Category Archives: Didi and Bishnu

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

The Middle Girl

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Aamaa talks often about my departure now. She’s worried about being left alone when Didi also leaves to join Bhinaju in Pokhara, which will be happening any day now.  And of course, Bishnu will stay in the city as long as she can, to study for her 12th grade exam.  It’s so strange to think that when I first arrived a year and a half ago, Aamaa and Didi and Bishnu were so intimately bound here in Kaskikot, and now Didi is married, and Bishnu is studying, and we are all wondering what Aamaa will do when I leave for the U.S. in a few weeks.  It’s strange that despite everything, it’s my departure, of all things, that will thrust her in to real solitude for the first time.

The wheat harvest, with the lack of fanfare it has produced, has been a kind of seal for us.  It’s fun to be exotic to one another.  But as crazy as it sounds, one day we looked around and found that something had tipped over.  Today I did housework on my own most of the day, with no direction: watering the buffalo, doing dishes, pounding wheat, moving goats.  Just because it was there and needed to be done.  The fact that nobody’s all hot and bothered about these feats anymore feels…strange.  It’s an entirely new reality, for all of us.

“Everyone is saying to me, ‘Don’t let your mailie go,’” Aamaa said in the late afternoon, while Didi and I were lying on the beds inside, writing, and she was on the porch pounding wheat.  Mailie means middle girl.  “Your maile does all this work around the house,” they’re saying.  “She brings you good food, she helps you all the time.  Don’t send her to America.”

Didi interrupted Aamaa mid-sentence to ask me something from her book, but Aamaa doggedly re-commanded my attention.  She wanted to make her point.  I looked at her through the doorway.

“Other people have said that?” I asked.  Despite myself, I was delighted. I realize I had no business being here, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve taken some knocks.

“A lot of people,” Aamaa sighed. “When you go, I won’t be able to say anything, so I’m saying it now: raamro sanga jannus, eh?”

Go well, okay?

I lay on my tummy on the bed with my head near the door, where Aamaa resumed pounding wheat.  I was writing a poem and story and speech I’ll recite at my school farewell if I get one.  And then where will I go?  Where on earth does a person go from here?

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Family

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

Roof Leaping

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Bishnu and I went to the field at about 7am to cut grass before breakfast.  After we ate, it was time for more house painting.  Fortunately, the structural layer involving buffalo poo is all done, so now we just have to go over it again with thinner mud that has color mixed into it.  This is how the house ends up orange on the bottom and white from the middle up.

The village looked like a party.  The jaunty line where the orange and white paint meet seemed to be winding from house to house in the sunlight, leaving its fresh mark on one cheerful home after another.  Women splattered in paint and mud were scattered over rooftops and sticking out of the grass behind their houses, painting away.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOur house is shaped kind of like a house on a house.  There is the roof over the first floor, and then the attic built on top of that, and then a triangular roof on top of the attic.  I came outside to find Bishnu and Aamaa standing on the highest roof, painting the uppermost part of the house.

As I stood there planning my next move, Mahendra came over carrying a severed goat head and smeared blood over our door.  His family was roasting the body in their yard on the terrace behind and above our house, in preparation for today’s big meat-eating celebration.

I climbed up to the lower roof, where I go frequently to lay out laundry in the sun, and after a while I got bored waiting for Aamaa and Bishnu to give me something to do.  So I did what you would do if you were standing on a middle roof with nothing to do: I made to climb up a level to the upper roof.

Aamaa immediately had a fit about how I was going to fall and kill myself.  “You can’t, you can’t do it!” she cried, as if she didn’t know by now that the fastest way to get me to do something I’m unqualified for is exactly like that.  And Bishnu expressed her disdain in characteristic fashion by smirking and standing in that unsympathetic posture that says, “What are you going to do, American?”

This attracted the attention of Mahendra’s entire family on the terrace above us, where they had previously been observing the headless roasting goat.  Just as I was realizing that climbing on to the upper roof really wasn’t that easy, I also took some pleasure in being more interesting than a headless roasting goat.  I calculated that climbing up on to a roof wouldn’t be all that difficult if a) I hadn’t been wearing a lungi and b) I had full confidence in the stability of the upper shingles.

So there I was.  Ironically, the only one trying to help me was Baa!, Mahendra’s father, who as a general rule seems more ambivalent than anyone of my right to show up like this, to explore the poverty he got stuck with like it’s some kind of escapade.  Let’s just say that Baa! has shown a distinct lack of confidence in my ability to be a fast learner.  But from edge of the roasting goat pit, he was, quite generously, making emphatic motions indicating the pulling up of one’s lungi above the knees.

Let’s face it – there really is no way to climb up from a middle roof to a top roof in a lungi except by grabbing on to the shingles over your head and jumping.  You hope for the best and don’t ask yourself what’s really worth risking your life for.

I was up.  The shingles did not fall off the roof, but Aamaa was still yelling “YOU CAN’T!” in a prolonged and energetic babble that apparently couldn’t be cut off simply by being proved incorrect.  I stood to my full height–more than enough to be a chimney for this house–raised my hands up, and tromped around defiantly.  Great view up there.

And that ended the show.  Everybody went back to their business.  Roasting goats; smearing mud.  I, however, still had nothing to do.  So when Bishnu and Aamaa went around to the other side of the house, I decided it was time to go down.  I returned to the spot where I’d come up.

Well, let’s just say that leaping up is one thing.  Leaping down a different matter entirely.

The audience had dispersed.  So it was before the eyes of God alone that I saw myself peering off the edge of one little roof, down to the top of another, reaching one leg down and straining with my toe, which dangled a good foot above the sloped shingles below, at the bottom of which was a nice little drop to the ground.  I looked over my shoulder to make sure nobody was watching.  I tried everything: this leg, that angle, slide on my bum, brace to the left, hike up the goddamn lungi; I looked for another disembarkation spot, an invisible step; I considered the unthinkable—waiting for Bishnu to give me a hand.

With sudden clarity I thought of Katharine Hepburn climbing houses (I’ve been reading her memoir, of course), and wondered if the roof below me could support my weight if I just jumped.  I pictured myself tumbling off the edge below, breaking my leg, and thinking that any small concession would have been a better gamble than loosing every last shred of dignity (and my leg).  I really dwelled on that image – what it would feel like, lying there on the ground in my own pain and stupidity.

I jumped.  I landed softly on the lower roof and walked over to the other side of the house, where Aamaa and Bishnu were still painting, and demanded that they give me a job.

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

Matters of Poop

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P1070066I came home to find Bishnu and Aamaa painting the house in preparation for the festival of Dashain.  Aamaa had a pot in one hand, and in the other, a rag dripping with goop that she was slapping and smearing over the walls.  Next door, Saano didi was doing the same thing – in fact, all over the village this week, women are standing on their roofs, sticking up like chimneys and shouting to each other across the open space.

Now, and this house-painting business is an interesting topic.  Because it’s something I really want to be a part of: the annual re-making of our house, renewing and refreshing the walls that shelter us.   It is both an extremely practical and very beautiful tradition, which we in our brick-and-plaster, carpeted houses are denied.  It a special opportunity to want to share in restoring the house and strengthening it for the coming year.

Unfortunately, the house is made of mud and buffalo shit.

See, I have this problem with shit.  I’ve really made some serious efforts to get over it.  I accepted Didi standing knee deep in a mound of shit and hacking at it with an axe, sending little bits of buffalo turd flying everywhere.  I accepted Aamaa walking into the house with an enormous heap of poop in her hands and cooking it in a vegetable pot in the kitchen and then putting it on Bishnu’s sprained ankle and then putting Bishnu in bed with me.  I’ve accepted that the hands that carry buffalo shit around the house are dark with grit beneath the nails and also cook the food that keeps me alive.  I even carried some shit in a basket hanging on my back and swung it bravely over my head to make it land in a tidy basket-sized pile of fertilizer in the wheat field.

But I cannot put my hands directly and purposefully on shit.  I can’t do it.

I know that the house is made of shit.  I know that I walk around in bare feet in the house made of shit; I eat off a plate on the floor of the house made of shit; I know that the wall that I lean on next to the bed is made of shit.  This is all perfectly okay with me.  But it is not okay with me to sink both hands into a pile of shit, mush it around with water and mud, and smear it against the wall.  I simply cannot touch shit in pure shit form.  It needs to at least be disguised as part of a house.

So instead of helping to paint the house, I took a nap inside, stewing in guilt and regret that could not quite defeat this final barrier in my relationship with shit.  And much later on, when Bishnu and Aamaa had come in for the day, and the ladder to the attic had been put back inside, and the mud and shit mixture was still drying on the rungs and I kept putting my hands in it and then washing them with soap and water, and our various water jugs—used both inside and out, for washing, cooking, and occasionally for giving liquid to the animal family members—had had the soupy brown water washed out of them, but had not been sterilized with hospital antiseptic, and everyone was going about the evening business of sitting around and cooking rice…even then, I still felt bad that I hadn’t helped paint the house.  But I felt worse that I’m afraid to just up and pick up a wad of shit—and worst of all, that I still didn’t want to.

And the conclusion that I came to is that I’m simply never going to want touch shit before I do it.  If I’m going to do it at all, and if I’m going to use my own two hands to renew the house for the new year, I’m just going to have to touch buffalo shit before I’ve decided that it’s okay with me.

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

Water

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Around the house, I am like a wind-up toy.  Maybe there’s a job for me over there!  Bzzzt.  Job?  Nope.  Bzzt.  Job?  Oh well, ok.  Job!  I see a job!!  Bzzt.  I have bumped in to the wall—bad naviagation—bzzt—rotate—sigh…bzzt??

Everyone is always doing interesting things.  Cooking, sifting, feeding, chopping, churning.   I can do stuff.  I’m a fast learner.  I’m enthusiastic.  If someone would just explain how to use this circular basket-pan-thing, for instance, I could be useful.

Luckily, it is becoming clear that, other deficiencies not withstanding, I make a perfectly adequate mule.  In fact, as a mule I am more than adequate—I am talented.  Carrying loads is mostly a matter of putting one foot in front of the other.  So even though Aamaa is nervous about my wrecking most of the other household tasks (I don’t know why), every load that I carry is one that someone else doesn’t have to haul from one place to another.  So, I am granted some latitude to do it inelegantly.  Thank you.

It appears that I have found my calling in water.  Everything else involves mysterious kinds of dexterity, or intuition, or magical powers.  But fetching water simply means taking an empty jug to the tap, filling it, and IMG_2362carrying it home in a basket.  And you can never have too much water.

And that, my friends, is how I have come to watch the water jugs like an underworked waiter monitoring the wine glasses at her only table for the evening.  My awareness gets magnetized to these tin vessels, God forbid they languish for a single moment with any spare real estate inside.  An entire section of my mind is devoted to calculating when and how water could be combined in various receptacles to leave the main jugs empty and in need of filling.  It isn’t exactly that I enjoy getting water, but that I passionately want this job to depend on my contribution.

Each evening when I return from school around 4:45, the four of us sit on the porch drinking tea and eating popcorn.  And I absolutely cannot relax as long as an inch of space remains available inside those tin jugs in the yard.

The routine is as follows.  First, I say, “I’m going to get water,” and leap off the porch.

Then Bishnu says, “Sit down, Laura.  I’ll get water.”   Then I insist.  Then Didi or Aamaa says, “Just take one jug.”  But I have no idea what the logic of taking just one jug is.  As long as I’m going, why wouldn’t I take two?  And get more water.

And then Aamaa always tries, “Tomorrow, do it tomorrow.”  What in the world is that supposed to mean?  First of all, I know that we need water before tomorrow.  I know because there is space in the big jug, and if there wasn’t space, I could create space by pouring water out of the big jug and into a smaller jug, and I could do that now, before tomorrow.

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I’m not easily fooled.

So invariably, I get water.  And the water tap is one of my most pitiless houses of education.  This is mainly due to a strict Canon of Maneuvering that determines the order of access to the waterspout; moreover, everyone fends for themselves, and negotiations occur manually, not vocally.

Let me explain.  It’s like chess.  Upon arrival at the tap, you set down your basket and rope and jugs strategically: close to the spout, but not too close.  You can’t be cocky about it.  At the same time, you will take stock of your place in line.  However, there is no linear line, just a theoretical, jointly acknowledged line–it’s a virtual line where everyone knows who arrived when.  Nevertheless, you absolutely must monitor exactly where your place is, because you hold your spot in the virtual line by moving in as your turn approaches—protectively, but not too protectively—and the instant the person in front of you whisks their jug from under the relentless stream of water, you have to be ready to replace it with yours.

If you’re too slow, a few things can happen.

1. An aggressor might swoop in.  Depending on the age and status and ferocity of the aggressor, it might be over before you know it, and if the aggressor has three jugs to fill, approximately nine minutes of your life are therein committed to waiting.  Loners are especially vulnerable; I don’t stand a chance.

2. On the other hand, an ally might come to your aid.  This is more likely to happen if the aggressor is young and overly ambitious, or, less often, if the ally is old and forceful.  But old and forceful ladies don’t usually waste their time being allies, so most commonly the ally is a young girl like Laximi, who does housework for Bhim.  Laximi and I are a great team.  She stands up on the ledge behind the spout, and when someone tries to mess with the virtual line, Laximi grabs my water jug and hooks it immediately under faucet, holding it there until the aggressor removes the offending vessel below it.  Then, when my jug gets full, I hand Laximi hers, and she hooks it just as mine fills, securing access before there’s an opening for challenge.  Then we leave together while the old ladies yell after us.

But ultimately, skilled water-getters stay totally disinterested in the entire affair.  Only the old, ferocious aggressors—tired out ladies who have every right to be weary with life and too busy for the nonsense of waiting—have the chutzpah to ignore the virtual line and the Canon of Maneuvering and just butt right off the bat.  Most of the time, a challenge involves placing your water jug too close too fast.  That’s how the arguing and shouting starts, and it’s really like a hundred times more fun than being an intern in some crappy office somewhere in New York.

I bring the basket of water home and sit back down.  Is there anything else to do?  Are you sure?  Definitely not?

Bzzt.  Maybe we need more water.

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Rules of the Water Tap - 2010

Rules of the Water Tap – 2010