Nepali Time, revisited

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

"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.