(for more photos check out: http://community.webshots.com/user/aytowler )
Raajan’s Maama (Uncle) is a highly regarded Lama (Buddhist Monk). He has gone to distant places to teach and has student’s that come from neighboring villages to pay respect to him. Now he mostly makes his living by treating people for various illnesses and giving them blessings. Whether it is diarrhea, sore muscles, a bad crop, or bad luck, one pervasive belief is that a cure can be found by ridding away the bhut (ghosts / spirits) which are responsible for the ailment in their occupation of a person or place. As payment Maama gets anything from a bag of rice to a few rupees.
My first time on the way to his house we came across a split in the path. This place was covered in flowers and rice. Raajan said that his Maama had done a blessing here to keep away the bhut that had been causing troubles for a neighbor.
We had gone to his house to receive tikka. Tikka is a colorful decoration worn on the forehead. During a small puja (religious worship ceremony) tikka is often given as a simple red dot on the third eye. Throughout Nepal many people walk around with tikka at any time of day, any time of the year. The tikka might be a plain dot, or it might be an elaborate piece of art combining various colors, rice, flowers and designs depending on the occasion. Dossain is an auspicious time when people travel to the houses of their elders to give simple gifts of milk or rice or alcohol and to receive blessings in the form of tikka. People will have their entire foreheads covered in rice and whitish yellow coloring as a symbol of this exchange of blessings and the godliness which we all inhabit.
A line of about 8 kids sat down on a straw mat on the mud flour in Maama’s stone house. Maama had prepared a concoction of chamel (uncooked rice) in a sticky paste. First Raajan, the eldest of our group, sat up straight with his hands cupped around his belly to catch anything that might fall. He lifted his chin slightly and turned his gaze downward. Maama whispered some prayers and flicked chamel this way and that in respect of the gods who are always recognized first. Then he gently covered a good portion of the center of Raajan’s forehead in the white rice while continuing to whisper prayers. The tikka was completed with the sprinkling of flower petals over the head. Raajan lifted himself up and bowed down to the feet of his uncle until Maama reached his hands down to lift Raajan’s head back up. Maama then continued down and blessed each of his younger relatives who in turn prostrated themselves to their uncle in utter respect and humility. It was a wonderful experience to be included in this blessing and I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face as the cool sticky rice was pressed into my third eye and flowers were sprinkled over my head.
We ate an incredible dinner at his house that night prepared by his two eldest daughters. Maama has seven children living in this small house and the two eldest daughters do most of the work as his wife struggles with mental and emotional problems which prevent her from doing many tasks like cutting ghaas, cooking and cleaning well. The hospitality here is incredible, almost too much so. I feel like a king to always have food served to you, to have the women constantly asking what you need more of as they wait for everyone else to finish before they serve themselves.
The next day we found ourselves back at Maama’s house sipping on fresh curd served by Lalita, his second eldest daughter. Then we were led upstairs to see some of Maama’s collection of Buddhist artifacts. A group of about four of us- brothers, cousins, we opened old books and scrolls written in the strange Tibetan script, we twirled around prayer wheels, beat on aged drums and blew on a beautifully carved, silver lined conch shell until our cheeks muscles were sore and could take no more. Then we sat down on the bed in the old room with Maama.
During festival time I had been noticing so much alcohol drinking and meat eating in the Buddhist community. Every house we went to they were offered. Even Maama invited us to enjoy Jard and roksi (corn wine and distilled corn wine) as is the custom to please guests. I couldn’t help but ask the alcohol avoiding, meat eating, middle aged married monk with a family a few questions.
“Can you tell me what you think about alcohol?” I asked.
“Its no good” Maama replied.
“But why? What does it do?” I said searching for a more full answer.
“Well” Maama began, “It ruins your heart, darkens your soul, spoils your mind, and destroys your relationship with god” he said in a very matter of fact yet heart felt way.
This definitely left me in a doubting and contemplative mindset. Nepalis are aimed at pleasing their guests, it is hard to refuse something without offending the host, finishing your mountain of rice is just about the only way to say thank you, not finishing it is a horrible insult to the woman’s cooking- ‘miTho bhayena?’ would be implied, ‘it wasn’t tasty?’
The conversation took another direction with Maama and it wasn’t long until he offered Jon and I some roksi. What! Jon and I looked at each other biting our lips to keep back the laughter, had this monk not just told us that alcohol is a horrible substance that ruins your heart, darkens your soul, spoils your mind, and destroys your relationship with god?!
“No, thanks” we said.
“Oh come on, just a little” he encouraged.
Saying no is just about the hardest thing to do in this culture. At this point I had had the jard a few times in the village but was yet to have its great grandfather roksi. Maama poured us a glass which continued to fill long after we said ‘enough’. I sipped the stuff and felt my mouth ignite. The burning liquor lingers in the mouth with a scent of cardamom and cinnamon as it moves down the throat tingling like liquid fire the whole way down. I am not a big liquor drinker, but compared to other liquors I have had, this was a homemade delicacy. I slowly sipped this puzzling contradiction of friendly hospitality and dharmic hostility. Jon was encouraged to finish the last sip before we headed back to Raajan’s house for dinner, it would be medicine for Jon’s upset stomach Maama said.
From the second day in Borjyang my stomach was never completely settled. At first asked the Lama family to boil our drinking water, but they told us that there was no need, the water at the springs is as fresh as it gets, straight out of a rock from the source further up the mountain. Who knows exactly what caused our problems- unboiled water, charred skin (see last blog entry), corn mush porridge- all firsts in my book, but Jon quickly became sick and bed ridden. While Jon had violent liquid raging from both ends, I was luckily only streaming from one, with only gas coming out the other. I woke up one time in the middle of the night and sat up straight to be met by a burp no shorter than a good seven seconds.
After a few days in the village most of the Lama Family had to leave to go back to Kathmandu, they had to re-open the fruit store and so on. Jon, Raajan and I had been playing around with the idea of walking back to the city- a full 2-3 day walk, but Jon was still not feeling well so he left with the others as Raajan and I stayed in the village for a few more days. Raajan just wasn’t ready to leave his village yet. He knew that soon he would be leaving for Dubai and would not be back here for 2-3 years. Raajan and I were hoping to go pay a visit to his one sister I had not met yet and who Raajan hadn’t seen for several months. At this point all I knew about Urmilla is that she is removed from the family in many ways because of her love-marriage and husband whom the family doesn’t like, that at one point she lived abroad in Dubai to make money, and that her husband’s house is about a four hour walk straight uphill from Borjyang.
Jon says that leaving the village he stopped by the Maama’s house again. Jon told Maama that his stomach was still not well and he was feeling very sick. Maama said it must have been because he drank to much roksi!
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the village. Without the whole big family and the blasting stereo, things were quieter and more relaxed. Slow days, good food, good people. I got to see how the men quantify their milk in the morning to be carried and sold in the city each day. I was able to see a the owner of the corn mill sacrifice a young goat to Durga spattering blood on the greasy industrial machine and giving a tikka of blood stained rice to his children. I was able to eat some of that goat.
I was also able to take an hour walk with Raajan and two of Maama’s kids to a holy place for puja. Across the village and down an incredibly steep hill we reached a beautiful waterfall. After bathing in the waterfall we climbed the adjacent rock covered in bat droppings and incredible ferns and came to a cave of white stone dripping with holiness. The white rock emanated a motherly wombness, and its brainy indentations made the place seem even more conscious than us humans. Behind sheaths of millennial oozing rock and stalactites were placed small artifacts for worship, but everyone knew which was the real god. We made offerings of rice, incense, prayers, fresh water buffalo milk, and flowers we collected on the walk. After giving ourselves tikka and climbing back up the steep mountainside he we walked back to the village collecting guavas, Indian goose berries, peanuts and tomatoes along the way.
I also had the frequent pleasure of being fed Saripha (Cheramoya). Raajan’s aunt Phupu, who is a more devote Lama (monk) than Maama, built the habit of inviting me into her home and sitting me down with a full array of these fully ripened fruits. We would chat some, but she mostly encouraged me to succumb to the blissful state these little fleshy morsels induce.
One day after John had left and before my bowels had found their peace, Raajan and two of his old friends invited me to ‘gumnu’ (to wander / go on a trip). We started descending down the hill out of the village in the morning so we could take a bus to another mountain where there was apparently a great temple for seeing and praying and fresh fish for eating. Before making too much progress down the hill I stopped midway through a terraced filled surrounded by bright yellow mustard flowers to inform the guys that I didn’t think I could make it. I was already feeling dizzy and tired, and was contracting my lowest sphincter to suppress an urgent calling. Of course they refused my proposal of them going on without me, so I said as an additional excuse that if I wanted to be able to visit Raajan’s older sister like we hoped, I would need to rest up.
I rested on the edge of the terrace and listened to the boys call my name from below. But the sight of the river waaaay below, and the mountain waaay on the other side, and the thought of climbing back up here by nightfall was too much. The thought of hanging around the village was much more appealing.
The past few days I had been spending a lot of time with some of Maama’s kids- Regina, Lalita, Ashish- and Bejay- the son of Raajan’s oldest brother Bikram, the fat drunk taxi driver who hasn’t come to the village where his wife and two sons live for several months, not even for Dossain. These kids always talked about how much they wanted to learn English. Speaking in broken sentence I could teach them I little but I felt like writing might be helpful especially because I would be leaving in a few days anyways. I had proposed a few days earlier to sit down and give them a lesson. They loved the idea and I thought today would be a great day. Maama had also half jokingly told me about a dozen times that I needed to teach him and his kids English. “You can speak our language but we cannot speak yours” he would say.
So I sat down with a group of four kids and Phupu (‘aunt’- the sister of Maama who is a more devoted unmarried monk) with the highest hopes of making great progress that morning. If they were really serious we could have a couple hours now and a couple hours later before dark. The kids were enthusiastic and it was a lot of fun. I gave them a set of colored pencils as a gift the day before. My idea was to use color coordination to teach them nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. I would write simple sentences in English language using roman script and sanskrit script to help with pronunciation and then translate the sentence into Nepali. Then later if the kids forget the meaning of an English word all they would have to do is coordinate colors. I knew there was only so much I could do in a day or two, but still my hopes where high.
It was all much harder than I expected. I was having difficulty explaining the meaning of grammar but was still able to pass some basic knowledge along. I saw in some of their school books that they had already learned about grammar, but clearly it had not stuck. The lesson was moving along very slowly. After about an hour Ashish, the younger brother of Lalita and Regina, started to become eager to go play. I began to become discouraged. This is when it really sank in that learning anything, but especially a language, takes serious long-term commitment. These kids already when to school where they were learning English, but they were clearly not getting much from it. ‘ So I can just teach them a few sentences and a structural basis!’ I had thought; but it is not that easy, especially because I really wanted them to really understand what they were saying.
Before finishing the lesson to go play again Lalita brought her homework that she had to complete before the holiday was over. I didn’t want to just do the homework for her, so I tried to do it with her. Quickly I realized that she could read all of it quit clearly but did not understand anything. The sentences she read used words from the past and present tenses using irregular verbs. These kids didn’t even know the most basic structures of the English language- how on earth their teacher could possibly expect them to complete this ridiculous assignment of answering questions about how animals from other continents ‘flew and fly’ and how ‘the man sipped tea from a saucer brought by the delightful mistress’ was now as alien to me as the relatedness of ‘bring’ and ‘brought’ are to poor Lalita.
Feeling like I hadn’t completed much of anything in the last two hours the kids sang me a song and wrote down the lyrics. Songs are always the best way for me to learn language. Maybe I should I have taught them a song, or spoke more, or… it no longer mattered…
We were off to play. Once every year, communities throughout Nepal- in the cities and in the villages- play ping. Ping is the world for swing. They construct huge swings towering 20 feet in the air and kids and young adults take their turn at standing in the rope and swinging themselves above the height of fear. It is said that paying ping removes obstacles from one’s life, that one is able to see past their fears and obtain their dreams if they play each year. I was amazed at how high the swing goes and the grace with which the kids push themselves toward the clouds.
For Regina and Lalita, Maama’s two eldest daughters, after playing it was time to cut ghass, and then time to pick vegetables, and then time to cook, and then time to clean, and then time to sleep, wake, cut ghass, milk the cows, pick vegetables, cook, clean… study? Schoool? Get married…
I joined Regina, Lalita, Phupu and bauju (Bikram’s wife) in the terrace to cut ghaas. We used our hands to rip up weeds by our hands and chit chatted with light hearts and occasional laughs. I couldn’t help but smile when I overheard them conspiring to go and eat immature, soft, sweet peanuts on the other side of the village next week; “we will tell them we are going to cut ghass…” I quickly learned the difference between a daal (bean) plant and a weed. I was embarrassed that I had pulled up one of their bean plants, the roots of which I tried, with no avail, to stick back in the earth.
Besides ‘are you fine?’ and ‘have you eaten rice?’ one of the most popular questions for small talk is ‘who is in your family? Do your have mother and father, brothers and sisters, etc?’ “Yes I have a mother, but actually my father died 10 years ago” I said this time around feeling comfortable sharing this with these people who have themselves treated me with so much love and kindness. “But I have a new father” I continue, “I have a younger sister and my new father has a son who is just like a little brother to me.” The “new father” part always throws Nepalis off. They say that here in Nepal, if a woman were to go live with a new man after her children were grown up, she might be killed. So I explain that well actually he moved into my mom’s house (a completely foreign concept). After my parents were separated he came to live in a room of my house to help pay rent, then eventually they started staying together in the same room. Divorce here is a new enough occurrence to cause some disgust, so this story is surely a mind and heart twister for them.
I asked the group of woman and girls why it is that if a woman moves in with another man she might be killed but a man can have multiple wives. Bauju explained that the reason her husband didn’t come home this holiday season is that he has a new woman in the city. I asked how this made them feel, they said its fine, “if your husband as more than one wife they should be able to live together and still honor their husband”. Bauju said she would like her husband and new woman to come to the village together.
“But isn’t there something unfair here, a gender inequality”, I kept on trying to imply. Regina and Lalita explained that the reason it was bad for a woman to go with a new man is because a person should only sleep with one person in their lifetime. Otherwise is a sin. Only if the woman has small babies and her husband dies or leaves can she have the honor of being taken in by another man, but even then she will be looked down upon for some time.
“So if a man has multiple wives he is not sinning” I asked.
“No” the girls replied, “because he will / should only sleep with one of them”.
At this point it was clear that the conversation was beginning to move into space usually not confronted. Sex is almost entirely taboo in Nepali culture. The older women now mostly kept silent. As the conversation continued however, I learned that Regina and Lalita’s had another older brother. In fact Maama, their father, has two wives and their older brother lives with their father’s first wife who could not get along with his second wife.
“So your father has two wives” I confirmed and received a positive answer.
“And his other wife had a son with your father, is this not a sin?” This particular topic receded with my point being made. We continued talking and I was incredibly surprised about these young girls forwardness in asking me about sex. I had heard that in traditional culture mothers and daughters hardly even breach the topic.
By this time our voices were extremely low, near whispers. “In your country do people sleep together before they are married?” they asked.
“Well some people do and some people don’t” I answered, “Some people think that to do that is a sin and others do not.”
One conception many Nepalis have of ‘my country’ (a strange concocted place where white people live- America and Europe- the difference between them unclear for many), among others such like ‘all Americans are white’ and ‘all Americans are rich’, is the idea that we all sleep with one person, leave them and quickly find another. Knowing my unmarried status, the girls asked me if I too had slept with someone before. My answer gave them a shock. “We really don’t like engresi people for this reason” they said. (engresi is the word for the English language and also can refer to white or American people).
“So you don’t like me?” I said.
“No, we like you but we just really do not like that habit” they replied.
“That is great” I told them, “I am glad you do not like all of my habits and we can recognize our differences”.
“How come you do not have a baby?” they asked.
“Because of condoms.” I must have said the word ‘condom’ too loud because Phupu turned around with a disturbed face grunting with a tone to keep it down or shut up. The girls explained to me that they knew about condoms from their sex-ed class that they were taking at school. They said that everyone is really shy to talk about this stuff, “but we shouldn’t be shy right?” Lalita said, “We can talk about it.” The girls told me that they knew about other forms of birth control- shots and pills and surgery as well and how it is better to have a small family with less mouths to feed- “A big family is a hurting / sad family, a small family is a happy family”. They knew about diseases and how a condom prevents them.
The fact that we had this conversation in the presence of the older women to me seemed revolutionary. The older woman would have been slapped silly if they had had such a conversation in their younger years. But there is a growing consciousness in Nepal that the status and respect of woman must be raised if the position of their society as a whole is to progress. ‘New Nepal’ is also bringing education and a new consciousness about development and progress. Raajan’s Aama did not go to school, there was none when she was growing up, especially for women. Raajan’s older sisters studied through fifth grade. Regina and Lalita are in 9th and 8th grade respectively.
Phupu and Bauju are both older adults while Regina and Lalita have told me that they are 16 and 15 respectively. I later learned that they are 18 and 17. Both girls say that their marrying age has come. I think they both feel inside that their fate is not unlike most of their neighbors, friends and family: they will (may) have an arranged marriage and be sent to their husband’s family’s house where they will do most of the housework and fieldwork and bare children. However when I asked about their hopes, “what do you want to be / do?” Regina says she wants to be a teacher and a good wife. Lalita says she does not want to get married, she wants to become a Lama (monk) like her Aunt Phupu. Se will go to school and learn the ways of monks. Another time Lalita told me she wanted to marry an American. I asked if that was really possible.
“Of course its possible” she said almost offended, “other girls from nearby villages have married Americans and now live there.” Lalita held onto my eyes later that evening and I couldn’t help but wonder which American this gorgeous young girl was hoping to marry. I also couldn’t help but wonder what processes of exotification might be exaggerating my attraction.
It is in fact not uncommon for aid workers and volunteers to marry local villagers. I have had fathers ask me to marry their daughter so they can move to America. I have had people ask me to pack their children in my bags when I return to my country so they can have a better life. ‘How can I go to America?’ is the next most popular question besides ‘have you eaten rice?’ ‘how do you know how to speak Nepali?’ and ‘who is in your family?’. The easiest answer to this question is “you need a visa.” An American visa costs more money than the average Nepali family can make in a lifetime or even in countless generations.
We wrapped up the giant piles of ghaas (weeds) we had collected and each carried a load up the steep hill to Maama’s house where we unloaded them for the animals. On the way back up I asked Phupu and Bauju to please not be offended by the conversation we had had. They said it was fine in a tone that seemed to show them giving way to an understanding that although taboo, dialogue about these things is important.
Getting back to Maama’s house I sat down with two young men that had come from several villages away to receive a tikka from their old guru. The boys had an old manuscript with them written in Tibetan. They were not very fluent with the book but I asked what the book was used for.
Maama asked what my birthday was, he took the book and moved his finger along an intricate pattern on the first page on the book. Back and forth he went, in a logic only he followed, until he landed on a symbol. This symbol caused told him to flip to a certain page and to read a particular stanza of that page marked by the same symbol. Maama told me that I had some bhut (ghost / spirit) with me. The bhut had been with me for quite some days he said. He told me that my stomach had been hurting.
I asked how serious these bhut were. “Not too serious.” I asked him who told him that my stomach had been unsettled for several days. “No one, only the book” he answered.
I was shocked but still not completely taken by belief. Before leaving Maama’s to go back to Raajan’s I asked if there was anything he could do to get the bhut to leave. “Of course.” So I asked him to Phuknu me. ‘Phuknu’ literally means to blow, but also means to deal with bhut.
So Maama lifted up my shirt where, he quietly chanted a mantra under his breath and lightly rubbed my stomach in a quick rhythm. The light touch tickled, and I would like to say it was somehow different from an ordinary ticklish feeling. The mantra he was whispering was only interrupted by quick bursts of air which he blew in rhythm with the chanting and rubbing. And just like that it was over in a couple minutes.
After a week of runny liquid stools several times a day, I did not move my bowels for two days after Maama did his work.
I returned to Raajan’s house and ate a quite dinner- Raajan and his friends had yet to return from their trip. Even though by this time I was feeling better, I was so glad I didn’t go with them. Finally the three boys got back and told me how much I had missed out, and how much better it would have been if I was there! They showed me pictures of the temple and the river from one of the guy’s camera phone. One of the pictures Raajan was especially proud of. He had taken the time to put individual leaves together on the ground to spell out: “WE MISS U.”
The other two guys left and that night Raajan and I stayed up for hours and hours talking. I told him about my attempts to give an English lesson. He told me about standing in the back of a classroom packed with over 90 students. He would lean against the wall and take notes using his other hand as a surface for his notepad. I asked about what it would mean for Regina or Lalita to move to the city and like some of Raajan’s other siblings and cousins, go to a private school. The city is really the only place where people get a good education and a chance to learn English in an ‘English medium’ school Raajan explains; but you have to get started at an early age. How can you transplant something whose roots are already so developed in its own home soil. Regina and Lalita are in 8th and 9th grade. If they went to a private school in the city they would probably be place in the 2nd or 3rd grade- they would not like this.
Raajan continued to explain that Maama would probably not allow his daughters to leave. Who would do the work around the house? How could he afford to pay tuition anyways? As it is Maama’s land does not produce enough corn and buckwheat to feed the family year-round. He has to take out loans and buy food to supplement their diet at certain times of the year. Raajan explains that he loves his cousins very much and how he sometimes buys them the new clothes, notebooks and pencils that their father cannot afford to buy.
From this conversation I began to realize the situation of poverty in the village. On the surface one does not see that over generations and increased population, each family’s plot of land has been divided and decreased in size several times. One does not see that the fields that seem full of food are hardly enough to feed families year round. One does not see the debt that most people are in from buying the newest seeds to plant for crops, from buying food to get through the hungry season, from building a new house, from buying fertilizer, from buying a plane ticket to go abroad to make enough money to send your kids to a decent school, from the cost of a funeral or a marriage, from buying a bisy, from the costs of feeding your relatives roksi at Dossain.
In this village most people who actually have a cow or bisy sell their milk as a main source of income- $40/month at the height of production. If fields here cannot grow enough corn to feed the people and animals here year-round, then you need to buy food and haul it in 100lbs sacks 3km up the side of the mountain. But how do you buy food? You have to sell crops. But if you are selling crops, that means you have less food and therefore have to buy even more to feed yourself. Kidney beans, peanuts, tomatoes, and potatoes are the most recently introduced crops in Borjyang- mostly grown as cash crops to be sold for income. To maximize income you have to maximize output from the fields. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides are being introduced for the first time to the terraced hillsides of Borjyang- a symbol of a way ‘forward’. A way forward leads to change. Change means better schools, electricity, roads and hospitals.
Raajan explains this all in a very dramatic way that leaves a melancholic mood in the room. I try to explain that in the English language there is a difference between the words ‘rich’ and ‘wealthy’, that one’s heart can be rich even if they are monetarily poor. I tried to explain the richness I found here but my attempts were lost in translation. I explained that here a whole extended family lives so close but while I was growing up I could only meet my cousins once or twice a year via a vehicle of wealth- an airplane, but is that really a ‘rich’ family circumstance? I said this with a twinge in my heart knowing that it wasn’t the best way to explain what I was trying to say. Raajan explained that for the better part of his life he only got to see his mom and dad once every two years. Aama and Baaba lived in Calcutta where Baaba had a job in the Indian Army as a security guard. Raajan has grown up in 4 different places and never had an airplane to connect him to his family. Both of his older sisters’ husbands have been overseas for the majority of their kids’ life making the money to pay the city room rent and school tuition.
There is no comparing our lives, we both concluded. I told him that I had complete sympathy for him and his family but wanted to ask a question out of sheer curiosity, free of implications: if Besanti’s and Sharmilla’s (his two older sisters) husbands came home and the whole family stayed together, would the combined labor be enough to produce enough food freeing the family from the need for a monetary income?
No. No freedom from money. The harvest is not big enough, buying more land is too expensive, chemical fertilizers are seen as the agricultural way forward. Raajan himself is over 400,000 rupees ($6,000) in debt, a tragic story that will come later in the next blog entry.
That night Raajan brought himself near tears ranting on about the tough situation of his family. He left me speechless talking about his personal / family financial situation inextricably woven into the social and economic fabric of his country. He is struggling so much, he says, he tries keep the times when he feels hopeless to a minimum, but they are inevitable. He wants to bring his family out this dark hole he sees them in and into the light of progress and opportunity.
We finally went to bed with plans to wake up and hike up to his sister’s village so Raajan could see Urmilla before he leaves for Dubai. We woke up the next morning and said slow goodbyes. Baaba had been drinking again and acted out again his life story to make sure I understood that his parents died when he was eleven, that he was forced out of Borjyang to find work in India. His life spent in India making money for his family to have land in Borjyang again has left Baaba with a language that mixes Nepal, Tamang, Bengali, Hindi and a half dozen other Indian languages which I do not understand, but I understand his story. I understand how moved he is that I have become such close friends with his son. I understand that he has taken me in as a son as well and that he welcomes me back here anytime.
The trip to visit Urmilla’s house was no longer an option. Aama’s leg had been hurting her for a month now and she needed to go to the hospital. The local health clinic on the other side of the valley had done nothing but prescribed pain killers which had ceased to be of any help.
So Raajan, Aama and I spent two hours slowly walking down the steep hill that had led me to Borjyang over a week ago. Raajan and I tried to keep our patience as we walked behind 55 year-old Aama who carefully limped down the trail.
We finally got down to the bottom of the trail to the rice patties. Raajan and I sat on a rock next to a small stream while Aama crossed through the strong river current. We talked about our sex lives. We talked about what it means to have a girlfriend in Nepal (from his perspective, the perspective of a wealthier, middle class liberal Nepali might be different). It means having a top secret relationship which not even closest friends can know about lest they tell others and the word spreads. Raajan told me about the multiple white foreigners that have semi-abusively sexually violated him throughout his life. I told him how I talk to my mom about sex and how I share with her some of the most intimate parts of my life. Raajan is utterly shocked and dumbfounded by this. “In Nepal that could never be” he says.
We crossed the river and I took a few extra minutes to submerge myself in the shallow yet powerful current. Staying underwater for several seconds I would come back up again and truly soak in the marvelous beauty around me. Feeling more refreshed than ever we walked up towards the road. We sat in a small tea shop as bus after bus went by packed to the brim, inside and out, with people. Finally a bus came which had some room available on the roof. We boarded up and watched as someone was being carried down the mountainside on a stretcher; the rumor was that he had had too much to drink and needed to be taken to a hospital.
Finally a bus came with a free roof The inside of the bus was packed like sardines and quickly so was the roof. My legs dangled off the side of the enormous vehicle as we drove through the country side passing by small towns and fields of rice, corn and beans and felt the wind in our hair, singing songs and laughing. We passed by a house that had a relatively nice car parked in front with some guys hanging out around it. Raajan turned to me and told me that probably he would never be able to but his children and my children one day would have an amazing time together riding in a car with the top down listening to music while driving on perfectly paved streets through tall skyscraping buildings.
I thought of New York City and I thought of all the people in the world who get to do this whenever they want. I wondered again critically and skeptically about the perceived wondrousness of that scenario and again remembered that it is only my extraordinary privileged position that affords taking for granted my ability to live like that if I pleased. That privileged position however is not one that Raajan occupies and the dreams he has that motivate him to work so hard to try to improve the lives of his family and eventually his village, his country cannot be taken for granted. If you take your dreams and motivation for granted you will go nowhere. And I don’t so much think Raajan was speaking literally about that joy ride, I think he was talking about equality and opportunity. If he works hard enough, he can give the following generations the ability to access the facilities of the modern world which today are so grossly unequally distributed.
After being given food and a roof for the past week I paid for all the bus and taxi fares that took us back to their two room apartment in Kathmandu. I would sleep there that night and go to the hospital with Aama in the morning.
