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.

Hospitality

Asti means 'the day before yesterday.' but it can refer to any day in the recent past, especially if you can't tell where one ends and the next begins or don't care to figure it out. Asti, rhymes with "moss tee". So asti, after a long day spent touring around the outskirts of Kathmandu with an American friend and a Nepali one, I was ready to put my feet up. This same friend and I had an invitation to dinner at the house of another Nepali acquaintance. We climbed into a bus, which followed the trail of black smog around some of the city's major roads until we got to Swayambhu, the 'monkey temple.' Here we waited and waited amongst honking traffic and fruit vendors for this friend to appear. The sun set. The power went out. We waited. Finally, after dozens of distorted phone attempts it became clear that he meant to meet us at the other police station, by the other gate of the temple. We took a cab and there he was, waiting patiently. Steeling ourselves with the thought of imminent refreshments we followed him through narrow alleys to the house he was sharing with, he said, a couple of sisters. Inwardly I relished the thought of a nice quiet dinner, just us and a few young Nepalis who, I thought, wouldn't be inclined to ask endless questions about American life. We could catch our breath, fill out bellies in peace. Well. The universe is a contrary bugger, but I'm beginning to suspect it usually knows what's good for us, and some times it rubs our faces in it. Up the stairs we go, into the sort of Southasian living room that has many a Westerner scratching their head (is that a Swiss chalet poster on the wall? Or a gingerbread house? What does 'love is one flower for your bouquet life' mean? etc. etc.). No women of a sisterly age are to be seen, but there's old Amma and four grandcildren. As if the cement doorway were a revolving door, in come neighbors, friends, relatives, finally the promised didis, everyone with questions for us, it's true. By this time we've been served some khaajaa (see preceding post), peanuts and pickled daikon, along with some cloudy homemade raksi. There's nothing much else to tell--we ate and drank, and then ate again when at 10 0'clock or so when the khaanaa was ready. Goat meat, in our honor, flavored the rice mountain with its spicy juices. There was no peace, or at least no quiet, but lots of stories, jokes, impersonations, schemings--just lots of living, as people with big families do. I learned a few words of Tamang, and heard tales of the family's home village in the hills of Kabre east of the valley. People recently moved to Kathmandu usually like to talk about their family homes amongst quiet, lush hills. They'd rather be there, you'll hear. In those same towns, talk to a youth and chances are you'll learn how backwards it is there, how it's not for him, this country life, no, he's going to the city where there's opportunities, and money.
With what looked to be and indeed turned out to be another busy day ahead, I somewhat guiltily declined their offer that I spend the night. My friend accepted, and found himself sharing a bed with who knows how many family members, eating daal-bhaat again with all of them crowded into the kitchen in the morning. I'd tumbled out of their cycle, back to my own mattress and a house whose quiet was almost disconcerting. It's nice, though, to feel that if ever I find my way to that Tamang household they'll make room for me in their lives' daily rhythms as if I never missed a beat.

Rice vs. all comers

21 September / 5 Ashoj

I'm staying at a friend's place in Bhatbhateni, a relatively quiet, Westernized/ritzy neighborhood north and east of the heart of Kathmandu. The worst thing about not living with a local family is not being fed. This may be a blessing in disguise, though, since in this context being fed is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel. The tradition of hospitality runs strong here, and that mostly boils down to food and lots of it. And for the un-initiated, Nepali food* is quite a strange beast.
By food, I mean rice. The Nepali word for food is 'khaanaa,' and it is literally synonymous with daal-bhaat, the ubiquitous staple of boiled rice and thin lentil/pulse broth. Of course everyone eats other things besides--boiled eggs, fruit, milk, tea, momos (tibetan-style dumplings), chowmein, all kinds of meat (except beef), chowmein, and, increasingly, chips, fries, soda, and pizza. Or chiura, dry flattened rice,but this doesn't really count as rice at all. Everything just listed falls into a different category altogether: it is 'khaajaa,' roughly 'snack food.' One might eat it in the morning, before the mid-morning khaanaa, or in the afternoon with tea, or while walking down the street. But it's not food, really. Just 'time pass,' as the Indian Anglicism goes.
So twice a day, if all is going well, you have your daal-bhaat. It comes on a metal plate with a lip around it to contain the juices, or a TV-dinneresque subdivided plate. Either way, if you're focusing on the meal in front of you the various colorful adornments aren't likely to distract you from the dominant feature: the mountain of rice. For starters--and you will be given more--it's about 4 times as much rice as you'd get with your beef with broccoli at a Chinese place in the states. It's white, and fluffy, and there's a ton of it. There's also a small metal bowl of daal, your soupy lentils, one of dozens of kinds of whole or split legumes, with or without floating bits of vegetables, spiced or plain. This is for lubricating the rice, and for adding some protein. There are one or two vegetable dishes, unless it's special occasion (you're a guest in someone's house, say), in which case one of these is a meat dish, probably goat. Almost every meal of daal-bhaat includes a potato dish, which counts as a vegetable, much to the chagrin of the gringos who may at this point throw their hands up in despair of something green. Luckily for them, it is equally common to find some sort of saag (cooked greens) as the other veg dish. All these vegetables are intensely flavored--with ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, ajwan, fenugreek, chilies, mustard oil--and plenty of salt. It's no coincidence that there ain't a whole lot of them, just enough in fact to flavor every mouthful of rice. For this same purpose the plate always includes an even more concentrated source of flavor, the achar. If you got a quarter cup of tarkari (veggies), the achar will amount to maybe a teaspoon. It's generally so spicy, salty and/or sour that you wouldn't want much more than that. Popular achars around here are either toasted sesame seed-based or tomato-based, pasty or runny respectively. Finally there may be some raw onion, or daikon radish, or cucumber--western concessions, I suspect, for those who clamor for salad. This is not the country for salad-eaters.
So how do you tackle this smorgasbord? Well, you roll up your sleeves, wash your hands--your right hand, anyway--and dig in. Eating with your fingers is a much more sensual experience than employing a metallic middleman. You 'taste' the food twice, feeling its temperature and consistency before it enters your mouth. There's an art to this kind of eating, of course, and takes a few times before it's comfortable for a bideshi (foreigner). But soon you're mixing away, balling up perfect mouthfuls of wettened rice, a morsel of succulent potato, a twist of bitter mustard greens, a trace of fiery achar. And if you're not careful you'll look up just in time to see another avalanche of bhaat cascading down on top of it all, and a wickedly-smiling woman's face. Don't hesitate. Accept your fate, stretch your stomach, and soon you too will be a rice-eater, someone who can't be satisfied with anything else edible. For the slightest sign of hesitation will prompt protests of 'mitho bhaena? isn't it good?' and you'll have to do overtime to make up for your rudeness.

The daily necessity of eating provides plenty of opportunities for cross-cultural comparison, above and beyond the content of the food. My friend Alden and I have been frequenting a hole-in-the-wall near his place, where a stout and sassy Gurung or Tamang woman serves up daal-bhaat twice a day for fiftee rupees a plate (less than a dollar). Never mind the fact that she's 4 foot 2 and I 6 foot 3 and our weights are roughly equal--we're about equally far our on the no-man's land region of the bell curve. I'm more interested in how she interacts her customers, joking with them, handing them single cigarettes, grubby glasses of homemade liquor. From the first time I met her she took me in stride and called me "Babu." This is not a Kansas family restaurant. If I thought of the place as a restaurant at all, I'd be amused by the juxtapositions of American popstar posters next to Buddhist images on the mildewy walls, and perhaps annoyed when the rice is cold. After all, you have to come at the right time! Where's the menu, anyway? And what's that chicken doing underfoot, pecking up rice from one end and fouling the place up from the other? Come next week, babu, and you'll find him on your plate.


*'Nepali food' is a bit of a fiction, as there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups in this country and no two of them shares exactly the same culinary culture. The high-Himalayan peoples eat very little rice, and lots of barley and yak products and potatoes. In the Terai, Nepal's southern plains region that borders India, you're apt to find roti (wheat flatbread) as often as daal-bhaat, and the spicing of the 'curries' (meat or veg dishes) will be more North Indian than what I've described. Newar food, dspite coming from Nepal's heartland, is different again and absolutely unique. But it's true that daal-bhaat spans many of the ethnic or tribal divides, and the differences frmi one plate to another don't outweigh the basic commonalities.

Bhaktapur

When I first schemed up a way to get back to this part of the world, I set my sights on a singular city, Bhaktapur, on the eastern side of the Kathmandu valley. My project proposal for a Fulbright grant involved exploring the agricultural and culinary life of this city, which is so often described as 'ancient' and 'traditional.' I wanted to see through the lens of food production, processing, preparation and consumption how this densely populated, undeniably urban place has (had) succesfully supported itself in near self-sufficiency for centuries.

Bhaktapur was and still is largely a Newar city. Although in modern Nepal the Newars are seen by others as just another one of Nepal's dozens of ethnic/linguistic groups, they see themselves as the quintessential Nepalis. From ancient times (arguably) the Kathmandu Valley and its three major cities--Kathmandu itself, Lalitpur (or Patan), and Bhaktapur--had been Newar territory. Theirs is an urban culture, highly structured, with a complex caste society encompassing both Buddhist (Mahayana/Vajrayana) and Hindu (Shiavite/Vaishnavite) "Great Traditions." In the late eighteenth-century the Valley fell to the great conquest by the Gorkhas, Pahari (hill-dwelling) Hindus sweeping in from the West. Although the Gorkha policy was, of necessity, to leave most of the existing Newar infrastructure and culture intact, there nevertheless began the irreversible process of diversification in the Valley. Today Newars are no longer even a majority, and their language is at risk. Newari has gone from a mainly linguistic category to an essentially ethnic/cultural one, as the Newars are forced to overlook some of their caste and religious differences in favor of an assumed ethnic solidarity. But the culture that defines this place is still that of the Newars, from their striking brick-and-woodwork pagoda architecture to the layout of the streets, and the gods that reside in every neighborhood temple.

Of the three cities of the valley, Bhatapur was the one that remained the most intact, at least until the mid-20th Century. Even today it stands aloof from the hustle and bustle of modern Kathmandu, which has swollen together with Patan into one choking metropolis. Of course such distinction doesn't escape the notice of tourists, who have been flocking to this ancient, traditional city for decades now and leaving their mark. The buildings are all either ancient or (more commonly, after various earthquakes) restored, but in many cases these picturesque shells house fluorescently lit internet cafes, luxuriously appointed tourist quarters and restaurants serving fries and imported lager. Still, Bhaktapur itself is still more than 95% Newar, and more than anywhere else in the Valley, Newari, or Nepal Bhasha as the Newar themselves call it, is heard spoken in the streets. But the kids, ever attuned to the trends of the day, are foregoing the clipped, nasal sounds of their ancestral tongue in favor of this nation's lingua franca, Nepali.

A week into this 10-month chapter of my life, I'm having second thoughts about transplanting myself into such an environment as Bhaktapur. It's an alluring place, but an elusive one--it's both more natural and more artificial than Kathmandu, more joyful and more laden. Moving to what is still a Newar city would mean becoming once again an infant, except when I'm a member of the tourist species, i.e. an alien to the cultural life of the city. The traditions I'm interested in--agricultural, culinary, medical--are all highly cultural, which again places me neatly at odds with the overwhelming trend away from exactly those traditions. Given my interests, is it not better to go somewhere where these things are still more prevalent? Yes, but what is more painful than watching the cracks forming in the walls of the last remaining stronghold of a culture? And knowing myself to be, despite my best efforts, a likely agent of that change?

from September 11, 2008

I'm resisting the urge to let loose a flood of gushing sentiment about how good it feels to be back in Nepal (though technically I was in India the first time around). All of me, except for my guts and my lungs, is happy.

Both mornings so far here I've woken like clockwork before 3 AM, with or without wrenching guts, so i've had insano long days of exploring Kathmandu. By far my favorite neighborhood so far is the maze of the old city, centering more or less around Asan Tol. Gorgeous crumbling Newar architecture: 3 or 4 story brick houses inset with intricate wood carvings, arranged around courtyards accessible only through 4-foot-high doors. With some big exceptions--the origin of some of the wares and the choke and tussle of traffic through the narrow, winding streets--life here continues as it has for centuries. It to this Newar enclave that I came early yesterday morning in search of a Vaidya (Ayurvedic doctor). I'd read of Dr. Kamadev Jha, reputed to have an office in Asan, but wound up by miraculous circumstace at the home and office of Dhana Bajra Bajracarya. I was and am looking for someone to study with, or at least observe in action, but in this case I was spurred particularly by a prompt case of loose and angry guts. So less than 24 hours after arriving in this indescribable city I found my first real lead. The Baidya (in Nepal Hindi/Sanskrit V's are pronounced as B's) greeted me, asked me what was wrong, quickly examined my pulse and eyes and took my blood pressure, Western-style. Within 2 or 3 minutes he'd diagnosed undigested food--the chewy microwaved fish steak courtesy of Thai Airways--gave me a powder (Bilvadi Curna) to take twice a day and that was that.

I stuck around while he examined others, and in 3 cases out of 4 saw him diagnose jaundice, indicative of a liver disorder. He had readymade Nepali printed handouts detailing the appropriate diet and herbal regimen for Kamala (jaundice), so evidently it is a common ailment in these parts. It's not hard to imagine why: the liver faces constant onslaught from pathogens bred by poor sanitation, and from exposure to environmental toxins in the air.

The most surprising thing about Dr. Bajrcarya is that he is a Newar Buddhist, in fact a Tantric Buddhist priest. Bajracarya means "master of the thunderbolt," and his hereditary cast role involves performing esoteric rituals and conducting initiations to other Newar Buddhists. If this has got you scratching your head--aren't Budhists supposed to be casteless?--I suggest you check out David Gellner's books on Newari society and religion. The Kathmandu Valley is a fascinating place. What I'm more interested in here is the type of Ayurveda hereditarily practiced by these Newari Buddhist priests; Dr. B's is an eight-generation practitioner. I'll probably never know, though, because as anything other than a high-caste Newar Buddhist, I don't qualify for initiation.

Another, more modern Baidya, Dr. Sarita Shrestha, confirmed my suspicions that this is a totally different lineage of Ayurveda from the more South Indian type I studied under Dr. Vasant Lad in New Mexico, and from the North Indian Brahmanical tradition of practice. Unlike the majority of practitioners, who are Hindu, Dr. Bajracarya is no Sanskrit pundit. Like all traditional practitioners he learned orally, but probably in the Newari language, which is of Tibeto-Burman descent. If I'm not mistaken this brand of Ayurved has never left Nepal, and is unknown in the West.

Now if I just change my name to Shakya, lose 18 inches and convince everyone I'm from Manabouddha . . .