Nepali Time, revisited

Back in the day!   Temporal dissonance in Kapilvastu district, early January 2009.  With my gracious host, Pusparaj Poudel, at his family's homestead.  

 

Back in January '09, after a rewarding but often overwhelming village stay in the mid-Western Terai, I channeled the frustration of cultural dissonance into a double-barreled post on "Nepali time."  It's still one of my favorite pieces of writing that's appeared here, and, thinking back on it after this past trip, I realized that there's more to be said on the subject.  Here, then, is part 3 of the saga.

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Nepali isn't as difficult a language as most people assume; it does share Indo-European roots with English, after all.  The pronunciation takes a sensitive ear and a lot of time to master (e.g. four different T's, four different D's, with differentiation between aspirated and non-aspirated and retroflex and dental sounds), but you don't need a huge lexicon to converse.  In fact, a small arsenal of key phrases can get you a very long way: ke garne (a rhetorical 'what to do?'), tyai ta ('that's what i'm saying!'), hawas ('thanks'/general acknowledgement), thik chha ('it's OK') and pugyo ('enough!'), for starters.  The committed language student finds that, once the initially steep learning curve levels out, he can stumble his way through a million iterations of the same few basic conversations with surprising success.  But there are certain...puzzling features of the language.  Things that don't translate directly and whose idiosyncratic usage has to be picked up through gradual exposure.    Of these unintuitive features of the language, the crown jewel is verb tense.

At first glance, the situation's not too bad: Nepali has fewer tenses than English and they all sounds straight forward enough.  A couple past tenses, a simple present, continuous past and present (was ___ing, am ___ing), and something sometimes called the Probable Future Tense.  I love this one: we never know what's going to happen anyway, so why pretend to predict the future with any certainty?  Hence we have an entire tense construction dedicated to statements in the nature of "see you again, probably."  What's disconcerting for the native English speaker, though, is that this is the only future tense in Nepali.  So how do you see "I'll see you tomorrow?" without sounding like a total flake?  The answer is, you use the present tense.  This must be a pretty common ploy in other languages as well, judging by the number of ESL students who say things like "I see you next week."  The Nepali "present" tense is used for this kind of confident near-future declaration and to express what's ongoing or true in general.  So far so good.  Where our deeply-seated ideas about time really start to get yanked around is in the realm of the past tenses.  On feeling the first raindrops of an approaching storm, a Nepali might declare "paani paryo," literally "water fell."  A novice student's natural response is, "when?  When did it rain?"  But if s/he tries to "correct" the temporal confusion the next time by stating "paani parchha"--the present tense--a Nepali might well respond "when?" As in "when will it rain?"  (And how the hell do you know?) To express that it is in fact raining, Nepali emphasizes that some water has already fallen from the sky.

Likewise it is truly disconcerting, at first, when you're waiting at a bus stop and someone hears a distant rumble, spies a far-off dust cloud, and says non-chalantly "bus aayo."  The bus came.  What??  The bus is coming.  It's on its damn way.  It has definitely not arrived!  To add insult to injury, the guy talking into his cell phone (in this village that has a single indoor toilet and no telephone lines) cuts his conversation short with an abrupt "la, bus aaisakiyo."  The bus already arrived; the bus finished coming.  All this before the damn thing's even in sight!  What insolence!

There is a pattern to these usages, a method to the madness.  The whole temporal framework of the language--and thus of the culture--is simply shifted back.  To talk about the present, you use the past; to talk about the future, you use the present.  And sure enough, if you want to talk about the past, you sometimes use the past perfect.  "(One time) I went to India might be ma India gaeko thie, 'I had gone to India.'  This backwards-slanted verb system jives well with a culture where the future is eyed warily, where the only certainty lies in what's good and done.

In addition to this usage pattern, what can strike Westerners as the maddening temporal imprecision of Southasian cultures is also firmly rooted in the language.  Take the word for now, ahile.  As might be expected on the basis of the usage of the present tense, ahile has a distinctly future-leaning sense.  At the old bus stop, perhaps you're tempted to inquire of your fellow passenger to be just when he expects the bus to arrive.  Wanting to reassure you, he replies "ahile aaunchha," literally "it comes now."  By now you may have enough experience to realize that not only does aaunchha mean "it will come," but ahile means "soon."  When are you going to the store, you ask your friend?  Ahile, replies, sitting there with his eyes glued to the TV screen, not moving a muscle.  

The words for yesterday, today and tomorrow--hijo, aaja, and bholi--are used precisely when they're used on their own.  But they can also be strung together, as in hijo-aaja or aaja-bholi.  These compound words mean "these days."  Nepali has words for 'the day before yesterday' (does English really take seven syllables to express that idea?) and 'the day after tomorrow:' asti and parsi.  These get a bit more impressionistic.  Asti can refer to practically any day in the past, and hijo-asti means, essentially "in the old days."  Parsi is relatively literal, since there are also precise terms for 'three days from now' and so on, but bholi-parsi means "in the future" or "one of these days."


Confusing?  Tyai ta!  But enough for now.  What can we do? We'll probably talk more on these things in the future.  Ke garne? Pugyo.  Bholi-parsi kuraa garaulaa.

Home Again, Same Day

It's my last day in Asia for a while, a fitting occasion for a post.  So I figured anyway, but the fact is I don't quite know what to write about, where to start, what tack to take.  Hmmm.  Ummm....Yeah, well, here's the situation, see: I've been on the move since late June in a sort of pre-emptive break from the intense 4 year bout of schooling I'm now, finally, about to dive into.  This was my last foreseeable chance to travel to India and Nepal with my partner, and we scrapped our initial plans to spend the summer in Guatemala to return to this part of the world instead, to the places that have hooked us, to deepen our connections here in Nepal and Northeast India and to branch out into the Hindi-speaking world of greater North India.  It's been part vacation, part pilgrimage, part adventure, part retreat.  Like any slice of life, it's included moments of frustration, ugliness, and boredom as well as sublimity, inspiration, and joy.  It's been a long trip and, yes, a strange one.  I find now as it draws to a close that I'm ready to return.
Perhaps out of some fear that these past months will recede into a slippery, dreamlike blur, I find myself wanting to somehow solidify my time here, to pin down a few experiences with words and images so I, and others, can refer back to them and say simply "see?  that happened."

If I'm sorting through my memories of the past four and a half months, winnowing them, there's a lot of chaff to get through.  A lot of in-between times I didn't often have the grace to turn into a numinous present: sweaty bus rides, low evenings in cheap, mildewy guest house rooms, greasy breakfasts gobbled down in front of staring eyes.  The camel ride from hell.  Aimless times, times that felt worthless in their essential self-centeredness, miserable sick times.  Mundane as they were, these were all part and parcel of the trip, and they bear mentioning if only to avoid romanticizing my time here or giving the impression that this has been some sort of high-flying joyride through Northern Southasia.  And, of course, a lot of the hardest times have been the most important.  The grinding challenge of silent meditation retreat, the sometimes literal immersion in destitution and filth, the acutely uncertain days of relationship crisis that welled up amidst the karmic vortex of Varanasi. And the paradox of finding the sublime interwoven with mundane substrate, of finding Saraswati in a junk pile.

But at this valedictory stage, I'm just as much in the mood to look back on some of the fun, blissful and hilarious moments of the trip.  It feels like every geographical stage of the journey had at least one.  Sometimes highs were triggered simply by arriving somewhere: returning to the familiar alleys of Kathmandu and the Nepali-speaking sphere after days of travel across the Gangetic plains in the summer closeness and finding myself more fluent in the language than I'd remembered. Once more navigating the backways of the Newari old city around Indra Chowk, Bhedasingh, and Thahiti I found myself wanting to talk to everyone, to broadcast my joy to all comers.  The feeling faded back into rude normalcy quickly enough, but for a day or so I felt like a salmon who'd returned after years and thousands of miles to his own native stream.

Then, after an idyllic interlude in Darjeeling and some catch-up with our old host families, there was my and Thandiwe's two days at Khecheopalri lake, where we stayed with an amazing young lama who sent us on an unforgettable excursion to a sacred meditation cave in the leech-ridden hills above the secluded, footprint-shaped lake and then returned shortly after we did with armfuls of foraged greens and fiddleheads.  That 36 hours already inspired its own post (back in August), in which I think I failed completely to capture the charisma and youthful, exuberant wisdom of the lama, Sonam, and the time-apart quality of those couple of days.

In Orissa, the tropical, seaside East Indian state South of West Bengal, the undisputed twin highlights were seafood so fresh it seemed a religious experience and a ride on a rented motorbike to a perfect, empty stretch of beach.  After days of shying away from swimming at the crowded, tout-infested and shit-spattered beaches of Puri, we were finally able to cut completely loose and frolic free in the bath-warm surf.  It felt as if the world were ours alone, and that our lives were as simple as sand, surf, sky.  And motorbike.

Our final destination that day was the famous Sun Temple at Konark, where we figured we might as well hire a local guide to explain the esoteric structure to us.  Our guide, who proudly told us that he was the head of the architectural tour guides' association, proceeded to enlighten us as to the precise details of the erotic carvings that stretch for what seemed like miles around the temple perimeter.  He'd obviously picked the brains of generations of previous tourists to glean the most (in)appropriate phrases to employ in his good work, with results that would have been creepy if they weren't so utterly hilarious.  As this is a family restaurant, I won't be reproducing any of those here.      

The next substantive stop, Varanasi really does feel like a blur, a sort of fever dream.  The place immediately provoked some of the most intense highs and lows I've ever experienced, in such rapid succession that I keep finding myself at a loss for how to describe it.  But the place itself, by virtue of that sheer intensity, strikes me as a highlight of the trip. It also set the stage for one of the most important friendships, and certainly the most timely one, of the past few months.  Budding neuroscientist, dedicated meditator, shamanistic psychonaut, outrageous storyteller; Nicholas Anderson is all these things, as well as a godsend to both Thandiwe and myself during a time of extreme emotional instability.  In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, he offers up the notion of a karass, a group of people who are one's spiritual family in life.  (He opposes this to the granfaloon, which refers to all the groups we identify with consciously and, more often than not, emptily.  I always think of fraternities, and I wonder if Vonnegut, a fratboy himself in his day, would have agreed.)  I've been blessed with a wonderful karass, and it is one of life's joys when a new member appears.

The last major destination before Thandiwe headed back to start school again was Rajasthan.  Amidst all of that state's sands, camels, myriad turbans--India at its most photogenic--the city of Jodhpur stood out for its character and charm.  Besides the ongoing pleasures of delicious food, beautiful sights, and a warm welcome from the Muslim family who hosted us at their guest house, the time I spent with an avuncular Ayurvedic doctor a stone's throw from the landmark clocktower remains one of the most memorable episodes of the trip.  It was the sort of connection that could suffice as an excuse for another trip, the kind of connection I spent so much of my Fulbright year in Nepal looking for: here was a vaidya enthused at the prospect of sharing his vast experience and knowledge with a young upstart.  And it makes for a good story that the medicine he prescribed for Thandiwe and that finally cured a nasty five-day old bout of diarrhea consisted, mainly, of opium.  Everything is poison, everything is medicine...according to Dr. Vasant Lad, "Arurveda asks, 'but for whom?' "

In Delhi the night before Thandiwe's flight, we got ripped on fancy lattes in the tourist district of Pahargunj before turning ourselves loose in the intoxicating Old City, Shahjahanabad, where we must have walked five miles through its back alleys while stumbling upon all sorts of wonderful diamonds-in-the-rough.  There was the pristine, quiet, pastel-colored lane of the 500-year-old Jain temple, where an absurdly friendly man welcomed us into his antique facsimile export business and sent us on our way with gifts of little jewelboxes.  There was the bustling wholesale market of Khari Baoli, where dried fruit vendors' piles of dates, almonds, raisins, walnuts and figs towered in (to quote my favorite Just-So Story) "more than oriental splendour."  There was the locally-famous stuffed naan shop, the quintessenial five star hole-in-the-wall, where I was later tempted to order the spicy naan to my everlasting chagrin.  Never, never order the spicy naan in India.

Of course a lot of my best memories are tied up with the traveling itself, and this comes through in some of my earlier posts.  A good, long Indian train ride may itself be reason enough to travel to India, and, traveling sleeper class, it's certainly one of the most honest ways to do so.  Bus rides are harder to recommend, but they too have their moments.  Seize, seize the opportunities to urinate when they arise, and bring headphones.

After Thandiwe left, once the initial shock of separation from someone I'd been attached at the hip to for nearly 3 months wore off, the nature of my trip changed completely. I felt the need to structure my time much more, partly to keep the five weeks until I met my mother in Nepal from yawning like a hippo's maw.  Apart from a gritty week in Amritsar and Delhi (where I ate the spicy nan and ended up in my little hotel room watching more TV than I have in years, including the undisputed and incredibly unexpected cinematic highlight, Moonstruck), I spent this time in the hill districts of Northwest India: Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.  I did a short meditation retreat and a short Buddhism course, both of which were wonderful in their own ways and in the people they put me in contact with. I got to see the Dalai Lama give public teachings, though I admit I'd had enough after the second session of listening to the rather dry discourse translation through FM headphones. I fell briefly into the black hole of touristy Dharamshala after being seduced initially by the bustling energy of the place.  And I spent a highly enjoyable week with the current crop of volunteers and interns at Navdanya, Vandana Shiva's biodiversity conservation farm.  Like most of the foreigners there, I probably spent more time strumming a guitar ("Quando sei qui con me / Questa stanza non ha piu' / Pareti ma alberi / Alberi Infiniti..." I learned to croon, from a wonderfully impish young Tuscan Indonesian named Nicolo) than weeding the herb patch or sorting chickpeas.  There again it's the people I'll remember most, and the hope and inspiration they lent me through their visions, projects and experiences.  Ali and Thea and Hannah from Brighton; Nicolo from Firenze; Sinclair from South Dakota and Abhyudai from India; and the local old woman (I just called her "didi") who was the head of the chickpea sorting operation and a font of wisdom and anecdotes that I struggled to understand with my intermediate Hindi.
This brings me almost to the present.  The last two weeks and a bit have been a third distinct stage of the trip, one that began when I met my mother at the Kathmandu international airport.  I've been playing guide, translator, son, and, increasingly, friend.  There has been considerable luxury and equally considerable squalor, as on one unforgettable incident in a tourist trap of a town called Chisapani, a day's walk uphill from the Kathmandu Valley, where we ended up sharing a bed in a hotel "for sheer animal warmth," as my mother put it, after a miserable evening of waiting for our daal-bhaat to arrive while being accosted for hours by a well-meaning and thoroughly unbearable troup of piss-drunk Bahuns who'd decided to ride their motorcycles up for an evening of the sort of debauchery normally taboo to members of their caste. Overall it's been a time apart for both of us; riding elephants in Chitwan National Park is something neither of us would normally find ourselves doing, but that seemed quite natural in the context of our time together in Nepal.  I've had a chance to see this place with fresh eyes, and to watch my own reactions to someone so close to me that I have no filter as she herself reacts to the sometimes shocking realities of this place.  Finally, mundanely, we're both ready to go home.  For my mother this means going back to her life in New York City, with its literary, social, professional and personal commitments.  For me it means moving again, this time to Portland, Oregon, to start a Master's in Oriental Medicine.  Moreover it means resuming what Gary Snyder calls "the real work...what is to be done" after a lengthy, nourishing, and orienting moratorium.  I feel like I'm about to dive back into the one-way stream of life, and soon this journey will seem a very long time ago.