I wrote this light little piece before my trip to India and might as well post it 'cause my next one is probably going to be something heavy about the state of Nepal and the world, with all the juicy stuff I've avoided 'til now but that's filling my head past the point where I can ignore it. So enjoy the trip to the barbershop!
[Oh, and I've twiddled the blog settings so that anyone can post comments without having to be a member of blogger or what-have-you. So by all means feed me some comments, hit me with questions, critiques, exclamations.]
There’s something universal about a barber shop—the loose camaraderie of men at leisure, the talk of sports, the hair on the floor. This basic template lends itself to hundreds of forms worldwide, probably, and the local “saloons” near my rented flat in Kathmandu are ever so Southasian: everything from the color of the walls (turquoise), the cricket game on the small color TV, the mullets coiffed. The barbershop I most frequent is manned by a few men (relatives?) from the Terai, the strip of southern Nepal plains that has as much in common with North India as with hill Nepal. The shop manages to preserve something of the lackadaisical feel of the great Gangetic plain. So I don’t go often, only when I have time on my hands. Anyway, the barbershop experience can’t be rushed. I wait for a nice lazy weekend morning when I have a few days of stubble and a big dusty mop of hair. Then I settle in.
The haircuts are nothing too special, just good old-fashioned barbering with scissors and a comb. A little more party in the back than I’d like, but these guys have their methods and just try convincing them to take another inch off back there. ‘Oh no, it’ll stand up, I can’t do that. This is as short is at can go, see, I tried.’ ‘Oh I see. Yes, a mullet is most necessary. Please proceed.’ The shave, though, will put a smile and a grimace on your face. It starts with a thorough face-spritzing with a pump-pressure spritzer, a dab of Dettol shaving cream, and a thorough and vigorous lathering with a shaving brush. Out comes the straight razor and a new blade, and a few short, expert scrapes later you’re clean. Repeat for baby smoothness. All the while the barber cleans his blade on the blade of his hand, transferring the whiskery foam to a scrap of newspaper periodically. The hands work with confidence, and you have little chance to pause and reflect that this razor could slice through your carotid artery like a hot knife through butter if this barber caught a notion. Wasn’t there some South American short story about assassinating a political figure that way. . . ? But he’s toweling off the remaining foam and move to the next phase, the facewash--but not before a once-over with pitkiri, a translucent chunk of some sour and astringent mineral salt not to be confused with sodium chloride. Wetted, it’s smoothed-side glides over your face with a slight sting, leaving a fresh and tightening sensation in its wake. Enter now cosmetic product #2, something called ‘cleansing milk.’ Here the barber shows off some chops, the way he slaps and jiggles your cheeks. This is an intimate process, and you are putty in his hands: the silky milky cleanser is all over your face, even your eyelids, and the man’s fingers caress every curve of your physiognomy. Without wiping it off, he proceeds to the next application. I open my eyes, hazarding a milky sting, to see what exactly I was about to be lathered with: an ‘apricot scrub’ exfoliant mixed in the palm of the barber’s hand with—nice touch--sprinkle of rose water (clearly this tradition evolved in a hot country). This is applied a little more vigorously, with lots of shaking and rubbing. The eyelid flutter amazes. To remove the residue of cleanser, out comes a taut length of string, with twangs of which he swipes the lather off the planes of your cheeks and forehead into little lines, like the piles of dust you create while sweeping. A spongy pad takes care of the rest. Phase 3: an application of foundation (what? On such freshly-cleaned pores?) combined with fairness cream (for men of course). The foundation I graciously decline, not being one for make-up or the weird grayish-pink opacity that it confers. He insists on the fairness cream, however strange it might seem want to make this white skin whiter. I’d finally earned my stinging, satisfying application of aftershave . . .
Now, I had planned to turn down the massage. It’s just a little . . . intense. But once the barber starts his scalp treatment I can’t find the words to stop him. I think, ‘let him do my head and shoulders.’ Before long he’s broken out the counter cushion and I’m leaning forward, head down, while he worked my back over. Fingers like spider legs, poking and prodding quickly and with precision around shoulderblades. Palms pushing transverse to the elongated spine, flexing it, as if testing its springiness in the lumbar and dorsal regions. Too many practiced motions to count, even if I weren’t too mesmerized to remember them all. With me sitting upright again, he begins a series of crack-the-egg-on-your head moves that feel strangely wonderful. My world momentarily a series of flashes, comforting pressures on the plates of my skull. Then he’s working down each arm from the shoulder, twisting as he goes so the palm is upward, then giving a little hand massage before cracking each finger joint with a swift tug. We’re into the last phase, this means, the crackings. My own hands clasped behind my head like someone in a hammock, he braces on my arm and mercilessly twists, cranks my spine around like a corkscrew, going for a pop of every vertebral joint. There are other indescribable maneuvers, incredible contortions on both our parts resulting in releases of heretofore unknown tension in joints I didn’t know I had. He pulls me against the back of the chair and jerks my upper body up and back, cracking my spine, then moves onto the neck. Two quick motions, left-jerk right-jerk, and crrrick-crack, it’s done, this strangely sensuous experience. I’ve been sitting for over an hour. I pay my 150 rupees, always a matter of negotiation and I know I’m paying too much, but I can’t argue with this guy. The skill, the attention . . . the eyelid caresses and makeup and the mullet. The experience is priceless, really. I step out into the Sunday sun, contemplating a cup of chiya, a little dazed but looking and smelling like a Bollywood hero.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
The main purpose of this entry is to post a transcript of a short talk I just gave at the regional Fulbright conference in Kolkata. It's on Ayurved, surprise surprise. See below if you want to cut to the chase. But since I'm stuck here in Siliguri on the edge of the Hills for another few hours due to a transportation bandh, I might as well do some rambling. That's what blogs are for, right?
So, rambling on . . . I've just had my first real taste of India. Technically I lived in India for almost 5 months in 2004, but that was Kalimpong, in Darjeeling District, in the hills. It's an area that (as Nepalis love to point out) was once part of Nepal and is still populated almost entirely by Nepali-speakers. Hence the bandh: these "gorkhas" as they call themselves (since they're not, after all, Nepali a citizenship sense) are staging a protest and demanding their own state, to be called 'Gorkhaland.' The movement began in the late eighties with ugly consequences and few tangible gains for any but the movement leaders, but it seems now the next generation wants to take a crack at the cause. The activists/agitators feel with some justification that they have little in common with the rest of West Bengal, the state that now extends a lanky limb of land from its base in Sundarban mangrove jungles flush against the Bay of Bengal and the megalopolis of Kolkata (once Calcutta) to reach up and cradle the rich Timber, Tea and Tourism resources of its hill region. If West Bengal is an elephant's head (I'm not in fact looking at a map at the moment), then Darjeeling district is the covered chafing dish supported by the beast's upwardly-extended trunk, a narrow spit of land more technically known (I've just been informed) as the "chicken's neck." I'll stick to large and majestic mammals, thanks. It's a contradiction, if I may speak for the Gorkhas, that the plate of delights and the hungry elephant should be lumped together without regard for their peculiar relationship. That Bengali elephant is hungry, everyone knows it. But India (and Nepal) is full of such contradictions. If every politically disenfranchised, culturally-marginalized, or linguistically-isolated group in the subcontinent had their own state . . .
I'm (as of 11 March) in Siliguri, as I said, right at the juncture between the elephantine nostrils and the sterling tray. I'll be here until the bandh clears up, which may or may not be as early as 6 AM tomorrow. Last night I was on a train running like an artery up through the snout: the Darjeeling Mail, my first bona fide Indian train, but already I feel like an old hand. India, this part anyway, feels only halfway-foreign after almost 11 combined months in the Darjeeling hills and Kathmandu. If the Nepali language has become a nearly transparent pane for me by now, barely interposing any noticeable structure between words and meaning, then the related north Indian lingua franca of Hindi is growing translucent. Numbers, days of the weeks are all the same as in Nepali, and the most useful linguistic knowledge here is simply knowing which English words work in the Indian context.
Yesterday I woke up in Kolkata, a city that makes commercial Siliguri's half-million look sleepy and provincial. But two mornings ago I woke up in the Sundarban, the largest mess of mangroves in the world. It's a labyrinth of inhopsitable islands where the Ganges and dozens of other rivers finally meet the sea, and it's known for its man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers, but the India side alone (and two-thirds of the Sundarban falls in Bangladesh) is home to over four million people. They live on the clay-soil, flood-prone islands of the region, cultivating rice in fields reclaimed from the mangroves and fishing. They are notoriously battered by cyclones and tortured by the tigers who pick off not just their livestock but people too, like the honey-hunters who steal through the islands of the Preserve to forage their thin, heady honey. They wear masks on the backs of their heads since tigers like to attack from behind. Like much of India, the region is home to a mix of Hindus and Muslims. Unlike in many places, though, in the Sundarban it's hard to tell the difference. Faced with common hardship, the village dwellers have evolved a culture with more in common than apart. Hindu and Mussalman alike worship Ban Bibi, the goddess of the forest, and the various deities associated with the dreaded and revered tiger. Hindu and Muslim alike lead lives that, from a passing ferry or rickshaw, look laborious yet lazily-paced. The landscape is brutal but lush--banana trees and rice paddy and fish ponds--water plentiful in this month.
I was there on an unabashed (well, slightly abashed) tourist mission. I wanted to see this region, to get on a boat and cruise its brackish waterways, see the villages, taste some local food and honey, watch the wildlife. Daydream about the hundreds of tigers that prowl the vastness even if I couldn't see them. And that's exactly what I did for a long, hot, sunburnt day--sandwiched between two days of intensive traveling from/to Kolkata by Bus, Tuk-Tuk, Ferry, rickshaw, and (smaller) Ferry.
All day long the guide tirelessly explained some of the nuances of the unique estuary ecosystem, pointed out black-capped kingfishers and greater egrets and, once, a set of tiger pugmarks in the tidal muck of a mangrove island. Other than that there was no sign of the big felines, but I thought I could feel the tension I've read about that only the presence of a top-of-the-food-chain predator can create. All life wary, silence thick.
After the second night under a mosquito net and the same vehicle sequence in reverse, I found myself back briefly in the equally hot, teeming, ineffable jungle of Kolkata. Some of the hardship of the Sundarbans life comes from human life there being so strictly circumscribed: by the shark and crocodile-infested water, by the threat of the tiger, by the fickleness of the monsoon rains. In Kolkata humanity knows no such bounds, it seems: life and its gritty, grotty accoutrements spill out in every direction, composing a city too big to know or tell. If my quintessential memories of the Sundarbans are of static, hazy green islands lying flat against grey-green water, my memory of Kolkata is buzzing still with the infinite variety of impressions that city bombards you with: a tiny tea shop no more than 2.5' x 2.5' x 3', proprietor crouching inside and making his tea on a charcoal burner on the sidewalk outside; an entire district of typewriter-wallahs copying (forging?)documents along a busy street; legions of street food vendors, and piles of sumptuous flesh-toned sweets; a cavernous communist coffeehouse vibrating with caffeinated nerves, paint fumes and animated conversation. literally hundreds of book stalls lining college street, a city of books. a muslim lane, butchered cow brains quivering in piles, a small mosque every fifty or hundred yards. mosaiced walls. men, mostly men in lungis, on rickshaws, in suits or in almost nothing, walking, squatting, standing, moving through this vibrant labyrinth of a city.
(Ramble off)
Presentation to Fulbright Conference
(To fit my 10-min timeslot I ended up having to cut about a third of what's printed below)
I was going to start by saying that I don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to define Ayurveda in only 10 minutes, and then I remembered that the Carak Samhita, the oldest complete Ayurvedic text, presents a nice compact Sanskrit definition in the form of a sutra. It goes “hitahitam sukham dukham ayus tasya hitahitam. Maanam [duration] ca tacca yatroktam ayurveda sa ucyate:” roughly, “Ayurveda is that which describes what is useful and not useful for promoting a healthy life.” The word Ayurveda itself is Sanskrit for “knowledge of life,” and the tradition includes everything under the sun pertaining to life and its propagation, maintenance, and extension.
Just continuing for a moment with the 2-minute crash course introduction to Ayurveda, if you take the Carak Samhita and flip it open, you might find material on anything from info on what food and daily routine are appropriate for the season of late spring; instructions for Panca Karma, a bodily purification regimen; care of children up to the critical age of 7 years; classification of plants and animals according to their properties; countless herbal formulas, or how to prepare an enema apparatus from an animal bladder and a piece of reed. Later texts include lengthy sections on surgical technique (still first millennium CE) and, quite a bit later, alchemical recipes using mercury preparations for purposes of rejuvenation. Since many of you may be familiar with Ayurveda through yoga, I want to note that the inclusion into the Ayurvedic tradition of Ashtanga yoga (including not just asana pranayama, dhyan or meditation, etc. in pursuit of samadhi) is a comparatively recent development. In other words, until quite recently yoga was practiced for its own sake, i.e. as a means of liberation, and not specifically as a way of attaining health on this plane.
So Ayurveda is ‘knowledge of life,’ and everything pertaining to it. As such, and as a product of a particular civilization and period of history, it is also impossible to disentangle completely from other fields such as religion and Jyotish (astrology). This all-encompassing quality of Ayurveda, its lack of segregation from other areas of knowledge, is precisely what makes Ayurveda so powerful on the one hand—and so powerfully appealing to a Western crowd hungry for holistic traditions and the spiritual promise they hold--and so difficult for modern science to come to grips with on the other. I’ll just note in passing that one problem with trying to conduct clinical research on Ayurveda is that Ayurved recognizes and gives a good deal of importance to intangible, unquantifiable things like an individual’s constitution as determined by the qualities their pulse, and the presence of prana, a sort of vital breath analogous to the Chinese qi. In effect Ayurved recognizes so many variables that the hope of performing a controlled experiment becomes a pipe-dream
So, no surprise, there are fundamental incompatibilities between modern science and classical Ayurveda. How various parties navigate these differences has been one of the themes of my work so far.
Just a couple words about myself before I get into my work so far. . . like many Americans I got into Ayurveda through English-language books by the likes of Robert Svoboda and Vasant Lad (both Vaidyas whom I have a great deal of respect for). These books tend to present Ayurveda as a system of “self-healing,” to quote one of Dr. Lad’s titles, and this is partly because the legal climate in the US means that Ayurved can’t claim its proper status as a medical system complete with actual doctors. As Jean Langford has observed in her book Fluent Bodies, self-healing is a short step from self-help: Ayurveda is growing in popularity in the US as a path to self-improvement and even to greater individuation, which as Langford points out is a unique goal of holistic health movements in the West.
I spent last year studying at Dr. Lad’s Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, where the emphasis is on becoming a lifestyle consultant and educator about how to improve one’s physical, mental and spiritual health through Ayurved. I learned a great deal there but it did not exactly prepare me for the sheer diversity of forms that Ayurveda takes in its native Southasian context. I spent the first few months of my Fulbright mostly on surveying this diversity and trying to make sense of it. Without oversimplifying too much, a few broad types of Ayurveda can be delineated using botanical language. The first is the heirloom varieties, the so-called traditional Vaidyas who learn both from texts and orally and never attend a government institution. I won’t have much to say about them today, but ask me in 5 months. Then there are the graduates of the Ayurveda College at Tribhuvan University, whom I mostly think of as vigorous hybrid cultivars. We’ll get to them in a minute. Then there are the new shoots from old roots, to borrow a metaphor from Robert Svoboda. These are the new incarnations of Ayurved that have sprung up in fertile soil in the West. This is the kind of Ayurved I was exposed to and that still informs my own perspective to a large degree. Whereas in the States, Ayurveda’s perceived promise of spiritual self-improvement often seems to trump the merely medical.of Ayurveda, in Nepal Ayurved is still primarily concerned with preventing and treating illness, i.e. with medicine, If Ayurved on the ground in Nepal looks less than glamorous to a Westerner expecting salvation or at least some insight into his or her own being, let him consider that the local culture has other branches for dealing with those sorts of concerns. Ayurveda may be deeply connected to philosophy and religion, but in its home context it has the luxury of being able to specialize in medicine.
It’s noteworthy that there are a few places in Nepal that purvey this kind the personalized, self-realization brand of Ayurveda that is growing so fast in America. But they are the places that cater to largely to foreigners and upwardly-mobile, westward-looking Nepalis.
Now onto the Ayurveda that I’ve dubbed “hybrid.” This kind of Ayurveda is associated with institutions like Naradevi hospital, the official government Ayurveda hospital in Kathmandu. I’d like to describe briefly what I saw over the course of my observation sessions there, because I think it’s representative of a new and pivotal chapter in Ayurveda’s history.
Naradevi has a public Outpatient Department clinic that also serves as an interning opportunity for students in their final year of training. Every Monday and Thursday people gather in the courtyard and wait to see the senior physician, Dr. D.B. Roka, or one of his team of interns. The clinical model is strikingly Western in many ways. Consultations are quick, for one, since there are so many patients to get through in a few short hours. The doctors and wear white coats and stethoscopes around their necks, and order blood tests and X-rays as necessary. I wasn’t surprised to see that taking of blood pressure is routine, but I was surprised to see that the traditional practice of reading the patient’s pulse is not. The patient consultations happen in Nepali but the diagnosis is in allopathic English, sometimes with the equivalent Sanskrit term glossed by Dr. Roka.
If Langford’s book is a reliable indicator, the biomedical style of Naradevi’s OPD is typical of the Ayurveda practiced in most of India’s institutional settings as well. The pattern as she describes it is “while in the classroom students cram Ayurvedic theory, on the hospital wards they learn primarily which Ayurvedic drugs to prescribe for which biomedical disease categories” (127). And actually, at Naradevi antibiotics and anti-worm medications are routinely used in addition to classical Ayurvedic formulas and modern Ayurvedic patent medicines. Even when herbs are used at Naradevi, they are cited in pseudo-biomedical jargon for their “immunomodulatory effect” (guduchi) or for being an “herbal antibiotic,” and never in the classical terms of rasa virya vipak and prabhav.
Anyway, after a few sessions of observing this pattern in the OPD room again and again, I was beginning to despair of any substantial traces of Ayurvedic thinking or language when it came to understanding a patient’s case. Then an older man came in, complaining of shifting pains in his extremities. The intern on duty, unable to pinpoint any biomedical disease category, nevertheless recognized that the patient’s complaints fit under the Ayurvedic heading of a Vata disorder. (Vata or “wind” is the dry, cold, mobile humor associated with old age, degeneration, pain and stiffness amongst a universe of other resonances.) Thus a diagnosis was possible, albeit a vague one: Vata Vyadhi, increased Vata, read the entry in the log book. His treatment consisted of ashwagandha powder, a nourishing herb that soothes aggravated Vata and strengthens Vata-affected tissues (dhatus). The episode proved to me that Ayurvedic theory is there at the Naradevi OPD, waiting in the shadows like a dusty, disused tool for its moment. For the doctor and his interns, however, the tools of allopathy gleam and glitter with the legitimacy of capital-S Science and it’s no surprise that those allopathic tools are the ones they reach for first. Of course the doctors are the first ones to point out that it is the patients too who demand the easy-to-take pills and syrups that patent and allopathic drugs provide, preferring them over Ayurveda’s messy powders and bitter-tasting tablets.
The hybridization or fusion of Ayurved with biomedicine is visible in more ways than the processes of diagnosis and treatment. At the end of every OPD session the office is flooded with drug reps from the patent medicine companies peddling their products and handing out free samples. Some of the very structure of the biomedical industry has taken hold in an ostensibly Ayurvedic zone. Looking at the products these companies are pushing is an extremely interesting exercise: there’s not much time to get into it but basically they are modern-looking syrups and capsules made with Ayurvedic herbs and marketed in a way that both looks to modern science for legitimacy (in that they refer to clinical trials etc. and use allopathic language) and claim to remedy such ills of modernity as toxins in the air, food and the water supply.
There’s plenty more to say but I’m about out of time. I’d like to wrap up by milking this comparison of this allopathy-heavy brand of Ayurved to a hybrid cultivar just a little more: like hybrid plants, the Ayurveda practiced at Naradevi is vigorous, but like hybrids, it is unlikely to “come true” from seed. When you plant the seed of a hybrid tomato the tomato you get will look nothing like the one you got the seed from. An allopathy-ayurved hybrid is likely to be equally unstable, and already the strain seems to be reverting to the tendencies of its allopathic side.
As in farming, here too genetic diversity is crucial. The hybrids are bearing fruit, but in the march of progress we had better remember the trusted older varieties as well.
So, rambling on . . . I've just had my first real taste of India. Technically I lived in India for almost 5 months in 2004, but that was Kalimpong, in Darjeeling District, in the hills. It's an area that (as Nepalis love to point out) was once part of Nepal and is still populated almost entirely by Nepali-speakers. Hence the bandh: these "gorkhas" as they call themselves (since they're not, after all, Nepali a citizenship sense) are staging a protest and demanding their own state, to be called 'Gorkhaland.' The movement began in the late eighties with ugly consequences and few tangible gains for any but the movement leaders, but it seems now the next generation wants to take a crack at the cause. The activists/agitators feel with some justification that they have little in common with the rest of West Bengal, the state that now extends a lanky limb of land from its base in Sundarban mangrove jungles flush against the Bay of Bengal and the megalopolis of Kolkata (once Calcutta) to reach up and cradle the rich Timber, Tea and Tourism resources of its hill region. If West Bengal is an elephant's head (I'm not in fact looking at a map at the moment), then Darjeeling district is the covered chafing dish supported by the beast's upwardly-extended trunk, a narrow spit of land more technically known (I've just been informed) as the "chicken's neck." I'll stick to large and majestic mammals, thanks. It's a contradiction, if I may speak for the Gorkhas, that the plate of delights and the hungry elephant should be lumped together without regard for their peculiar relationship. That Bengali elephant is hungry, everyone knows it. But India (and Nepal) is full of such contradictions. If every politically disenfranchised, culturally-marginalized, or linguistically-isolated group in the subcontinent had their own state . . .
I'm (as of 11 March) in Siliguri, as I said, right at the juncture between the elephantine nostrils and the sterling tray. I'll be here until the bandh clears up, which may or may not be as early as 6 AM tomorrow. Last night I was on a train running like an artery up through the snout: the Darjeeling Mail, my first bona fide Indian train, but already I feel like an old hand. India, this part anyway, feels only halfway-foreign after almost 11 combined months in the Darjeeling hills and Kathmandu. If the Nepali language has become a nearly transparent pane for me by now, barely interposing any noticeable structure between words and meaning, then the related north Indian lingua franca of Hindi is growing translucent. Numbers, days of the weeks are all the same as in Nepali, and the most useful linguistic knowledge here is simply knowing which English words work in the Indian context.
Yesterday I woke up in Kolkata, a city that makes commercial Siliguri's half-million look sleepy and provincial. But two mornings ago I woke up in the Sundarban, the largest mess of mangroves in the world. It's a labyrinth of inhopsitable islands where the Ganges and dozens of other rivers finally meet the sea, and it's known for its man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers, but the India side alone (and two-thirds of the Sundarban falls in Bangladesh) is home to over four million people. They live on the clay-soil, flood-prone islands of the region, cultivating rice in fields reclaimed from the mangroves and fishing. They are notoriously battered by cyclones and tortured by the tigers who pick off not just their livestock but people too, like the honey-hunters who steal through the islands of the Preserve to forage their thin, heady honey. They wear masks on the backs of their heads since tigers like to attack from behind. Like much of India, the region is home to a mix of Hindus and Muslims. Unlike in many places, though, in the Sundarban it's hard to tell the difference. Faced with common hardship, the village dwellers have evolved a culture with more in common than apart. Hindu and Mussalman alike worship Ban Bibi, the goddess of the forest, and the various deities associated with the dreaded and revered tiger. Hindu and Muslim alike lead lives that, from a passing ferry or rickshaw, look laborious yet lazily-paced. The landscape is brutal but lush--banana trees and rice paddy and fish ponds--water plentiful in this month.
I was there on an unabashed (well, slightly abashed) tourist mission. I wanted to see this region, to get on a boat and cruise its brackish waterways, see the villages, taste some local food and honey, watch the wildlife. Daydream about the hundreds of tigers that prowl the vastness even if I couldn't see them. And that's exactly what I did for a long, hot, sunburnt day--sandwiched between two days of intensive traveling from/to Kolkata by Bus, Tuk-Tuk, Ferry, rickshaw, and (smaller) Ferry.
All day long the guide tirelessly explained some of the nuances of the unique estuary ecosystem, pointed out black-capped kingfishers and greater egrets and, once, a set of tiger pugmarks in the tidal muck of a mangrove island. Other than that there was no sign of the big felines, but I thought I could feel the tension I've read about that only the presence of a top-of-the-food-chain predator can create. All life wary, silence thick.
After the second night under a mosquito net and the same vehicle sequence in reverse, I found myself back briefly in the equally hot, teeming, ineffable jungle of Kolkata. Some of the hardship of the Sundarbans life comes from human life there being so strictly circumscribed: by the shark and crocodile-infested water, by the threat of the tiger, by the fickleness of the monsoon rains. In Kolkata humanity knows no such bounds, it seems: life and its gritty, grotty accoutrements spill out in every direction, composing a city too big to know or tell. If my quintessential memories of the Sundarbans are of static, hazy green islands lying flat against grey-green water, my memory of Kolkata is buzzing still with the infinite variety of impressions that city bombards you with: a tiny tea shop no more than 2.5' x 2.5' x 3', proprietor crouching inside and making his tea on a charcoal burner on the sidewalk outside; an entire district of typewriter-wallahs copying (forging?)documents along a busy street; legions of street food vendors, and piles of sumptuous flesh-toned sweets; a cavernous communist coffeehouse vibrating with caffeinated nerves, paint fumes and animated conversation. literally hundreds of book stalls lining college street, a city of books. a muslim lane, butchered cow brains quivering in piles, a small mosque every fifty or hundred yards. mosaiced walls. men, mostly men in lungis, on rickshaws, in suits or in almost nothing, walking, squatting, standing, moving through this vibrant labyrinth of a city.
(Ramble off)
Presentation to Fulbright Conference
(To fit my 10-min timeslot I ended up having to cut about a third of what's printed below)
I was going to start by saying that I don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to define Ayurveda in only 10 minutes, and then I remembered that the Carak Samhita, the oldest complete Ayurvedic text, presents a nice compact Sanskrit definition in the form of a sutra. It goes “hitahitam sukham dukham ayus tasya hitahitam. Maanam [duration] ca tacca yatroktam ayurveda sa ucyate:” roughly, “Ayurveda is that which describes what is useful and not useful for promoting a healthy life.” The word Ayurveda itself is Sanskrit for “knowledge of life,” and the tradition includes everything under the sun pertaining to life and its propagation, maintenance, and extension.
Just continuing for a moment with the 2-minute crash course introduction to Ayurveda, if you take the Carak Samhita and flip it open, you might find material on anything from info on what food and daily routine are appropriate for the season of late spring; instructions for Panca Karma, a bodily purification regimen; care of children up to the critical age of 7 years; classification of plants and animals according to their properties; countless herbal formulas, or how to prepare an enema apparatus from an animal bladder and a piece of reed. Later texts include lengthy sections on surgical technique (still first millennium CE) and, quite a bit later, alchemical recipes using mercury preparations for purposes of rejuvenation. Since many of you may be familiar with Ayurveda through yoga, I want to note that the inclusion into the Ayurvedic tradition of Ashtanga yoga (including not just asana pranayama, dhyan or meditation, etc. in pursuit of samadhi) is a comparatively recent development. In other words, until quite recently yoga was practiced for its own sake, i.e. as a means of liberation, and not specifically as a way of attaining health on this plane.
So Ayurveda is ‘knowledge of life,’ and everything pertaining to it. As such, and as a product of a particular civilization and period of history, it is also impossible to disentangle completely from other fields such as religion and Jyotish (astrology). This all-encompassing quality of Ayurveda, its lack of segregation from other areas of knowledge, is precisely what makes Ayurveda so powerful on the one hand—and so powerfully appealing to a Western crowd hungry for holistic traditions and the spiritual promise they hold--and so difficult for modern science to come to grips with on the other. I’ll just note in passing that one problem with trying to conduct clinical research on Ayurveda is that Ayurved recognizes and gives a good deal of importance to intangible, unquantifiable things like an individual’s constitution as determined by the qualities their pulse, and the presence of prana, a sort of vital breath analogous to the Chinese qi. In effect Ayurved recognizes so many variables that the hope of performing a controlled experiment becomes a pipe-dream
So, no surprise, there are fundamental incompatibilities between modern science and classical Ayurveda. How various parties navigate these differences has been one of the themes of my work so far.
Just a couple words about myself before I get into my work so far. . . like many Americans I got into Ayurveda through English-language books by the likes of Robert Svoboda and Vasant Lad (both Vaidyas whom I have a great deal of respect for). These books tend to present Ayurveda as a system of “self-healing,” to quote one of Dr. Lad’s titles, and this is partly because the legal climate in the US means that Ayurved can’t claim its proper status as a medical system complete with actual doctors. As Jean Langford has observed in her book Fluent Bodies, self-healing is a short step from self-help: Ayurveda is growing in popularity in the US as a path to self-improvement and even to greater individuation, which as Langford points out is a unique goal of holistic health movements in the West.
I spent last year studying at Dr. Lad’s Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, where the emphasis is on becoming a lifestyle consultant and educator about how to improve one’s physical, mental and spiritual health through Ayurved. I learned a great deal there but it did not exactly prepare me for the sheer diversity of forms that Ayurveda takes in its native Southasian context. I spent the first few months of my Fulbright mostly on surveying this diversity and trying to make sense of it. Without oversimplifying too much, a few broad types of Ayurveda can be delineated using botanical language. The first is the heirloom varieties, the so-called traditional Vaidyas who learn both from texts and orally and never attend a government institution. I won’t have much to say about them today, but ask me in 5 months. Then there are the graduates of the Ayurveda College at Tribhuvan University, whom I mostly think of as vigorous hybrid cultivars. We’ll get to them in a minute. Then there are the new shoots from old roots, to borrow a metaphor from Robert Svoboda. These are the new incarnations of Ayurved that have sprung up in fertile soil in the West. This is the kind of Ayurved I was exposed to and that still informs my own perspective to a large degree. Whereas in the States, Ayurveda’s perceived promise of spiritual self-improvement often seems to trump the merely medical.of Ayurveda, in Nepal Ayurved is still primarily concerned with preventing and treating illness, i.e. with medicine, If Ayurved on the ground in Nepal looks less than glamorous to a Westerner expecting salvation or at least some insight into his or her own being, let him consider that the local culture has other branches for dealing with those sorts of concerns. Ayurveda may be deeply connected to philosophy and religion, but in its home context it has the luxury of being able to specialize in medicine.
It’s noteworthy that there are a few places in Nepal that purvey this kind the personalized, self-realization brand of Ayurveda that is growing so fast in America. But they are the places that cater to largely to foreigners and upwardly-mobile, westward-looking Nepalis.
Now onto the Ayurveda that I’ve dubbed “hybrid.” This kind of Ayurveda is associated with institutions like Naradevi hospital, the official government Ayurveda hospital in Kathmandu. I’d like to describe briefly what I saw over the course of my observation sessions there, because I think it’s representative of a new and pivotal chapter in Ayurveda’s history.
Naradevi has a public Outpatient Department clinic that also serves as an interning opportunity for students in their final year of training. Every Monday and Thursday people gather in the courtyard and wait to see the senior physician, Dr. D.B. Roka, or one of his team of interns. The clinical model is strikingly Western in many ways. Consultations are quick, for one, since there are so many patients to get through in a few short hours. The doctors and wear white coats and stethoscopes around their necks, and order blood tests and X-rays as necessary. I wasn’t surprised to see that taking of blood pressure is routine, but I was surprised to see that the traditional practice of reading the patient’s pulse is not. The patient consultations happen in Nepali but the diagnosis is in allopathic English, sometimes with the equivalent Sanskrit term glossed by Dr. Roka.
If Langford’s book is a reliable indicator, the biomedical style of Naradevi’s OPD is typical of the Ayurveda practiced in most of India’s institutional settings as well. The pattern as she describes it is “while in the classroom students cram Ayurvedic theory, on the hospital wards they learn primarily which Ayurvedic drugs to prescribe for which biomedical disease categories” (127). And actually, at Naradevi antibiotics and anti-worm medications are routinely used in addition to classical Ayurvedic formulas and modern Ayurvedic patent medicines. Even when herbs are used at Naradevi, they are cited in pseudo-biomedical jargon for their “immunomodulatory effect” (guduchi) or for being an “herbal antibiotic,” and never in the classical terms of rasa virya vipak and prabhav.
Anyway, after a few sessions of observing this pattern in the OPD room again and again, I was beginning to despair of any substantial traces of Ayurvedic thinking or language when it came to understanding a patient’s case. Then an older man came in, complaining of shifting pains in his extremities. The intern on duty, unable to pinpoint any biomedical disease category, nevertheless recognized that the patient’s complaints fit under the Ayurvedic heading of a Vata disorder. (Vata or “wind” is the dry, cold, mobile humor associated with old age, degeneration, pain and stiffness amongst a universe of other resonances.) Thus a diagnosis was possible, albeit a vague one: Vata Vyadhi, increased Vata, read the entry in the log book. His treatment consisted of ashwagandha powder, a nourishing herb that soothes aggravated Vata and strengthens Vata-affected tissues (dhatus). The episode proved to me that Ayurvedic theory is there at the Naradevi OPD, waiting in the shadows like a dusty, disused tool for its moment. For the doctor and his interns, however, the tools of allopathy gleam and glitter with the legitimacy of capital-S Science and it’s no surprise that those allopathic tools are the ones they reach for first. Of course the doctors are the first ones to point out that it is the patients too who demand the easy-to-take pills and syrups that patent and allopathic drugs provide, preferring them over Ayurveda’s messy powders and bitter-tasting tablets.
The hybridization or fusion of Ayurved with biomedicine is visible in more ways than the processes of diagnosis and treatment. At the end of every OPD session the office is flooded with drug reps from the patent medicine companies peddling their products and handing out free samples. Some of the very structure of the biomedical industry has taken hold in an ostensibly Ayurvedic zone. Looking at the products these companies are pushing is an extremely interesting exercise: there’s not much time to get into it but basically they are modern-looking syrups and capsules made with Ayurvedic herbs and marketed in a way that both looks to modern science for legitimacy (in that they refer to clinical trials etc. and use allopathic language) and claim to remedy such ills of modernity as toxins in the air, food and the water supply.
There’s plenty more to say but I’m about out of time. I’d like to wrap up by milking this comparison of this allopathy-heavy brand of Ayurved to a hybrid cultivar just a little more: like hybrid plants, the Ayurveda practiced at Naradevi is vigorous, but like hybrids, it is unlikely to “come true” from seed. When you plant the seed of a hybrid tomato the tomato you get will look nothing like the one you got the seed from. An allopathy-ayurved hybrid is likely to be equally unstable, and already the strain seems to be reverting to the tendencies of its allopathic side.
As in farming, here too genetic diversity is crucial. The hybrids are bearing fruit, but in the march of progress we had better remember the trusted older varieties as well.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Jonny's first interview
Myself, my roommate and the team of interviewers from Ayur Info
I had the unexpected pleasure back in January of being interviewed by a group of four students at the Ayurveda College here in Kathmandu. We sat down for a couple hours in my flat, sang some Nepali folk and pop songs and some American songs (my roommate found a crowd-pleaser in the Red Hot Chili Peppers canon), and eventually got around to talking about Ayurveda here and in America. Then we went up on the roof and ate a delicious lunch of dal-bhat Alden had prepared while I was blabbing.
A few weeks later they sent me the transcript they had put together. I was . . . a little dumbfounded. Although the students had tape-recorded everything and taken notes, they evidently had a very different idea of quotation than I did, not to say journalistic integrity. I recognized a few phrases that sounded like I might have uttered them, but mostly my “answers” were in Indian English. No one reading the interview would think I was a native speaker, let alone an American. And in some cases the words put in my mouth were actually contrary to the spirit of what I’d tried to express. And my name was spelled wrong. And and . . . but luckily the students, ever thoughtful and friendly and certainly well-meaning, gave me an opportunity to edit the interview via email. I turned to this task immediately and with the vigor of the misrepresented. I present here the edited interview, which I hope will bear some resemblance to what eventually appears in the Ayurvedic students’ newsletter Ayur Info. If anyone's interested in the 'original' version, I'd be happy to share that as well. (There's about 20% overlap between the two.)
Jonathan (Jon) H. Edwards (25) is a Fulbright Research Scholar in Nepal staying from September ‘08 to July ‘09. He is investing his time to study Ayurveda.
He grew up in New York City and Vermont and has visited Italy, France, India, and Thailand.
He speaks and writes Nepali well, sings Nepalese songs playing Madal, Tabala, and Guitar. And he is currently learning Newari too.
He did his bachelors at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania (USA).
Last year he completed the Ayurvedic Studies Program-I at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico. The Institute is headed by Dr. Vasant Lad, a renowned Vaidya and teacher.
In January, Ayur-Info (AI) team visited his residence in Kathmandu and made the conversation. The theme is presented hereupon.
AI: Sir, first of all we would like to know how you were attracted to Ayurveda.
Jon: During my bachelors, I went to Kalimpong (India) on a study abroad program through Pitzer College and stayed with a local family. That is where I learned Nepali. During the program I got to hear a lecture on Ayurveda that sparked my interest. After returning to the States my interest grew and eventually I realized I could make Ayurveda the focus of a trip to Nepal. In the meantime I completed ASP-I (Ayurvedic Studies Program-I) in New Mexico, in the States.
AI: What is the status of Ayurveda in the USA?
Jon: Not too many people know about Ayurveda in the States. But due to various factors in recent times, there are many people who are getting familiar with it and are really interested in it. People's interest is growing day by day. In some ways, the position of Ayurveda in America is similar to that of Chinese medicine a few decades ago before it was recognized officially. In ten years time, the number of people loving Ayurveda will definitely be encouraging.
Right now there is a small but growing number of Ayurveda practioners serving as lifestyle consultants in the States. As such we can use diet and lifestyle therapies and some herbs but it is completely taboo to talk about diagnosis and treatment since Ayurveda is not recognized as a legitimate system of medicine in the US. But things are changing. Some states like California have passed legislation that allows Ayurvedic practitioners to operate freely, even if not as actual doctors as is possible here. For the most part people in the US practice Ayurveda after obtaining certification in Naturopathy, Yoga Therapy, Massage Therapy, Conventional Medicine, etc. They slip Ayurveda in through the back door, so to speak.
Nowadays demand for Yoga, Ayurveda and Panchakarma is on the rise. The number of students is growing, too. There were people from all walks of life when I was doing ASP (even a few students from India, ironically!). It just shows the wide-ranging appeal of Ayurveda.
AI:What is the role of Ayurveda in people's life?
Jon: We can't have a ruined environment and healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy world at the same time. It’s all connected. Ayurveda is eco-friendly; it can contribute a lot to sustainable health development. But the classical idea of local potent herbs is being replaced by patent drugs. It may be due to the fact that people look for drugs easier to use and attractive to look. But modern the production of pharmaceuticals and even “ayurvedic” patent medicine products has an environmental cost. We would do well to remember the classical idea that the people of a particular place are best cured by the herbs of that place. Ayurveda can help us live in greater harmony with the world around us. After all, it is a fundamental principle of Ayurveda that we are nothing but reflections of the world (or vice versa).
In the US, people go to buy things in stores, and they are confused, overwhelmed with choice. What to eat? People hardly know what food is anymore. Advertisements in the mass media give all sorts of perverted ideas, so we have an epidemic of diet-related disease in the West. Ayurveda can help people remember what is good ad natural. It's time-tested medicine, and it provides a lot of common sense: not just herbal remedies but preventative care through seasonal diet and such. But people in the West tend to want a quick-fix or magic pill, and worse, they want to consume an exciting new product. For some, Ayurveda is just that: something new and exotic to try, then forget about. I want to see Ayurveda adapted locally and assimilated into the broader culture in the States, because we need it so badly.
AI: What is the status of Ayurveda in Nepal?
Jon: It's a tricky question; actually . . .I don't know if I’m qualified to answer that! You might know better as you study in official Ayurveda College.
I do know that here in Nepal, cultural practices with regard to diet and lifestyle are well-informed by Ayurveda. (Though some people do not follow it seriously) people mostly know what to eat and what not to eat, for example. I mean that a lot of Ayurveda is actually embedded in the culture here in Southasia.
You have a long-rooted tradition. But in many modern settings such as Naradevi hospital they take a less traditional approach. They say “integrated,” but they seem to use mostly biomedical language in diagnosis. The overall clinical model there is very Western. Ayurvedic examination and treatment are minimized—they take blood pressure but not pulse (nadi pariksha). There is certainly a postcolonial dynamic at work, with people aspiring to the legitimacy that they associate with Western medicine.
One problem with allopathy is it focuses on disease without looking at the big picture, the overall aspects of body mind and spirit. You know there is no good definition of health in modern bio-medical science. I'm worried that people look too much to the West to validate such time-tested medicine.
AI: What do you think about integration?
Jon: Integration is exciting, but Ayurveda may be in some danger of being swallowed up by the biomedical/allopathic approach. Even the Ayurvedic drugs are justified in (Western) scientific terms: they say that this herb is Ayurvedic 'antibiotic’ or that one an ‘immunomodulator’ instead of talking rasa/virya/vipak/prabhav. So it’s a fine line between changing with the times and staying true to tradition. I for one am not convinced that modern science should be the ultimate judge when it comes to health. I tend to trust tradition; traditions have survived for so long for good reason.
Some dream about a single, global medical system. I prefer to think in terms of what’s appropriate for a given place, you know, keep it local. But there’s this tide of globalization, the dominance of big multinational companies on the supply of drugs to the whole world. You have to be suspicious whenever there is a lot of money involved . . .
Still, integration in a positive way is necessary. We can’t keep knowledge segregated, it’s not possible. For example, while treating an acute case like bike accident/emergency case, we have to use the modern biomedical parameters immediately. Biomedicine is undeniably excellent for traumatic injuries. And for long-termtreatment (like those of chronic conditions- as sometimes Ayurveda scholars mention) and for health maintenance we can use Ayurvedic parameters. I mean to say that there should be equal dialogue. It should not be like one medical system (like Allopathy) dominating the other systems of medicine.
AI: What do you think about the efficacy of Ayurveda ?
Jon: It's one of the reasons why I got into Ayurveda—because it works. I had some lingering digestive problems and I visited many doctors for the cure. But they said I had no problem, I was OK. I searched in net and went through some Ayurveda books. I met Ayurveda physicians. Ayurveda explains the idea of agni (the digestive fire) which many westerners do not have a concept of. Ayurveda helps to build some common sense like - proper food in proper time and in appropriate amount. In American culture, such things are not practiced well. (Now my digestion is better)
Although it is more than this, Ayurveda can serve as a self-help book. If you study it you can manage many things yourself. People think Ayurveda works slowly. Yeah! it works slowly and balances all ingredients of body unlike Allopathy, which may manage one thing at the cost of another- you take from one hand and lose from another. There is a growing dissatisfaction with the allopathic approach in the West, a growing demand for approaches like that of Ayurveda which work deeply and for longer period of time.
for clarification we'd like ask you, here you mean to say- 'Some may argue one system to be scientific and another to be unscientific and useless. This is due to lack of proper understanding.' Is it so? I consider Ayurveda scientific, in the sense that it is based on observation and experimentation. But of course the worldview that Ayurveda comes out of is broader than the merely physical. The reason that many modern scientists are skeptical of holistic systems like Ayurveda is that the current trend in science is to be reductionistic, to look at one little element and ignore the big picture. The Ayurvedic tradition contains the wisdom not to try and isolate. There are always too many variables; when it comes to life and living creatures, everything is a variable! So clinical studies have trouble capturing the beauty and consistency of Ayurveda.
AI: Do you think more Ayurveda scholars are required for the better health of the people and community?
Jon: Sure, more is merrier. But educating the general population is as important as creating more specialists.
AI: What can be done for public awareness?
Jon: If every student at the Ayurveda campus teaches their friends and family some of the principles of Ayurveda, that is a good start. And this magazine plays a role too. For me it’s about bringing the concepts to life on a daily basis. Everybody already knows some Ayurveda, since they know some things that are useful for life (the sutra defining Ayurved says, hita hitam sukham dukham, ayus tasya hita hitam . . . ): like maybe they chew cardamom for flatulence and indigestion or drink ginger tea for a cold. Now if they can just extend their understanding to why these things work . . .
AI: How are you doing here in Nepal, how is your study going here?
Jon: (Despite few problems like electricity, pollution, transportations, he did not like to mention them, as it was already well understood. Let us hope that in coming days there will be no electricity cut, pollution, traffic jam and so on. Jon has never experienced power cut in the USA)
Nepal is treating me very well. I don't have one way of study. I'm using various methods and techniques. I have studied with the people of different fields. I have been going to meet traditional Vaidyas in Banepa, the guys who are still preparing Ayurvedic medicines in the old way. They are also involved in Rasa Shastra-- alchemy. In western culture, Mercury is considered as a poison and in Ayurveda it is used in some medicines called Rasaushadhi, so some westerners are afraid of it. I have had to pleasure to meet with Dr. Kashi Raj Sharma Subedi - who is a reknowened Ayurveda scholar here and a real embodiment of Ayurveda. I have visited many people and places. Sometimes I work and study with friends like Puspa Raj Poudel and you.
Overall, I try to find a balance between studying Ayurveda itself (like you all are doing at TU) and researching the forms that Ayurveda is taking in modern Nepal.
AI: Anything that you like to say at the last?
Would you like to send any further message to the readers?
Jon: Sure. I’d like to say, remember how broad Ayurveda is. It’s about what is useful for life, what is healthy in a broad sense for people, for society, for the world. Today so much ill health can be traced back to food: processed, refined, nutrient-deficient food. Too much food, not enough food. That’s a big enough problem to occupy the most ambitious student of Ayurveda (or public health or nutrition). I owe a shout-out to my roommate Alden Towler, a fellow Fulbright scholar, who is studying the relation between modern diet and disease (especially diabetes) in Kathmandu. I consider his work to be Ayurvedic as well.
To the students at the Ayurveda College--keep up your studies but don’t lose sight of the big picture. Find time to do the things you love, that’s the only way you can keep up your own health and happiness. There’s no point in being a doctor if you are sick and stressed-out. When you lose your inspiration, remember the richness of the tradition you are studying, the distilled wisdom of hundreds of generations of Vaidyas. You are a vehicle for that living tradition. And for that you have my deepest respect.
AI: Thank you very much for your kind cooperation and invaluable time!
Jon: You’re welcome, It's a great honour to me. Thanks to you as well.
(Prepared by Aseem Baidya, Cyrus Neupane, Shiva Ram Khatiwada and Shree Ram Phuyal)
{Our heartiest thanks to Mr. Alden Towler for his unforgettable cooperation, help and hospitality}
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
We humans, animals cursed with metacognition, are in constant need of stories, without whose ordering power existence is a senseless (if occasionally sublime) series of events. These stories are of all kinds. Some are handed down to us as myth, but also as what we call history; even the great god Science consists of the gluten of fact stretched and leavened by the yeasty air of interpretation: like bread, knowledge is mostly useful fiction. In the areas of our lives where the great library of culture fails to supply stories, we’re left to construct our own. This is no mean feat, though, since the stories by which we order our lives had better be believable. Our job is to tell a story so good we convince ourselves it’s true.
Part of the work of growing up in modernity is finding the words in which to tell your own story. (In postmodernity, prose, being linear, may fail altogether; so then you have to write your own poem?) Young people are frequently forced to assess how well the stories we tell fit us: whether they bind and constrain, straightjacket-like; comfort and thwart ambition like a bathrobe; stoke the ego like a tailored suit. Often they’re second-hand stories (though all stories are second-hand in one sense), or patchworks scrapped together from TV and Hollywood, and fit like you’d expect someone else’s clothes to. Who hasn’t in all earnestness tried on layers that look ridiculous in retrospect? Dressing oneself in a story that fits is no easy task, especially with pop culture bombarding us with ready-made articles, one-size-fits-all pieces of glimmering one-dimensional pulp that can’t serve our individual purposes for long. How many people, wearing a plastic tiara or superhero jockstrap, talk in snippets of Hollywood drama for want of something that fits any better?
Just because I’m the storyteller here doesn’t make me immune to the need for narrative, and I’m as excited as the next twenty-something (a phrase I submit myself to voluntarily because at 25 it’s nice to feel I’m in the same boat as all my story-hungry peers, and there is a particular flavor (quiet urgency?) to the years before 30, as we search out our paths) when I stumble across good material for my own plot. I had such a moment recently, when I suddenly found myself playing the role of Ayurvedic doctor to a fifty-year-old Nepali woman. This was during a trip to the Terai a month ago (cf the Nepali Time entry below). My friend Pusparaj and I had stopped by the woman’s house to pay a social call, and over the inevitable irrefutable methamphetamine-like tea it came up that the woman suffers from pain in her right hand. My friend, who is in the middle of his five-and-a-half year Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medical Science program in Kathmandu, beckoned me over so I could examine her. I wasn’t totally comfortable, both because my own Ayurvedic training is very limited in scope and because there was a small crowd of her family members, neighbors, and interested birds watching. But with a little encouragement from Pusparaj I asked her a few questions, compared her hands, took her pulse. Ayurveda’s basic diagnostic strategies: darshana, sparshana, prashna (looking, touching, questioning). She was constipated, it turned out, suffered from lower back pain as well as the pain in the back of her hand, and her pulse and tongue showed the presence of aam (metabolic waste, generally from improper or incomplete digestion) in her system. Her appetite was poor. Her pain was worst in the morning. I found myself blurting out a diagnosis before my conscious mind had reached its conclusions, but Pusparaj nodded: ama-vata, or rheumatism. Treatment would have to involve first cleansing her system of the aam, and under the circumstances of a quick and informal chat about her health, that was all I could hope to undertake. I told the woman to take triphala, the famous Ayurvedic bowel-cleansing, digestion-regulating formula. I’ve given triphala (“three fruits”) many times in my capacity as an Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant in the States, but this was different: here the remedy I prescribed was not some funky, esoteric and exotic powder, but a traditional formula that the villagers knew of. The three ingredients—amalaki (Emblica officinalis), bibhitaki (Terminalia belerica) and haritaki (Terminalia chebula) all grew in the vicinity. The medicine would be fresh, it would be free, and it would be all the more potent for it.
The clarity with which Ayurveda explained (with its own narratives, in turn; much of Ayurveda’s power is in its metaphors) the woman’s condition and pointed to a simple treatment; the beauty of feeling that the remedy lay not only in physical but in cultural proximity—a small but successful union of nature and culture; the mounting roar of disease everywhere; my own struggle for good health in a broad sense; these factors align to illuminate the thread of my own tale.
My own tale: I’ve couched it before as based on a recognition of the fundamental unity between the health of people, society, and the planet; my work then must be somehow to serve as doctor, helping in some small ways to restore the health of the interconnected parts and of the whole. Medicine is anything that enhances health at all these levels, or at least one level without disrupting it elsewhere. Planting a tree can be medicine for the earth; that tree’s nutrient-rich fruit can be medicine for a sick person; even cutting that tree down for its fragrant heartwood can be compatible with medicine if you leave many such trees for every tree you take. Love is good medicine, since it is always more than the sum of its parts.
The premise of my plot, then, is to practice medicine as best I can, using my own peculiar skills and proclivities to do some good, try and avoid harm. (Sounds deceptively simple, I know. Stay tuned for complications.) As this story comes into focus I find myself believing it as though my writing were merely the tracing of letters already written. Don’t we all have to convince ourselves that what we find ourselves drawn to is what we are destined to do? Destiny, that grand narrative, (or as master storyteller Neil Gaiman has it) a dusty tome always being written. An endless book of stories, a story of an endless book of stories: basta. I surrender to that vision, knowing Borges would approve.
Part of the work of growing up in modernity is finding the words in which to tell your own story. (In postmodernity, prose, being linear, may fail altogether; so then you have to write your own poem?) Young people are frequently forced to assess how well the stories we tell fit us: whether they bind and constrain, straightjacket-like; comfort and thwart ambition like a bathrobe; stoke the ego like a tailored suit. Often they’re second-hand stories (though all stories are second-hand in one sense), or patchworks scrapped together from TV and Hollywood, and fit like you’d expect someone else’s clothes to. Who hasn’t in all earnestness tried on layers that look ridiculous in retrospect? Dressing oneself in a story that fits is no easy task, especially with pop culture bombarding us with ready-made articles, one-size-fits-all pieces of glimmering one-dimensional pulp that can’t serve our individual purposes for long. How many people, wearing a plastic tiara or superhero jockstrap, talk in snippets of Hollywood drama for want of something that fits any better?
Just because I’m the storyteller here doesn’t make me immune to the need for narrative, and I’m as excited as the next twenty-something (a phrase I submit myself to voluntarily because at 25 it’s nice to feel I’m in the same boat as all my story-hungry peers, and there is a particular flavor (quiet urgency?) to the years before 30, as we search out our paths) when I stumble across good material for my own plot. I had such a moment recently, when I suddenly found myself playing the role of Ayurvedic doctor to a fifty-year-old Nepali woman. This was during a trip to the Terai a month ago (cf the Nepali Time entry below). My friend Pusparaj and I had stopped by the woman’s house to pay a social call, and over the inevitable irrefutable methamphetamine-like tea it came up that the woman suffers from pain in her right hand. My friend, who is in the middle of his five-and-a-half year Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medical Science program in Kathmandu, beckoned me over so I could examine her. I wasn’t totally comfortable, both because my own Ayurvedic training is very limited in scope and because there was a small crowd of her family members, neighbors, and interested birds watching. But with a little encouragement from Pusparaj I asked her a few questions, compared her hands, took her pulse. Ayurveda’s basic diagnostic strategies: darshana, sparshana, prashna (looking, touching, questioning). She was constipated, it turned out, suffered from lower back pain as well as the pain in the back of her hand, and her pulse and tongue showed the presence of aam (metabolic waste, generally from improper or incomplete digestion) in her system. Her appetite was poor. Her pain was worst in the morning. I found myself blurting out a diagnosis before my conscious mind had reached its conclusions, but Pusparaj nodded: ama-vata, or rheumatism. Treatment would have to involve first cleansing her system of the aam, and under the circumstances of a quick and informal chat about her health, that was all I could hope to undertake. I told the woman to take triphala, the famous Ayurvedic bowel-cleansing, digestion-regulating formula. I’ve given triphala (“three fruits”) many times in my capacity as an Ayurvedic lifestyle consultant in the States, but this was different: here the remedy I prescribed was not some funky, esoteric and exotic powder, but a traditional formula that the villagers knew of. The three ingredients—amalaki (Emblica officinalis), bibhitaki (Terminalia belerica) and haritaki (Terminalia chebula) all grew in the vicinity. The medicine would be fresh, it would be free, and it would be all the more potent for it.
The clarity with which Ayurveda explained (with its own narratives, in turn; much of Ayurveda’s power is in its metaphors) the woman’s condition and pointed to a simple treatment; the beauty of feeling that the remedy lay not only in physical but in cultural proximity—a small but successful union of nature and culture; the mounting roar of disease everywhere; my own struggle for good health in a broad sense; these factors align to illuminate the thread of my own tale.
My own tale: I’ve couched it before as based on a recognition of the fundamental unity between the health of people, society, and the planet; my work then must be somehow to serve as doctor, helping in some small ways to restore the health of the interconnected parts and of the whole. Medicine is anything that enhances health at all these levels, or at least one level without disrupting it elsewhere. Planting a tree can be medicine for the earth; that tree’s nutrient-rich fruit can be medicine for a sick person; even cutting that tree down for its fragrant heartwood can be compatible with medicine if you leave many such trees for every tree you take. Love is good medicine, since it is always more than the sum of its parts.
The premise of my plot, then, is to practice medicine as best I can, using my own peculiar skills and proclivities to do some good, try and avoid harm. (Sounds deceptively simple, I know. Stay tuned for complications.) As this story comes into focus I find myself believing it as though my writing were merely the tracing of letters already written. Don’t we all have to convince ourselves that what we find ourselves drawn to is what we are destined to do? Destiny, that grand narrative, (or as master storyteller Neil Gaiman has it) a dusty tome always being written. An endless book of stories, a story of an endless book of stories: basta. I surrender to that vision, knowing Borges would approve.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Transport is Arranged
"Jaawalaakheljaawalaakhellagankheljaawalaakhelsaatdobaato! O jaawalaakhellagankheljaawalaakhel!"
It was an early milestone of my stay here, the day I found myself able to decipher these strings of syllables. They unreel like gritty, oily ribbons from the mouths of the (pre)adolescent boys who hang out the doors of every microbus in greater Kathmandu. The system is simple enough: it's basically an audible sign conveying the vehicle's route. This one's headed to Patan, the former city-state that lies south of Kathmandu proper and that is now well swallowed-up by the ever growing metropolis. Everywhere are reminders that within living memory of most of the city's inhabitants Kathmandu was more like a modest town, one that gave way abruptly to a sleepy agricultural hinterland. Patan, only a few kilometers away, was enough of an entity in itself that its dialect of Newari is distinct, and Bhaktapur's (at less than 15 km from KTM) is only marginally comprehensible to a Kathmandu Newar. Place names around the Valley are reminders, in their simplicity, of simpler times: new road, Pipal tree, work-place, seven-way-crossroads (saat dobaato, "seven two-road"). Now Haadigaon, whose name imlies village, is in the middle of the city, a short and trafficky walk from Nepal's first and largest supermarket (which in turn is named after the local tantric Hindu temple, Bhatbhateni).
But I digress. I was talking about getting around: it's a trip. I mentioned systems, but when it comes driving they are nonexistent. The only rule is to drive on the left-hand side. Even that's more of a suggestion, for cutting across the road (there are no actually lanes) to pass is fair game. No, wrong word: that implies rules again. Driving is a free-for-all of three and four-wheeled vehicles, hordes of motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, a few rickshaws and the occasional wayward sacred cow. Horns are used not so much as instruments of expression, as in "Screw you bub, try and cut me off!!", as announcements of one's presence on the road. "Here I am coming up on your right." And the bigger buses are equipped with incredible horns that emit a staccato burst of deafening noise like a child hitting a huge organ's keyboard rapidly with a mallet. Do-mi-re-mi-do-mi-re. Intersections . . . work somehow, sort of, despite rather than because of the occasional traffic-light or uniformed mannikin unwilling or unable to direct anyone. But jams (as in "kasto jam bhayo!") are an everyday reality and are caused as often as not by road closures due to strike/protest (the infamous "banda"). Mind-numbing, chest-choking, soul-sucking jams. The motorcycles take their chance to squeeze between the immobilized four-wheelers but in the old city's narrow alley's they too clot up so that sometimes even pedestrians are stuck in the midst of the pack. It just came to me: the city is having a coronary. Anyway. There's talk of a Japanese initiative to expand the arterial "Arniko highway" (spectacular euphemism) into a 6-lane affair, but, as they say elsewhere than here, 'nothing good will come of this.' I take comfort in the near certainty that nothing at all will come of it.
If driving demands a different kind of canniness than we rule-bound Americans are used to, so does being a passenger. The first challenge is re-assuring oneself that there is indeed room in that sardine-can microbus: just find a foothold and someone to grab onto and duck your head inside the door, or hang off the side until the micro nears any sort of police presence (then it's all limbs inside). When two inches of seat open up, claim it like your birthright with one blade of your butt and be content. Make sure to shout out when your stop comes, and be up on the latest fare (11 rupees as of today) so you don't get shortchanged. It can be stressful, what with the discomfort of half-crouching in Twister-worthy contortions, gripping onto a seat with an old woman's head in your armpit. But more and more I find the closeness of the crowding comforting. No one will think twice about leaning on you or sitting closer than any New York subway-rider would find appropriate, and you can lean back on the supporting mass of humanity without reservation.
A peculiar jewel of the bus system lies in the interchange between the driver and the other character I mentioned, usually a twelve-to-fifteen year old boy, whom I'll call the conductor. His job is not only to spew those gorgeously melded syllables with as much brusque adolescent disdain as possible. He also collects fares and makes change, arranges passengers with impunity. You, brother, over here, you come sit, you up front. let's go, let's go! anyone for Tangal? No? Speak up! Guess not, go, go. He's constantly in and out of the vehicle, or standing in the open doorway, hanging on by the tips of his rubber sandal-clad toes. It's his exclusive right (though much abused by disgruntled passengers) to bang on side of the bus, signifying by the rhythm of taps to stop or go. On the bigger buses on precipitous roads throughout the hill region, this simple means of communication has evolved into a complex set of whistles and taps. En route from Syabrubesi in November, Wave was convinced she had decoded the conductor's bird-like calls: he was directing the vehicle as if by remote, with a call for L (away from the craggy blasted rock face) or R (away from the abyss). When we met another vehicle, both would shriek to a stop and the lowlier of the two would reverse around the switchbacks and minor rockslides to a place wide enough for the other to pass with a few inches to spare. It fell to the conductor to relay the signal that this operation could proceed: ta-tap ta-tap, ta-tap ta-tap . . . and the bus inched back, axles moaning, brakes crying for mercy. All this bussing is more fun, at least in nice weather, if you're one of the sardines stacked on top of the bus, sitting on the iron rack, your 50 kilo sack of rice or your trekker's pack. Avoid neighbor's vomit, get proper look at the screaming death down below.
Recently I've started riding on the back of Alden's bicycle, or what's known here as a "budho saikal" (old-man bike, in contrast to the ubiquitous motor scooters). The bike is, as he says, "very Southasian:" heavy as hell, comfortably upright in posture, no brakes to speak of. Nice loud bell. It must be made for the endless flat expanse of North India, which means it's not ideally adapted to Kathmandu's occasional hills: a slight incline and the brakes are apt to fail, as they did the other day when we took a nasty spill into a steaming pile of garbage (sweepers' strike?).
Biking around does give one a whole new perspective on KTM traffic, as well as a good lesson in faith. All I can see is Alden's back and the oncoming traffic to my right. I've trained him to shout 'bump' before a bump. I brace myself, thankful for the sweater wedged between me and the stiff frame. But mostly it's glorious, the smooth flow of the awkward machine in and out of traffic, the ding of the bell, the door-to-door service. Come bicycling with us!
It was an early milestone of my stay here, the day I found myself able to decipher these strings of syllables. They unreel like gritty, oily ribbons from the mouths of the (pre)adolescent boys who hang out the doors of every microbus in greater Kathmandu. The system is simple enough: it's basically an audible sign conveying the vehicle's route. This one's headed to Patan, the former city-state that lies south of Kathmandu proper and that is now well swallowed-up by the ever growing metropolis. Everywhere are reminders that within living memory of most of the city's inhabitants Kathmandu was more like a modest town, one that gave way abruptly to a sleepy agricultural hinterland. Patan, only a few kilometers away, was enough of an entity in itself that its dialect of Newari is distinct, and Bhaktapur's (at less than 15 km from KTM) is only marginally comprehensible to a Kathmandu Newar. Place names around the Valley are reminders, in their simplicity, of simpler times: new road, Pipal tree, work-place, seven-way-crossroads (saat dobaato, "seven two-road"). Now Haadigaon, whose name imlies village, is in the middle of the city, a short and trafficky walk from Nepal's first and largest supermarket (which in turn is named after the local tantric Hindu temple, Bhatbhateni).
But I digress. I was talking about getting around: it's a trip. I mentioned systems, but when it comes driving they are nonexistent. The only rule is to drive on the left-hand side. Even that's more of a suggestion, for cutting across the road (there are no actually lanes) to pass is fair game. No, wrong word: that implies rules again. Driving is a free-for-all of three and four-wheeled vehicles, hordes of motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, a few rickshaws and the occasional wayward sacred cow. Horns are used not so much as instruments of expression, as in "Screw you bub, try and cut me off!!", as announcements of one's presence on the road. "Here I am coming up on your right." And the bigger buses are equipped with incredible horns that emit a staccato burst of deafening noise like a child hitting a huge organ's keyboard rapidly with a mallet. Do-mi-re-mi-do-mi-re. Intersections . . . work somehow, sort of, despite rather than because of the occasional traffic-light or uniformed mannikin unwilling or unable to direct anyone. But jams (as in "kasto jam bhayo!") are an everyday reality and are caused as often as not by road closures due to strike/protest (the infamous "banda"). Mind-numbing, chest-choking, soul-sucking jams. The motorcycles take their chance to squeeze between the immobilized four-wheelers but in the old city's narrow alley's they too clot up so that sometimes even pedestrians are stuck in the midst of the pack. It just came to me: the city is having a coronary. Anyway. There's talk of a Japanese initiative to expand the arterial "Arniko highway" (spectacular euphemism) into a 6-lane affair, but, as they say elsewhere than here, 'nothing good will come of this.' I take comfort in the near certainty that nothing at all will come of it.
If driving demands a different kind of canniness than we rule-bound Americans are used to, so does being a passenger. The first challenge is re-assuring oneself that there is indeed room in that sardine-can microbus: just find a foothold and someone to grab onto and duck your head inside the door, or hang off the side until the micro nears any sort of police presence (then it's all limbs inside). When two inches of seat open up, claim it like your birthright with one blade of your butt and be content. Make sure to shout out when your stop comes, and be up on the latest fare (11 rupees as of today) so you don't get shortchanged. It can be stressful, what with the discomfort of half-crouching in Twister-worthy contortions, gripping onto a seat with an old woman's head in your armpit. But more and more I find the closeness of the crowding comforting. No one will think twice about leaning on you or sitting closer than any New York subway-rider would find appropriate, and you can lean back on the supporting mass of humanity without reservation.
A peculiar jewel of the bus system lies in the interchange between the driver and the other character I mentioned, usually a twelve-to-fifteen year old boy, whom I'll call the conductor. His job is not only to spew those gorgeously melded syllables with as much brusque adolescent disdain as possible. He also collects fares and makes change, arranges passengers with impunity. You, brother, over here, you come sit, you up front. let's go, let's go! anyone for Tangal? No? Speak up! Guess not, go, go. He's constantly in and out of the vehicle, or standing in the open doorway, hanging on by the tips of his rubber sandal-clad toes. It's his exclusive right (though much abused by disgruntled passengers) to bang on side of the bus, signifying by the rhythm of taps to stop or go. On the bigger buses on precipitous roads throughout the hill region, this simple means of communication has evolved into a complex set of whistles and taps. En route from Syabrubesi in November, Wave was convinced she had decoded the conductor's bird-like calls: he was directing the vehicle as if by remote, with a call for L (away from the craggy blasted rock face) or R (away from the abyss). When we met another vehicle, both would shriek to a stop and the lowlier of the two would reverse around the switchbacks and minor rockslides to a place wide enough for the other to pass with a few inches to spare. It fell to the conductor to relay the signal that this operation could proceed: ta-tap ta-tap, ta-tap ta-tap . . . and the bus inched back, axles moaning, brakes crying for mercy. All this bussing is more fun, at least in nice weather, if you're one of the sardines stacked on top of the bus, sitting on the iron rack, your 50 kilo sack of rice or your trekker's pack. Avoid neighbor's vomit, get proper look at the screaming death down below.
Recently I've started riding on the back of Alden's bicycle, or what's known here as a "budho saikal" (old-man bike, in contrast to the ubiquitous motor scooters). The bike is, as he says, "very Southasian:" heavy as hell, comfortably upright in posture, no brakes to speak of. Nice loud bell. It must be made for the endless flat expanse of North India, which means it's not ideally adapted to Kathmandu's occasional hills: a slight incline and the brakes are apt to fail, as they did the other day when we took a nasty spill into a steaming pile of garbage (sweepers' strike?).
Biking around does give one a whole new perspective on KTM traffic, as well as a good lesson in faith. All I can see is Alden's back and the oncoming traffic to my right. I've trained him to shout 'bump' before a bump. I brace myself, thankful for the sweater wedged between me and the stiff frame. But mostly it's glorious, the smooth flow of the awkward machine in and out of traffic, the ding of the bell, the door-to-door service. Come bicycling with us!
Friday, January 16, 2009
shout out
above: the omnivorous Mr. Alden Towler
I thought I'd post this excerpt from my compatriot (and co ex-patriate) Alden Towler's blog, the matter-of-factly titled Alden in Nepal. Find it at http://aldeninnepal.blogspot.com We've shared much of our Nepali experience, so it seems fitting to invite my readers to check out his thoughtful and earnest perspective. The following bit dates back to the Dashain festival in October:
During festival time I had been noticing so much alcohol drinking and meat eating in the Buddhist community. Every house we went to they were offered. Even Maama [=maternal uncle -Jon] invited us to enjoy Jard and roksi (corn wine and distilled corn wine) as is the custom to please guests. I couldn’t help but ask the alcohol-avoiding, meat-eating, middle-aged married monk with a family a few questions.
“Can you tell me what you think about alcohol?” I asked.
“Its no good” Maama replied.
“But why? What does it do?” I said searching for a more full answer.
“Well” Maama began, “It ruins your heart, darkens your soul, spoils your mind, and destroys your relationship with god” he said in a very matter of fact yet heart felt way.
This definitely left me in a doubting and contemplative mindset. Nepalis are aimed at pleasing their guests, it is hard to refuse something without offending the host, finishing your mountain of rice is just about the only way to say thank you, not finishing it is a horrible insult to the woman’s cooking- ‘miTho bhayena?’ would be implied, ‘it wasn’t tasty?’
The conversation took another direction with Maama and it wasn’t long until he offered Jon and I some roksi. What! Jon and I looked at each other biting our lips to keep back the laughter, had this monk not just told us that alcohol is a horrible substance that ruins your heart, darkens your soul, spoils your mind, and destroys your relationship with god?!
“No, thanks” we said.
“Oh come on, just a little” he encouraged.
Saying no is just about the hardest thing to do in this culture. . .
Thursday, January 15, 2009
"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.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
At the Paan Pasal
Four hits of sweet paan in the making in Patan
What the hell is that guy selling, a non-initiate is apt to wonder as s/he ambles past the neighborhood paan vendor. Besides cigarettes and chewing tobacco, all that's visible in the narrow storefront or miniature roadside tent are a bowl or two of heart-shaped green leaves soaking in water of questionable origin. Hidden from view, however, are dozens of containers ranging from thimble-sized to a couple of quarts, containing the minutiae of the paan man's (usually a man’s) craft. Corrosive limestone paste; tiny cubes of bright red candied papaya; chunks of broken betel nut; and a thousand and one other flavors, textures, and colors.
But what compels one to halt here, to shell out 7 or 15 rupees--what, in short, is the appeal of this morsel of a mouthful that stains mouths crimson the subcontinent over? That, friend, is the nut of the matter, the inexpressible kernel of supari that keeps you coming back again. For paan is more than a digestive aid, a mouth freshener, a heart tonic, and a welcome distraction from the infinite frustrations of life here, though it is all of these. It is a custom-folded moment of bliss. According to your stripes, that bliss may consist mainly of the taste explosion and slight head-tingling effect of a mitha (sweet) paan, but it may also involve the less subtle effects of a lacing of tobacco. The leaf itself makes a difference: there is the standard mithapatta, the basic, mild and sweet-natured leaf. There is its idiosyncratic yellowish cousin, whose sourer, spicier flavor is not without its devotees. Then there is the banglapatta, a roguish leaf, which is frowned upon by some for its more blatant narcotic effect. But the beauty of paan is that it's appeal is never reducible to a single ingredient, or even a simple combination of two or three.
It always begins with the leaf, that which gives paan its name. Next comes a scant swipe of chuna, the white lime paste that somehow activates whatever subtly addictive alkaloids the leaf and betel nut contain. The stuff is corrosive on its own (a factor that may be inseparable from its role in paan—more research required), but in the context of the whole it is neutralized by the next ingredient, a light brown paint made of the bark of a tree. I have to admit this ingredient remains mysterious to me, but I like to theorize that it complements and tones down the chuna. From here the particulars of paan production diverge wildly, but it can at least be said that most paan contains a good piece or six of supari, the infamous betel nut. Here is one of our active principles, a seed of great distinction. Activated by the leaf and/or the chuna, the supari stimulates digestion to an almost miraculous degree. It also causes a slight feeling of constriction in the throat, as though you've swallowed your jawbreaker. Not to worry, chances are you're not allergic. Just enjoy the bizarre and (I'm convinced) benign effects of this storied, stone-like nut on your stomach, your cranium, and (according to the Michaelangelo of paan vendors, soon to make his entrance onto the page) the heart.
If you're asked for a mitha paan, your lime ad bark-smeared leaf will now be graced with shredded coconut, clove, cardamom, candied papaya, fennel seeds, silver sugar balls . . . if your order was for a special sweet paan, the list will grow and include a big dollop of heavenly, gloppy rose-petal jam, and the final, folded product will be adorned with silver leaf (not for those of us with silver fillings in our teeth) and that true luxury, a maraschino cherry. A jarda paan, on the other hand, is more about the tobacco, and for reasons of pride or purity of purpose, habitual eaters of this harsher pleasure tend to eschew the sweet delights that make mitha paan so blissful. But compromises can be made. There is also, of course, the "plain" paan, which is almost as fiendishly complex as the sweet version, but omits some of the more sugary additions.
But a paan is never only a paan. I learned this one warm autumn day in Kuleshwor, when I stopped by an untested paan shop on a quiet street. I was with friends, and we were all in the mood, so to speak. In Nepal there is little sense of 'first come first served,' especially since our order for 5 or 6 deluxe mitha paan would take longer than other walk-up requests for a pouch of tobacco, a single cigarette, a bit of supari wrapped in paan leaf with chuna (paan at its most elemental, strictly for the addict). But when the sahuji--honourable shopkeeper--did turn his attention to us, he did it fully. Fielding our newbie curiosity with grace, he lovingly presented a sample of each successive ingredient for our tasting. His ingredients were anything but ordinary, for here was a man for whom work was service, and service divine. Take the rosepetal jam. He had not make it himself, it's true--his wife had. The supari he soaked until tender and cut to order, with an iron implement, into paper-thin slices. The coconut chunks were perfectly toasted. The cardamom he decorticated on the spot, removing the sticky black seeds from the inedible papery green pod. Each perfectly folded leaf was sprinkled with rosewater before being skewered with a toothpick and served. And he forewent the synthetic masala ("spice mix") and maha (honey) that most paan vendors use as a matter of course--saccharine, artificially-flavored, for the birds. His paan was pure, constructed with devotion, presented with pride. It was orgasmic.
In this employment-deprived country, it’s common to be asked to bring someone to America. How, it’s easy to say dismissively, by putting you in my luggage? This might get a laugh, but it does little to address feelings of resentment or inferiority. But lately a local paan vendor had an idea. Is there paan in your country, he wanted to know? Well, a little, I began to reply, in places where Indians have settled . . . other Americans don’t know what paan is. But he had spied the glint of opportunity in a fat, glistening, folded up leaf: bring me, he said, and we’ll start a paan business together. Rarely have I been so tickled by a version of that old saw, the American Dream.
Monday, December 8, 2008
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.
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