Today went way too fast. I woke up with a jerk shortly before 8 this morning, got dressed and washed up, and organized my room a bit (hiding a laptop here, stashing a camera there), before doing a short review of my well-read and thoroughly beaten up Intro to Nepali book from my last trip, to try to bring back some of the language proficiency I was so proud of just two weeks ago. I am having a harder time with Nepali right now than I anticipated, which threatens to become frustrating if it keeps up. I think my problem stems from the fact that in the last two days I’ve done a really substantial amount of work on a wide diversity of research-related tasks, and my brain is tired.
But there are no external or artificial stimulants to kick things back up a notch when I’m beat, here, as at the moment my delicious-smelling coffee remains un-ground, the candy and sweets one can buy in the little convenience stores aren’t quite sugary enough to get me going, and exercise…exercise remains elusive, and for the large part appears not to be done in Nepal the way it is in the US. More than a few of my Nepali friends have made passing reference to working out in their own homes, doing what I imagine are a mix of calisthenics and yoga on their floors, but nobody seems to go for a run, which is what I taught myself to do when I was too stir crazy or tired to sit still this year. Thus far I’ve only seen one Nepali person running for exercise, and he was running up the mountainside early one morning in Bagar (a neighborhood at the other end of Pokhara where I stayed last trip), while everyone he passed made fun of him, quietly and without malice. But you turn that Nepali guy into a tall, white, foreign woman who is wearing long jeans and sleeved shirts for reasons of cultural propriety despite the heat…and you have a non-starter. I’m just not interested in doing it.
Plus, Nepal’s roads are more than a little rough around the edges. Mostly paved but with some huge rocks and even larger potholes which transition easily to dirt and mud, and back to pavement again, they are navigated by about six different types of at least quasi-mechanized conveyance shooting along on both sides, frequently rolling effortlessly into one another’s sides of the road, and back again (as in most places there are no lanes). And then there are the cows.
Cows and especially bulls roam the streets of Nepal from Kathmandu to Pokhara and beyond, and as I understand it, it was a crime to kill a cow anywhere in Nepal as recently as a few years ago, because they are considered holy in the Hindu tradition. This prompted me to wonder if Bart Simpson’s “holy cow!” was a derivate of his creator’s experience traveling in Asia, but as of yet I’ve not been able to find any evidence to support this claim.
But bovine homicide came with a mandatory 5 year prison sentence, from what I’ve heard, and this included vehicular homicide commited via car, rickshaw, tuktuk, tractor, motorcycle, scootie, bicycle, or truck. And so they abound here, mischieviously lingering about like so many squirrels along the lengths of the streets, comically chewing garbage (or worse) when they should be chewing cud, sashaying their huge hind quarters along the passageways of Nepal, occasionally lazily splaying out smack dab in the middle of the road, in a disorganized little herd. I am convinced that they are deliberate in provoking the Nepalis, daring the people to even attempt to haul their gigantic cow-ness out of the way of globalization, and of commerce. But the cows here always win – they stay lethargically in place, mooing woefully in the heat and swatting the flies off of their great behinds, while the vehicles, be they manpowered or machine-powered, swoop and swerve and roll on around them.
This includes lingering on the lawn of the local missionary organization’s offices, where I am taking my Nepali classes because the instructors rent office space in return for a discount on Nepali language instruction for the newly arrived missionaries. The organization’s offices have a huge, currently gorgeously flowering field of grasses which is fenced in by stone, across which runs a long and thin paved walkway, which I take to get to the school.
When I’ve left class the last two days there has been a HUGE number of HUGE…uhhhh…beasts, for lack of a better term, grazing on the grass there like so many low-tech riding lawn mowers, keeping things nice and tidy for the missionaries while still getting themselves fed. These are some seriously large brown mammals, of the cow family (is there such a thing as a cow family?), but I am unsure of what they actually are, despite Deepak’s insistence that there is, in fact, a different, between this animal which Nepalis call a buff, or buffalo, and a cow. I myself have seen actual, wild, American-style buffalo in the US, and can verify that it looks nothing like the buff-branded creatures here. I often wonder if perhaps the buff is a bit of a Get Out of Jail Free Card, as the people of Nepal (with some caste restrictions) consider themselves able to eat buff, but not guy (cow). I don’t see any difference at all, really, between the buff and the cows of Nepal, but perhaps that’s just my American-tinged perception of the beasts. What I do know is I quiver a bit with fear whenever I walk past their thick brown horns, as they graze in the field. Because I, who am afraid of only the utterly banal, am afraid of the cow-beasts.
The path away from the mission building and through the gate leads right through the middle of this field, which means that all of the mission’s office workers in the various buildings (there are at least 11 separate buildings) can see what happens there, and often take little breaks to stare out the window and watch the coming and going of visitors. Today to my dismay what happened there was me, strolling along with a cautious eye towards the cow-beasties, and getting beat to the exit by a rather active, rather alert, large male bull.
Now I am a tough woman, and an outdoorsy woman, and a confident woman, but the one thing I am not is a farming woman. My experience with eyeball-owning organisms intended for the eating is limited to a two-week-stint on an organic farm in VT, which I notably left early when I realized that in the days before Thanksgiving we were going to kill the turkeys I was helping to raise. Not that this was a surprise, or that I liked the turkeys. I actually didn’t like them one bit. But I certainly didn’t dislike them enough to want them to die, for goodness’ sake, and if they did die, I wanted to put them in a shoebox and bury them in the backyard with a prayer and a little rock for a tombstone, not chop off their heads and rip their feathers out while they hung upside down bleeding goopy turkey blood…because ew. But I digress…
So there in the field, at center stage for the world to see, is me, and there is the lumbering slab of meat. Or like, 400 slabs of meat. A steak feast fit for a large wedding party. And he is a big dude. As I watch and walk quickly towards the exit he begins to head towards the path, eyes (read: horns) rolling around to point in my direct, menacingly. I speed up my pace a bit more, hoping to beat him past our point of interception; he speeds up too. I begin to think this is like how you don’t run from bears because they’ll think you’re prey, and this thought startles and perturbs me, so I freeze. In the middle of the field. Where everyone can see me. Because of what is basically a glorified cow. But I am scared! The cow-beast is huge, and is now directly across the path, and staring me down. Daring me to come closer. His cow-lady friends ring him on both sides like the Pink Ladies hanging on to watch a fight start in the movie Grease, and a decline in the terrain prevents me from going around him without going waaaaay out of my (his) way, in such a manner as would indicate to everyone watching and not already clear on it that this American is afraid of “what’s for dinner.” And I of course wasn’t having that.
So instead I start to walk back to the school like I forgot something, all casual-like, even gesticulating with my hands as if to say “oops, how silly!” but then stop again. This is so stupid, I thought to myself. I’m afraid of a cow-beast? I turn around again (conscious of all the windows and the building sense of humiliation), and stared at the beastie. “How many times have you heard of an American tourist getting gored to death by a cow-beast?” I ask him aloud, content in the fact that I no longer have any pride left to lose. And with that, as I’d said the secret password and the word was “humility”, the cow-beast slowly, begrudgingly, stepped to the side of the path, still partially across it (I get it dude – you’re in charge!), but leaving enough of a margin that I could tiptoe past on the far fringe of the walkway, maintaining a body-width from his cow lady’s head. And so tiptoe I did. As I went by he suddenly swung his head around as if to check my movements, and I made like the “chicken-hearted” (to borrow from the Nepali-English translation) woman I am and bee-lined around the nearest tree, figuring that if there’s only one of him, I could circle (or, hell, with this much adrenaline, climb!) that tree all damn day. But lazy in the day’s heat, and perchance not the antipathetic beast I had understood him to be, the cow-beast did not deign to follow, and I made my escape.
-M-
