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.