At the Paan Pasal

Four hits of sweet paan in the making in Patan

What the hell is that guy selling, a non-initiate is apt to wonder as s/he ambles past the neighborhood paan vendor. Besides cigarettes and chewing tobacco, all that's visible in the narrow storefront or miniature roadside tent are a bowl or two of heart-shaped green leaves soaking in water of questionable origin. Hidden from view, however, are dozens of containers ranging from thimble-sized to a couple of quarts, containing the minutiae of the paan man's (usually a man’s) craft. Corrosive limestone paste; tiny cubes of bright red candied papaya; chunks of broken betel nut; and a thousand and one other flavors, textures, and colors.
But what compels one to halt here, to shell out 7 or 15 rupees--what, in short, is the appeal of this morsel of a mouthful that stains mouths crimson the subcontinent over? That, friend, is the nut of the matter, the inexpressible kernel of supari that keeps you coming back again. For paan is more than a digestive aid, a mouth freshener, a heart tonic, and a welcome distraction from the infinite frustrations of life here, though it is all of these. It is a custom-folded moment of bliss. According to your stripes, that bliss may consist mainly of the taste explosion and slight head-tingling effect of a mitha (sweet) paan, but it may also involve the less subtle effects of a lacing of tobacco. The leaf itself makes a difference: there is the standard mithapatta, the basic, mild and sweet-natured leaf. There is its idiosyncratic yellowish cousin, whose sourer, spicier flavor is not without its devotees. Then there is the banglapatta, a roguish leaf, which is frowned upon by some for its more blatant narcotic effect. But the beauty of paan is that it's appeal is never reducible to a single ingredient, or even a simple combination of two or three.
It always begins with the leaf, that which gives paan its name. Next comes a scant swipe of chuna, the white lime paste that somehow activates whatever subtly addictive alkaloids the leaf and betel nut contain. The stuff is corrosive on its own (a factor that may be inseparable from its role in paan—more research required), but in the context of the whole it is neutralized by the next ingredient, a light brown paint made of the bark of a tree. I have to admit this ingredient remains mysterious to me, but I like to theorize that it complements and tones down the chuna. From here the particulars of paan production diverge wildly, but it can at least be said that most paan contains a good piece or six of supari, the infamous betel nut. Here is one of our active principles, a seed of great distinction. Activated by the leaf and/or the chuna, the supari stimulates digestion to an almost miraculous degree. It also causes a slight feeling of constriction in the throat, as though you've swallowed your jawbreaker. Not to worry, chances are you're not allergic. Just enjoy the bizarre and (I'm convinced) benign effects of this storied, stone-like nut on your stomach, your cranium, and (according to the Michaelangelo of paan vendors, soon to make his entrance onto the page) the heart.
If you're asked for a mitha paan, your lime ad bark-smeared leaf will now be graced with shredded coconut, clove, cardamom, candied papaya, fennel seeds, silver sugar balls . . . if your order was for a special sweet paan, the list will grow and include a big dollop of heavenly, gloppy rose-petal jam, and the final, folded product will be adorned with silver leaf (not for those of us with silver fillings in our teeth) and that true luxury, a maraschino cherry. A jarda paan, on the other hand, is more about the tobacco, and for reasons of pride or purity of purpose, habitual eaters of this harsher pleasure tend to eschew the sweet delights that make mitha paan so blissful. But compromises can be made. There is also, of course, the "plain" paan, which is almost as fiendishly complex as the sweet version, but omits some of the more sugary additions.
But a paan is never only a paan. I learned this one warm autumn day in Kuleshwor, when I stopped by an untested paan shop on a quiet street. I was with friends, and we were all in the mood, so to speak. In Nepal there is little sense of 'first come first served,' especially since our order for 5 or 6 deluxe mitha paan would take longer than other walk-up requests for a pouch of tobacco, a single cigarette, a bit of supari wrapped in paan leaf with chuna (paan at its most elemental, strictly for the addict). But when the sahuji--honourable shopkeeper--did turn his attention to us, he did it fully. Fielding our newbie curiosity with grace, he lovingly presented a sample of each successive ingredient for our tasting. His ingredients were anything but ordinary, for here was a man for whom work was service, and service divine. Take the rosepetal jam. He had not make it himself, it's true--his wife had. The supari he soaked until tender and cut to order, with an iron implement, into paper-thin slices. The coconut chunks were perfectly toasted. The cardamom he decorticated on the spot, removing the sticky black seeds from the inedible papery green pod. Each perfectly folded leaf was sprinkled with rosewater before being skewered with a toothpick and served. And he forewent the synthetic masala ("spice mix") and maha (honey) that most paan vendors use as a matter of course--saccharine, artificially-flavored, for the birds. His paan was pure, constructed with devotion, presented with pride. It was orgasmic.

In this employment-deprived country, it’s common to be asked to bring someone to America. How, it’s easy to say dismissively, by putting you in my luggage? This might get a laugh, but it does little to address feelings of resentment or inferiority. But lately a local paan vendor had an idea. Is there paan in your country, he wanted to know? Well, a little, I began to reply, in places where Indians have settled . . . other Americans don’t know what paan is. But he had spied the glint of opportunity in a fat, glistening, folded up leaf: bring me, he said, and we’ll start a paan business together. Rarely have I been so tickled by a version of that old saw, the American Dream.

Thanksgiving in Kathmandu

Above: our Bagmati river ducky enjoying the last and cleanest bath of his life

I’ve been part of some strange Thanksgivings in my day. There was the time a couple years back when 6 or 7 friends and I decided the way to give thanks was to cook the meal, complete with 30 lb. brined turkey, the day before, so that we could eat some poisonous mushrooms on T-day and wander around the Bitterroot mountains. It was a cold and chaotic day in the woods, but we did stumble upon a Ponderosa pine seeming to grow out of another Ponderosa, straight over and up, like some sort of inexplicable flying buttress; and in our impressionable state we marveled at rotten stump-turned-termites’ nest. “That’s where they mansion at,” I remember observing. Profound words. The eight of us arrived back home to our big weird house safely enough, if a little disoriented, but I for one had no appetite for meat or stuffing or pie or anything else.
I’ve spent two thanksgiving days in New Mexico, both of them in the company of a lively and loquacious near-centenarian named Jack, who I’ve never spent time with on any day but Thanksgiving. Then there were feasts in the Barn where we lived in college, huge productions involving multiple apartments and lots of smoked meat courtesy of my friend Tev; all I remember really is lying in bed groaning all night afterwards—my strategy of taking just a bite of everything backfired, since it added up to a heaping mound of incompatible delicacies.
In any case, I’ve usually looked forward to Thanksgiving, and this year was no exception. But how to celebrate in the Nepali context? Aiming for any sort of typical American feast was out of the question; the nearby Bhatbhateni supermarket did actually stock frozen turkeys for the occasion, but each 5 kg bird was flown in from some monstrous poultry farm in Australia and cost a whopping 6300 rupees, about $75. Not exactly in the Thanksgiving spirit, if we interpret the holiday as my friend and room-mate Alden does, as a chance to commemorate and thank the other Indians for showing us how to live in a New World. Instead of ignoring local foodways, we wanted to revel in the flavors of this place, and do so in a way that still recalled the Thanksgiving archetype burned deep into every American’s palate. Pumpkins and yams are readily available here, as are green beans and potatoes. No cranberries, though. And no turkey from halfway around the world. Enter, then, the duck.
Alden, as obsessive a cook as I have sometimes been and as devoted to tracing food chains back to their roots, had long wanted to slaughter an animal himself, so I was not entirely surprised when he called me on Wednesday night to tell me that the bird he had purchased was alive and, well, quacking. Morning found us, my girlfriend Waverly and Alden and I, on the roof of our house with a bucket of hot water, a knife, and an astoundingly docile duck. Said duck was freshly bathed thanks to Alden, who was now down on one knee stroking our quarry with perfect tenderness. Thank you ducky, he said with a knowing sweet smile, for the gift of your flesh and blood. The veteran fowl-slaughterer of the bunch, I showed him how to tie and hold the duck and how to make the killing incision so that our friend would bleed out before the heart stopped beating. An hour later (plucking a dark-feathered duck clean is fussy work) we had a surprisingly scrawny dressed duck, a plastic bag full of heart and neck and gizzard, and another full of feathers and entrails. It was time to grab our seasonings, head to a friend’s house (home of a makeshift oven, i.e. a large pot) and start cooking.
We had high ambitions for our roast duck. Knowing the likely provenance of our bird—the indescribably filthy banks of one of Kathmandu’s rivers—and its probable effects on the flavor of the meat, we decided a rather unsubtle spice rub would be in order. Thyme, rosemary, black pepper, coriander, garlic, and plenty of salt. Easy. This we applied liberally to our duck inside and out, along with some melted ghee. Into our hot pot he went, all trussed up on a brass plate and stuffed with some onions and whole garlic cloves. Meanwhile we set to work on an orange-pomegranate glaze by boiling down fresh-squeezed juices and honey. We brushed the bird with this crimson stain every so often, and watched with anticipation as the duckfat rendered out into the plate below. Our poor centerpiece was shrinking by the moment as it lost its last shred of dignity, its thick insulating layer of subcutaneous fat.
Mid-day had its own adventures, including an epically circuitous cab ride to another Thanksgiving dinner at some old friends’ of Alden and me. By the time we returned to our duck, the troops had gathered and our host was busy reheating various dishes, all vaguely—but only vaguely—reminiscent of the Thanksgiving fare of your childhood. The spread included Nepali-style pumpkin soup courtesy of myself and W, a dish of strangely pungent mashed potatoes, a bland shepherd’s pie, sautéed green beans with mushrooms, stuffing with apples and green peppers, and numerous apple desserts. We reheated our tiny, saffron-colored duck, spruced him up a bit with some clementine wedges and a spring of parsley, and presented him to an awkwardly preoccupied hodgepodge of Fulbrighters, significant others, and a couple Nepali friends of mine, a middle-aged man and his straight-talking mother (later, when I asked her what of our traditional American feast she liked the most, she pointed to the no-bake chocolate-oat cookies and the ice cream.) And? The punch line here, if there is any, is that neither Alden nor Waverly nor I could bring ourselves to do more than taste the merest shred of our piece de resistance, the duck. Possibly it was the imagined but surely very real contamination of the once-spunky creature by Kathmandu’s unspeakable waterways, the tinge of open sewer to the succulent flesh. The limp skin added another brick to the wall of our discontent (we had reheated the duck with a little water in the pot ‘to keep it from drying out’). And there was the memory of the tiny rubber band we had found in the gizzard of the intrepid fowl to further deaden our appetites for its meat.
The slaughter had felt noble enough, serious but not sinful; but the earned reward was somehow more unpalatable than the dirty work. We gave thanks along with everyone in the room that night for the blessings in our lives. With characteristically charming sincerity, Alden thanked the duck.

We Took to the Hills

Above: "hills" on the Tamang heritage trail

Below: on the trail between Langtang village and Kyanjin Gompa, mid-November. The walls are made of thousands of engraved prayer-stones.

Our long-awaited trip started out with a reconnoiter to the New Bus Park, a dismally chaotic transport hub on the outskirts of the city. After the usual bureaucratic hurdles--in this case, tracking down the ticket-sellers who had disappeared on the pretext of lunch--W and I procured our tickets for the next morning for Syabrubesi, the furthest you can drive North from Kathmandu. We had already scrounged, rented and borrowed all the necessary gear for 2 weeks at the foot (and perhaps up to the knees) of the Himalayas: warm sleeping bags, down jackets, a sci-fi water purification device that works by UV-light, the bare minimum of clothing (if you can’t wear it all at once, you packed too much). Our only reading matter—and it should go without saying that we're a couple of book fiends--was a tattered ghost of a Peter Dickinson novel that we ended up tearing apart page by page, so that the two of us could read it simultaneously without waiting for one another to catch up. Now that we had the tickets and the gear, our scheme started to feel like something that might turn into something outside of our heads, and we were light with excitement. Walking back along the grey and congested route from the bus park, we made small last-minute purchases: pieces of hard gudpak (a rich sweet confection with jaggery and butter) and a bandana for snot and blood; cashews to sustain us on the chilly mountaintops of our imagination; a dark chocolate bar. We were going to Langtang.

The next morning we jumped in a taxi to the bus park around dawn. it's worth noting that the 15-minute taxi ride cost 200 rupees, which while still less than US $3 was nearly as much as our 280 rupee bus tickets. We located our bus and somewhat hesitantly left our packs in a pile of things to be stowed on the roof. W glanced back nervously until she was sure our things were there, intact, on top of our bus. We tried to settle in as the bus rattled to a start. We sat on the side of the bus that had fewer missing windows, but still the morning air was chilly and the bony seats tilted forward at an awkward pitch. Soon the 'conductor' (more on the ingenious, informal systems of transportation management in a later post) came and asked us to move, since our tickets actually had assigned us to a different pair of seats. Reluctantly we repositioned ourselves just behind a missing, suited up in our windbreakers and wool scarves, and braced ourselves for a long ride.

Even with the prospect of a jangly 10 hours ahead of us, it was exhilarating to be moving, to be rising out of the Kathmandu valley and to find ourselves so suddenly in rural Nepal. It was W's first glimpse of a Nepal other than Kathmandu: of endless terraces carved into the precipitous hillsides, their crops of mustard and finger millet and rice in various stages of maturation and harvest; of long white Daikon radishes piled high by the roadsides; of village houses with thatched or corrugated tin roofs, Maoist slogans still blazing in bright blue paint from the elections last spring. Kids barely clothed, grubby, playing in the roads and running alongside the bus for a while, shouting with laughter. WIthout warning the brakes screeched a dreadful shrief of metal-on-metal, jolting us from our private reveries, and the bus hurtled to a stop. Pee break. Men lining up on the side of the road, women darting for the cover of the forest. 90 seconds and everyone was back on, the bus moving again. But where was my wallet? I had shifted it to a front pocket so as not to have to sit on the uncomfortable lump all day, and now it simply wasn't there. There was some searching, some wracking our brains and asking around, but by the time we stopped at Trishuli Bazar for mid-day dal-bhat it was clear that my wallet including cash and local bank card were simply gone. Then the inevitable flush of emotions: anger at myself for my carelessness, and at whoever would pickpocket me or simply pick up my wallet off the seat we'd moved from and disappear; frustration, and even a weird feeling of justice. I'd been pondering, from my wind-blown seat, the predicament of the majority of Nepalese, of rural poverty in an era of ever-more-glaring inequality. Nothing new, but hard not to think along these lines given the moving panorama framed by the bus window. Now someone (and someone who could probably use it) had 20,000 of my rupees (about US $250) and I was left with nothing, not a cent. A fitting reversal, in a sense, I thought with a wry smile, and a strange stand-in for my guilty feelings of a couple hours back. For the time being I would no longer be able to play the rich white Westerner tromping off to explore at leisure the pristine Himalayas, blessing the locals with my patronage only to disappear at midnight (the end of the tourist season) on a pumpkin-coach (taxi, hired jeep, or airplane). But what of our trip? W still had some money left, about 5,000 rupees. It might be enough to take a short trek, if we were thrifty, and still buy bus tickets back. We'd be forced to bargain hard, and to ask for more local hospitality, but then again we would see more of the Nepal that Nepalis live in instead of the tourist fantasyland that’s been superimposed on top in places like Langtang.

In the end our consternation and uncertainty were for naught. Once bus pulled in to Syabrubesi, after a jolting final 4 hours along narrow, bumpy roads, across landslides and streams, and down a vertiginous set of switchbacks to the Bhote Koshi river; after thousands of ear-splitting brake-squeals and one episode of spontaneous window-shattering into the lap of the poor Scottish lass behind us (the conductor took one look and nonchalantly tossed the two pieces of the tinted pane out the now-empty windowframe)--when we finally disembarked, bruised and jangled and rather demoralized, we quickly made friends with an energetic Austrian named Michael who lent us 10,000 rupees as soon as he heard of our predicament. He too had had money stolen, while doing the Annapurna circuit, and figured it was his turn to help out some strangers in need. We were back on track, just on a slightly tighter budget than originally planned. We finally felt we could relax, once I'd taken care of canceling my ATM card, and we settled into the smoky kitchen of the Sherpa/Tamang family who ran the budget guest house we found ourselves in that first night. Some tongba was procured, and for once I enjoyed the stuff immensely: red millet fermented whole for weeks or months, put in a wooden vessel and covered with hot water, left to steep, and sipped through a bamboo sippy straw. Every batch is different, and this one hit the spot: not too sweet, nicely acidic and fruity, with a clean taste. None of the chemical overtones or the nauseating breadiness that immature tongba can yield. Sitting by the family's hearth, helping to chop vegetables or dinner, and learning a few snippets of the Tamang language, I thought to myself: the bus ride was worth it already.

Butter tea. Silky, reviving, hot comfort in a cup, and one of three or fore defining tastes of the Himalayan region. Tamang, Sherpa, and Tibetan woman make it in a tall quiver-like device braced against one leg. In go boiling water, a hunk of more-or-less rancid yak butter, some Chinese brick tea, and salt. The plunger (English terms fail miserably here) churns the stuff as it steeps, emulsufying the butterfat, so no one of the endlessly forthcoming cups of tea has too much or to little. In Gongang, a Tamang village of perhaps 30 houses (one turned hotel, i.e. they have an extra bed), the butter tea was smooth and delicate, but at the Yeti guesthouse in Syabrubesi whence we set off it was as funky as blue cheese.

Hills. Anywhere else these hills would count as mountains. They rise and fall thousands of feet with brutal abruptness, the slopes often so steep that even the rugged farmers can't terrace them. Landslides, when they happen, can wipe out entire villages. But the true mountains rise behind them, gleaming perpetual white, cheating the hills out of their otherwise deserved geological category. These mountains, the proper peaks of the Himalaya, are too big. It challenges the smooth flow of cognition to sight them from almost any distance; they seem to hover in the sky.

Weather. Central Nepal is temperate, I suppose, but only on average: during our summer months monsoon rains beat the hills mercilessly, while for more than half the year chances are no rain at all will fall. The sun is strong year round, especially at altitude, so that the south-facing slopes of the hills are all but scorched. They harbor hardy grasses and spiny cactus-cousins and not much else, at least not so’s you'd notice in the winter. Meanwhile the north-facing slopes are lush with deciduous trees, pines higher up, in the full subtropical spread.

Walking along a sandy trail up the Bhote Koshi river our first morning out we came around the end of a large wrinkle of the land and spotted our first house: modest, solitary, built roughly from stone. In front of the house the ripening fields of millet, buckwheat, mustard formed three broad stripes like a great flag spread over the ground: gold, brown, green.

In Gongang, our first night after a day of walking up the river, we sat with our Tamang hosts around the earthen hearth, warming ourselves and watching as the evening meal slowly came together one pot at a time over the coals. What emerged, finally, was the most satisfying dal-bhat I've ever had. Every ingredient locally grown except the salt and a couple of spices: nutty, slightly sticky rice, black dal, potatoes with cabbage and beans, cut up meticulously into thin strips. A simple fresh daikon achar. I've never eaten rice so slowly, savoring every bite, nor felt so at home in a stranger’s house. Our host, when asked the next morning how much we owed him for lodging, dinner, and a breakfast of flatbread and butter tea, said, “three hundred rupees” with a smiling shrug. “Why ask for more?” (We’d paid that much earlier in the day for two cups of ginger tea and a plate of chowmein that I’d ended up cooking myself).

Amongst other remarkable flora, the marijuana growing wild on the sunbaked hills near Tatopani caught my attention. Its buds looked candied, in the way that one candies ginger: colors concentrated, sticky, glistening in the sun. The heady scent wafting along the narrow trail and alerting you to its presence before your eyes catch sight of it. Seeing my admiring one such specimen, a couple of women sent a 4 year old boy over to me with gifts: a grubby fistful of finger-sized sticks of homemade hash. (Thanks but no thanks, kid, I’m on a government scholarship!) For this kindness we shelled out a measure of our own most precious goods: cashews, dried coconut, dark chocolate.

A few minutes past that cannabinoid seductress, the hotsprings at Tatopani were a sight to behold: under the gushing pipes stood Nepali men and women of all ages, most of them people who I imagined had never enjoyed the luxury of unlimited hot water in their lives. Families walked for days to come here, loads hoisted on a tumpline around their foreheads, and camped out at this strange little village for days to be near the hot water. But aside from a warm exchange or two with fellow travelers, Nepalis and a lone, stoned Frenchman, we found the place standoffish and hit the road after a soak and a plate of dal-bhat. (We were getting used to cabbage potatoes by now.) Mid-afternoon found us in Brindang, an eerily quiet village of Tibetans or Tamangs perched high on a ridge above Tatopani and where little Nepali was spoken. An old woman conveyed the direction of our trail, towards Thuman, and off we set along the high dry slope in the waning hours of the day. The trail was lightly worn and uncertain, and soon we were doubting our way on and worrying about where me could find shelter for the night. There’s something about being high up on a hillside with the sun about to dip behind a ridge . . . our vision tinged with panic, we spied a shape bobbing about a few hundred feet below us. Man gathering scrappy firewood. No answer to our shouts, so down we go, small quick steps over the tricky terrain, to catch him before he too disappears. Catch him we do, and he turns out to be an old man, hard of sight and hearing, a Nepali-speaker (thank God) and the caretaker of a small gompa tucked away in a clump of pines a few hundred feet below us. Shelter there for a couple of lost travelers? Sure. Not knowing whether to lead the man or follow him, and still a little trembly with the adrenaline of running straight down a mountainside with packs, we ended up lending him a headlamp and beating him to the gompa. How romantic—a chilly night in a remote Buddhist monastery—but not to be. The man lives there alone but for a small child whose mother has recently died. Another man, of similar stature and nimbleness of foot, arrives just as night is settling in and tells us of the caretaker’s misfortune, of how alone cares for the child while living largely off of the charity of nearby townsfolk. This man has come to borrow a drum from the gompa. He tells us to follow him to his village, just a few minutes he says, where we can find shelter for the night. Well. He straps the drum onto his back and down we go, as in the deepening moonless dark the stars come out by the scores. I notice for the first time a sharp shooting pain on the outside of my left knee, and am glad we’re close to rest. Finally, after another hour or more of descending steeply over all but invisible paths, we arrive in a village. We find ourselves in the main room of a house, in the midst of some commotion. The family, it seems, is preparing for a puja to be held in the morning. We lay down our packs, trying to keep them out of the way yet in our sight, hurriedly change our sweat-soaked base layers, bundle back up, and settle ourselves gingerly on a stiff bed. The room has been cleared, and the men of the house, all teens or twenty-somethings, bustle back and forth attending to the work at hand. We are too tired and dazed to realize it at first, but the man seated near us is the Lama who will perform the puja and who is overseeing its preparations. No one is terribly interested in talking, which is fine with us, but all seem to accept our presence without so much as a sidelong glance. Some lost white people, OK. Before long we are brought steaming bowls of filtered tongba, far and away the best tongba I’ve ever had; it was a year old, and worth the wait. The evening takes on a dreamlike quality from this point, not so much from the drink as because I was falling asleep. W has been quiet, but speaks with understated alarm in her voice when my head hits first her shoulder, then her lap. ‘I need you to stay awake.’ This situation is novel for both of us, but unlike me she has no precedent for how to act, what is expected of her. I force myself awake and notice what everybody is working on. Tomorrow’s wood and bamboo altar having been completed, the boys have made an enormous ball of whole wheat dough and are kneading it in batches. Soon everyone is greasing up their hands and rolling and shaping pieces of the dough into tapered cone-like shapes, sticking these in rows on boards. The lama takes part as well, and his playdough shapes are the most elaborate. In the flickering candlelight I see macabre sandcastles, crooked teeth, dream images. The illusion only heightens when one of the sequestered women of the house appears with a saucepan of nutty-smelling butter infused with a local root to make a potent red paint, and a brother starts dabbing it onto the dough spires. The lama fashions a bull without fuss, and it is reddened. Next come dabs of butter that he flattens into disks and deftly attaches to each piece. At some point I lose consciousness, asleep sitting up, only to wake to a plate of hot rice. I’d been so hungry after our afternoon that I’d eaten some nuts, thinking we’d missed dinner, but no, the dictates of Himalayan hospitality know no such bounds. The rice is delicious, even better than the previous night’s in Gongang. In the dark I guess from aromas and textures that the accompanying dish is dried yak meat and potatoes. I don’t realize until too late that the dal is spiked with hot peppers, and I douse my rice with it. Eating greedily, my mouth suddenly explodes with fire. There is nothing at hand to quench it, so I take another and another handful of soothing rice. Soothing, napalm-soaked rice. Soon my plate is empty, my entire head burning, and I stumble outside for some cool air and to clear my sinuses. Back inside we pull out our sleeping bags and fall asleep side-by-side amidst the quiet bustle in the big dark room.

The morning was a morning of intestinal distress, and I’ve had one too many of those to want to recount it. I relieved myself inappropriately and urgently in the yard next to a slumbering buffalo just before dawn for lack of any evident toilet, and tried to ignore the cramps and sulphur-reeking giardia belches and go back to bed. But everyone was up, including W who was hyper-conscious of being in the way. The was puja about to begin a few feet from our bed. Someone brought more hot tongba, this time laced with sugar; W graciously accepted and I graciously declined. Too weak to think of walking anywhere for the time being, I sat next to W in the early morning light and watched the ritual. Now we could see the night’s work properly, the intricately shaped tiers of dough figures on the makeshift altar. The lama sat cross-legged on the other bed, sipping his tongba, surrounded by the instruments of his trade: the drum brought down from the monastery, a brass bell and dorje (thunderbolt), carefully wrapped Tibetan texts, a straight horn, cymbals. The heavenly racket soon began, and it is to the aesthetic credit of that venerable B’on or Buddhist tradition that I could sit there at all in my state. After an hour or so I tucked 4 or 500 rupees under a cup and we made a quiet exit, thanking the family and apologizing for not spending the day with them. It was only then that I noticed the Maoist slogans painted on the façade of overhanging second story; if these people held Maoist ideology, it didn’t prevent them from treating a couple of bourgeois interlopers like comrades for a night.
That day took us back to Syabrubesi, for we had strayed too far off our trail during the evening to think about trying to rejoin our proposed route. I was in a pitiful state what with my knee and my bowels, and the short trail back to our starting point took half the day. A little guiltily we snuck past our faithful Yeti guesthouse, home of the blue cheese tea, in favor of a more comfortable-looking place with a garden and rooms with real walls. We inquired about a chessboard and spent the day playing, drinking tea, wondering what to do next. It seemed a pity to turn tail and take the early bus back to the Valley, but then it again it was pure foolishness to think about heading up a glacial valley with a bum knee, even if my guts took care of themselves in the meantime. In the end we woke early, took a test walk after switching packs and shifting around weight (W now taking the lion’s share) and decided to give it a go for a day. My knee felt less than stellar after an hour’s walking, but soon the trail towards Langtang steadied into an upward grade and I could forget about the pain of stepping down onto my left leg.

In the end we did the whole Langtang trek, up to Kyanjin gompa and back, and did it in four and a half days. My knee was fine, and there were no more mishaps. Somehow the stories from that second half of our trip feel less poignant than those from the Tamang trail, though. Partly this must be because we were now on the beaten track, a well-established tourist route. We spent nights at lodges with woodstove-heated dining rooms and laminated menus, all alike except for the prices (which increased exponentially with altitude and distance from the nearest road). There was a nice one at Rimche, the Moonlight guesthouse, that we returned to on the way home. There was a little co-operative cheese factory in Langtang, the only actual town on the trail, where we had yak gouda and both immediately came down with head colds. The views were extraordinary, the air rare, the terrain rugged. Barberries hung like tiny waxy red lanterns, and bright yellow sea buckthorn berries blazed against the deep blue of the sky. Silver-faced langurs played in the trees, and higher up hundreds of crows picked the last dried rosehips clean off the bushes. The climax of the trip, altitude-wise, was the cluster of tourist lodges near tiny Kyanjin Gompa at 3700 meters or so. We were slightly depressed by the sight of dozens of these ugly concrete buildings all crammed together in that rugged place, I think, and by the way that every other lodge-owner solicited us. Offending at least one friend from the morning’s road, we settled on a small, out-of-the-way place where we were the only guests, and talked with the owner for a while about business and opportunity over bowls of Syakpa, the hot Tibetan-style noodle soup. Next day we headed early back down the valley, retracing our steps at nearly double the pace on the downgrade. In Langtang we skipped the yak cheese but sought out some yak butter to take home, some roasted barley flour called tsampa, and were rewarded by an amused old Tamang woman with some tsampa-cakes she had used in a puja. The hearty lumps were painted with a familiar red infused butter and dotted with sticky gobs of jaggery.

Our only remaining ambition was to spend some of our last funds on the weirdest item on the ubiquitous tourist menu, the “snicker momo.” Momos, in this context, are pastry turnovers, much richer than the meat or cabbage-filled steamed dumplings of the same name in Kathmandu. The Snicker part, of course, refers to the candy bar that (along with the inferior Mars bar) was bizarrely prominent on the Langtang trek. But when we arrived for the second time tired but happy in Syabrubesi, no one seemed to be able to locate any Snickers. We contented ourselves with an apple momo and milk tea at our fancy garden hotel (200 rupees a night), then chowmein, then an omelette--our appetites suddenly insatiable after 9 days on the move. But to sleep we returned to the Yeti lodge, where a comfortingly lukewarm welcome and a hard bed awaited. The bus ride back to the city was if anything longer than the first one, though less terrifying. Somehow arriving back in crazy Kathmandu felt like coming home.

Enter the Juice

There are times when one can sense, not only with 20/20 hindsight but right then, in the moment, that something has changed forever: a door opened, a step taken across a threshold to a world of new possibilities. A majority of us Americans dared to hope that Barack Obama would become our President, and through the sheer audacity of this hope—we’re talking about a black man, but even more radically for a candidate for our highest office, a man who speaks from his heart, who pours all of himself into his vision for our country and for the world—the sheer audacity transformed dream into reality. Rarely is it so clear that we are witnessing history in the making. Where were you on the day Obama got elected? I was in an American compound here in Kathmandu, watching in shock and disbelief along with a motley hundred or so fellow citizens as the flat screen showed his lead turn suddenly into to a mute declaration of victory, a victory that had until that moment remained almost unthinkable. I’ve never before felt a welling of tears at any mass event, not even at ruthless war or senseless disaster, let alone politics: but this was personal, for me and for everyone in that room it seemed. There was a first mounting round of cheers and applause as the realization set in, then further bursts rising and falling over the next hour or so. Eyes shining, smiles of joyous disbelief. Faith, after all, still leaves room for shock and awe.
Now, less than 24 hours later, the historical moment already seems almost inexorable, the tipping of the pendulum back towards light, clarity, hope. Dark days are yet ahead for America and the world, but perhaps we can—we will--strain against the terrible reins of our country’s momentum. Anything taken to enough of an extreme gives rise to its opposite; in our darkest hour is born the spark of hope anew. The Bush Era is suddenly conceivable as a thing done with, grittily lived through, as we prepare to exit the dark tunnel of these years. No matter the reality of the next four or eight, whatever the stumbling blocks, the disappointments inevitable from a leader onto whom millions of disenchanted people have cast their desperate hopes, we can never now go back; there’s no forgetting the sight of a sunbeam into the oubliette.

I doubt I’m alone in feeling the charged energy of these days, this past week or so in particular. Even here, across the world, the tension though indefinable has been thick. Now of course it’s broken, the rising tide having spilled over and turned out to be sweet. Our popular language is poor in terms to deal with movements of our collective consciousness; serious students of astrology probably have some grip on what’s going on ‘energetically.’ For me, at any rate, this public break in the status quo has aligned with a significant internal shift, or so it feels like in the middle of this giddy night. This’ll take a little explaining.
A few weeks back I discovered the stretch of narrow street between Bhedasingh and Naradevi east of Asan Tol in old Kathmandu. This little neighborhood is a sort of Ayurvedic nerve center, containing not only the Naradevi Ayurvedic hospital but also countless shops/clinics that sell mostly patent medicines from big modern herbal manufacturers like Himalaya. I’m more interested in the older shops, the herb retailers whose tiny stores are packed with medicines in various states of preparation: from hundreds of plastic bags of whole dried herbs hanging from the low ceilings, each bag marked with a permanent marker in scrawled Devanagari script, to the bins of various woods, barks, powdered extracts, resins, to the smaller glass bottles filled with handmade compounds and the tiny vials of bhasmas (mineral and other finally ground oxidized substances). Whenever I’m in the vicinity, I feel an almost magnetic pull towards this district, and each time I go I find something new. How did I not notice this particular shop last time, I’ll wonder, or fail to ask this old Vaidya-cum-pharmacist about his medicines? Yesterday, in the happy, bewildering aftermath of the election returns, luck carried me to a small shop that sells not whole herbs and from-scratch formulas but rather pre-made formulas ranging from traditional to patent, made in India and Nepal. It turns out the woman I met there and her brother both come from a long family of traditional (non-academic) Vaidyas and are thoroughly-trained and certified Vaidyas themselves. They gave me a warm welcome, the sister tickled by my knowledge of Ayurved and Nepali, and I settled in for a few hours behind the counter, trying to stay out of the way as customers came in for a word or two of medical advice for themselves or a child, to fill a formula, to pick up a popular Ayurvedic supplement. I got to watch as the pair custom-ground formulas that they had composed out of various already-compounded drugs on their shelves: formulas made out of formulas. First into the smooth porcelain mortar went the most potent ingredients, the Rasadi (mercurial) preparations that make little more than a percent of the total. These are ground steadily for until a sheen develops—the longer the better—along with a little herb powder for easier grinding. Then the other ingredients go in, factory-made pills and powders of plants and oxidized minerals, and all is thoroughly mixed before being packed pack into the emptied plastic bottles that the ingredients came from. This was a great opportunity to learn about Ayurvedic pharmacology, or Vaisajya Kalpana as the sub-discipline is more properly known. Complaining of a lingering sinus infection—polluted Kathmandu is not an easy place to kick a cold—I was able to discuss with the knowledgeable brother some details of the formula he wrote me. (It’s interesting, too, to compare the Ayurvedic dietary restrictions he outlined with popular Nepali conceptions of what not to eat when you have a cold: Ayurvedically speaking, it boils down to avoiding Kapha-increasing foods like yogurt, bananas, old and sour and heavy foods, while your Nepali Aama will insist that you avoid “cold” things: essentially the same list, but in (over)simplified layman’s terms.)
I have at this point a decent grasp of the basic properties of many of the more common Ayurvedic herbs, but these two were using almost exclusively classical (textually-rooted) formulas that I knew nothing about. This new vista was tantalizing, and in a burst of enthusiasm I proposed to the brother that we make me a personalized formula of a type called a Rasayana. A Rasayana (“russ—EYE—an--uh”) is a rejuvenating formula used to restore strength during convalescence, or simply to enhance one’s health. It’s a nourishing therapy, but also a catalytic one supposed to trigger the body to restore itself towards perfect health. Lots of substances are known to act as Rasayanas if given in the right way at the right time: the ubiquitous Amala (amalaki fruit, ghee, milk, probably chocolate chip cookies too. The right time is when the system is relatively free of impurities, like the byproducts of undigested food that can linger in the tissues and clog the body’s subtle channels; the process of rejuvenation is likened to dying a piece of cloth, so of course the cloth must be clean to start out. Little or no accumulated aam, metabolic waste, and healthy digestive ability (agni) are important. Like most students of Ayurveda, I suppose, I had been experimenting with Rasayan therapy for a while, making use of fortified milk decoctions and the renowned herbal jam called Chywanprash (after the old sage Chyawan, who used the formula to keep him strong and vigorous enough to satisfy his young wife) on a more or less daily basis. But here in this little pharmacy it occurred to me to try out another order of Rasayana: the alchemical formulas that include purified and processed mercury as well as other metals and minerals. Like many Sanskrit words, “ras” has an interesting range of connotations: it can mean juice, flavor, essence, interest, enthusiasm--and mercury. Literally, then, Rasayan means “entry of the ras.” Of course in the West anything that contains mercury, in any form, is taboo, and the association with such a notorious poison has threatened the reputation of Ayurveda just as it is starting to gain recognition as a legitimate healthcare system (of course it is much more than this, but in the context of our Western culture Ayurved is perceived as one option amongst many in “alternative” or “complementary” medicine). Hundreds of years of Ayurvedic philosophers, doctors and alchemists were no fools, though, and they know the dangers of mercury if not properly prepared. This is subject in itself (called Rasa Shastra). When I met an old Rasa Shastri, alchemist-Vaidya, in Banepa a couple of weeks ago, he said something like, “they say that mercury is poison. Well, we turn it into amrit [nectar of life].” I’m deep enough into this world, this worldview, that I no longer have any hesitation about consuming such substances, provided they came from reputable sources. (Ironically, the toxic Ayurvedic drugs come from the more modern Ayurvedic drug companies who cut corners in the purification process in order to save money.) At the little shop in Bhedasingh, the brother Vaidya wrote out a Rasayan formula based on my prakriti (Ayurvedic constitution—mine is Pitta predominant with Vata a close second). He also asked if I was married: well, not exactly, I admitted, but for his purposes the answer was essentially yes. He was asking because the formula he was composing would be a powerful aphrodisiac; the way to renew the body is through the reproductive organs, the ‘deepest’ of the 7 dhatus or tissues, and the one that is capable of producing ojas (the sap of life, analogous to the Chinese jing).
The formula he came up with contains Amalaki Rasayan (itself a processed and purified formula) as its base, to which he added tiny quantities of bhasmas of silver and mica, the soluble starch extract of Guduchi (Tinosporia Cordifolia), Prawal Pishti to counterract the heating properties of some of other bhasmas, and a mere few grams of Siddhi Makaradhwaj, a famous Rasayan containing Mercury, Sulphur and Gold. A Rasayan of Rasayanas. I wanted to grind it myself, so I began with the glittering granules of makaradwaj, watching the dark sparkling substance turn into a deep red powder as I ground it down finer and finer. That done we added the rest of the ingredients, all already powdered, and mixed it all up. Before I paid (Rasayanas aren’t cheap, as Ayurvedic medicine goes, but my total was still under $20 US) I wanted to clarify what dietary or other restrictions would go along with medicine. It should not, I learned, be taken with any other medicine, especially potentially toxic allopathic drugs, recreational drugs, or alcohol. I would finish the cold medicine he was also giving me before starting the path of Rasayana. It would also be superfluous to take any of the other tonic type herbs or mild Rasayanas like Chyawanprash once I started this formula.
When I got home after the morning watching the election results and the afternoon in the medicine shop, curiosity got the best of me and I allowed myself just a little taste of the innocuous looking, charcoal-gray powder. (It smelled like plums, my roommate decided.) That taste was one of the more electrifying experiences I’ve been privy to. It began as a lively tart sensation on the tongue, delightfully effervescent, and spread from there instantly, up to my head and out to my limbs. I broke out in a big stupid grin and couldn’t help but exclaiming out loud and then bursting into slightly maniacal, joyous laughter. After the initial reaction I thought, Good God, what is this stuff? It was just so obviously potent, pregnant with possibilities I’d only considered half-seriously, as a piece of esoteric lore out there in Ayurvedic wonderland. All that talk about rejuvenation wasn’t just talk—I could feel this stuff working already, and I hadn’t even meant to take a therapeutic dose. It affected my consciousness as definitely as a hit of hash (a possible object of my quest for Rasayana in days gone by) or a surging feeling of love—much closer to the latter, though, in terms of its qualitative experience. The rest of the evening I spent basking in the afterglow of this discovery, this epiphany: not only are Ayurved’s most powerful medicines much stronger than I’d even suspected, but I was—I am--going to commit myself to the straight and narrow path of Rasayana and see where it takes me. Having such a powerful aid in the search for health—health, the only solid foundation for dharma, artha, kama, and moksha, the Vedic Four Aims of Life—is profound inspiration for me to keep up my own end of the bargain, to keep myself clean in body mind and spirit so that the dyeing will come out even and deep.
In my current frame of mind I may be prone to grandiloquence (not to say delusions of grandeur), but it feels like the greater paradigm shift presaged by Obama’s victory is reflected in me in a small way in my discovery of the path of Rasayana, the bringing in of the life-giving juice. I hope the analogy proves fruitful, that Obama and what he represents serve as Rasayana for our ailing world. Is it possible that all the war, the starvation, the ugliness we numbly accept daily over the morning paper, that all this sickening mess is a cathartic purge that will ready us for the dye of new life?

image: rice harvest outside Panauti, Kavrepalanchowk, Nepal

the greetings and solicitations shouted your way whenever you (tall, white) venture out of the city:

"hallo!"
"whatisyour name?"
"hello how are you!"
"take one photo please"
"yes give me please one sweet"

* * *

Fall comes to the Nepalese middle hills as a chill in the air at night, days now pleasantly warm and sunny. Cherimoyas are done and suntala (tangerines? mandarins?) are starting to blush gold. Time to eat black dal (heavy and warming) and to sun-dry hot peppers, strips of daikon radish, and the fermented greens called gundruk against the coming chill. A proverb refers to the "min pachas," 50 days and nights when even the fish are frozen in place in this land's swift-flowing rivers.
I think of New England fall days, tumbling towards solstice more dramatically than they do here. Walking with a Nepali friend to Namobuddha, a really extremely old stupa a day's walk from the Valley, I tried the capture the feeling of our Northeastern autumn: the colors, I said, and the slant of the light... you, reading this at a northerly latitude, understand.
But how to evoke to you the feel of the rice harvest in the villages? The terraces, meticulously laced one-by-one with emerald shoots back in June when the monsoons provided the necessary ankle-deep mud--the paddy in the terraces is now ripened to golden brown. The plants have been tied into bunches (with other rice stalks for ties) for weeks, and after cutting and threshing with a foot-powered spinning device the empty bunches of straw are left in place to dry (see photo). The rice, still in husk, is spread out on pieces of plastic or cloth tarps, combed through, fanned with circular woven bamboo trays called nanglo to blow away bits of foreign matter. One man or woman hurling nanglos full of spiraling, shining rice onto the tarp, two or three fanning with their own nanglos, thrrrepp-swoosh-swoosh, a steady rhythm. Every step of this work is accomplished with whole families working together, long days in the sunny fields as slowly the gold stalks give way to bare brown, the stubble and the hut-like straw piles the only signs left of the months of labor. Hard to conceive of the amount of sweat that went into every luxuriant spread of husked rice, like the queen-sized mattress-sized amount that the old woman is combing through with her bare feet, taking her time as she pores through the fruits of her labor.

Kinds of rice. There's mansuri and its various subtypes for everyday eating, fat-grained tai cin (preferred for chiura, beaten rice, and chang, milky rice beer) but an unreliable producer, prone to pests and disease), prized pokhreli and jira masino ("fine cumin-seed"). Some seed is heirloom, some new-fangled hybrid that yields higher or is more resistant to disease but that, surely, takes its toll even on the rich lakebed clay soil of the Kathmandu Valley. I don't know if genetically-engineered rice has made its way here yet, with its double-talk promises and price to match. Most farmers probably couldn't afford the initial outlay, and I hope they would refrain from taking loans and risking their lands to do so (though many here, Newars of the Jyapu caste, are tenants working others' fields and receiving 50% of the harvest). It's a topic for another entry, better yet a more politically and economically-astute writer--but the trend away from subsistence and towards commodity agriculture looks to me like a dangerous one. I'm highly suspicious of the global free market...but better quit while I'm ahead on this subject. The argument for primeval or pictureque poverty isn't a pretty one either. But--one last protest--before TV arrived here, no one complained that their lifestyle wasn't up to the Western 'standard of living.'
Now that I've put my foot in it--comments welcome.

Tea break ( with Masala Chai Recipe )

Above: doing Mha Puja in Patan. At this yearly ritual Newars worship the divinity within, then cap it off with an enormous feast. Thanks to Rajman Bajracarya for his hospitality!

Belwo: Oh, those beautiful boys--room-mate / co-conspirator Alden (right) and I during Tihar


Fair readers, y'all deserve a little something to eat to sustain you across this wasteland of words. How about a cup of tea.

Get a hold of the cheapest, strongest black tea you can, from assam or ceylon. (all the better if the box has a picture of a beaming indian family on it.) the best stuff for chai (Nepali "chiya") is called CTC (cut-tear-curl), and comes in little pellets. toss in a teaspoonful of these little nuggets and a cup of water for each drinker, and turn on the gas. Add spices: fresh ginger root, green cardamom pods, maybe a clove or two. Cinnamon's too obvious, but black pepper is delicious if it's chilly out. And add sugar--nice, unrefined, rich jaggery, or (sigh) more authentically, the white granulated stuff. Don't be shy. We're going for near-syrup consistency. Bring all this to a raucous boil and don't turn it down until the house smells like (a sanitized version of) a Kashmiri spice bazar. Then add milk, rich sweet whole cow's milk, or (for more authenticity) the stuff that comes in little plastic baggies, robbed of its fat and adulterated with bad water and milk powder. Add almost as much milk as there is tea, and bring it back to a boil for a couple minutes. strain it into little cups or grubby glasses and serve it piping hot to everyone in the vicinity along with bland, dry little cookies. don't let them refuse. repeat five (5) times a day.

note that this tea is not for those with hypertension, insomnia, or restless leg syndrome.

Top Photo: goat sacrifice to Durga, the fierce form of the female divinity. Its blood is being sprayed straight onto a rice mill to bless it. Courtesy of Alden Towler.

Photo at Right: me winning a bootleg Diesel T-Shirt at the Bhorjyang village raffle! I'll say it again: at least I didn't win the goat.

Dashain, the biggest annual holiday for most Nepalis, is in its final throes. After all the animal sacrifice and feasting, these final days are more like a hangover than anything: quiet (everyone's still out of the city, staying at their home villages) and full of headaches (everything's closed).

Jumping at the chance to get out of the valley for a few days, I went with my friend and roomate Alden Towler to celebrate Dashain at a village in Khavre district, on the invitation of some friends of ours from the local fruit and juice shop. Their family, like many in Nepal, is large and extended family, with seven adult siblings each with kids. Being neither genealogically astute nor on top of the complexities of Nepali kinship terminology, I had no real chance of keeping everyone straight. Be that as it may, on Monday morning Alden, myself and 15 or so of the family all piled into a reserved microbus and headed for the hills. Through the pockmarked roads of the city, the horrendous smog of Koteshwor, past Thimi and Surya Vinayak and out, through Banepa, Dhulikhel, out into the country. Originally Alden and I had hatched a scheme to walk to this village over the course of two days, having heard from our hosts that it was a mere hour's walk from Dhulikhel. Manageable. Hence our surprise when the micro continued on another hour and a half past Dhulikhel--it would have been a hell of a walk. When we finally did disembark, the hike up to the village of Bhorjyang, though a mere trifle by local standards, was enough to satisfy my restless legs. We waded across a river in pairs, small children clinging to parents' backs, then switchbacked up a hill jutting up at an angle of at least 50 degrees. We kept climbing for another 40 minutes, through scrubby, rocky ground hosting clumps of lemongrass, amalaki (amla) trees, baby pipals that will provide blessed shade for the next generation of villagers. Past the scrubby hillside and into more inhabitable terrain, we found ourselves in the midst of fields--buckwheat, peanuts, mustard (for oilseed), kidney beans and other legumes climbing last season's maize stalks. Rice paddy at stages from green to gold, getting close to mature. Fruit trees lined the rocky footpath: luscious cherimoyas and small, tangy yellow-green guavas this time of year. A couple of family members showed me some useful wild plants: a bitter flower used to treat fever, another low-growing mint-like plant, also bitter, for jaundice, some small red berries, sweet and astringent, for diarrhoea. Also a weirdly ubiquitous shrub that didn't produce any food or medicine but whose stalks, properly snapped and drawn out, can be used to blow bubbles. We moved aside to let villagers carrying enormous loads of fodder pass us on the narrow trail. It's rare in Nepal to see ruminants on pasture; land level enough is terraced for fields, so the remaining steep hillsides become the source of foliage that's cut and carried to goats, cattle, and water buffaloes at least twice a day. Some of these villagers gave us sidelong looks, and some seemed to avoid our eyes. The kids, meanwhile, stared unabashedly but without malice at these tall white interlopers.
We arrived at the house of our host family just before dusk. Like most of the village houses, it was three stories, built of stone and plastered on the inside with red earth. Few windows, earthen hearth. First floor for living and for goats and chickens (on one side), second for sleeping, third for storing crops (hundreds of dried ears of maize). The roof was of closely-fitting tiles, though many neighboring houses had thatch. Since our hosts were wealthy be local standards, they also had a small solar panel powering a fluorescent bulb, and they had built small addition consisting of a toilet room below and a tiny extra bedroom above. Our quarters. The room was high enough for me to stand up in (always a question), and had a bed with a couple blankets on top of its plank for a mattress. A little wider than a twin, and we were to share it. Notions of personal space are one of the first of Western cultural conceipts to go out the window.
As soon as we came in and greeted the patriarch and matriarch of the family, we all feasted on fruit and were soon served good hot daal-bhaat. Everything we ate the whole time, except for spices, salt and tea, came from the family's fields: rice and soupy kidney bean daal; pumpkin, bitter gourd, iscoos, mustard greens; blisteringly hot achars with nutty little seeds (not sesame) ground up with tiny jeera khorsaaani (little "cumin peppers"). And meat--but that's still to come.
Like everyone in the village, our host family was Tamang. Tamang is an ethno-linguistic designation, referring to a few hundred thousand hill dwellers of Tibeto-Burman stock. They are mostly Buddhist but like everyone in this part of the world have been assimilated into the caste system--to the extent that they won't accept water from the Kamis (untouchable blacksmiths) who live down the hill, and that they celebrate Dashain. I was somewhat surprised and definitely happy to see that Tamang identity, at least in Bhorjyang, is thriving: our family spoke more Tamang than Nepali, leaving Alden and I scratching our heads. When a language goes moribund the first sign is amongst the kids, who from an early age will preferentially speak the more dominant, prestifious language to the exclusion of their ancestral tongue. Like English on a global scale, Nepali is such a 'predator' language throughout the eastern Himalayan foothills (in India's Darjeeling district and Sikkim as well as in Nepal itself). But here in the village some of the kids didn't even speak Nepali, though the schools would remedy that soon enough (and do their best to discourage Tamang). The teens were proud to be Tamang, as evidenced by their musical preferences: a single tape of Tamang hiphop was blasted on infinite repeat from our house. It wasn't so bad, the first 18 times through: old-school simplistic rhythms and rhyme schemes against a melodic female vocal-laced beat. The only respite, except for the nighttime hours, was another tape of Hindi film songs and a couple tracks of filthy Southern rap that none of the Tamangs could understand. Alden and I exchanged smiles, shrugs of disbelief.

The only thing I knew about Dashain coming into it was that it's a festival honoring the fierce goddess Durga by spilling blood in her honor. Sure enough, our first morning in Bhorjyang we wandered forth amongst the homesteads and stumbled upon a group of kids, mostly, clustered around a great water buffalo tied to a post. It's not fair to say we stumbled, I suppose, since our host father had impressed on us clearly enough that today we would watch them 'cut' the big beasts. As the designated slaughterers made their last-minute preparations, little kids clung to my pant legs, afraid to look but too curious or horrified not to. As for me, I had slaughtered chickens in Vermont, dozens of them, and even a goat once, though that was hard. This was to be a ritual, a cultural practice. I expected a certain amount of ceremony, so the great arcing first blow with an enormous curved blade almost caught me off guard. The great beast seemed to startle, make some half-noise: and it's neck was missing a great wedge, and a dark red glistening mess was popping out grotesquely. The second swing hacked deeper, almost through, and the animal fell. Another few seconds and they had the head off, the blood draining into a big pot, the feet still kicking. The sheer essential violence of the act hit me hard, and I found myself breaking a cold sweat, my heart racing. I walked away quickly, away from the brutality of that scene, nauseous. I'd heard of Hindus sprinkling water on a sacrificial animal so it shakes itself in supposed assent before its death, but even that paltry religious justification was lacking here. The men seemed gleeful. In the past my objections to eating meat have had to do with considerations of sustainability and the appalling way most animals are raised, and I have mostly made choices to eat meat only when I thought it was ecologically sound. This situation fit those criteria, yet I couldn't imagine wanting to eat that hulking form, collapsed there in the dust. A visceral, as opposed to an rational, reaction.
But this was Dashain, the one time when everyone feasts on meat they can't afford to eat most of the time. The butchering proceeded into the afternoon, with teams of men first covering the buffaloes with burning straw, scraping and scrubbing them, then removing the limbs for further dissection. Every organ was saved, including the small and large intestines, which were squeezed of their liquid contents by hand. The shit mixed with blood at the UNISEF-built community tap. Our family received a sixth of a raango (male buffalo), including our share of each organ. By mid-afternoon we were being fed chunks of liver mixed with red pepper and salt, hunks of belly fat merely singed in the fire, still chewy. I didn't eat much, but there was no question of refusing to share in this family affair. And anyway, what else would I have eaten? There were no vegetables that night. The colon was stuffed with fat for sausage, and the rest of the muscle meat cut into strips and hung to dry over the fire.

When the men weren't buthering beffalo or giving/receiving tika from family members (another Dashain ritual), they could reliably be found in the stone yard in front of my host family's house, gambling. Card games would continue into the night, with thousands of rupees changing hands. Even fields and the small pieces of family gold would change hands with some regularity, I heard. No wonder microcredit organizations target the women of the family: in most of rural Nepal, at least, is it they who make households run, who cook and clean and cut ghaas for the cattle, and who make sure there is some money set aside for clothing, salt, soap.

A bizarre highlight of my third day in the village was a raffle whose prizes consisted of (in order of ascending value) a large Coke, some T-shirts, a topi (hat worn by most Nepali men) a cassette boombox, a pressure cooker, a cell phone, and a castrated goat. I bought two tickets for 50 rupees a pop, one for me and one for Alden, and let him have his pick. Mine was #046. The drawing was preceeded by endless speeches on village development and politics, broadcast by means of a fuzzy microphone setup, and which captured almost nobody's attention. Finally the crowd gathered as the drawing began. I was weirdly prescient that I was going to win, and even debating with myself what I would do with a goat. Not kill it, surely, at least not then . . . sell it, maybe? Raise it on our rooftop in the city? Out of the hundreds of tickets, my number was indeed pulled: I was the proud owner of a brand new bootleg turquoise Diesel T-shirt. I got up on stage in front of the assembled village, had my cheeks and shoulders smeared with vermillion powder, shook some hands, and claimed my prize. Someone asked me to put it on, and I did so, smiled for a camera, Namaste'd to a cheering crowd. Truly surreal, but at least they didn't ask for a speech, and at least it wasn't the goat!

One nice Dashain tradition was the swings built out of bamboo and thick rope and set up at a couple spots in the village. The swinging radius was high, and peopled played "ping" standing up, so it was a bit wilder than your average school playground. Unforunately I didn't get much chance to partake, as starting soon after the first round of feasting I got sick. Predictable enough, given the combination of factors I was exposed to: I drank untreated, unboiled water the whole time I was there, and then ate too much at the biggest feast night after an afternoon of gnawing on lard and chucking away the rinds. At least now I know what giardia is like: the foul sulphurous burps (like buttered popcorn, I thought, in the middle of a miserable night), epigastric pain, diarrhoea, vomiting. But lest my gentle readers think I'm abandoning my Ayurvedic understanding in favor of protozoan explanations, let me say that mere exposure to this nasty little critter isn't enough to make one sick. Alden was drinking the same water as me for days, and didn't have as much as a hiccup. It takes a weakening of the body's defenses to let the giardia organism get a foothold in the lumen of the small intestine, which happens when one's agni (digestive fire, the Ayurvedic term for the body's digestive capacity) becomes low. In such a case you can't digest everything you've eaten, and the lucky little flagellate steps in to finish the job and cause a ruckus in the process. Looking Giardia Lamblia up on wikipedia today I even saw a reference the fact that Giardia generally becomes chronic only when gastric acid secretions are low. Aha! I thought. Confirmation.
After my second sick night (I had recovered in the intermittent day but then caved in to the family's urgent desire that I eat dinner, with nasty results) the poor family was worried enough to take matters into their own hands. Baa woke me up early in the morning, sat me up, and muttered some words while gesturing and finally blowing on and around me in short puffs of air. This is a way of dispelling spirits, commonly identified throughout Nepal as culprits in stubborn or bizarre illnesses. Timilaai bhut aayo, he said. A ghost came to you. Well it ain't my worldview but after the second round of such treatment (and not eating anything for the rest of the day) I did indeed recover in time for the arduous trip back to the city.
Back down the hill we went, my dehydrated body shaking a little on the steep slope under the weight of my pack. Across the river to the road, where we waited for hours for a microbus back to the waystation of Banepa. One last bout of the hiphop tape, burned into my memory forever as the soundtrack to those wretched giardia nights. In Banepa we climbed onto the roof of a packed bus and hung on to the rails as it sped through the cool night air, a mad feeling of exhilaration taking hold and spreading, I thought, through the crowd up there on the bus roof. I had wind-whipped conversations with 3 different Nepalis, hurriedly typed their numbers into my cellphone, before hoping off and sharing a cab for the last leg back to Bhatbhateni, which is starting to feel like home. Alden and our closest friend in the Tamang family, Rajan, who is off to work in Dubai in a week, leave today form the village, taking the long way back on foot as far as Dhulikhel. I'm only a little jealous. Mostly just glad to have my appetite back, and not to have to raise any goats on the roof.

Into the depths

Sat down with a very traditional Brahmin yesterday to talk about Ayurveda, the venerable Southasian medical system, literally 'knowledge of life.' I had a list of questions including one on the politics surrounding Ayurveda in Nepal (the traditional family practitioners butting heads with the more academic, certified ones). But as soon I met this humble, smiling, soft-spoken man, I changed my tack. He was disarmingly open, saying not a word as we seated ourselves and made noises of introduction, but smiling a slight toothy smile that an impatient New Yorker would dismiss as idiotic. But here was a man rich with inner resources cultivated over a lifetime of religious observances, fasting, meditation, and puja (worship). When he did speak it was clear that, like my teacher Dr. Vasant Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, Dr. Kashi Raj Subhedi embodied Ayurveda. A container molded through long use to fit perfectly its content.
Dinesh had contributed a couple of questions to our list, and was eager for me to ask guru-ji (as he called Dr. Subhedi) about the fundamentals of Ayurveda. I was reluctant, knowing what an enormous topic this is, and feeling that I had at least a passing acquaintance with the philosophical roots of this healing tradition. But Dinesh opened with this question. I struggled to comprehend the Brahmin's softly-garbled, old-fashioned Nepali, but caught the gist of his beautiful and succinct answer. Asked what the fundamental principle of Ayurved is--the root of all knowledge about life, essentially--he spoke of the oneness of inner and outer worlds, the old doctrine of "As above, so below." Just as the wind blows, pushing clouds and carrying scents, so does the wind within the body (Vayu) initate movement and carry signals of communication. Outside, the Sun, representative of fire, provides the heat and light energy that all life needs. Likewise, our fire within (Agni) allows for transformation of one substance into another, as matter into energy when we digest, and governs our metabolism. Too much solar energy in the outside world and we have drying, burning, a desert. Internally, a hyperactive metabolism dries up the juices of life, scorches our delicate membranes with acidic secretions, burns up our lifespan like a candle lit from both ends. This solar/fiery force is counterbalanced by cool, moistening, lunar energy, the earth's watery majority. Water nourishes, soothes, buffers a landscape against high winds and scorching sun. In the microcosm, water (Jal) performs the same role, irrigating our tissues with nourishment. But this force too can be destructive, floodwaters suffocating and overwhelming the capacity of the land to absorb them. Too much water in the body leads to stagnation; water needs air to keep it moving and fire to warm it up and keep it in check.
The Brahmin's message, from what I understood, was not just that such a correspondence exists, but that these worlds are coterminous. There can be no disturbance to the outer world without an effect on the body; conversely, the way we live our individual lives impacts our surroundings, our 'environment.'
The promise of Ayurved is to bring balance and thus health to both outer and inner worlds, but first we must remember that we are but an encapsulation of the world, it a reflection of us. The rest of Ayurveda, the six tastes and seven dhatus, the three doshas and three malas and 20 gunas, all this is simply a set of tools to implement this balancing.

I was fascinated with the guru's lucid grasp of Ayurvedic cosmology, and my thoughts turned to another esoteric branch of this great tree, the preparation and use of mineral preparations, bhasmas. Dr. Subhedi talked of the arduous preparation of these potent medicines, using alchemical terms like 'slaying' the metal and 'cleansing' it. Indeed, bhasmas fall under the alchemical tradition which merged with Ayurveda centuries ago in common pursuit of longevity and self-realization. This is a controversial topic, as rasa shastra (Vedic alchemy) makes use of certain forms of mercury, which is revered as the Semen of Shiva. Potent and dangerous in and of itself, this glistening quicksilver needs stabilization in the form of union with the Ovum of Parvati, sulphur. Alchemical processing involves various samskaras whose upshot is to fuse the two, Mercury and Sulphur, into a stable form (Mercury sulfide, chemically speaking). This black powder, called Kajjali, is chemically inert and hence non-toxic, if correctly prepared, and it is considered a vehicle for carrying other medicines deep into the body and a means of potentizing them.
Dr. Subhedi didn't get into all of this; he just made reference to it en route to discussing the properties of various of the bhasmas. He spoke of Suvarna Bhasma, finely powdered gold; Moti bhasma, oxidized pearl; Tamra Bhasma, copper ash; Krisna Abhrak Bhasma, a preparation of black mica; and others. As he explained, all these elements are present in our bodies as in the earth; bhasmas are powerful because work directly on the level of our elemental composition. Gold bhasma is like a concentrated form of solar energy: hot, stimulating, nourishing in the right quantity. It supports immunity and strengthens the heart. Pearl bhasma is like the moon, or like milk, sweet and cool and nourishing. It counters inflammation and aids in anabolic growth. Tamra, copper, is hot and sharp, with a scraping action. It is used in inflammation/enlargement of the liver, amongst other disorders. And abhrak, mica, a renknowned tonic for the respiratory system, considered beneficial in any disease when mixed with the right herbs.

After a couple hours Dr. Subhedi got up to do his nightly puja, a 2 hour affair. Dinesh and I lingered for a while over cups of tea and then slipped out into a surprisingly peaceful night in a quiet corner of Kathmandu. We stopped at a momo shop for a snack, talking of our next step: to find the few remaining alchemists in Nepal, and learn what we can of that strange art, that beautiful science.

Fit for a King

I had the good fortune yesterday to be invited to a Newar feast, and the intestinal fortitude (despite recent events, see below) to live to tell about it and even to eat some breakfast the next morning.
I arrived in Patan late afternoon, with unseasonable rains threatening to damage the maturing rice crop and flood the imminent festival of Dashain. It had been a long day of navigating the sodden city both on foot and folded into tiny tin buses, newly purchased fabrics clutched tightly about me, but I arrived at my friend's friend's house cheerful. And hungry. As a perpetual guest in this culture, ironically enough, true hunger is rarely something you'll experiece, but there it was. That nervous twinge emanating from an empty belly. And ironically again, we had to wait. There were friends to meet, then more friends, all Patan Newars, and by the time we were all heading to eat it was nearly dark. Mind you I had another dinner to attend, on the other side of town, with an American expat couple I'd been dying to meet--but somehow here I was, hours later than I'd expected, suddenly a welcomed guest at a traditional feast. There was no escape, nor could I really have wished for one, so a phone call later I let myself settle in for the duration.
Before I get to the point--which is the food, of course--I need to make one more digression and explain that this bhoj ( feast) was traditional in a self-conscious sense. It was billed as such, on the tourist-priced Rs. 300 tickets. The whole festival of which it was a part was contrived as some combination of fundraiser and cultural exhibition; all the narrow brick or cobble streets around Patan Durbar Square were filled with Newars of various castes demonstrating their traditional trades, from pounding baji (flattened rice) by hand (nowadays there are machines that do this), to making and hand-firing bricks and tiles, to distilling liquor. There was one area where the entire year's worth of festivals were represented by their distinctive iconography and ritual foods, one after another, on tables around a courtyard. Step over here and it's midwinter, yomari punhi, and eat this sesame-and-molasses filled treat (the yomari) to warm your insides; over here come try this millet beer that the Newar farmers drink on X month. . . it was all fascinating and beautiful to see--this sort of rich cultural elaboration on the ties between season, ritual and food was what drew me back to Kathmandu and formed the basis for my original Fulbright research proposal. But you have to wonder what it means when a cultural group feels the need to put itself on display, or, one might even say, to sell itself. As the Newari man sitting next to me said later at dinner, 'now our culture is less than 25 percent.' I.e. people are no longer making handmade bricks on a daily basis, but they haven't yet forgotten how. There's a sense that these traditions are valuable, both priceless and yet somehow priceable. But back to the feast.
Our tickets purchased, we entered a courtyard and we're Tika'd with vermillion paste and rice, garlanded with red ribbons. Not three step further on a woman thrust little clay dishes of the notoriously strong Newar raksi upon us, along with a large green leaf-plate (i'm a little embarassed, as an amateur ethnobotanist, not know what kind of leaf it was) containing a 3-inch round urad daal pancake topped with unbelievably tasty "buff" (water buffalo meat). The warm-up to the warm-up. We were ushered over to some plastic tables under a tarp. Now chhang--cloudy, tart, slightly sweet rice beer--came in clay vessels one size up from those used for raksi, and a dish of spicy daikon and cucumber achar appeared. What an appetizer! Light, crunchy, and absolutely packed with flavors. What spices, I wanted to know? I counted off the usual suspects: fenugreek? yes. Turmeric? of course. Garlic? that was obvious enough? Cumin, coriander, onion, ginger . . .? yes to all of the above. And of course plenty of chillies. And a small round green thing--vegetable or spice I don't know--whose name was lost in the delicious shuffle. I thought the meal had begun, but no, this was mere child's play, something to accompany the drinks. (I now had another little dish of raksi alongside my chhang). It was now dark, and we moved over to a long table set with metal plates. In good weather we'd have been sitting on long mats on the floor, in long rows facing each other. Now began the processon proper: first the most strictly ritual foods, as far as I understand it, the Samay Baje: a pile of flattened rice (Np chiura, Nw baji) surrounded by little bits each of ginger pickle, black soybeans, a small cube of raw pumpkin, delicate, stemmy mustard greens in mustard oil, and an unidentifiable but memorable achar. I'm already forgetting something, I know it, but there's a time and a place for field notes: this was a time to eat. I followed the lead of my neighbors and set aside the pumpkin piece and a tiny bit of everything else next to my plate--for what deity I know not, in the rich and baffling multi-traditional pantheon of the Newars. Then we tucked in. I barely had time to appreciate the unique savor of each dish before two more appeared, as a line of servers doled out delicacy after delicacy with relentless efficiency. I began to understand the second half of the saying "parbate bigriyo mojle, newar bigriyo bhojle," which translates roughly to "hill Nepalis are ruined by sex, Newars by feasting." It rhymes in Nepali. Anyway, between incredulous mouthfuls of baji flavored with spicy stewed chicken (the British fiction of 'curry' doesn't get us anywhere as far as description goes), cauliflower tarkari, and fragrant, soupy white peas, I caught on from my neighbor's enthusiastic commentary somethig of the set order to all this, the method to the madness. I quickly realized I would have to refuse categorically any offers of seconds of any one dish to have any hope of saving face, trying everything and cleaning my plate at the end. A Newari phrase appeared out of the ether: ghataa, enough! The servers crinkled the corners of their eyes in amusement and gave me little dollops whenever I blinked. There must have been 20 dishes. I remember buff meat; potato and bamboo shoots; something red and very spicy; another incarnation of the daikon achar; assorted buffalo entrails prepared dry (I identified my three little morsels as liver, tripe, ear); another spicy meat broth or other; and raksi. Most everything was perfumed with mustard oil, in which a trace of red onion was fried to a crisp brown. Fenugreek, chillies, turmeric, always. But more subtle permutations of spice, too, mysteries to unravel. At one point a glistening round gulab jamun (a classic Indian sweet, Newar by extension?) was dolloped aboard, "to protect the liver" after the raksi--while the raksi aids in the digestion of the heavy meats, helps the diverse clientele in the bar of the stomach mingle without resentment or mutual suspicion. Nice. At long last, after my world had been focused down to a brass plate and an endless mingling of colors and flavors, came the gentle winding down. A sour, sulphury-salty red broth fell from the sky, lip-smacking after all the preceding richness. Another soupy item, too, bitter and aromatic stewed fenugreek seeds doled out by the tablespoonful or so. Then a scant teaspoon of sprouting raw mung beans, I think they were, and finally a flourish of thick, sweet yogurt. Digestive upon digestive ensuring the continuing health and capacity for gluttony of a people that have attained the status of culinary genius; Ayurvedic principles applied rather perversely, in order to enable otherwise unthinkable levels of consumption. This was truly a feast, of a magnitude I'd never experienced, medieval, almost, in its proportions.
On top of it all I swilled the last of my raksi alongside my compatriots--we were all damn friendly by this point--and ate my gulab jamun with an inward wink at my liver. Handwashing in the dark, much back-clapping and joking, a rare cigarette to celebrate the occasion and give final impetus to my digestive process. Out into the night, in a taxi who's driver had apparently never left the confines of his native Patan--I shouted directional queries out the window at bicyclists and, once in familiar territory, navigated with growing confidence to the house of the American couple. I was only an hour and a half late in the end, quite wthin reason given the circumstances. Their dinner looked good, and I would have called it quite elaborate on any other day. But, except for some Rosh Hashanah apples and honey hours later, I'm eternally grateful they didn't make me eat anything.

an upheaval, an uprise . . . an upchuck

It had to happen sooner or later--the dreaded, violent pangs of my digestive tract turning itself inside out. It hit my last night, after a beautiful afternoon of walking up to a Buddhist nunnery high in the hills that ring the city. My enthusiastic friend Dinesh had suggested the walk, me not realizing we were talking about a half-day excursion up a steep and winding dirt road. In lieu of sufficient water I was reduced to greedily slurping at the mealy apples and bland oranges we had bought down below in Budhanilkantha; at the top, tired and sweaty, I added to this churning brew some salty Tibetan tea, potatoes and flattened rice. I can't blame the water here for this intestinal insurrection, though I did drink it untreated from the taps on this pristine hillside; no, this ailment was a result of prajaparadha, the Sanskrit Ayurvedic term for "crime against wisdom." I ate when not hungry, just to be polite to our gracious host nuns, and mixed the verboten combination of fruit, dairy, and starch in an already struggling stomach. I made it back down the mountain fine in the dusk light, but barely survived the close, smoggy microbus rides back to my shared apartment without giving my guts their due. I'll spare the gentle reader my analysis of the physics of projectile vomiting.

I'm convincend it's good to have thorough purge once in a while--it breaks the routines that life can so easily slip into, gives a sense of perspective through its feverish lens of squirming self-pity. The real payoff, if I may be permitted a moment of masochism, is the following day, today, the day of shaky convalescence that closely resembles a mid-strength hangover. I did little but sit in the apartment and sweat, and read The Grapes of Wrath. Good timing, too: today there was a bandh, a sort of citywide strike that can be described either as popular protest against the latest governmental outrage or as blackmail--as in 'we'll shut down this city until you pay (up) for what you've done'. I'm certainly in no position to judge. So as always happens on these days, the city ground to a halt, tires burning in the street, and instead of fighting through it make some hoped-for appointment with a some contact who is probably staying home anyway, I too put my feet up. Around 4 PM I decided to give wings to a rather curious craving, for sweet black coffee. Being an inveterate meddler, I added some American Ginseng powder and some bitter liver tonic herbs along with the cardamom and sugar, and indeed the concoction perked me up, without the nervous twinge that coffee usually delivers to this Vata-Pitta constitution. I even found the appetite to eat some naan; I'm a new man.

Being sick oneself is a fine opportunity to take a look at folk medical beliefs. The operative one in this case seems to say that one should eat, not fast, when one's stomach is upset. I tend to think it depends on a number of factors, like just how nauseous and feverish one is, and am glad there was no Nepali aama around to force feed me in the night. As with many such beliefs in this part of the word, however, there may be an Ayurvedic basis for it (or, conversely, these tidbits of folk wisdom may have preceded the formal codification of Ayurveda a few thousand years ago). The concept of agni, digestive fire, is central to Ayurveda, and a certain logic argues that when the fire is weak it's necessary to feed it so it can grow strong. This has to be done carefully, so simple foods are appropriate, like plain bread, or the quintessential Ayurvedic convalescent food kichari, a stew of split mung beans (mung daal) and rice. Even now I can feel the dull flames in my beat-up belly lapping with renewed vigor at the starchy fuel I've just laid on top of the coals.

Another area where Ayurvedic concepts run together with everyday, popular conception is in the realm of heating and cooling foods: black (urad) daal, most meats, and sesame seeds are examples of hot or heating foods that are best consumed during winter. Similarly, when one has a cold (a Kapha disorder, Ayurvedically speaking), one should avoid cold drinks, yogurt, cucumbers, and other cold or cooling items. This seemingly simple (if unfamiliar) notion is not as straightforward as it seems, though, since Nepalis have no qualms about eating blazingly hot/spicy food in any weather. A lapse, a blindspot in the system? Perhaps not; it is well-documented that all the major chilli-eating cultures are distributed in tropical and subtropical latitudes, and that chilies have a cooling effect in the long run since they promote sweating. Thus hot peppers are hot in the short run, with their digestion and metabolism-stimulating effects, but ultimately cooling. (Fellow students of Ayurved, what do you say to this potentially blasphemous piece of thinking? Are chillies hot in taste, hot in virya and sweet in vipak!? They certainly don't seem to promote constipation, as they should if they had a pungent post-digestive effect.)

I should use the occasion of this otherwise rather trivial and self-centered entry (sorry, Beth, not to continue along yesterday's lofty train of thought) to relate another vignette or two about life in Nepal. In addition to the bandh, the water ran out today. I don't know how widespread the outage is, but the flow from our tap dwindled to a trickle this afternoon before drying up completely. This annoying cloud has a definite silver lining in that we're no forced out to the dhunge dhaaraa, the neighborhood water tap, to fill jugs for domestic use. Everyone is doing the same, so it becomes quite the social event. A quintessential Nepali experience, as bathing at said tap will be if the water doesn't start flowing soon.

Tradewinds a-blowing

I'm back from Dhulikhel, a moderate-sized old Newar (and new tourist) town just outside the hustle and bustle of the Valley. I returned with spoils: a glass Horlicks jar filled with waterbuffalo ghyu (clarified butter) and a one liter soda bottle filled with mahi (buttermilk, the side-product of freshly-churned butter). To find good quality dairy products, you have to look outside domain of the monetary economy, which means you have to go to the villages which still make up the most typical kind of community in hill Nepal. In the city, ghyu is adulterated with hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and milk comes from (I have reason to suspect) from grain-fed, antibiotic-laden cows in crowded dairies without a shred of greenery in sight. Then it's watered down, and probably reconstituted with added powdered milk before being sealed in plastic baggies and distributed for Kathmandu's morning chiyaa.
As a westerner in Nepal, it's hard not think about issues of "development," bikaash, a word on everyone's lips. It's impossible to argue that Nepal is just fine as it is, what with the glaring social and health issues that plague these hills, from appalling infant mortality rates to young women being sold into the Indian sex trade . . . it's a long list. But the supposed solution of development is rife with problems of its own. This is an enormous debate that I've hardly dipped my feet into, but even a casual glance into its murky depths is startling enough to provoke a double take.
In Panauti, a two hour walk from Dhulikhel that Alden and I stretched into a 6 hour walk by stopping to share an avocado (a novelty--is it a fruit? a vegetable? with salt and chili peppers, an achar? not many converts to this strange fleshy bulb) with some tea house locals, to discuss rice varieties and crop rotations with a peasant farmer who then asked for 1000 rupees for his trouble (we gave him 55, too much for 15 minutes of work; he said, 'we're poor people, what can we do?'), and to investigate an egg-production facility that employed 10 workers and housed 15,000 hens--in Panauti, after walking and talking all day, we settled down for some momos at a hole-in-the-wall and found ourselves in another in-depth conversation with some young men. These guys were under 30, and like most of their demographic group, they were consumed with scheming their way to America. All their friends had already left: how, they asked, could they get by here, working their fathers' terraced rice paddy fields, when the snack (fried buffalo meat) and drink (whisky and coke) they were enjoying cost 300 rupees? The issue at the heart of these guys' rhetorical question, of course, is that of modernization: the lead of advertizements and peers demands consumption levels well above what a simple subsistence-based economy can support. The question wouldn't arise if these men had contented themselves with chiura (dry, flattened rice) and yogurt washed down with locally-distilled raksi. One foot in the fast-flowing current of the global economy immediately pulls the other one in too.
In situations like this one, I always feel obliged to speak of America's problems. Lousy food, I say; bigrieko (broken) families. Lifelong debt, too much work, not enough satisfaction. I'm not the only one to notice the irony: Nepalis flock to America while Americans like me aim for "third-world" Nepal. Yet as I write America's unsustainable, growth-based economy is in shambles, toppling in on itself. Meanwhile, the local traditions I place so much value in, from Ayurvedic medicine to traditional agriculture and cooking, are losing their integrity due to pressures emanating from the West. The middle-aged Baidya I met in Dhulikhel no longer follows the family tradition of making his own medicines from herbs he has gathered--the mass-produced Ayurvedic products from India are fine, and there's more money in them. He still knows the theory, reads pulses, but his son is training to be an Allopathic doctor.
That's my spiel for today, except that I don't want to end on a sour note. Who was who said 'expect the worst, hope for the best?' Wallowing in the mud makes the starlight look awful bright. There are rays of hope here, and in America too. Or call them flowers growing out of toxic ground--now we need them to cross-pollinate. For the fate of globe is all bound up with itself, every seemingly loose end connected to the rat's nest tangle of the whole. This has always been true in an abstract sense, only now it's painfully concrete. Nepal needs America, and America needs Nepal.