"I am not time" / A riff and a rant on temporal dissonance

image: "straw festival" in Bhalwad, Kapilvastu. My host Pusparaj Paudel is in the head-scarf.

(1) polishing a stone

What is most unnerving to an outsider about rural Nepali life is the stasis of it. This finally hit me recently on the microbus from Kathmandu as I was listening to lok git, stylized folk music, on the radio: for all their melodic elaboration, the tunes never stray from the tonic. The underlying maadal drumbeat itself is tonal, but mono-tonal (which is not to say monotonous, necessarily: at their best these songs are hypnotic, almost narcotic). In the gaon, life has a similar steady, circular (because endlessly repeating) rhythm that can be incredibly unsettling to someone used to the perpetual drama of novelty. In the village people (well, women) are busy—washing clothes, cutting fodder for the livestock, cooking—but as an outsider there’s this hard-to-define sense of stillness. All the activity is intended to maintain domestic order, to keep the wheel turning; there is momentum, but it is angular, not linear. The modern, Western world is obsessed with change, our exalted “progress.” This forward momentum carries through to our daily and moment-to-moment lives, so that sitting and doing nothing for even five minutes is frowned upon: why is he just sitting there? Why doesn’t he get up and do something productive? (asking ‘why’ is another typically Western behavior.)

Visiting my friend Pusparaj in his village in the mid-Western Terai, before long I had to confront the question of ‘how to get into the rhythm here?’ It’s OK to sit and read when the life going on all around offers no easy way in, but in a way that misses the point. It's a kind of escape. Better to sit and sit. What’s needed is work of a mindless sort to yoke the striving mind to the day's minutes and hours: stripping kernels off of dried corn, maybe, or leading water-buffalo around in endless circles to coax the last rice grains to detach themselves from their straw. A piece of wood to carve. A stone to polish.

(2) on "Nepali time"

The thing that gets me about so-called "Nepali time" isn’t that any estimate of how long X is apt to have a margin of error twice as wide as itself, but that you can’t even count on the comforts of slowness that you’d expect to be a reliable result. Instead you’re likely to be rushed—chitto chi-chitto!—into doing something that will then fall victim to endless delays.
Today I set out on foot at 10 o’clock from the village of Bhalwad after a great many exhortations from my Pusparaj to get a move on. Obligingly I finished shoveling in the morning’s rice and we set off after relatively little ado. Our first destination was a town at the beginning of the hills where we were to meet a cow-urine-prescribing baba. How long the road, I ventured to ask? Two hours. Three and a half hours later we stumbled into the town parched—I hadn’t brought a waterbottle for the ‘two-hour’ walk--only to discover the Baba was nowhere to be found. We’d had an appointment (though perhaps that’s to strong a word) for 11:00 AM, so I would have thought we were right on time. No matter, we boarded a bus towards Sandhikharka, the district capital, where we’d spend the night at PR’s maternal uncle’s. The ride would take a full hour, my two companions agreed. I didn’t set my stopwatch. By the time we reached the town it was evening, the January sun ready to dip behind the hills. It must have been a three hour ride. All around me old women and small children were vomiting out of windows, into plastic bags, onto silent husband’s laps. But now we were almost there, to PR’s uncle’s place just a ‘little ways’ from the bazaar. By now I was agitated at our little group dawdling, visiting here and there with relatives and vague acquaintances and drinking tea while the light failed. I was hungry with that mean hunger that hits your head before your belly. Our presumed hosts hadn’t been contacted, and I wasn’t at all sure anyone knew the way to their house, so I thought we should at least try and arrive before they went to bed. Finally we set out as the stars came out along with a bright half-moon. ETA: 20 minutes. No, said a didi from a saree shop, it takes 25. Ah, I thought—here people are precise. But I steeled myself against any thoughts of a prompt arrival, and wisely bought 10 rupees’ worth of peanuts for the road. It’ll be an hour, I thought. After half that, I asked the local man who had volunteered to walk us up how long it would be. What can I say? I was curious. 10 more minutes, came the reply. He pointed out a distant speck of light on a ridge above us and far across the valley. In the end we made it within an hour after a relentless uphill march. Amazingly to me (though I knew in my head that it would be so) we were received warmly but with no fanfare or expression of surprise. Rarely-seen relatives showing up after dinnertime, plus an American—sure, put on some more rice, make a little tea, get out extra blankets and let’s do this thing.