Category Archives: Family

Aamaa, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Reflections

The Language of Mothers

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….so I got behind on Aamaa-Rama, the epic (obviously) recounting of Aamaa’s journey to visit us in America last fall.  Now I’m catching up months later, which is a thing to never do–the whole point of keeping a blog is that even though you think you will remember things just as you felt them in the moment, nobody does.  Anyway, now it’s 8 months later and you can’t miss Aamaa’s visit to America, so we just have to make do.

When last I left you, Aamaa had buckled herself in to my friend Catherine’s Mini-Coop and rolled out from my house in Connecticut with Bishnu to shift to my parent’s house in Maryland. My parents, for their part, have been to Kaskikot in 2003 and 2010.  And Bishnu has been in the US since the start of 2009. Which means that since our early twenties, Bishnu and I have slept in each other’s childhood beds and grown up a second time in one another’s families, learning a new language over dinner plates on each other’s tables (or kitchen floors, as it were), gaining autonomy over time, absorbing the values and habits of one another’s households.  So even though my folks and Aamaa have only met twice, they share a peculiar confidence, forged in a wormhole that compressed an enormous distance in to the finest intimacy—parenthood.

This has manifested in odd bits of cross-pollination. For example, the first time my parents and brother came to Kaskikot, which was well before cell phones or Internet, they stayed for a week. When they were leaving, Aamaa came out to the road to see them off. She stood up on a high terrace near Butu boujou’s house and waved her arms back and forth like one of those people with the reflective orange vests who directs airplanes on a tarmac. In the absence of another common language, my parents lingered in the road and returned the movement, swinging their palms back and forth over their heads dramatically: TEN-FOUR AAMAA, COPY, WE HAVE REACHED THE ROAD, WE ARE CLEARED FOR WALKING TO NAUDANDA. This gesture was then adopted in to our family lexicon for momentous goodbyes. For example, when I back out of the driveway in Bethesda to go to Connecticut, my mother stands in front of the garage and waves both arms back and forth over her head: FAREWELL, DAUGHTER, OFF YOU GO TO A FAR AWAY PLACE CALLED CONNECTICUT.

It was hard to picture Bishnu and Aamaa turning in to my parents driveway in Catherine’s Mini-Coop. Bishnu and I are like zipliners, swinging between two distant worlds connected by a suspiciously unbreakable cable. For me Aamaa’s arrival had the feel of an asteroid collision, primal, made inevitable a long time ago by gravitational forces in a distant solar system. And it happened. Our planets crashed together. Bishnu sent this wonderful piece of documentation, complete with garage:

Over the next few days, Bishnu took Aamaa to the National Zoo, to McDonalds, to her office, and to monuments all over Washington D.C. In the evenings, we would video-chat over dinner in my parents recently renovated kitchen, where Aamaa was eating all sorts of new foods cooked in a variety of contraptions such as the oven or on the electric stove in nonstick pots. And it quickly became apparent that if Bishnu and I thought we were running this show, our mothers were going to overtake us in imminently.

By the time I came to town a week later, my Mom and Aamaa had built a solid telepathic bond over topics such as whether Bishnu and I are eating enough, why we live so far away from them, and how unmarried we are. It didn’t matter what language these topics came up in (which they did extremely frequently) or which mother started it. The other mother would just inexplicably pipe up in her own language with reinforcing material. Since to our knowledge Aamaa only knew how to say “light” and “good morning” in English, and my Mom’s Nepali vocabulary consists solely of “chicken,” “buffalo,” “rice,” and “delicious,” this was confounding. It would go something like this:

Me (using both languages): Anyone want more pasta? Pasta khannu hunchha Aamaa?

Aamaa (in Nepali): I just want you and Bishnu to bring me some grandchildren.

Bishnu: Ok, ok.

Aamaa (Nepali): When’s there going to be a wedding? All I want is some grandchildren from you before I die, happy.

Mom (English): I keep telling them to get out there! Krishna over at the Nepali restaurant could be my son-in-law.

Bishnu: Ok, Mom.

Me: What the hell Mom, how do you even know what we’re talking about?

Aamaa (Nepali): See, Mom agrees with me. We’re getting old. You’re getting old. You’re both old.  Soon we’ll be dead.

Bishnu: Starting to giggle.

Me: Can somebody please have some more pasta?

Mom (English): I think Laura needs to get fatter. Her face looks too small.

Aamaa (Nepali): Laura, you go out in the morning without even eating rice! Walking all day! You’re just a nose!

Bishnu (giggling hysterically): Mom, Aamaa says Laura is just a nose.

Me: Thanks Bishnu—

Mom: I remember when she used to row and she was big and strong! Now she’s too skinny!

Aamaa (Nepali): And only eats THIS MUCH rice!

Mom (English): Aamaa, Bishnu cooks Dad and me delicious Nepali food. Bhaat. Mitho! Bishnu!! 

Aamaa: Oooohhh! Mitho bhaat.

Bishnu: How are they talking to each other?

Me: It’s a hostile takeover.

Mom: Bhaat. RIIIIICEEE!

Aamaa: RRRRRRIIIICE! BHAAT!

Me: Dad, do you want more pasta?

The day I arrived, Bishnu was out with Aamaa most of the day, and I confess now that I was in a high-stress state. I’d only been home from Nepal for about a week, my graduate program was starting again in a few days along with a 25-hour-a-week internship, and a Situation came up that set off a fluorescent, strobing life-anxiety. My head hurt, my heart was racing, I demoralized and tired. All day, I dealt with The Situation while Bishnu took Aamaa to the Washington Monument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That evening Aamaa and Bishnu arrived home. They had already been in Maryland for a week, but with my arrival that morning it was the first time we were all together in my parents’ house, and instead of being totally in to the momentous occasion I was exasperated and upset about The Situation. I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom and found Aamaa lying in bed with Bishnu, resting in the fading light after their long day of adventuring. I flopped down with them, and they asked after The Situation, and I filled them in, and they told me not to worry and reassured me that of course I was right and the world was wrong, and all would be okay. Bishnu reported that, unexpectedly, Aamaa had rather taken to McDonalds.  Then the door creaked open, a bar of light fell in from the hallway, and my Mom poked her head through it.

We scooted over and my Mom wrangled bum-first on to the bed with us. The four of us arranged our entangled limbs on the puffy comforter. Night edged in. Without ceremony, the outside world fell away and I felt the collapse of time and space that is unique to parents and children and to long, long distances completed. And then a blossoming awe. How were we here together, like this?  Nobody can sit at one end of a road and plan a route that ends in this place. We were somewhere that can’t be reached using the mind.  With a jolt of clarity I saw the whole geography of it, like a continent, a huge swath of my life that is navigated only by the heart, which brought me to this shore. I felt us safely encompassed by an endless higher wisdom.

It was dark now, save for the bar of light from the hallway. The Situation shrank and became a hard, rocky thing shooting pain in to my foot, low and dense and false. It was not the real thing.

“Can you imagine,” Aamaa said in Nepali, “how nice it will be when there are more grandchildren? Like Ricky’s.”

“They’re always going and living far away, ” Mom added in English. “They should stay near their mothers.”

*

(Photo credit: Bishnu)

Bonus reel:

Aamaa, Family, Kaskikot, Nepal Life, Reflections

Afternoons

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First Saturday of Summer  

our hands sweat in the grass until

plateaus and peaks draw in their woolen covers.

Fried fresh corn kernels from the fire

salt.  

Each drop on tin, a world

An hour, or so

maybe more or less

to talk about, so

We gaze out the door

where slick leaves are dripping

lick our salty fingers

and pass the minutes

…or so they pass us

listening to the rain.

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Aidan and Pascal, Didi and Bishnu, Family, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Borders

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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 governments in rural areas.  Our big goal is to impact policy and 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

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Didi and Bishnu, Family, Reflections

The Other Side of Democracy

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Today women all over the U.S. – and the globe – are marching again on the 1-year anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March that overshadowed the inauguration of our current celebrity President.

I had half-written this post last January, and then my spring semester of graduate school took over.  I almost completed the entry in June, and then my summer in Nepal took over, followed by my fall semester.  So today, as women walk by on the other side of this glass café window wearing their pink hats for a second time, seems like a good time to finally post it.

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The day that Bishnu arrived in the US for the first time was January 18, 2009. We flew in to JFK and took a cab to my apartment on the Upper West Side. The next morning we got up to find snowflakes drifting past my fifth floor windows, and ran outside with our palms open. Bishnu had never touched snow. We got bagels at Lenny’s and took the train to Washington DC. When we got out in Union Station, the place was exuberantly decked out for President Obama’s inauguration.

“Union Station doesn’t always look like this,” I said. “This is an incredible moment in our history.”

President Obama’s Inauguration

We woke up to President Obama’s inauguration a few days later. While Bishnu went to register for her first college classes in the United States, my mom and I got in the subway and went down to the National Mall.  We’d been able to get seats at the Inauguration through a family friend who is a former member of Congress, which allowed us special access to a maze of hallways under the capitol building itself. Wearing our winter coats and hats, we ran through mysterious marbled corridors, dragging our gloved fingers along the polished walls, and then emerged dizzy in to an ecstatic crowd of tens thousands. It was only a week after Bishnu arrived in this country, and everything seemed enchanted.

 

Almost a decade later, on Jan 21, 2017, my family woke up in Bethesda and once again put on our warm clothes to go down to the capitol. This time, to protest. For women’s rights, immigrant rights, tolerance and celebration of diversity and equal opportunity. The previous day had felt…how can I describe it?  The somberness of President Trump’s Inauguration had been additionally weighted down the tug of that marvelous day eight years ago, which, in addition to the pain and sadness we all felt, created a kind of suction, a vacuum of joy.

It seems like Bishnu and I live our lives at bookends. Here we are again. The other side of democracy, the other side of celebration, the other side of the freedom to gather in America.  Outrage.

Under my winter jacket I put on my #6 Red Hots jersey, which I wore from age 12 to 17 on my youth soccer team. A group of us started playing together as girls, made up the core of the varsity soccer team at our high school, and won my high school’s first ever Independent School League championship in women’s soccer. Our Red Hots coach Chris was on the Jamaican National Team and he was also God.  When we were on the road to tournaments in Virginia Beach or wherever, he passed the time by testing us on our ability to understand pidgin Jamaican English. We adored him and he taught us that “anybody can teach a donkey to kick a ball,” but we were going to be “brilliant.” In my Red Hots jersey, I had superpowers.

Bishnu, my mom, and my two of my friends and I crammed in to the Metro at Bethesda station just as we had eight years prior. We came up above ground near Pennsylvania Avenue. As we rounded the top of a hill, a sea of people came in to view ahead of us. Immediately, our anger and resentment rose up on a tidal wave of protesters marching toward the capitol. Thousands and thousands and thousands pulling us in with a thrill of momentum.  Bishnu and I floated in to the river like two leaves.The events of these past weeks have forced my mind in to new contortions. I have had an easy life. It is easy for me to go to Nepal on a grand adventure, with no idea what I am doing, take my time figuring it out, and be falsely credited with kindness or courage. I can indulge in experiments of curiosity and empathy and generosity, and it doesn’t cost me anything except for the pain, later, of confronting that as a luxury. This is something I have recognized for a good while now. But in the climate of our recent election, the sting is fresh and hot. What kind of world do we live in where empathy is a privilege assumed only after survival? As long as my survival remains easy, what is my responsibility? I waffle between rage at the outpouring of ignorance and bigotry happening here in the United States, and shame at the helium balloon I live on. From up there, it is easy to take the high road.

The Women’s March provokes this disquiet, luring it back in from around the edges to the center of my attention. With my mom and our friends, Bishnu and I drift through currents and eddies of elation, passion, and indignation – not all that different from the torrent that welcomed the nation’s first black president, right here where I now stand. But this river swells with anger rather than euphoria. When the speeches start, I climb a tree (for the record, some ladies ahead of me try but can’t scale the long trunk to reach a perch higher up; thanks for help with tree-climbing, Nepal). Bishnu sits on a ledge at the base of the tree. From my location, I can see a vast ocean of people stretching out in all directions, and it is breathtaking. I also can’t help noticing, and being surprised, that it is a predominantly white ocean.

Later, the critiques will roll in from feminist advocates, and especially from those who have spent lifetimes advocating on behalf of people of color, of all those in this country marginalized by class or race or sexuality. What will happen after all of this? Will we march, feel better, and then go home? What about those who have been railing against injustice for decades, centuries?  Where were we then?  This sea of whiteness is angry and disappointed and embarrassed, but we are not being profiled and shot. Our sons are not wasting in jail because they cannot pay bail on an arrest for marijuana possession (but our sons are high, I’ll tell you that). Our daughters are not making sixty cents on a dollar, not spit at, welfare queens, baby mamas, you bought that hand-bag and you’re on stamps, learn English bitch, lazy—

Maybe, after today, we’ll feel better, and then we’ll be…you know, busy.

Maybe we have a lot of nerve showing up here at all.

I cling to the tree branch as words fly past me, originating from massive speakers many blocks away.  At the base of the tree, I can see Bishnu looking a little bored, although she is a great sport. I don’t know what she will make of all of this. In the world Bishnu is from, it doesn’t matter what you are doing here in America: if you can get your feet on U.S. soil, you’ve won the golden ticket. Period.  Or so it is perceived, for better or worse.  You hang on and don’t let go.

This thing happens sometimes where I zoom out and I feel I am seeing us from far above. Little me and little Bishnu, like neon dots of radar in an anonymous expanse of blue-gray nothingness, moving in some configuration that must have meaning to it I do not understand. What are they doing? Where are they going?  These two little dots…what is their story?  Can they explain anything about the topography around them?

After all this time, I am no closer to an answer. There we are, leaning on a tree, just as far from something that holds together as when we started.  But in the decade and a half we’ve mucked around in each other’s worlds, there is one I thing never stop coming back to.  It is always better to show up.  Be a little blip of radar.  Even if you screwed up the first two centuries.  Even if you don’t know what you’re going to do about it next.

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Aidan and Pascal, Family, Oral Health Care Project, Work

Nepal Smiles 2.0

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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

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.

Ok ok ok ok…bring it on!

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Aamaa, Family, Reflections

Education

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Where droplets of water leak through the tin roof
Into the cooking fire
What is an education?
Page after page after page after
She can’t read
Pages.
She can read the weather
She can read the seeds
She can read the incense spiraling up over the roof into the sky to Heaven
I have a book.
I leave it at home and follow her
In my flip flops
Flop after flop after flop after flop down
The stone path to the fields of buried seeds.
We planted the corn
We tilled the corn
The hail is ruining it now
And droplets are leaking through the roof in to the cooking fire
Just one at a time
Plop after plop after plop.
She collects water in tin jugs
For drinking and cooking
From over there, near Bauta dai’s house.
I imagined this place once
When I read about it in a book
My education began when I began
Tearing the pages from the spine
Page after page after page after
LISTEN.
What is this world anyway?
An education.
Pick up your pen again
And again and again and again and again
You must send something
A gift to the future
That somebody can rip in to beautiful pieces
And put in the fire
Where the smoke seeps
Up under a gap in the roof up into the sky up to Heaven
And comes down again
As drop after drop after drop after drop
Of rain.

*

Aamaa, Didi and Bishnu, Family

Aamaa-Rama

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Ice cream cone practice

If the Guiness Book of Records took entries for Aamaas who had rarely left their villages in Nepal and had the most friends living in the U.S., our Aamaa would win by a landslide. I don’t even know how many people have been to Kaskikot to eat in Aamaa’s kitchen in the last decade and a half, but it’s an impressive cohort of my friends and family, even if you don’t count all the tourists that Prem bhinaju brings by. We wanted Aamaa to get to see as many of them as possible here in their natural habitat. I put out a call for visitors.

My friend Jackie drove all the way down from Maine to meet Aamaa in Connecticut. We went to a hot air balloon festival and ate ice cream.

“We should go. It will be dark soon,” Aamaa clucked.

“The whole point is to see the balloons lit up in the dark!” Bishnu and I objected.

“It’s night,” Aamaa countered logically. The fact that everyone isn’t basically inside by dark is one of the features of American life that Aamaa seems to find continually alarming. As a side note, she has been busting my chops for being out after dark in Kaski for fifteen years.

We had dinner (after dark) with my friends Heather and Abigail and their son Teddy. Heather was in Nepal with a group of my friends in 2010 for a big hiking trip. I took Aamaa to my IMT clinic, where she was received like a celebrity by all of the therapists. Of course, Aamaa knows all about IMT because in 2013 we did a major manual therapy project in Kaskikot based on the model we use in our oral health program, and three of my IMT therapist friends spent a few weeks in Nepal.

For the weekend, we went shopping in a grocery store (what?), got our nails done, did our hair, cooked an insane amount of Nepali food, and had an all day Aamaa-Rama party. Will, Lissa and Catherine, the therapists who’d come for the IMT project in 2013, came in from Boston and D.C. Dr. Keri, my cousins Robert and Audrey, and my friends Mona and Todd all made long drives to meet Aamaa. I set up a slideshow to play through photos and we sat around all afternoon seeing friends.

The next morning, Bishnu and Aamaa packed their things to drive down to D.C. to stay with Bishnu and my parents.  Will and Lissa came over for breakfast, and then we put everything in Catherine’s Mini Coop and I stood on the sidewalk.  Aamaa got in the car an buckled her own seatbelt.

At last, it came…that withdrawing feeling that I am used to having in the front yard of our gentle orange house in Kaski. Like a fishnet has been tied around my insides and is being pulled away by the force of a world that cannot come with me.  The thing is that usually I am on the other side of it, moving away from an anchor and feeling that world slip away as I leave.

This morning, I was the one standing on the porch, watching the color and sound move out in to the road.

“This is no fun,” I mumbled.  I would be going down to Maryland down to my family in a week.  But suddenly it felt like I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been alone.

“No kidding,” said Aamaa in her matter of fact, unsentimental way.  “That’s what I do.  Everyone leaves and it’s not fun and I sit and cry.”  And it’s true.  Every time a group of us come to Kaski, we leave.

“Nice job with the seatbelt,” I noted.  “See you guys next week.”

They pulled off in Catherine’s car, and I waved, like Aamaa always does, and went back in to my house to think of something to do.

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‘merica, baby
Aamaa and Kris A
Dr. Keri in her American habitat
HandoverMatter 2013
Harvesting
party prep
Cousins Robert and Audrey
Moms: Aamaa and Will’s mom Barb
With my pal Debbie
Abigail, Heather and Marynell
Jackie drove all the way down from Maine

 

 

Aamaa, Didi and Bishnu, Family

All These Lights

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It’s true that the hardest part is undocking from the house in Kaski, but after that, each step further away gets less difficult and more strange. Now we are completely ummoored and nothing makes sense at all: Aamaa is in JFK airport.

Bishnu was waiting for us and she and Aamaa were reunited after four years. It was quite undramatic.  My parents, by contrast, have been known to stand in the waiting area with an enormous welcome home sign and my mother has a happy attack that involves all four of her limbs. Nepalis are much more subdued. But Bishnu was wearing an orange shirt, a gesture she planned after seeing the photo I posted of Aamaa and me leaving Kathmandu.  Bishnu had also ridden a bus all night from DC, and given that Aamaa and I had been traveling for a few days and endured airport dinosaurs and nauseous teddy bears, it appears I was the only one who was really enthusiastic about taking arrival this picture.

We got in a car back to Connecticut and showed Aamaa how to buckle her seatbelt. The car set out and was soon rising over the Whitestone bridge, where Aamaa caught her first glimpse of the edge of the ocean.  It occured to me then that I hadn’t thought to point the ocean out for the fourteen hours we were crossing the Atlantic. Aamaa looked out the car windows from side to side. “All of this is America!” she exclaimed.

A few weeks ago, my wallet was stolen in Cambodia with my passport, credit cards, all of my IDs, Verizon sim card, and house key. So when we pulled up to my house, I had no keys, no phone, and as it turns out, my internet had been turned off because the automatic payment on the cancelled credit card was rejected. We had to solve at least one of these problems, so we went to the mall. Que the following: Aamaa has only been in the U.S. for about seven hours and we’re in the Apple Store.

At one point I left to go to Verizon to get my lost sim card replaced, and when I came back, Bishnu and Aamaa were sitting outside Nordstrom’s, facing away from me and looking small in the wide, polished corridor of the mall. It is going to take me a while, I thought in a jet-lagged daze, to integrate the incredibly odd experience of seeing Aamaa in these spaces.  In the next few days she would be cooking in my kitchen, strolling down the Farmington Avenue sidewalk in West Hartford, pulling open the door to Starbucks, sitting on a treatment table at the IMT clinic where I worked. Imagine if Barack Obama was suddenly sitting in your living room, watching the TV he is supposed to be inside of. Or if there was a zebra standing in the Emergency Room. Or orange juice coming out of the kitchen sink faucet. The components are all fine, they are just extremely jarring in the new arrangement.

After it is dark, we are driving up Farmington Avenue. Aamaa has buckled herself in to the front seat and Bishnu is in back. We pass a synagogue.

“Aamaa, that’s the temple where people who practice Jewish religion go to pray,” I say.

“What’s Jewish religion?”

“I’m Jewish!”

“Oh right,” Aamaa says.

In the next block, we pass a church.  I point again.

“This is where people who practice Christian religion go to pray.”

Aamaa peers out the window. “We’re Christian, right?”

Bishnu lets out a torrent of giggles. “Aamaa, we’re Hindu!”

“Oh,” she says. By American standards, Aamaa is fairly religious. She mostly sticks to a Brahmin diet, lights incense and prays many days of the week, observes the dictates of the lunar calendar and the demands of solar eclipses.  She honors her ancestors and has practiced ritual widowhood since the age of twenty-two (although you could argue that that’s more about the patriarchy than religion). But from her point of view, Bishnu and I reflected later, it’s just dharma. She’s never had to label it.

Another block of Farmington Avenue rolls past, and we stop at an intersection.

“What’s with all these lights hanging everywhere?”

“They’re traffic lights,” Bishnu says from the back seat. “They tell the cars when to stop and go.”

“Ah, they put them out at night,” Aamaa concludes.

Bishnu and I start giggling again. “No, they are there all the time for the cars,” Bishnu corrects, and explains how the traffic lights work.

“Oooooooh,” Aamaa replies.  And then, for the rest of the week, each time we pull up to a traffic light, Aamaa will begin narrating. “It’s red Laura, it’s red, stop….Ok, it’s green now. Go. Go go.”   This is one of the things that I will begin to quickly see about Aamaa: how efficiently she absorbs ordering details of this completely new world, and then references them constantly with an air of mastery and satisfaction. This process of discovery and wonder is absolutely magical to witness. I soon realize that being with Aamaa is a lot like being with my nephew Jonah was when he was about four, and we think that children outgrow their ability to be enthralled by traffic lights because they get smarter. Actually, children just get used to the way the world works. In point of fact, a traffic light is a pretty thing up in the air that brings discipline to the otherwise entirely chaotic phenomenon of traffic (see: Nepal, roads). To splash around in the delight of traffic lights with a highly competent sixty year old adult is a beautiful experience.

We make our first Nepali dinner together and sit at my kitchen table to eat with our hands. In Kaski, Aamaa has usually just boiled milk fresh from the buffalo, and from her throne on a pirka by the side of the fire, she gives us each a cup of velvety, hot cream with dinner.  Now we are taking care of her, and Bishnu pours Aamaa a cup of organic whole milk from the grocery store.

“Aamaa, have some milk.”

“Ok.”

“…Did you try it?”

“Not yet.”

“…Try the milk.”

“I tried it. It’s bad,” Aamaa declares without pause.  On either side of the table, Bishnu and I immediately collapse in hysterics.

On our second night, Bishnu has to leave at four in the morning to fly to Virginia for an interview. A short while later, Aamaa comes knocking on my bedroom door, which shares a corner with the door to my kitchen.  I get out of bed.

“Laura! What is that noise?”

“What noise?”

“VRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.”

“The refrigerator?”

“Oh, okay. I was scared.”

“It’s just the refrigerator,” I reassure her groggily. We go back to sleep.

At 9:00, Aamaa raps on my door again.

“Laura, get up,” she says. “I’ve been up for hours. I thought I’d make some tea, but I don’t know how to use that stove of yours. And I can’t even go outside because I don’t know how to open the door.”

“The door?” I reply, confused. Maybe the deadbolt is locked? And then I realize Aamaa has probably never used a rotating doorknob before. “Oh. I’ll show you how to open the door,” I say apologetically.  For the rest of the week, each morning that I wake up, Aamaa is sitting on the front porch, observing neighbors walking by.

“I learned how to say, ‘good morning,’” she reports.

*

Aamaa, Around Town, Family, Nepal Life

The Other Skies

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The first thing I have to do is convince Aamaa to wear one of her new kurta salwaars. She has spent 60 years wearing a more dignified sari and she’s shy to dress like a girl. I insist she will be a lot more comfortable on our 24 hour journey with trousers on.

Bhinaju and our cousin Laxu come to the airport with us. As we stand outside the door to the airport, again there seems to be a strange inversion of everything. We say goodbye and move in to the 24-hour netherworld of air travel, but the moment when I detach like a raft in to the sea, alone and timeless until landing back in the rest of my life, never comes. Instead, all my focus is on Aamaa while we pass through various inexplicable passages and security checks, making goodbye phone calls along the way.

We end up seated with Chandrakala, a charming woman probably in her mid-forties leaving Nepal for the first time to go be a maid in Greece. I explain everything from the seatbelt to how to order drinks and use the bathroom. I set up their personal TVs with films for them to watch. They both look disapprovingly at the glass of wine I ask for, so I make a point of asking each of them repeatedly if they would like some wine during the flight. Aamaa has a million questions. Is it night or day? Can I put my passport away yet? Are mom and dad awake now? I don’t know. I’m used to not thinking about any of these things.

We spend the flight talking with Chandrakala didi and when we get off the plane in Doha in the middle of the night, the three of us stick together. The Doha airport will be the first thing we encounter that is a developed country version of the comparable thing in Nepal; Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu only supplemented its two small departure terminals a few years ago and the waiting area is decorated with rows of cheap, attached metal chairs that can be dragged about in units of three. The Doha airport is a dazzling maze of high ceilings, moving walkways, shiny things, monitors, duty free shops where beautiful women are illuminated by fluorescent lights, and of course, the enormous random nauseous teddy bear that is taking up space at the center because space needs to be taken up. It occurs to me how strange it is that in modern times, the first thing an immigrant from a developing country will see in a wealthy country is an airport, which is one of the weirdest environments modernity has to offer.  For example, Aamaa couldn’t even think of a question about the following dinosaur under a passageway in the airport:

I lead Aamaa and Chandrakala didi to the sleeping room and we all try unsuccessfully to doze off. Aamaa and I both end up stretched out on the floor instead of the awkward lounge chairs, and I appreciate how we must look, sprawled out on the ground in a room full of disciplined travelers using the chairs.

We go to the bathroom and use an automatic hand dryer.

By now we are all aware that we’re going to have to abandon Chandrakala didi to the Doha airport when our flight leaves for New York. I take us out to the nauseous teddy bear where a bank of monitors will show Chandrakala’s departure gate when the time gets closer, and explain to her three or four times how she’ll navigate the list of English symbols. Chandrakala didi is literate but uncomfortable with English, and if you don’t know what a gate is or how an airport works, reading the monitors is just one obstacle (how do you even know you’re supposed to read a monitor?). There are many Nepalis working in the Doha airport and we chat some of them.  Chandrakala didi will be able to ask someone if she needs help, but it still feels wrong to leave her alone in the glowing Doha airport with its mysterious halls and signs and statues. Eventually we have to say goodbye, and she sits outside our gate watching us go.

Every time Aamaa and I have to pass through a checkpoint or security screen, the international airport staff first assume that we aren’t traveling together, and then want to know what in the world is going on. Aamaa has all the looks of a first-time traveler from a traditional part of Nepal, and in addition to the fact that I have all the looks of a private-school educated white suburban yuppie from Connecticut, I tower over Aamaa by about eight inches.  Since she doesn’t speak English, I usually have to translate instructions.  After figuring out that we go together, most people assume I am her daughter in law, which would explain how I know Nepali and why I’m the one shepherding her on an overseas journey. “This is my daughter!” Aamaa giggles as she corrects enthralled security guards and airline attendants. We make our way from counter to counter and checkpoint to checkpoint, crossing the globe in a little bubble of delight that we make no sense.

Finally we board our fourteen-hour flight to JFK. We get incredibly lucky with an empty middle seat on a mostly full flight, so we’re able to take turns properly sleeping. I was worried about how Aamaa would handle strange food made by unknown people, but she mostly exclaimed over amount of it, approaching each tray with curiosity and then asking me if I wanted to eat her pats of butter because she was full from the continuous flow of food.

“That goes on the roti Aamaa, you don’t eat it by itself. It’s like ghee.”

And then the next tray would come and she’d ask me if I wanted the butter again.

We peered out the window at the rolling white puffs lolling off to infinity and Aamaa asked if the clouds were the ground or the sky.

“The sky,” I said.

“Does this plane also go to the other skies?” Aamaa asks, long after we’ve lost track of night and day.

“Other skies?”

“They say there is this sky, and then a sky above this, and then a sky below this one,” Aamaa says. “I don’t really know much about it. But I was wondering if this plane goes to the other skies.”

I gaze at her.

“I don’t really know,” I say. “I don’t know much about it either.”

Many trays and questions and naps and pats of butter later, we break through this sky and New York comes in to view. Aamaa reaches behind her for my hand as she stares out the window, and with a dramatic rumble, the plane sets us down on the ground.

*