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.