With inspiration from Sara, my good friend and college roommate who has begun updating her Facebook status only in a kind of poetic short form, herewith is my day today, in glimpses.
So humid overnight I slept in my silk sleeping sack and nothing else. Feet and hands slathered with lotion to lock in what little moisture I had managed to retain on a steamily hot, sweaty day. Woke to birds and critters, the mouse in my room shitting little black pellets as he ran from the towering bideshi. To my misfortune I find him cute, so he lives another day. Again.
Class without breakfast because hot rice and lentils in humid heat is not my cup of tea. Last Nepali class in Lakeside, the tourist haven cum ‘Gringolandia’ of Pokhara. I ride on the back of the ‘scootie’, helmetless, as there is none available for me – they are expensive. Hair blowing in the wind and skin burning under the cloudless sky. American on a scooter – I am a rockstar. We part traffic like Moses parted the water – everyone stops to stare at the white girl on the back of a Nepali woman’s bike. Our journey becomes safer because I am strange. Thighs clenched around my driver and her scooter, the seatback digs into my palm, etching little triangles across it, but I don’t notice – I just hang on. I know the risk is foolish but relish the thrill of the breeze, driven by the machinations of engine and petrol. My Nepali ‘guru’ leads, as I wrap a huge American palm around her tiny shoulder, holding on there as well. I would buckle myself in if I could, and mentally rehearse how I’ll protect my head if we have to stop short. But we don’t.
This woman is so much more than I am, this diminuitive Nepali woman, who remains unmarried at 27 because she refused to marry her cousin, as her caste’s tradition dictates. She has turned down dozens of suitors but wants to be more than an obedient wife and a mother, to do more than fall into the mode of what Nepali women are supposed to want, per tradition. We are feminists of the same caste, but she is up against more than I could shoulder – they tell her to fear being an old maid, being left, being alone. I am luckier, perhaps – my challenge is simply to hold out for one who wants to be a truly equal partner, as well as a lover. She is so much braver, stronger. She says she does not care and will support herself alone if she does not find love, and I believe her. We skipped an hour of Nepali class last week to talk about love and relationships in and across our two cultures.
This is how I come to truly know people, I think. This is how meaningful friendships are formed. She said all Nepali women worry about finding a husband. I said all human beings worry about finding love. We are both right, although in Nepal love and a husband may not be the same thing. In America, I think, love and a husband may not be the same thing, either, sometimes. We will both hold out for love. We are both romantics, both feminists. The two go hand in hand.
I respect this woman – like Rekha, my first Nepali teacher, and Kanchan, my friend, she creates the change she wishes to see in her world, but does so quietly. The women of Nepal create change so subtly that it creeps in, and fend off traditional elements of sexism daily. But there are tremendously good men here, too, like the professor who interviews women in the villages beginning with questions about women’s roles in the home, getting his interviewees to open up by admitting that he asks these questions about equality and participation during the day, but that when he gets home he still wants his wife to serve him tea. I think this honesty begets change.
We zip through the chaos of Pokhara’s streets, dodging kamikaze motorcyclists and overbearing buses, chickens, a shitting cow. I grin. Nepal is all smells and sights and sounds, and if you are not receptive to it, if you don’t embrace it, and clasp it tightly to you, it could overwhelm. I like Nepal best by bus, scorching hot and sweaty all over, rattling, bouncing, crowded with people and smells and nails encrusted with little bits of daal bhaat that evaded being washed off after breakfast. Runny-nosed children grasping at something or someone foreign they cannot elucidate, mothers seeking seats, teenage boys talking smack. Chatter. In the buses on the good days they play Hindi music, and it feels like the soundtrack to the whole world. To a day in the life. Put to music the scenes and colors and smells and noises and cries are symphonic – they tell the story of a culture too profound and varied to summarize in a blog post. Or perhaps, in a blog.
To Lakeside where the tourists are, pink with sunburn in their refusal to carry an umbrella, one’s portable shade. I carry an umbrella, but turned down several with hearts, stars, and ruffles before I found one I could stand. ‘Too girly’ doesn’t translate. We shop and I practice Nepali, bargaining needlessly for my dictionary, for my coffee beans to be ground. Prabha, my guru, tastes the coffee, made fresh from Costa Rican beans. ‘Charko cha’ she pronounces, trying not to pull a face. It’s bitter. Strong. Perfect.
I write emails to friends in my head. You should come here. Join me. Let’s run away. Our culture exhausts me even as I miss it. Most days abroad I could almost never go home, except that home is where my life is. Friendship, I realize all over again while away, is what life is worth living for. Friendship and love. And yet I delay seeing and calling friends because life is “too busy,” and avoid starting relationships to focus on school. So strange, I think now. Life is not, should not be, work. But how then can I ever have a respectable “life’s work?”
At the same time, I crave the things we have. Beaches, woods, hot water, clean streets. Clean air. Sanitation. I lust after good sanitation. You can’t love it until you don’t have it, but once you know that experience, you will watch in utter amazement when the toilet flushes, clear water in, black water out, and know that what you’ve sent on its way will not end up in the river behind your home, or running alongside the border of your state, until it has been treated and all the little good bugs you could see under a microscope have eaten up all the little bad bugs. Sanitation.
I am chagrined that today is our last day, even as I’m overjoyed to turn to my research full force. I have been mentally lambasting myself for low productivity. But I always have low productivity.
Pokhara may be the most relaxing place I’ve ever been, perhaps because it’s so hot I can’t think to do much else. The white people at the place where I learn Nepali are struggling – it is a Christian group and I overhear them praying to their God for help here. I think that they cannot learn to love it unless they do it – learn Nepali, clean up after the sick, tend to the homeless, care for the children – for themselves, and for the people who need them, and not for God. I think to myself that their God would tell them that, if he or she could. I hear them quietly contemplate leaving and giving up, and hating their struggle with the language, and notice that they seem to marvel a bit at my contentment in our conversations. “But you are alone on Ban Campus?” they ask, and I want to declare loudly that I am not alone – I am surrounded by people.
There are students and faculty and staff and their families, and I could not be alone among so many if I tried. To be the singular white person, singular woman, or single bideshi, does not make you alone. To be white among brown does not equal alone. But everyone asks me that question, both Nepali and bideshi. It baffles me. You would have to choose to be alone among so many, and especially among so many people with such interesting life stories.
I wonder if the white people from the Christian group feel their aloneness so keenly because of the quiet struggle of their Nepali coworkers, who cannot possibly (to my mind) feel true friendship for those who would come to them and tell them in earnest that their gods are false, and that there is only one true god, and that they have deigned to bring “him” to them. I would take the Nepali gods any day, thank you kindly. My professor friend tells me I should be a Buddhist, because I will not eat the animals, and that I should be a Hindu, because I won’t eat the Chow Mein (ramen!) with Chicken flavor. As I understand it, in Nepal the two dabble in being one and the same, and the patrons of one religion or temple are welcome in both. As am I. The Nepali people welcome you to their religion, and would never tell you that yours is false. Their gods celebrate life, death, and all the events in between – enriching life, instead of limiting it, constraining it, reproaching the faithful. “Their god is not false,” I want to tell the bideshi. “Your reason for coming to Nepal is false.” But despite myself, I cannot resent them for their insincerity, somehow. Instead I feel a tremendous degree of pity, and compassion, and hope that they will find a reason (such as learning to care in earnest for others unlike themselves) to want to stay.
-M-
