alone had nine children, of which Aamaa’s husband was the youngest. So my point is, it’s a very enormous family.
“Don’t you think Lynne and Neil might be bored?”
“Who would be bored?!” Aamaa cried. “There will be two or three thousand people!”
“Do you want to go to a family reunion?” I asked Lynne and Neil. Having a picnic with the descendants of The Grandfathers would mean compressing our schedule in Kaskikot a little.
“Basically what it comes down to,” said Lynne, “is that a family reunion is always a thing to go to.”
We met Didi and Prem and Aidan and Pascal at Hollan Chowk at 8:30am to wait for a family reunion bus. (Neil and Aidan, who turn out to be roughly the same age, commenced exchanging shoes.) One of the buses started in Kaskikot and Aamaa called with updates of its progress as it rambled down through the hills and wound through the valley, picking up uncles and cousins and great-aunts at Milan Chowk and Simpani and Harichowk and Vindivasini.
The Family Bus arrived and drove right past us at Hollan Chowk. Pascal took off down the road with all his limbs waving, the rest of us jogging along behind him and dodging tourists out for their morning coffee in Lakeside. Luckily, due to Pascal’s dedicated flailing, family bus huffed to a stop and we climbed aboard.
Lynne and I squeezed in to the back row of seats with Didi, Prem and the boys, while Neil sat up front and got in to a conversation with our first cousin Ram Chandra Dai. This struck me as extremely entertaining: my first cousin Neil from Chicago, shooting the shit with my adopted first cousin Ram Chandra Dai, on a bus driving out to a family reunion in Chisapani. We ambled on past the edge of Phewa Lake and into the valley along the southern edge of the Kaskikot hills. The cut wheat fields yawned dry and dusty in to the distance.
After about an hour and a half, we arrived to find a shade tarp and plastic chairs set up in the hillside. Music thumped over a speaker. We set our things down and people starting flocking over to welcome us, grabbing my hands. “Laura! Isn’t this wonderful! A family picnic! Everybody is here!” Many were neighbors and longtime friends in colleagues in Kaskikot – Butu Bouju, Bhim sir and Krishna sir and Indra sir, Maile Bouju – whom I’d never really had the chance to mentally arrange as family relations.
Of course in Nepali culture people aren’t called by names, but by a relationship like Didi so I didn’t know almost anybody’s name. But it made introducing Lynne and Neil exceptionally easy.
“My Didi and Bhinaju are here from America!” I’d say.
“Oh, Didi and Bhinaju!” the thousands of relatives (who probably numbered about 200) would reply. After explaining a few times that Lynne was a cousin on my dad’s side, I learned to introduce her as my “banja-didi,” which literally means my father’s-older-sister’s-daughter. As my Banja-didi and Bhinaju, Lynne and Neil were instantly organized in to their places at the family reunion and that was that.
Cousins: Lynne and Neil with Ram Chandra Dai and Aamaa
As we wandered about the grounds, I motioned over to where a goat’s head was being prepared.
Banja-didi and Bhinaju looked alarmed.
“Most likely they brought the goat here this morning and slaughtered it nearby,” I offered. It bears mentioning that I’m the near-vegetarian in the group, but Lynne and Neil took this news hard.
Soon we were scattered about the field, seated on the plastic chairs and chatting over breakfast. I kept being worried that my cousins would get bored. I went and found Lynne.
“How’s it going?”
“Pretty good!” She pointed to Neil.
I’m going to say it was only minutes before Neil had people passing around the oversized glasses and Harry Caray’s head was bobbing up and down around the plates of chickpeas. And that’s how this happened
“Time for the program, time for the program!” somebody announced. We were all summoned to the foot of an empty garden terrace that was to act as a stage.
I didn’t really know what to expect. Our family is very musical and our reunion always includes an ad-hoc music concert in Lynne and Neil’s living room. Uncle Gus plays a spoof he wrote called the Russian Number. The younger kids plunk out notes on whatever instrument they’re learning. For about a million years, my brother had to sing Mr. Grinch in his booming base that would later anchor his college a capella group. Our cousin Greg, who is an actual rock star and jazz composer who played keyboard for Halsey, eventually takes over from the amateurs and the evening dissolves in to a combination of improv and mulled wine and Christmas music played in Jewish minor keys.
“First up, Grandfather Number One!”
A collection of relatives shuffled up on to the barren garden. I realized what was about to happen. The patriarch of Grandfather Number One’s branch of the family introduced the entirety of Grandfather Number One’s descendants to the rest of us. Photos were taken. Discussion was had. I understood what we were doing.
“This is brilliant,” I thought, as each branch of the family was called up and a senior member meticulously mapped out its relational geography. We were here to keep the books organized: to name the membership, introduce new additions, and have a long, solemn moment of silence for those no longer here, like Bishnu and Didi’s dad–Grandfather Number Four’s youngest son, born to his second wife.
It came time for our branch of the family. I dragged Lynne and Neil up with us on to the garden stage, where we stood packed in near Didi and Aamaa before the crowd. Ram Chandra Dai began an accounting of each of Grandfather Number Four’s offspring. Eventually he came to Aamaa and Didi and Bishnu (“who is living in America”), and then, to me.
“And of course Laura, Aamaa’s middle daughter. We take Laura in the family just as Bishnu and Malika. And today Laura’s Didi and Bhinaju are here from America.”
I poked Lynne and Neil and they waved, so that it would be obvious which were the three American people at the family reunion in Chisapani.
Neil looked expectant and hopeful like a puppy with a chewed up ball. I leaned forward and stood up on my toes, which made me three times the height of everyone else on stage.
“Um, thank you everybody,” I said to the crowd. “And, um, there’s just one thing I’d like to do. See, Bhinaju here, it’s his friend’s birthday. And his friend wears these glasses, and his name is Hari.” Hari is a very common Nepali name so this seemed like the simplest path to internet fame. “And Hari really liked Nepal. So, um, we’d like to have a family picture of people wearing these glasses and holding Hari’s picture and saying happy birthday to him.”
We passed out the glasses and Neil ran down in to the crowd, where he stretched his arms out over the descendants of the other four Grandfathers and snapped pictures on his phone, while we waved Harry Caray’s head around and cried “Hari! Hari!”
Man, I thought, I can’t believe anyone listens to the manic things that I say. This is actually working. Lynne and Neil looked ecstatic.
Then someone tapped my shoulder.
“We should be saying Hari Prasad,” she told me matter-of-factly. The oversized glasses and random photos of the white guy didn’t seem to faze her at all.
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s our Grandfather’s name,” she said, “Hari Prasad Subedi.” Then she rejoined the chant. “HARI!HARI!‘
It used to be that, in the winter, we’d sometimes get up at four AM to fetch water. When the tap nearby in Deurali would dry out due to the dry weather, or the tenuously protected pipe sourcing it would breaksomewhere along its many kilometers between Dhampus and Kaskikot, we’d have to go further downhill to the natural spring in Rotepani.
Deurali
In the summer, Rotepani was so rich with water that people filled their tin water jugs freely under gushing, splashing geysers while others bathed and did laundry and on the surrounding rocks, submerged up to the knees, cooled in the August heat. But in the dry season, sometimes even Rotepani would slow to a trickle from two out of three pipes that protruded from a cemented tap. The gushing natural spring that pours directly over the rocks would evaporate. Sometimes the line for water took half the day.
During those times, Saano didi and Neru would wake up before dawn and come up the path to our house. Aamaa and I, and Bishnu while she was still here, would join them with baskets slung from our heads and loaded with every jug and bottle in the house. We’d pick up Maya Bouju as we passed her house and walk single file along the edge of Gita Bouju’s wheat field. With the hills still shadowy along the southern horizon we’d cross the dirt motor road, make our way down a steep stone walking path to arrive at Rotepani in the dark, and help each other fill all the containers trickle by trickle. Then we’d walk back up the hill, pour the water in to slightly larger vessels in each of our homes, and turn around to do it again. Each trip took about 45 minutes, and we’d make three or four visits before the sky stretched open its arms to deliver another morning.
There have been times when water takes up the majority focus of attention in the household functioning. When pipes break in Deurali, when the weather is dry, when the buffalo is ill, when there many guests, or when there are very few residents to share labor; all of these lead to an immediate and exacting calculation of how much water is in the house, how long it will last, and what amount of physical labor is required to replenish it. Sometimes it’s one person’s job to ferry water for hours at a time. When I’m here, I tend to gravitate toward the water carrying—a fairly straightforward, essential, and never-finished chore.
Over the last year or so, recent changes in the government have led to mumblings about piping water to the yard of each individual home. In sixteen years, I’ve seen many changes come through Kaskikot…new two-story cinderblock houses, paved road, the occasional wifi connection, a completely transformed economy from subsistence to remmittance. Cellphones, Facebook, TVs, hotels, cars. Many of the houses around us in Kaskikot have already rigged up pipes that they can attach to the Deurali tap when it’s not in use, offering a continuous stream of water that passively fills an enormous polypropylene tank in the yard. But water still lords great power over us.
In our case, we’ve had a tank for years, but like the enclave of about four houses near us—including Saano Didi’s and Mahendra’s houses—we still have to carry water to it, the regular way. Our water situation remains basically unchanged. We still take baskets five minutes up the road to fetch our water from the tap in Deurali. When Deurali is dry, we still go to Rotepani, 15 minutes away. On occasion, when Rotepani is too busy or the flow of water is almost dried out, we walk winding footpaths half an hour down to the fields in Dadapari and use a cup to lift water from a natural pool under the rocks. A few times, I’ve accompanied Aamaa to do a household of laundry on flat stones there.
Aamaa, of course, is sixty-two and lives alone most of the time. So by “we,” I mean Aamaa.
Last summer as I was leaving in August, somebody rigged up a pipe that had been brought from Deurali up to the crest of the ridge by our house. Its mouth wasn’t in our yard, but it was only a up on the ridge, about seventy-five yards away instead of all the way in Deurali. The day I was leaving for the U.S. was the same morning that this new pipe was first hooked up, and all our closest neighbors clamored about filling buckets and oil gallons and jugs while Mahendra’s father presided over the fray. Whenever the pipe was unattended, it sprayed wild streams of water that swirled into muddy rivulets, spilling down the side of the hill and into Khemraj sir’s corn field. Little Narayan and Amrit were ecstatic with the newfound responsibility of presiding over a line of eager adults and aiming the unruly three-headed pipe head as it washed dirt off the footpath and over the terrace.
When I arrived back this week in January, I discovered this setup slightly relocated but similarly conceived. With water more spare in the winter, each household has been assigned to use the pipe on alternating days. Today was our assigned day; Aamaa began fretting about it last night. I assured her that I would take water duties in the morning, which is pretty straightforward, but the problem is that for reasons I couldn’t determine, Aamaa wanted to get cracking at dawn…and one thing that’s changed in the last ten years is that I am no longer so interested in proving something that I’m motivated to get up before dawn. I am happy to prove my value during daylight hours.
Lucky for both of us, for some reason the water didn’t become available this morning until 9am. Having slept until American hours and had my tea, I dutifully began the water retrieval process. Pascal helped me bring all the water jugs and bottles and even buckets up the hill, where we set them down beside Maya Bouju’s house to wait our turn.
Saraswoti was there of course, and Jivan’s young wife Bal Kumari, and Mahendra’s father. Everyone had brought literally any item in their house that could hold liquid. The issue–and the thing is, I’m American, I’m trained to spot potential matters of inefficiency and to fret about them–was that the pipe itself was barely producing a trickle. So filling the army of receptacles from our three households was a phenomenally lengthy task that quite literally involved watching water drip for long, yawning minutes. And minutes. And more minutes.
I squatted down next to my pals Saraswoti and Bal Kumari. They were perfectly happy with the distraction, the pace of the task, the opportunity to sit on a hill and chat or not chat and pick at blades of grass. I was like, “Yo you guys, it’s going to take me approximately one million years to fill all this stuff.” My gaze drifted to the footpath. Four minutes away was a perfectly functional, largely unmanned water tap.
I calculated that in the time it would take Saraswoti and Bal Kumari’s water jugs and buckets and bottles and gallons to fill in front of mine, I could easily take a jug to Derail, fill it, bring it home, and bring it back here for a second filling.
“Just wait, Laura, it won’t take too long,” Saraswoti assured me, despite the fact that this was plainly inaccurate advice.
“I’m just going to go…um, fill this jug and come back,” I said. I did. When I came back, my other six jugs and buckets and bottles were still waiting in line. Bal Kumari had left and Saraswoti was taking her turn.
“Have a seat, Laura,” Saraswoti said. I sat. Saraswoti and I watched the water drip lazily, its splashy pitch changing as the surface level crept up the inside of the tin jug. The winter mountains pierced the entire panorama of the northward sky, and to the south the hills were clear and fresh. When it was my turn, I filled our jugs, took them home, dumped them in to the tank, and began the whole process again.
Of course, Bal Kumari was back.
“Laura didi, it won’t take long,” she and Saraswoti assured me. Given that the water hadn’t become more abundant, this statement had also not become less untrue. I couldn’t take it. I took one jug off to Deurali, repeating the entire process as before.
As my trips accumulated, so did the various filled containers in the yard. The tank filled. Aamaa has recently installed a recycled oil barrel that comes to my chest; it was filled. At intervals, Pascal was reluctantly cajoled in to retrieving filled bottles and buckets from and dumping them out at home and returning them to our muddy hill. The tubs and emptied kerosene gallons were filled. Each time I thought I was done getting water, Aamaa would find another centimeter of space inside some container or another and make an entire four liter tin jug of water disappear in to it. I started to get annoyed, and then I started to giggle. The teapot, after all, was still empty.
I couldn’t help but think of when our only containers were two tin jugs, a leaky plastic box, and two small lotos. By comparison, there was now enough water in the house for all of us to bathe five times and do a midnight water puja under the moon. But Aamaa kept finding more spaces to add water and sending me back to the maddeningly dripping pipe by Maya Bouju’s house.
“Aamaa, I think–” I wanted to point out that the tap in Deurali was currently available daily. Why was I an indentured servant to the drippy pipe by Maya bouju’s house, today, just because it…existed?
“It’s so much closer,” Aamaa said. “If the tap dries up, I’ll be without water,” she explained. I found this both entirely logical and entirely illogical at the same time. It couldn’t be solved. It reminded me of the time that Bishnu and I had dozed off in the middle of the afternoon with Pascal lying between us when he was a baby, and we woke up to find the lights on in broad daylight amidst the ruthless load shedding schedule; Bishnu yawned groggily, “Hey when the electricity is available, we have to utilize it.” This immediately launched me in to fits of hysterical laughter for the next ten minutes and I would lose it every time I thought about it for years. Now, I also knew the only thing to do was keep getting more water from the pipe on this, our assigned day. The opportunity was not to be missed, irrespective of any broader analysis about overall benefit. And while I claim to have nothing left to prove in Kaskikot, let’s face it: where the rubber meets the road, I still have too much pride to throw in the towel early.
The only way out was to prove this labor was unwarranted.
“Aamaa, are you gonna take the cups out of the kitchen and have me fill them up too?!” I cried, half joking and half serious. Truthfully, I wanted to sit around and read. I resented this unreasonable purgatory, even though I not only signed up for it voluntarily, but also understood that it technically started and ended far away from the pipe by Maya Bouju’s house. I didn’t want Aamaa to have to haul water tomorrow or really ever. It just seemed to me, like, you know, we totally had lots of water.
Finally, when our entire yard was ringed with anything that could be turned in to a basin or pitcher, each brimming so high that the act of dipping a cup in it would spill a few steps worth of hauled water, I put the basket and rope down on the porch.
The buffalo honked lazily. It was mid-morning, and the day stretched bright and clear in front of us.
“They say,” Aamaa mused to nobody in particular, “that we’re each going to have our own water tap. I brought the pipe here already. But I’m not allowed to connect it up to the yard.”
It’s another newsletter repost, so please forgive me if you get both….
Dear Friends,
It is the first day after the solstice and the monsoon is is still trapped up in the clouds, pressing the heat heavy on to our heads. In a few weeks the sky will break and we will be deliciously soaked for weeks and weeks.
I arrived in Nepal a few days ago after graduating from my Master’s in Social Work this spring, and it is a pretty interesting point in time to be here. Over the course of the last year, the government of Nepal has gone through a major restructuring, with power being distributed from the central level out to newly-formed provinces.
We have a front-row seat to this transition: working with local level governmentsin rural areas. Our big goal is to impact policyand establish oral health services at the community level throughout the public health system in Nepal, so we are constantly getting new footing based on changes in Nepal’s ever-shifting government. The fiscal year ends in mid-july, so during this season our tiny staff of four is busy riding around on motorbikes and variously getting out to the villages we work in to meet with local leaders who are planning their health budgets for next year. The key mission of course is to make sure that funding gets allocated to sustain the dental clinics we’ve set up in rural government health posts.
The twist is that at the moment, with the entire Ministry of Health changing, all the rules are up in the air. Who is responsible for allocating funding from the federal to provincial governments? What are the budget headings? When will funds be provided to provincial governments? Will the District Public Health Office still exist in the second quarter of next year?
Nobody is entirely sure.
So anyway, that’s what we’ll be working on this summer.
From my side, today was the first day I arrived at our office in Pokhara, and we had a long jam session trying to predict how political forces in the country will affect health care in rural villages. Then it was time for the main show- heading home with some tennis rackets, DVDs, and a lot of candy. My first order of business was getting Aidan and Pascal to play tennis inside the house, because I can be relied upon to help with childcare, and then we went to play frisbee in the square and eat ice cream. We’ll go up to Kaskikot tomorrow.
It has to be said that as I re-enter beautiful country that has welcomed me as a daughter without asking any questions, the borders of the U.S. are heavy on my heart. As always, I casually purchased my visa upon arrival in the Kathmandu airport. At our office, everyone wanted to know what on earth is going on in America. The papers say that New York is receiving many stranded children, including in Harlem just a stone’s throw from where I lived and taught art in schools for many years. I find myself thinking about the years I have spent in Nepal, and how they began one afternoon when I arrived at two-room plastered mud home and Didi was standing by the sewing machine and I asked if I could move in to the house. The best spaces were cleared out for me. The tiny rice pot went from thirds to quarters. I could have been anywhere on the planet, I wasn’t running from anything, I had alI needed and nobody asked why I presumed to eat out of that little pot, which was filled with food that had been laboriously cultivated from the ground. I had nothing to offer except my curiosity.
It is particularly jarring to look back across the ocean at the news from here; in a way, the politics blur with distance. But the shame is crushing. This world is so very magical when its doors are open.
The summer has begun…stay tuned.
Laura, Aidan, Pascal, Didi, Prem, and the Jevaia Foundation Posse on Soon-to-be-muddy-bikes
I’ve just arrived in Nepal for our second research and training collaboration with students and faculty from Berkeley, UCSF and the University of Puthisastra in Cambodia. Last year, this was a blast, brought me amazing new friends, and created my first chances to present our work internationally in California, India and Cambodia. This year we have a big group of sixteen people descending in to our Pokhara valley to five overlapping projects over the course of a week.
Getting ready for this research collaboration is, and was last year, somewhat like putting on a Broadway show. In the office we currently have just three full time staff, and they are responsible for getting all of the necessary government permissions in place, mobilizing unofficial social leaders whose support we need in rural areas, recruiting hundreds of participants for focus groups and surveys, securing transportation to remote villages (the entire group fills two buses), organizing food in rural areas where we can only eat at people’s homes, and not least of all, coordinating with our nearly 20 field staff to make sure everyone shows up from their respective villages for a week. On top of that, we need to design and print 40 logoed shirts, get hundreds of survey printouts, and translate multiple documents between languages. Our amazing office team of Muna, Gaurab and Rajendra manage to steamroll through all of this while keeping our regular work afloat across ten villages.
My role is to keep the different project streams sorted and to bridge between our foreign visitors and the reality of the ground situation in Nepal. I have an excel file featuring no less than ten tabs, tracking everything from hotel rooms to project leaders and bios to budgets. This is because, let’s say we need to buy 40 printed sweatshirts. That seems simple (nope), except that we have people ranging in size from Soba, our Team Leader in Sindure who is about the volume of a pencil holder, to me at 5’8” and a dozen foreign students of various heights and widths. So figuring out what sizes to order and then finding someone who can give us such a large quantity of them and print them on time is an entire spreadsheet. Everything gets more hectic when you are multiplying gaps in planning by 40, dropping them in the gap between two languages, and adding in the overall entropy of the Nepal environment. Do you know what happens when you show up with three dozen people for a project at an empty community building at the top of a hill and you didn’t think to plan ahead how many chairs you might need there? Or, let’s just say you don’t have enough pens?
Chaos, my friends. Chaos happens.
Appreciate my spreadsheet
I will write about the different project streams of this year’s collaborations in upcoming posts. But they include focus groups, observations of schools and shopkeepers, a survey on maternal and child oral health and nutrition, an oral health status survey being conducted by a British student who has also joined us, and last but not least, an ENTIRE WEEK OF TECHNICIAN TRAINING which I am so excited about I can hardly handle it.
For now, here we are just after I arrived in the office yesterday. I sat down to debrief with the team and doled out Amercian candy and Race to the Rock tshirts. Within a short time, my two favorite creatures came busting through the door and started stuffing all of the office candy in to both their faces and their pockets. Before the performance begins this week, it was lovely to land here in our red-carpeted office and find this cheerful team, to listen and observe as they jammed about how hard they’ve worked to support each other with this complex preparation, and to see the pride they are taking in seeing things come together. It is a wonderful feeling to see our tiny but mighty team take on a cohesive identity as host to visitors, and I especially enjoyed the trill that these three were getting out of how much more they know about doing this than they did last year. We are all on a steep and exciting learning curve as we introduce the world to the efforts we’ve been making here over these years.
I’ve been here a week and by yesterday it was time to head to Kaski for the weekend. Pascal and Aidan have their exams this week, but I like taking one or both of them with me when I can. In Pokhara, there is too much sitting. When Didi and Bishnu where 9 and 11, they spent all their non-school hours working, carrying, cooking, washing, or studying by the little kerosene lamp. Aidan and Pascal should examine bugs and trip on roots while running over the terraced fields.
Pascal said he wanted to come along, so I told him to show up at 4:30 the room I’m renting this summer. He was here and ready at 4, and Aidan showed up a few minutes later. While I put my things together, they explored my little apartment, and I suggested they take the opportunity to try out the private shower with its shiny hot and cold faucets. The boys are used to bucket bathing. Pascal gave the shower a go (very refreshing, Laura-chiama), but Aidan ran out of time. The sky was gathering a storm and we had to get to the bus park.
We arrived just in time to cram ourselves in to the last Friday bus. The bus to kaski is always crowded and always an adventure, but Friday evenings are the worst. I found a spot up near the front of the bus with my back to the driver – I was sitting, so that’s a plus – and Aidan wiggled up on to my lap. The bus was packed well beyond capacity, every knee and elbow and hip bent to accommodate a body part belonging to somebody else, a situation made worse by the rain that had started. With all the windows closed it felt like oxygen was being consumed faster than it could be collected, and the window panes fogged up with body heat, leaving everything slick and heavy. Aidan was hot on my lap, and I wished I’d shoved him in to the shower. Then again, he was my only shield against the sea of limbs and sweaty brows, and at least his sweat is familiar. For a 5’8” American, I can pack myself in to a pretty small space in a crowded Nepali bus, but this ride was set to put my capabilities to the test.
Up we went. Switchbacks.
By the time I peeled Aidan off my lap in Kaski, dusk had settled soft and blue on the hills. We emerged outside into the cool wide air, suspenseful with pending rain, and ran through the corn stalks to the house (Laura-chiama, the corn is so much taller than you!). Aamaa put dinner on our plates, and sitting on the floor, we arranged our knees to fit in the narrow kitchen. The electricity went out. The very same kerosene lamp Didi and Bishnu studied by all those years (my single favorite object in the house) lit up the clay walls and the boys’ faces in the kitchen, where I feel happy.
Aidan and I are both partial to the new kitten, a bony sliver of a thing that always seems hungry and cold. Aidan likes to pet its fragile spine with two fingers, the only thing I’ve ever seen him do gently. Normally Aidan moves too fast, is covered in bruises, and breaks everything. But he feeds the kitten little bits of rice on the clay floor while we eat. When we get in bed, the kitten wants to cuddle with us and I let it nestle on to my shoulder while I read. It purrs in to my neck. Aidan is delighted, but Aamaa and Pascal are displeased. The cat is a feral beast with no business in a bed. It is here to eat mice. Poor little thing.
During the night, I wake up every time I have to roll over because I don’t want to smush the kitten. Aidan jabs his knee in to my back. Around 4am, the kitten poops exuberantly onto the blanket. I take the kitten and the blanket off the bed and go back to sleep.
I wake up my favorite way: gradually, lazily, inside the conical mosquito net drifting up to the ceiling, with rain pattering on the tin roof. Aidan is already gone out of bed. Saturday stretches out before us, a long summer meadow rustling and flowered.
Narayan with his other American gift
I come out on to the porch and Aamaa is serving milk tea. Milk tea! Aamaa sold the buffalo a few weeks ago and we are milk-less.Where did the milk come from? But Aamaa knows that I forget about black tea halfway through, and it gets cold sitting on the porch. Somehow this morning she is pouring creamy milk tea in to a tin cup and everything is perfect.
Narayan comes over from next door, and within a few minutes, Aidan has broken the toy I gave Narayan: a set of Velcro pads and a Velcro ball to play catch with. The boys set to fixing it. Aidan recruits some tape from someplace, I can’t imagine where, and Pascal has taken a sickle to a piece of bamboo. He is making a walking stick. They want to watch TV and Aamaa tells them that’s fine so I unplug the TV and hide the remote and tell Pascal to go wield a sharp object too close to his hands, like the rest of the kids.
I walk over to Govinda dai’s house for is sarad, the anniversary of his mother’s death. I get there just as the priest is arriving to start the puja, and he asks after how I am doing. The priest knows me partly because I stick out, and also from my project documenting death and mourning rituals. I have sat and listened to him and taken his photo and written about him and sought explanations from him often. The house fills with incense and stillness and an oil lamp is lit. Sulochana doesn’t want me to leave; she asks for some henna on her hands, and I’m surprised this is allowed on sarad, but Govinda’s father doesn’t seem to mind.
In the afternoon little Narayan takes a break from his exploits with Aidan and Pascal to bring me down to his mother’s fields where Aamaa is helping plant rice. I follow his tiny frame along the edges of the flooded rice paddies, and through the part of Kaskikot where the students I taught in 2003 are from. Their families know me as Laura-miss, and I spend less time in this area, so people might only see me every couple of years, but I sense a certain look of recognition when I pass somebody who knows me as the teacher of their kid. “Eh!! Laura, Laura right?” She is going to cut rice, they shake their heads, isn’t that delightful? Yes yes, it’s Laura. I have a weird life, I think, and it is pretty great. After all this time, it is still magical to be known on a wooded stone path winding down to the rice paddies.
We pass our neighbor Butu bouju. Laura! Did you have milk tea this morning? Aamaa wanted to pay for the milk, Butu bouju says, and I said no, Laura is here from America. Aidan and Pascal are visiting from Pokhara. They should have milk. How was the tea?
For three or four hours, Saraswoti and I stand shin-deep irrigated mud, planting one sprig at a time. The gleaming hills stretch out across the valley, monsoon humidity draped over their shoulders. The edge of my left leg will get burnt below the knee, where my rolled up trousers cease to shield skin against the hot sun. Mostly we work together in silence. Every once and a while Saraswoti looks over and murmurs, bhay chha Laura, bhay chha, it’s good. Or, Laura, how much does a plane ticket cost to get to America? I bet it is scary, being on a plane. I ask if Saraswoti has ever been on a plane, even though I know the answer. Does she think it would be scary? Probably, I think. It would be scary, I guess. Splash, plop. Bhay chha, Laura.
Last Saturday, I think, I was in Connecticut. I try to remember what I was doing…errands?
*
Downpour.
Starting around 4pm, we could barely hear ourselves for the rain pummeling the tin roof. Sulochana and Narayan were both over. I decided Aidan still needed a shower and began to goad him in to going out in the deluge. Narayan, who is even more of a spaz than Aidan, launched himself into the center of the patio with all of this clothes on and was immediately soaked. Aamaa began screeching at all of us. In this weather! Get inside! Everybody on the beds with the windows closed! Aidan changed in to shorts and came running on to the porch, alight with glee, while Aamaa scolded him loud enough to cut through the noise of the pounding water. There was a curtain of rivulets dripping off the corrugated tin all along the edge of the porch. Aidan stuck his hand out, stuck his toe out, and then finally
I dried Aidan off. See, Aamaa? Now he’s clean-ish.
Narayan spent the rest of the afternoon without his shirt on.
I lay down on the bed to read by the gray light of an open window, because we’d unplugged all the lights and turned off the electric sockets. Lightening has ended more than one life in this neighborhood; in Saano Didi’s family, it was inside the house.
Laura-chiama! Let us use the henna! Please please please….I allow Aidan, Narayan, and Sulochana to decorate my outstretched left arm with henna while I use my right arm to hold mybook on my chest. The three of them hover intently over their work by the light of the window, while the rain continues singing loudly over our heads. It tickles. Sulochana has been learning by watching me, and she makes a lovely flower in my palm. I take my eyes off my book and notice Aidan squeezing the tube of henna lusciously in to a pile of brown goo under the spot where he has scratched out my name below the elbow. Later, this will become a bearded LAURA hat looks like a large bruise. Oh well.
Aamaa and I debate all afternoon over the boys’ exams. They haven’t brought their books, she says, and they should have gone back to Pokhara today to study. Aamaa comes up with all kinds of nonsensical plans such as walking them to Naudanda an hour away to catch the bus. I say that if they want to get on the 3:30 bus from Kaski, we can send them off and Didi will meet them at the bus park. I say we are leaving at 7:30 am tomorrow morning on the first bus. Aamaa says they shoudl be reading now. I ask Pascal how old he is and he says almost twelve and I say, “Do you know you have an exam on Sunday?” and he says yes Laura-chiama! And I say, see Aamaa? They decided not to bring their books and that’s up to them. Aamaa says the bus could be cancelled tomorrow morning, and I say there could be a flood or alien space landing or invasion by Mongols, but generally speaking, the bus leaves Kaski every single morning at 7:30am.
It pours torrentially all night. Waterfalls, oceans, tidal waves coming from the sky, filling every bucket, drum, jug, pot; washing the stones clean; overflowing the planted rice paddies.
Aamaa wakes us up at 5:30am. I scold her from inside my mosquito net. Aamaa! I set my alarm for 6:30am! Why do we need to get up in the middle of the night?! Grumpy, I stay in bed until 6:15. When I get up, the boys are eating heaping plates of rice, vegetables and daal that Aamaa has cooked before 7am. Like she does for me when I am leaving at 9am for the office, when I eat rice because I know how much it matters to her to feed us before we leave the house for the day.
MILK TEA. I fill up my cup twice.
Aamaa wants us to make the hour long walk to Naudanda to take the bus to Pokhara. I roll my eyes. There is a bus leaving from right here at 7:30am! The road will be washed out, Aamaa says, the bus could break down, a million problems could occur. We could be late. The boys have their exams, they haven’t even studied, why don’t we walk to Naudanda? Has Aamaa spoken with my mom lately, I wonder? Moms are all the same.
We go backwards through the drenched corn stalks to Deurali to wait for the bus. Prem sir greets us. The bus is not going this morning, Prem sir says, because there have been some small landslides and the road is blocked.
We have to walk to Naudanda.
Laura-chiama, we have to walk to Naudanda!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!
Everything is soft and cottony in a mist that makes us unsure whether or not it has stopped raining. Even though there is no water coming down, the air is wet, our hair is damp, the road is full of puddles, and the hills float in and out of a white sky. We take photos of the mythical landscape. We find sparkles of radiant purple and red poking out of the clouds in our hands. Some vehicles pass, taking, like us, the opposite route to town this morning due to the blocked road, and I could stop them, but now we are not in a hurry.
(Editor’s note: apologies if you’re on my email list and receiving this a second time. It won’t happen too often. If you’re not on my email list, you should be! Please write “SUBSCRIBE” to laura@jevaia.org).
Good morning from sunny Pokhara! I arrived yesterday and enjoyed a nice homecoming tour of all my regular haunts. Since August, Pascal has rigged up a home-made antenna on the roof, Aidan’s other front tooth has finally come in, and the corn has been cut down in the garden in front of our office, replaced with new seedlings. I absolutely love this season in Nepal – the cold, wide air, the clear mountain skyline which is obscured by fog during the monsoon, the evening snuggles with my nephews under warm blankets. Tonight I head up to beautiful Kaskikot to see Aamaa.
I’m so excited to tell you about our plans for this winter. After 10 years of chipping away at all this, we are just days away from a two-week collaboration with dentists, researchers, and students from Berkley, UCSF, UConn and the University of Puthisastra in Cambodia. It is a strange and wonderful feeling to be preparing for such a large and qualified group of visitors after so many years of working away with few outside witnesses to our efforts. There are many great things wrapped up in upcoming this ball of projects.
The first is helping to implement a UCSF/Berkley study of oral health and nutrition in mothers and their children. Our own JOHC field teams will get to work with the researchers to conduct this study in one of our villages. The second project is training our technicians in some new techniques, which they’ll incorporate in to their sustainable clinics. Third, we have the chance to bring dentists to our rural clinics for medical audits. Believe it or not, after an entire decade, this will be the first time we’ve had foreign dentists come to visit our clinics.
And finally, we’re going to pilot an evaluation of past patients who’ve been treated by our technicians over the years. If you don’t think that sounds like Christmas, listen here! This means comparing the outcomes achieved by our local dental technicians to the results produced by fully credentialed dentists in prior studies of the same treatment techniques. This is a HUGE step towards our goal of having Nepal’s national health care system adopt rural dental clinics in to all of its health posts. Why? Thank you for asking! Because the main criticism is that community-level health workers aren’t qualified to perform dental medicine…even though that excludes millions of people from care. But we’re making the case that, rather than write off local health workers, the medical field must find ways to properly train them to provide the best care possible in their settings. And that’s what we’re doing!
Ok, so those are the technical points. Now let’s talk about me organizing for fourteen people to show up next week from California, Connecticut, India and Cambodia. We have a schedule, a budget, a training plan, hotels, flights, and t-shirts. We’re doing our best to keep things under control. But we are up against the entropy of Nepal, people. THE ENTROPY OF NEPAL. Pretty much anything could derail our plans and contingency plans: a wedding, a political strike, rain, someone’s grandpa dying, a forestry meeting, a buffalo falling ill. A buffalo having a baby. A traffic jam. A flat tire. Lost luggage. Fog on Sunday afternoon. Somebody decided to drive this point home for me at the recently renovated, lusciously carpeted arrival terminal in the Kathmandu airport, which has a new row of fancy kiosks for visa filing:
On the plus side, sometimes fate works to your advantage. Consider our office. This fall, our landlord’s son got married. The son received a number of couches by way of dowry. They don’t fit in our landlord’s apartment, so I arrived to find them in our office, which now looks rather like a furniture store. If you have any idea how much I have obsessedover the setup of our office, you will especially appreciate this stroke of….er….luck…
Well, in solidarity, I think I’ll leave you there on the edge of your seat. Except for sharing a photo of this year’s Race to the Rock, which was one of our best yet. If you missed it, pleaseconsider Jevaia in your end of year giving. After all, we’ve made it this far – through many political trials combined with road mishaps, fuel strikes, weddings, earthquakes, and baby buffalos – almost exclusively on the wings of individual donors, and here we are entering a very exciting new chapter. Thank you for being a part of the ride with me and all of us.
Now and then I realize I have a collection of items that are too good not to share but have been too random to include in other posts. I present you now with this summer’s collection, the Worldedge Restaurant.
1. An old lady tending to a street a cow.
As deities, cows freely wander the streets of Nepal, and there are a number of regulars on the stretch that runs between Jarebar and Lakeside. They rummage through the gutters and depend on the kindness of strangers. One day I noticed this old lady attentively grooming one of these gentle animals by the side of the road in the middle of the afternoon.
2. Paragliders sailing over the valley.
I snapped them one day on the bus ride home to Kaskikot.
3. Hotel Touch Nepal Worldedge Restaurant
I walk past this establishment each night on my way home, and either nobody was able to reach consensus about which words to include in the business title so they went for everything, or they just have a bit of confusion regarding core mission. In any case, I’m thinking it’s probably best not to use Hotel Touch Nepal for lodging purposes.
4. This shop of things made entirely out of tin.
Such as storage chests, chimneys, and watering pots.
5. Pascal and Aidan entertaining themselves at home while the electricity is out.
Because you need power to charge things, but not to dance in the dark.
6. Aamod’s Shrek Bike
When Aamod puts this cover on his motorbike each day outside the office, it convincingly resembles Shrek. Unfortunately I failed to photo his actual motorbike every day for two months, so on the last day I tried to recreate Shrek on a bicycle, which is why he looks a little anorexic.
7. A plant lake
During the summer, Phewa Lake apparently becomes so sodden with greenery that it turns in to an enormous garden with boats in it.
8. The Delhi Airport
Officially and unequivocally the most lavishly decorated circus of an airport on the globe, today’s edition of the Delhi airport brings us this buoyant use of indoor space, and these bottle holders – or something – in the airport hotel fitness center.
9. Aidan practicing his martial arts during a golden rainstorm.
We walked four kilometers, along a length of the lake, and then through the bazaar, where a trailing white sheet pinned to wooden poles announced our procession and was swallowed close behind by vehicles and diesel swirling around our knees. Death in the middle of the mundane. An entire lifetime borne on her sons shoulders through the bus stop, where vendors were selling oranges. 
Then: “I want to try,” Aidan says suddenly. 
It has to be said that as I re-enter beautiful country that has welcomed me as a daughter without asking any questions, the borders of the U.S. are heavy on my heart. As always, I casually purchased my visa upon arrival in the Kathmandu airport. At our office, everyone wanted to know what on earth is going on in America. The papers say that New York is receiving many stranded children, including in Harlem just a stone’s throw from where I lived and taught art in schools for many years. I find myself thinking about the years I have 
All The Pieces 