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.
Aamaa and I landed in San Francisco in mid-afternoon, and Youba came to get us at the airport. It’s hard to imagine that exactly two short years since Aamaa’s first visit to the US, Bishnu has gotten married and had a baby. Little Serena Dali is still just a month old and she doesn’t yet weigh six pounds.
Aamaa and Youba, of course, had never met in person before we arrived. Bedraggled, we emerged from the airport, and Aamaa and her son-in-law looked past each other and shuffled their weight, unsure how to introduce themselves without the normal directives of a proper setting or the customary procedure that goes with such a meeting. Nepali mothers don’t meet their son-in-laws for the first time with nobody else around, at Door #4 of airport arrivals.
“So, um…hi,” Youba offered. He had gallantly driven through Bay Area traffic at rush hour to retrieve us, and now we had to get through rush hour Bay Area traffic in order to get home and take a nap. I was tired and grumpy wanted to sit alone being antisocial in the back seat.
“Aamaa, you sit in front.”
“No way, you sit in front.”
“Come on, you and Youba can—“
“Nope,” Aamaa replied, and annexed the back seat of Youba’s Honda before any further negotiations could be held.
When we arrived at Bishnu’s apartment, of course, baby Dali was all bundled up waiting for us. We immediately took our first US-side family photo.
I am staying in San Francisco for a week before leaving Aamaa and Bishnu and Dali and Youba to head back to Connecticut for the fall. So we’ve got about eight days together to hover over the baby and deploy a non-unified strategy of obsessing over competing certainties about what to do with a baby.
Even though it’s obvious, we’ll state right off the bat that I am on the lowest rung of qualifications in this debate by many orders of magnitude. The baby did not come out of me and I have never raised one. Bishnu comes in at a solid second place since she’s the one who made the human. But in the lead, Aamaa is Aamaa. She raised Bishnu and Didi and two grandsons and she runs shit. The issue is that the shit she runs is usually in Nepal and we are in America and I come in first place at being American, thus resulting in a rare case of circular cross-continent baby-doting logic that cannot be solved.
Let’s take the matter of baby massages. It is traditional for Nepali mothers to massage their babies with mustard oil a few times a day, usually in front of a fire where they can warm the oil and warm their hands. I watched Aamaa drip oil in to Aidan and Pascal’s eyes and ears until they were well past toddlerhood. This is thought to be good for the baby’s development.
As we were unloading our suitcases, I extracted a few 2-liter sprite bottles that Aamaa had filled with ghee. I admit I knew these illicit items were stowed in my luggage and I consented to the, um—smuggling—for the sake of the baby. But then—Lo!—a two-liter bottle of mustard oil was discovered next to my shirts.
“You can’t get good mustard oil here,” Bishnu explained. Yes, these two were in cahoots.
“The oil massage is fine, but no oil in the eyes and ears,” Bishnu told Aamaa.
“Oh god, definitely no oil in the ears,” I squirmed. “And the eyes are out of the question.”
“La, la,” Aamaa murmured.
Aamaa set happily to her oil massages. However: we were missing fire. She would sit in a patch of sun in the living room, but it wasn’t the same thing as having fire, and fire was needed.
Are you worried about where this is going? Be worried.
September in San Francisco is temperate to hot. Bishnu’s apartment consists of a small living room attached to the kitchen, and there is one south-facing glass door that collects heat all afternoon. When the door is slid open, it lets through a nice breeze. For fully developed human mammals like me, this nice breeze is refreshing and has other benefits such as abundant availability of breathable oxygen. But for Nepali babies, moving air is considered cold. ANY MOVING AIR. There is a general understanding in Nepali culture that babies should be kept warm, so much so that they are ensconced in multiple layers of clothing and hats even in the middle of the summer. I have tried to free many sweaty babies from their multiple baby hats when I’ve had occasion to visit with said babies in said season in Nepal. It’s futile; the babies are going to be re-swaddled and re-sweated immediately. But I’m intolerably hot and uncomfortable just looking at them in their hot clothes, so I try to free them anyway.
Seeing Dali bundled in layer upon layer of clothes and blankets in San Francisco raised my sense of temperature regulation distress to a previously unattained level. Clearly, American territory calls for American swaddling to American body temperatures. Plus, the nurse who came by to check on Dali our second morning told Bishnu that the baby didn’t need to be put under so many layers and that the breeze was good for her. See, that’s what I said too.
So what this means is that each morning, I get up and crack the glass door – or sometimes just throw it open – and Aamaa runs to Dali in the opposite corner of the room to shelter her from the evil hypothermia-inducing fall breeze. Henceforth, we alternately, each when the other isn’t looking, adjust the glass door and Dali’s armor of clothing to our respective levels of comfort. This is of course an implicit pact. I know Aamaa’s going to undo my adjustments, and she knows the same, and the deal is that you have to respect the other person’s catastrophic approach to baby temperature maintenance by executing your improvements on the sly.
Advocating for your method, on the other hand, happens in the open and frequently. This is a lot of where Bishnu comes in. (Remember Bishnu?) Throughout the day, each of us loudly comments to Bishnu on why her baby should be kept hot or breezy. Bishnu tolerates this expertly. Both of our contradictory opinions are correct at all times. Bishnu is both too happy and too tired to care. We have nothing better to perseverate about. Everyone’s fine.
Now, the so-called absence of heat for Dali is particularly problematic during Mustard Oil Massage Time every few hours, due the aforementioned missing open-fire pit. On Wednesday, I go for a run. I breathe a great deal of healthy unimprisoned oxygen wafting off San Francisco Bay. Hot and refreshed I enter the apartment to find the glass door sealed shut…and Aamaa puttering in front of the floor-to-ceiling central heating unit, which is going at full blast, and where I realize she has just given Dali an oil massage. The apartment is about 10 million degrees.
I stand in the door, probably with a friendly look on my face.
“What?” Aamaa asks.
“Are you serious, you turned on the central heat in the middle of summer and closed the door and we’re all gonna cook and die in here!”
“Oh, it’s warm for the baby,” Aamaa says innocently.
“Oh my God, Aamaa, ok…Listen!” I throw open the glass door. “In a week, I’m gonna be in Connecticut and you guys are going to do whatever you want. But for the love of God, while I’m here, can we have air for the grown ups to breathe?”
“La, la,” Aamaa says, satisfied. I do have to hand it to her for that round.
The next day a package shows up from Amazon. Youba, bless his cotton socks, has ordered it.
Space heater.
For the rest of the week, and indeed as she will do for the next six months, every few hours Aamaa sits in front of the space heater in Bishnu’s room, which rises to five thousand degrees, happily massaging her squishy granddaughter. She warms her hand in front of the space heater and dips it in the mustard oil we brought from Nepal and presses it in to Dali’s tiny belly, cooing and giggling over her. Bishnu dotes around the two of them, delighted in their overheating together, and I pop in and out of the room reminding everyone that it’s much too hot for any normal person, and Aamaa answers, “La, la,” but I also have to take some pictures—they are so beautiful together and that space heater is so ridiculous and fantastic—and Youba sits in the living room letting us girls do what we do, and we are utterly content in our Dali’s world.
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.”’
We are having a family get together in Asheville, North Carolina. My dad is turning 80 this summer, and it’s Father’s Day, and Bishnu is pregnant with a baby girl. She and Youba arrive on a red-eye from San Francisco, Bethy and I fly in from Connecticut, and my parents drive over from Chapel Hill with Ricky and Julie and the kids. We plop our bags in a cluster of wood-paneled cabins shaded by rustling trees. It is the first time we have all been together since Bishnu got married last year. Now she is Bishnu Subedi Bhatta.
Bishnu and Youba have made the questionable decision of asking for name suggestions. We bat around ideas as we eat ice cream and go to the playground and climb Chimney Rock, where, even though there is an elevator, Bishnu takes the stone staircase up to the top, plodding along step by step while Youba fawns hopelessly over her. At the summit we take a family photo, the North Carolina hills yawning green in to the distance, an endless rustle that is too far off to hear from the top of Chimney Rock, giving way to blue.
In the six years after I first showed up in Kaskikot and before Bishnu came to the US, we would talk on the phone from time to time. It was always morning on one continent, and evening on the other, and in the decade since then I can’t say the phone connection has improved much. Through the static I’d hear about how Saano didi and Mahendra’s families were doing, and whether the millet or corn stalks with their stacked Groucho Marx mustaches had recently been planted or cut down. I’d tell her about New York City, where I was living, and say that Mom and Dad and Ricky were fine. We ended most of our conversations the same way.
“Ok then, well let’s meet in a dream.”
“Where should we go this time?”
And then we’d plan a meeting at the Kalika Temple, or in the kitchen with Aamaa, or on a mat in the yard to paint our nails, or at the festival of Teej. And then we’d say goodbye, and go to sleep to meet in a dream. And always in Nepal.
It has always seemed to me that Bishnu and I were born in to this world with a thread between us, translucent, like the kind used in mobiles or dental floss or to catch carp, because it is unassuming, tensile, and indestructible. The kind that seems as if it can be spooled out forever without reaching the other end that’s buried somewhere in its bottomless coils.
I decide to print the Chimney Rock photo for Father’s Day, which requires sneaking away in to Asheville. We need three copies of the photo for Dad, Ricky and Youba. While I’m out in Asheville I send a text to the family chat to ask if I need to pick up any ingredients for dinner. My mom replies.
Bishnu is cooking dal Bhatta.
I giggle at auto-correct, which has apparently learned Youba’s last name already. My mom means “dal bhaat,” traditional Nepali food–but the more I look at this, the funnier I find it anyway. My fingers tap over the keys.
Does this mean they picked a name for the baby?
It is Youba who replies.
Dal sounds like a boy. Shouldn’t it be Dali?
My mother and I become ecstatic over this. Bishnu’s kid is immediately christened Dali Bhatta. Mostly it is only my mom and me who think this is brilliant. It could be worse, though. My mom called me Loolie-tabooli-tabootznicky…and by “called” I mean “calls.” This is a true story. I was named for my grandfather Louis, and my family turned it turned into Tabootznicky.
We spend the rest of the weekend fishing in the pond, making s’mores on the porch, and turning the kids upside down. Bethy and I are staying in a cabin with Youba and Bishnu, and my mom has brought Bishnu an old notebook along with a pile of belongings from her now-“old” room in Bethesda. We flip through its pages, mystified and awed, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. It contains, in Bishnu’s handwriting: a list of instruments needed for the prehistoric version of the Kaskikot Dental Clinic; draft text for a sticker about fluoride toothpaste to be printed and posted in Kaskikot shops for vendor outreach; and practice answers to questions Bishnu expected to be asked at her visa interview with the US Embassy in 2008. She does a dramatic reading in the living room.
I remember when we bought Bishnu’s first pair of jeans. She looked as out of condition in jeans then as I did in my floppy kurta salwaars, each of us yet to learn to fit our bodies to these foreign garments that we irrevocably longed to inhabit. The more time Bishnu spent attending different trainings and programs that year, the more time I spent at the house with Aamaa alone, learning to move the goats about and cook and plant and cut. When Bishnu was away, Aamaa and I developed a quiet and comfortable flow together. Then Bishnu would come back for a day, arriving on the last bus at 7:30 at night, and I would feel a pang of sadness. The loss of the illusion that I was useful. I would fall back in to following Bishnu around and learning from her for the next twenty four hours. The spool would turn inward, we were drawn together, arguing, sitting in the kitchen, going to the temple, teaching each other about our worlds.
Bishnu always left to go back to her training programs early in the morning. They got progressively further away- Sarangkot, Pokhara, Damauli. America. (I didn’t know it then, but there would be a time when Bishnu was to wake me early in the morning in Bethesda, before going to work in Virginia.) On these mornings I could never motivate myself to wake up any earlier than necessary. Instead I would close my eyes to stave off departure, and then in the dawning bloom of morning, Bishnu would come take my shoulder to say goodbye, and slip out the door to catch the 7am bus. It always seemed, once she had been here, that she was going terribly far away; suddenly, I would be at a lose end. For a few hours, everything seemed empty.
And inevitably, after some period of months, I would spool away to America, and we would meet in a dream.
It is 2019. In my parents’ cabin, I assign my nephew Jonah, Ricky’s eldest and and a lanky eight, to instruct his three and four year old sisters as to how we are going to surprise three fathers with their family photographs. Jonah orders his sisters about for fifteen minutes, placing them behind the curtain, behind a couch, and practicing a chaotic toddler chorus of “Happy Father’s Day!” It is decided that I am to cue the surprise with a casual unsuspicious phrase, for which Jonah has selected “Wasn’t it nice weather today!” With this, my nephew and nieces are to spring from their hiding places and proclaim the happiness of Father’s Day.
The plan goes remarkably well. Youba’s features spread momentarily in to an arrangement of euphoric surprise: he is going to be a dad. And then, a collage of moments fluttering around us. We coo over Dali Bhatta. Jonah and Eli and Nell swing elatedly in the hammock, laughing hysterically over each other, until my dad and Ricky and Youba take their places. The trees around the cabin fall in to a still sheltering, rustling blessings over us, and the sun drops slowly over the hammock, delayed like a water droplet on velvet. We are gorgeously suspended in time.
Bishnu and Youba have booked a 6am flight. So it is still dark when Bishnu comes in to wake me the next morning. I roll over and can almost feel the straw mat under arm as Bishnu whispers, “Bye Laura, we have to go to the airport.” I wrap my arms around her and Dali Bhatta, suddenly both at peace and without coordinates; it is an old feeling, ancient as the notebook and the Dead Sea Scrolls, bottomless as a whole new human being.
The enormous future seems unimaginable in this pre-dawn, where we stretch away in to a miraculous dream, until we are real again.
Recently, Bethy was in Thailand and discovered that someone there has been making teddy bears with a full set of teeth.
In my life, this is a very interesting and exciting finding.
Bethy decided to order some teddy bears with teeth for health centers in Cambodia that are running an early childhood hood oral health program, and I figured I would bring a teddy bear over to Nepal. It was fairly simple. In brainstorming the idea, we got to thinking about the enormous contribution that Jevaia’s Education Field Officer Gaurab has made in our organization, beginning long before we had a name. Gaurab was our first Clinic Assistant in our first clinic in Kaskikot. He volunteered for years as a teenager in school seminars, teaching kids about about oral health. He became one of our field officers in 2015 and has walked literally countless miles, up and down hills, in the rain, after dark, and in just about every crazy situation possible to promote oral health in schools in Nepal.
We decided our first teddy bear with teeth should obviously be named Gaurab.
When I arrived recently in Cambodia, Gaurab the Bear had completed the first leg of his journey, from Thailand to Cambodia. He came with frens.
We were so excited to meet him!
We hung out in Cambodia for a while, and then Gaurab’s frens said goodbye
And we left for the airport.
We took a tuk tuk.
Gaurab seemed to like the airport
and he really blended in with all the other travelers.
Especially while waiting for his flight.
He settled in, clutching his ticket to Kathmandu
And we enjoyed perusing very expensive jewelry that isn’t really less expensive even though it’s Duty Free, in Kuala Lumpur.
Honestly we were pretty tired by the time we finally arrived in Kathmandu and Gaurab tried to be patient with the visa process but he was ready for a nap.
The next day, refreshed for our flight to Pokhara, we made some NEW Frens in the airport!
You can imagine Gaurab’s anticipation on the flight west…
And finally, upon arrival we were greeted by some real big fans.
Finally, after meeting the rest of the team, Muna and Rajendra,
For the year and a half, we’ve been extremely lucky to be able to provide bi-annual professional development for our dental technicians and clinic assistants. It has quickly become one of my favorite parts of our project. Jevaia dental clinics deliver the Basic Package of Oral Care, a collection of dental procedures that was designed in collaboration with the World Health Organization for limited-resources settings. The BPOC was developed by Europeans, and it has mostly been used in developing world settings as aid or transient care.
Since we train local dental technicians to provide the BPOC in Health Posts instead of temporary camps or outreach programs, we’ve had the chance think about applying it as a sustained primary health care strategy–especially since we started working with Berkeley, Dr. Bethy and Dr. Keri and other collaborators in 2016. I suppose that kind of thinking is one difference between aid, or any kind of temporary relief, and human rights, which entitles people to a consistent standard of health care.
Our past three professional development workshops have focused on the use of Silver Diamine Fluoride; infection controltailored to rural Health Posts; and treatment planning (one thing about a stable primary care provider is: they can actually plan!). This summer, Dr. Bethy is teaching our professional development on school-based treatment planning, so we can shift to a more systematic school-based oral health care model with local dental technicians.
Dental technicians in JOHC already conduct monthly school seminars to do school-based screening and treatment for children and parents. We call these “seminars” rather than “camps” because they are run by a local provider and they help connect people with the Health Post dental clinic. Unlike most “camps,” seminars don’t aim to treat as many teeth as possible in the shortest time, but to build relationships with the technician and raise public support for a government dental clinic and community outreach programs.
Our 2018 summer professional development was seven days long for veteran technicians and ten days for new technicians. It kicked of with technicians and assistants examining photos of real ART fillings (like the kind they do) organizing them in to acceptable and unacceptable outcomes. Then the clinicians had to use the photos to diagnose why the unacceptable treatments had partly or fully failed, which lead to a review of practice technique. It was really gratifying to see how this impacted everyone’s thinking a few days later, when we were back in a school placing fillings.
Since the BPOC was originally conceptualized as crisis management, a challenge of our project establishing a quality of care standard in a stable primary care setting. At this year’s workshop Bethy helped introduce a competency framework. During the three days of classroom work, our new technicians supervised old technicians in a “simulation seminar” where they had to demonstrate each technique using the competency checklist. When we moved to the three-day school setting with live patients, new technicians were supervised through ten of each procedure and had to pass the competency checklist ten times. Veteran technicians performed one of each technique under a doctor’s supervision and we used the completed checklists to award “competency certifications” that are valid for 18 months. We even created a framework for technicians to review their competency certification every 1-2 years.
Overall, the workshop was meant to guide our clinical teams toward a more rigorously informed, holistic approach to school-based health care, where JOHC technicians work as members of the primary care system rather than visitors. The training emphasized taking time to slow down and connect with patients rather than blowing through a line at the door. Dentistry can be scary and rather than jumping straight at a kid’s teeth, the intake leaves time to comfort frightened children and to learn about their lifestyle habits and disease risk factors. In turn that information is used to provide more complete and well-informed care, instead of just treating as many teeth as possible. It seems obvious, especially for primary care practice, but in reality that’s not usually how dentistry is done in our setting (or often, in general, if we’re being honest). As part of this, the clinical teams spent a good amount of time reviewing cariology (the biology of oral disease) which unlike the practicalities of how to mix cement and apply it properly, informs which techniques should be used when. In other words, without adding in more high-technology interventions, we are focusing on more effective deployment of the conventional BPOC.
For me as a non-clinician, it’s super interesting to see how these minimally-invasive techniques can be used not only for emergency management of foregone problems, but for early intervention and prevention of disease in the whole child. In all children, actually. This same package of care can be used in service to population level public health needs where resources are a practical limitation, and yet there has been little focus on applying it that way. My dream is that one day it will be rural technicians and assistants presenting to academics at conferences on how they’ve adapted and improved these innovations to benefit their communities in the real world.
An incredible thing happened on the third day of our practice seminar in Kaskikot. The school we chose is next door to the Health Post. The third day was reserved for parents so that technicians could apply the training concepts to adult patients. I was waiting out in the stairwell when suddenly I saw a face I could never forget: Nisha, one of the students I taught for a year at Sada Shiva Primary when she was in fourth grade, a million years ago. It was with Nisha and her classmates that Govinda dai and I ran our first ever school oral health program back in 2004. At the end of that day, we took a photo of all of us in front of the Kaskikot Health Post, which at that time was just one simple building that today is fully dedicated to our Dental Clinic. Nisha had come to our seminar because her daughter is a student at the school where we were running the training in 2018–with five dental technicians, seven assistants, and an international expert in public health dentistry as trainer.
Finally, the icing on our professional development cake was a world-class makeover for the Kaskikot Clinic. My friend Maelle who lives in Pokhara started an organization called We Art Onethat paints murals and does art programs in schools. We asked We Art One to turn our Kaskikot Dental Clinic in to something bright and welcoming. They took it next level, putting this exuberant mural on the outside and literally building a ceiling mobile inside for patients to gaze at while lying in the chair. It’s made from hand-cut wooden clouds that Maelle painted.
I know not every rural Health Post in the world can have clouds and rainbows hanging from the ceiling. But I think they all should and I think we should try. The only reason we need is that every patient in the world is a person. Those of us with choices would never choose health care in an unfriendly, cold or unwelcoming environment, especially for medical treatment that can be scary like dentistry. I don’t know why we seem to believe in some kind of false economy that suggests it’s not realistic to afford that dignity to everyone. This beautiful artwork was not expensive or difficult; it was just a decision. It mattered more than doing something else for some other purpose.
So that was our summer. Two new clinics and nine veterans are open for business, if anyone out there needs an appointment! Come visit us soon!
….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.”
The cicadas came when I was five
behind the school yard.
I put my finger on one
and then I picked it up
it was like a fig, dark and rough.
At five cicadas were interesting, like figs.
Now I am much bigger
friendly, the little goat nuzzles my shoulder with his warm snout
soft, we are alive, together easily.
And then I press my eyes shut
as I capture the insect that has invaded this carpet, which is mine
because I own it.
Sometimes I wonder how I can find my way back
from the pliant kid to the figs to the cicadas, captivated
with all their legs, their slick ribbed shells, all their songs enchanting
the school yard
all chirping and chirping tickling my ears until my ears overflowed with music
amid the crunching leaves and delicate wings
a symphony, a society, a universe blossom
after seventeen years of silence.
Sometimes I wonder
what we are afraid of
why we crush things, bugs and leaves and oceans and people
when I was five, I used
just one tiny finger
to say hello.
Over the course of 13 years in Nepal, I’ve spent almost all my time in villages. My whole understanding of Nepal, and all my friends, routines, the food I eat, the places I sleep, even the way I speak the language and therefore the way I think, have been organized around my adopted family and rural life, or its popular sister, the cramped and thankless circumstance of recent urban migration.
But this summer, I’m full-time supervising a city-based office with four people and a field staff of 16; getting a latte each morning; diving in to health care policy and human rights frameworks. I schedule coffee meetings and visit offices. All told, it’s only in the last 1-2 years that I’ve started getting to know some of the other long-term foreigners and NGO founders living in Pokhara, who all pretty much know each other, because they all live in the city, which for me has always been just a place to visit for work. And when I’m here, my non-work life is completely centered around my (recent urban migrant) Nepali family.
There’s a vague sense of discovery about this new routine. For example, I’ve been sleeping in a room in the office, and – this is going to sound weird, but – slowly realizing I can put things there to make the bed and little space around it mine. Like: a new blanket. Or: a hook on the wall. This is an especially weird feeling. In all the time I’ve lived in Nepal, the only space that’s been mine-ish is the small house in Kaski, with its two beds and one dresser that I share with the rest of the family. A single bed and little shelf of clothes for me alone, that I can modify to my liking, is a bizarre amount of freedom that I’m only even noticing bit by bit. (Mind you, we’re talking about a bed in the finance and admin room of our office.)
Obviously, I have no trouble with this in the rest of my life. But in Nepal, well, it’s just not the way I’ve learned exist here.
The other night, I had Pascal and Aidan for a sleepover at the office, with its main attraction, the Internet. We watched movies and ate treats. We’ve also been out for boating and out for dinner, because it’s fun, and we live in the city. And yet these are activities that have never remotely crossed my mind in the past, because they are more similar to how I live in the U.S. It actually never occurred to me I could do them here because the communities I spend my time with mostly don’t.
Today I went to a salon and got my hair done. A salon.
When I was a kid, I was literally the pickiest eater the world has ever seen. I know you think your kid is pickier, but trust me on this one. I was okay with a short list of simple foods, and I would gladly sit and watch everyone else eat rather than be forced to alter this known quantity. Once, I went to my best friend Katie Schultz’s house, and they made me pasta with butter while the rest of the family enjoyed a normal meal. It wasn’t till I put the pasta in my mouth and a terrifying and unfamiliar taste exploded on my tongue, that I found out that butter doesn’t taste like margarine, which is what we had in my house. The feeling of shame and fear sitting at the dinner table, hoping nobody would notice if I didn’t eat, is still with me almost 30 years later.
It wasn’t until eighth grade, on a school trip to Smith Island where I was stuck in an adolescent group eating situation, that I tried tomato sauce for the first time. For a few years – ok, until college – I’d put a little blob of tomato sauce on the side of my plate, and kind of dip my fork in it. Eventually I worked my way up to normal pasta, but to this very day, when I make my own meals, every component sits side by side so I can mix as I go. I’m no longer alarmed by new foods like I was as a child, but I don’t adventure much. I eat the same reliable items almost every day.
What, you ask, does this have to do with Nepal?
I’m not sure, but all I can say is it kind of feels the same. I’ve spent a long time in this environment adjusting to the absence of almost everything I was accustomed to before I came. I found my nook and I’m comfortable there. Rural life in particular, while not materially complex, runs miles deep, and each iteration, each day, each season and year, enriches and returns itself to the last one with a sense of familiarity and certainty: the next one will come too, even if we are not here to see it. I haven’t made a life of travel. I plopped down in one place and snuggled in. Altering its fundamentals even in small ways creates a whole orchestra of funny tastes on my tongue.
Also, FYI, we eat the exact same thing for every meal in this country. PHEW.
Mean time, I do like this blanket though. How do you like my office nook?
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. 
All The Pieces 
