image: rice harvest outside Panauti, Kavrepalanchowk, Nepal

the greetings and solicitations shouted your way whenever you (tall, white) venture out of the city:

"hallo!"
"whatisyour name?"
"hello how are you!"
"take one photo please"
"yes give me please one sweet"

* * *

Fall comes to the Nepalese middle hills as a chill in the air at night, days now pleasantly warm and sunny. Cherimoyas are done and suntala (tangerines? mandarins?) are starting to blush gold. Time to eat black dal (heavy and warming) and to sun-dry hot peppers, strips of daikon radish, and the fermented greens called gundruk against the coming chill. A proverb refers to the "min pachas," 50 days and nights when even the fish are frozen in place in this land's swift-flowing rivers.
I think of New England fall days, tumbling towards solstice more dramatically than they do here. Walking with a Nepali friend to Namobuddha, a really extremely old stupa a day's walk from the Valley, I tried the capture the feeling of our Northeastern autumn: the colors, I said, and the slant of the light... you, reading this at a northerly latitude, understand.
But how to evoke to you the feel of the rice harvest in the villages? The terraces, meticulously laced one-by-one with emerald shoots back in June when the monsoons provided the necessary ankle-deep mud--the paddy in the terraces is now ripened to golden brown. The plants have been tied into bunches (with other rice stalks for ties) for weeks, and after cutting and threshing with a foot-powered spinning device the empty bunches of straw are left in place to dry (see photo). The rice, still in husk, is spread out on pieces of plastic or cloth tarps, combed through, fanned with circular woven bamboo trays called nanglo to blow away bits of foreign matter. One man or woman hurling nanglos full of spiraling, shining rice onto the tarp, two or three fanning with their own nanglos, thrrrepp-swoosh-swoosh, a steady rhythm. Every step of this work is accomplished with whole families working together, long days in the sunny fields as slowly the gold stalks give way to bare brown, the stubble and the hut-like straw piles the only signs left of the months of labor. Hard to conceive of the amount of sweat that went into every luxuriant spread of husked rice, like the queen-sized mattress-sized amount that the old woman is combing through with her bare feet, taking her time as she pores through the fruits of her labor.

Kinds of rice. There's mansuri and its various subtypes for everyday eating, fat-grained tai cin (preferred for chiura, beaten rice, and chang, milky rice beer) but an unreliable producer, prone to pests and disease), prized pokhreli and jira masino ("fine cumin-seed"). Some seed is heirloom, some new-fangled hybrid that yields higher or is more resistant to disease but that, surely, takes its toll even on the rich lakebed clay soil of the Kathmandu Valley. I don't know if genetically-engineered rice has made its way here yet, with its double-talk promises and price to match. Most farmers probably couldn't afford the initial outlay, and I hope they would refrain from taking loans and risking their lands to do so (though many here, Newars of the Jyapu caste, are tenants working others' fields and receiving 50% of the harvest). It's a topic for another entry, better yet a more politically and economically-astute writer--but the trend away from subsistence and towards commodity agriculture looks to me like a dangerous one. I'm highly suspicious of the global free market...but better quit while I'm ahead on this subject. The argument for primeval or pictureque poverty isn't a pretty one either. But--one last protest--before TV arrived here, no one complained that their lifestyle wasn't up to the Western 'standard of living.'
Now that I've put my foot in it--comments welcome.

Tea break ( with Masala Chai Recipe )

Above: doing Mha Puja in Patan. At this yearly ritual Newars worship the divinity within, then cap it off with an enormous feast. Thanks to Rajman Bajracarya for his hospitality!

Belwo: Oh, those beautiful boys--room-mate / co-conspirator Alden (right) and I during Tihar


Fair readers, y'all deserve a little something to eat to sustain you across this wasteland of words. How about a cup of tea.

Get a hold of the cheapest, strongest black tea you can, from assam or ceylon. (all the better if the box has a picture of a beaming indian family on it.) the best stuff for chai (Nepali "chiya") is called CTC (cut-tear-curl), and comes in little pellets. toss in a teaspoonful of these little nuggets and a cup of water for each drinker, and turn on the gas. Add spices: fresh ginger root, green cardamom pods, maybe a clove or two. Cinnamon's too obvious, but black pepper is delicious if it's chilly out. And add sugar--nice, unrefined, rich jaggery, or (sigh) more authentically, the white granulated stuff. Don't be shy. We're going for near-syrup consistency. Bring all this to a raucous boil and don't turn it down until the house smells like (a sanitized version of) a Kashmiri spice bazar. Then add milk, rich sweet whole cow's milk, or (for more authenticity) the stuff that comes in little plastic baggies, robbed of its fat and adulterated with bad water and milk powder. Add almost as much milk as there is tea, and bring it back to a boil for a couple minutes. strain it into little cups or grubby glasses and serve it piping hot to everyone in the vicinity along with bland, dry little cookies. don't let them refuse. repeat five (5) times a day.

note that this tea is not for those with hypertension, insomnia, or restless leg syndrome.

Top Photo: goat sacrifice to Durga, the fierce form of the female divinity. Its blood is being sprayed straight onto a rice mill to bless it. Courtesy of Alden Towler.

Photo at Right: me winning a bootleg Diesel T-Shirt at the Bhorjyang village raffle! I'll say it again: at least I didn't win the goat.

Dashain, the biggest annual holiday for most Nepalis, is in its final throes. After all the animal sacrifice and feasting, these final days are more like a hangover than anything: quiet (everyone's still out of the city, staying at their home villages) and full of headaches (everything's closed).

Jumping at the chance to get out of the valley for a few days, I went with my friend and roomate Alden Towler to celebrate Dashain at a village in Khavre district, on the invitation of some friends of ours from the local fruit and juice shop. Their family, like many in Nepal, is large and extended family, with seven adult siblings each with kids. Being neither genealogically astute nor on top of the complexities of Nepali kinship terminology, I had no real chance of keeping everyone straight. Be that as it may, on Monday morning Alden, myself and 15 or so of the family all piled into a reserved microbus and headed for the hills. Through the pockmarked roads of the city, the horrendous smog of Koteshwor, past Thimi and Surya Vinayak and out, through Banepa, Dhulikhel, out into the country. Originally Alden and I had hatched a scheme to walk to this village over the course of two days, having heard from our hosts that it was a mere hour's walk from Dhulikhel. Manageable. Hence our surprise when the micro continued on another hour and a half past Dhulikhel--it would have been a hell of a walk. When we finally did disembark, the hike up to the village of Bhorjyang, though a mere trifle by local standards, was enough to satisfy my restless legs. We waded across a river in pairs, small children clinging to parents' backs, then switchbacked up a hill jutting up at an angle of at least 50 degrees. We kept climbing for another 40 minutes, through scrubby, rocky ground hosting clumps of lemongrass, amalaki (amla) trees, baby pipals that will provide blessed shade for the next generation of villagers. Past the scrubby hillside and into more inhabitable terrain, we found ourselves in the midst of fields--buckwheat, peanuts, mustard (for oilseed), kidney beans and other legumes climbing last season's maize stalks. Rice paddy at stages from green to gold, getting close to mature. Fruit trees lined the rocky footpath: luscious cherimoyas and small, tangy yellow-green guavas this time of year. A couple of family members showed me some useful wild plants: a bitter flower used to treat fever, another low-growing mint-like plant, also bitter, for jaundice, some small red berries, sweet and astringent, for diarrhoea. Also a weirdly ubiquitous shrub that didn't produce any food or medicine but whose stalks, properly snapped and drawn out, can be used to blow bubbles. We moved aside to let villagers carrying enormous loads of fodder pass us on the narrow trail. It's rare in Nepal to see ruminants on pasture; land level enough is terraced for fields, so the remaining steep hillsides become the source of foliage that's cut and carried to goats, cattle, and water buffaloes at least twice a day. Some of these villagers gave us sidelong looks, and some seemed to avoid our eyes. The kids, meanwhile, stared unabashedly but without malice at these tall white interlopers.
We arrived at the house of our host family just before dusk. Like most of the village houses, it was three stories, built of stone and plastered on the inside with red earth. Few windows, earthen hearth. First floor for living and for goats and chickens (on one side), second for sleeping, third for storing crops (hundreds of dried ears of maize). The roof was of closely-fitting tiles, though many neighboring houses had thatch. Since our hosts were wealthy be local standards, they also had a small solar panel powering a fluorescent bulb, and they had built small addition consisting of a toilet room below and a tiny extra bedroom above. Our quarters. The room was high enough for me to stand up in (always a question), and had a bed with a couple blankets on top of its plank for a mattress. A little wider than a twin, and we were to share it. Notions of personal space are one of the first of Western cultural conceipts to go out the window.
As soon as we came in and greeted the patriarch and matriarch of the family, we all feasted on fruit and were soon served good hot daal-bhaat. Everything we ate the whole time, except for spices, salt and tea, came from the family's fields: rice and soupy kidney bean daal; pumpkin, bitter gourd, iscoos, mustard greens; blisteringly hot achars with nutty little seeds (not sesame) ground up with tiny jeera khorsaaani (little "cumin peppers"). And meat--but that's still to come.
Like everyone in the village, our host family was Tamang. Tamang is an ethno-linguistic designation, referring to a few hundred thousand hill dwellers of Tibeto-Burman stock. They are mostly Buddhist but like everyone in this part of the world have been assimilated into the caste system--to the extent that they won't accept water from the Kamis (untouchable blacksmiths) who live down the hill, and that they celebrate Dashain. I was somewhat surprised and definitely happy to see that Tamang identity, at least in Bhorjyang, is thriving: our family spoke more Tamang than Nepali, leaving Alden and I scratching our heads. When a language goes moribund the first sign is amongst the kids, who from an early age will preferentially speak the more dominant, prestifious language to the exclusion of their ancestral tongue. Like English on a global scale, Nepali is such a 'predator' language throughout the eastern Himalayan foothills (in India's Darjeeling district and Sikkim as well as in Nepal itself). But here in the village some of the kids didn't even speak Nepali, though the schools would remedy that soon enough (and do their best to discourage Tamang). The teens were proud to be Tamang, as evidenced by their musical preferences: a single tape of Tamang hiphop was blasted on infinite repeat from our house. It wasn't so bad, the first 18 times through: old-school simplistic rhythms and rhyme schemes against a melodic female vocal-laced beat. The only respite, except for the nighttime hours, was another tape of Hindi film songs and a couple tracks of filthy Southern rap that none of the Tamangs could understand. Alden and I exchanged smiles, shrugs of disbelief.

The only thing I knew about Dashain coming into it was that it's a festival honoring the fierce goddess Durga by spilling blood in her honor. Sure enough, our first morning in Bhorjyang we wandered forth amongst the homesteads and stumbled upon a group of kids, mostly, clustered around a great water buffalo tied to a post. It's not fair to say we stumbled, I suppose, since our host father had impressed on us clearly enough that today we would watch them 'cut' the big beasts. As the designated slaughterers made their last-minute preparations, little kids clung to my pant legs, afraid to look but too curious or horrified not to. As for me, I had slaughtered chickens in Vermont, dozens of them, and even a goat once, though that was hard. This was to be a ritual, a cultural practice. I expected a certain amount of ceremony, so the great arcing first blow with an enormous curved blade almost caught me off guard. The great beast seemed to startle, make some half-noise: and it's neck was missing a great wedge, and a dark red glistening mess was popping out grotesquely. The second swing hacked deeper, almost through, and the animal fell. Another few seconds and they had the head off, the blood draining into a big pot, the feet still kicking. The sheer essential violence of the act hit me hard, and I found myself breaking a cold sweat, my heart racing. I walked away quickly, away from the brutality of that scene, nauseous. I'd heard of Hindus sprinkling water on a sacrificial animal so it shakes itself in supposed assent before its death, but even that paltry religious justification was lacking here. The men seemed gleeful. In the past my objections to eating meat have had to do with considerations of sustainability and the appalling way most animals are raised, and I have mostly made choices to eat meat only when I thought it was ecologically sound. This situation fit those criteria, yet I couldn't imagine wanting to eat that hulking form, collapsed there in the dust. A visceral, as opposed to an rational, reaction.
But this was Dashain, the one time when everyone feasts on meat they can't afford to eat most of the time. The butchering proceeded into the afternoon, with teams of men first covering the buffaloes with burning straw, scraping and scrubbing them, then removing the limbs for further dissection. Every organ was saved, including the small and large intestines, which were squeezed of their liquid contents by hand. The shit mixed with blood at the UNISEF-built community tap. Our family received a sixth of a raango (male buffalo), including our share of each organ. By mid-afternoon we were being fed chunks of liver mixed with red pepper and salt, hunks of belly fat merely singed in the fire, still chewy. I didn't eat much, but there was no question of refusing to share in this family affair. And anyway, what else would I have eaten? There were no vegetables that night. The colon was stuffed with fat for sausage, and the rest of the muscle meat cut into strips and hung to dry over the fire.

When the men weren't buthering beffalo or giving/receiving tika from family members (another Dashain ritual), they could reliably be found in the stone yard in front of my host family's house, gambling. Card games would continue into the night, with thousands of rupees changing hands. Even fields and the small pieces of family gold would change hands with some regularity, I heard. No wonder microcredit organizations target the women of the family: in most of rural Nepal, at least, is it they who make households run, who cook and clean and cut ghaas for the cattle, and who make sure there is some money set aside for clothing, salt, soap.

A bizarre highlight of my third day in the village was a raffle whose prizes consisted of (in order of ascending value) a large Coke, some T-shirts, a topi (hat worn by most Nepali men) a cassette boombox, a pressure cooker, a cell phone, and a castrated goat. I bought two tickets for 50 rupees a pop, one for me and one for Alden, and let him have his pick. Mine was #046. The drawing was preceeded by endless speeches on village development and politics, broadcast by means of a fuzzy microphone setup, and which captured almost nobody's attention. Finally the crowd gathered as the drawing began. I was weirdly prescient that I was going to win, and even debating with myself what I would do with a goat. Not kill it, surely, at least not then . . . sell it, maybe? Raise it on our rooftop in the city? Out of the hundreds of tickets, my number was indeed pulled: I was the proud owner of a brand new bootleg turquoise Diesel T-shirt. I got up on stage in front of the assembled village, had my cheeks and shoulders smeared with vermillion powder, shook some hands, and claimed my prize. Someone asked me to put it on, and I did so, smiled for a camera, Namaste'd to a cheering crowd. Truly surreal, but at least they didn't ask for a speech, and at least it wasn't the goat!

One nice Dashain tradition was the swings built out of bamboo and thick rope and set up at a couple spots in the village. The swinging radius was high, and peopled played "ping" standing up, so it was a bit wilder than your average school playground. Unforunately I didn't get much chance to partake, as starting soon after the first round of feasting I got sick. Predictable enough, given the combination of factors I was exposed to: I drank untreated, unboiled water the whole time I was there, and then ate too much at the biggest feast night after an afternoon of gnawing on lard and chucking away the rinds. At least now I know what giardia is like: the foul sulphurous burps (like buttered popcorn, I thought, in the middle of a miserable night), epigastric pain, diarrhoea, vomiting. But lest my gentle readers think I'm abandoning my Ayurvedic understanding in favor of protozoan explanations, let me say that mere exposure to this nasty little critter isn't enough to make one sick. Alden was drinking the same water as me for days, and didn't have as much as a hiccup. It takes a weakening of the body's defenses to let the giardia organism get a foothold in the lumen of the small intestine, which happens when one's agni (digestive fire, the Ayurvedic term for the body's digestive capacity) becomes low. In such a case you can't digest everything you've eaten, and the lucky little flagellate steps in to finish the job and cause a ruckus in the process. Looking Giardia Lamblia up on wikipedia today I even saw a reference the fact that Giardia generally becomes chronic only when gastric acid secretions are low. Aha! I thought. Confirmation.
After my second sick night (I had recovered in the intermittent day but then caved in to the family's urgent desire that I eat dinner, with nasty results) the poor family was worried enough to take matters into their own hands. Baa woke me up early in the morning, sat me up, and muttered some words while gesturing and finally blowing on and around me in short puffs of air. This is a way of dispelling spirits, commonly identified throughout Nepal as culprits in stubborn or bizarre illnesses. Timilaai bhut aayo, he said. A ghost came to you. Well it ain't my worldview but after the second round of such treatment (and not eating anything for the rest of the day) I did indeed recover in time for the arduous trip back to the city.
Back down the hill we went, my dehydrated body shaking a little on the steep slope under the weight of my pack. Across the river to the road, where we waited for hours for a microbus back to the waystation of Banepa. One last bout of the hiphop tape, burned into my memory forever as the soundtrack to those wretched giardia nights. In Banepa we climbed onto the roof of a packed bus and hung on to the rails as it sped through the cool night air, a mad feeling of exhilaration taking hold and spreading, I thought, through the crowd up there on the bus roof. I had wind-whipped conversations with 3 different Nepalis, hurriedly typed their numbers into my cellphone, before hoping off and sharing a cab for the last leg back to Bhatbhateni, which is starting to feel like home. Alden and our closest friend in the Tamang family, Rajan, who is off to work in Dubai in a week, leave today form the village, taking the long way back on foot as far as Dhulikhel. I'm only a little jealous. Mostly just glad to have my appetite back, and not to have to raise any goats on the roof.

Into the depths

Sat down with a very traditional Brahmin yesterday to talk about Ayurveda, the venerable Southasian medical system, literally 'knowledge of life.' I had a list of questions including one on the politics surrounding Ayurveda in Nepal (the traditional family practitioners butting heads with the more academic, certified ones). But as soon I met this humble, smiling, soft-spoken man, I changed my tack. He was disarmingly open, saying not a word as we seated ourselves and made noises of introduction, but smiling a slight toothy smile that an impatient New Yorker would dismiss as idiotic. But here was a man rich with inner resources cultivated over a lifetime of religious observances, fasting, meditation, and puja (worship). When he did speak it was clear that, like my teacher Dr. Vasant Lad at the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, Dr. Kashi Raj Subhedi embodied Ayurveda. A container molded through long use to fit perfectly its content.
Dinesh had contributed a couple of questions to our list, and was eager for me to ask guru-ji (as he called Dr. Subhedi) about the fundamentals of Ayurveda. I was reluctant, knowing what an enormous topic this is, and feeling that I had at least a passing acquaintance with the philosophical roots of this healing tradition. But Dinesh opened with this question. I struggled to comprehend the Brahmin's softly-garbled, old-fashioned Nepali, but caught the gist of his beautiful and succinct answer. Asked what the fundamental principle of Ayurved is--the root of all knowledge about life, essentially--he spoke of the oneness of inner and outer worlds, the old doctrine of "As above, so below." Just as the wind blows, pushing clouds and carrying scents, so does the wind within the body (Vayu) initate movement and carry signals of communication. Outside, the Sun, representative of fire, provides the heat and light energy that all life needs. Likewise, our fire within (Agni) allows for transformation of one substance into another, as matter into energy when we digest, and governs our metabolism. Too much solar energy in the outside world and we have drying, burning, a desert. Internally, a hyperactive metabolism dries up the juices of life, scorches our delicate membranes with acidic secretions, burns up our lifespan like a candle lit from both ends. This solar/fiery force is counterbalanced by cool, moistening, lunar energy, the earth's watery majority. Water nourishes, soothes, buffers a landscape against high winds and scorching sun. In the microcosm, water (Jal) performs the same role, irrigating our tissues with nourishment. But this force too can be destructive, floodwaters suffocating and overwhelming the capacity of the land to absorb them. Too much water in the body leads to stagnation; water needs air to keep it moving and fire to warm it up and keep it in check.
The Brahmin's message, from what I understood, was not just that such a correspondence exists, but that these worlds are coterminous. There can be no disturbance to the outer world without an effect on the body; conversely, the way we live our individual lives impacts our surroundings, our 'environment.'
The promise of Ayurved is to bring balance and thus health to both outer and inner worlds, but first we must remember that we are but an encapsulation of the world, it a reflection of us. The rest of Ayurveda, the six tastes and seven dhatus, the three doshas and three malas and 20 gunas, all this is simply a set of tools to implement this balancing.

I was fascinated with the guru's lucid grasp of Ayurvedic cosmology, and my thoughts turned to another esoteric branch of this great tree, the preparation and use of mineral preparations, bhasmas. Dr. Subhedi talked of the arduous preparation of these potent medicines, using alchemical terms like 'slaying' the metal and 'cleansing' it. Indeed, bhasmas fall under the alchemical tradition which merged with Ayurveda centuries ago in common pursuit of longevity and self-realization. This is a controversial topic, as rasa shastra (Vedic alchemy) makes use of certain forms of mercury, which is revered as the Semen of Shiva. Potent and dangerous in and of itself, this glistening quicksilver needs stabilization in the form of union with the Ovum of Parvati, sulphur. Alchemical processing involves various samskaras whose upshot is to fuse the two, Mercury and Sulphur, into a stable form (Mercury sulfide, chemically speaking). This black powder, called Kajjali, is chemically inert and hence non-toxic, if correctly prepared, and it is considered a vehicle for carrying other medicines deep into the body and a means of potentizing them.
Dr. Subhedi didn't get into all of this; he just made reference to it en route to discussing the properties of various of the bhasmas. He spoke of Suvarna Bhasma, finely powdered gold; Moti bhasma, oxidized pearl; Tamra Bhasma, copper ash; Krisna Abhrak Bhasma, a preparation of black mica; and others. As he explained, all these elements are present in our bodies as in the earth; bhasmas are powerful because work directly on the level of our elemental composition. Gold bhasma is like a concentrated form of solar energy: hot, stimulating, nourishing in the right quantity. It supports immunity and strengthens the heart. Pearl bhasma is like the moon, or like milk, sweet and cool and nourishing. It counters inflammation and aids in anabolic growth. Tamra, copper, is hot and sharp, with a scraping action. It is used in inflammation/enlargement of the liver, amongst other disorders. And abhrak, mica, a renknowned tonic for the respiratory system, considered beneficial in any disease when mixed with the right herbs.

After a couple hours Dr. Subhedi got up to do his nightly puja, a 2 hour affair. Dinesh and I lingered for a while over cups of tea and then slipped out into a surprisingly peaceful night in a quiet corner of Kathmandu. We stopped at a momo shop for a snack, talking of our next step: to find the few remaining alchemists in Nepal, and learn what we can of that strange art, that beautiful science.

Fit for a King

I had the good fortune yesterday to be invited to a Newar feast, and the intestinal fortitude (despite recent events, see below) to live to tell about it and even to eat some breakfast the next morning.
I arrived in Patan late afternoon, with unseasonable rains threatening to damage the maturing rice crop and flood the imminent festival of Dashain. It had been a long day of navigating the sodden city both on foot and folded into tiny tin buses, newly purchased fabrics clutched tightly about me, but I arrived at my friend's friend's house cheerful. And hungry. As a perpetual guest in this culture, ironically enough, true hunger is rarely something you'll experiece, but there it was. That nervous twinge emanating from an empty belly. And ironically again, we had to wait. There were friends to meet, then more friends, all Patan Newars, and by the time we were all heading to eat it was nearly dark. Mind you I had another dinner to attend, on the other side of town, with an American expat couple I'd been dying to meet--but somehow here I was, hours later than I'd expected, suddenly a welcomed guest at a traditional feast. There was no escape, nor could I really have wished for one, so a phone call later I let myself settle in for the duration.
Before I get to the point--which is the food, of course--I need to make one more digression and explain that this bhoj ( feast) was traditional in a self-conscious sense. It was billed as such, on the tourist-priced Rs. 300 tickets. The whole festival of which it was a part was contrived as some combination of fundraiser and cultural exhibition; all the narrow brick or cobble streets around Patan Durbar Square were filled with Newars of various castes demonstrating their traditional trades, from pounding baji (flattened rice) by hand (nowadays there are machines that do this), to making and hand-firing bricks and tiles, to distilling liquor. There was one area where the entire year's worth of festivals were represented by their distinctive iconography and ritual foods, one after another, on tables around a courtyard. Step over here and it's midwinter, yomari punhi, and eat this sesame-and-molasses filled treat (the yomari) to warm your insides; over here come try this millet beer that the Newar farmers drink on X month. . . it was all fascinating and beautiful to see--this sort of rich cultural elaboration on the ties between season, ritual and food was what drew me back to Kathmandu and formed the basis for my original Fulbright research proposal. But you have to wonder what it means when a cultural group feels the need to put itself on display, or, one might even say, to sell itself. As the Newari man sitting next to me said later at dinner, 'now our culture is less than 25 percent.' I.e. people are no longer making handmade bricks on a daily basis, but they haven't yet forgotten how. There's a sense that these traditions are valuable, both priceless and yet somehow priceable. But back to the feast.
Our tickets purchased, we entered a courtyard and we're Tika'd with vermillion paste and rice, garlanded with red ribbons. Not three step further on a woman thrust little clay dishes of the notoriously strong Newar raksi upon us, along with a large green leaf-plate (i'm a little embarassed, as an amateur ethnobotanist, not know what kind of leaf it was) containing a 3-inch round urad daal pancake topped with unbelievably tasty "buff" (water buffalo meat). The warm-up to the warm-up. We were ushered over to some plastic tables under a tarp. Now chhang--cloudy, tart, slightly sweet rice beer--came in clay vessels one size up from those used for raksi, and a dish of spicy daikon and cucumber achar appeared. What an appetizer! Light, crunchy, and absolutely packed with flavors. What spices, I wanted to know? I counted off the usual suspects: fenugreek? yes. Turmeric? of course. Garlic? that was obvious enough? Cumin, coriander, onion, ginger . . .? yes to all of the above. And of course plenty of chillies. And a small round green thing--vegetable or spice I don't know--whose name was lost in the delicious shuffle. I thought the meal had begun, but no, this was mere child's play, something to accompany the drinks. (I now had another little dish of raksi alongside my chhang). It was now dark, and we moved over to a long table set with metal plates. In good weather we'd have been sitting on long mats on the floor, in long rows facing each other. Now began the processon proper: first the most strictly ritual foods, as far as I understand it, the Samay Baje: a pile of flattened rice (Np chiura, Nw baji) surrounded by little bits each of ginger pickle, black soybeans, a small cube of raw pumpkin, delicate, stemmy mustard greens in mustard oil, and an unidentifiable but memorable achar. I'm already forgetting something, I know it, but there's a time and a place for field notes: this was a time to eat. I followed the lead of my neighbors and set aside the pumpkin piece and a tiny bit of everything else next to my plate--for what deity I know not, in the rich and baffling multi-traditional pantheon of the Newars. Then we tucked in. I barely had time to appreciate the unique savor of each dish before two more appeared, as a line of servers doled out delicacy after delicacy with relentless efficiency. I began to understand the second half of the saying "parbate bigriyo mojle, newar bigriyo bhojle," which translates roughly to "hill Nepalis are ruined by sex, Newars by feasting." It rhymes in Nepali. Anyway, between incredulous mouthfuls of baji flavored with spicy stewed chicken (the British fiction of 'curry' doesn't get us anywhere as far as description goes), cauliflower tarkari, and fragrant, soupy white peas, I caught on from my neighbor's enthusiastic commentary somethig of the set order to all this, the method to the madness. I quickly realized I would have to refuse categorically any offers of seconds of any one dish to have any hope of saving face, trying everything and cleaning my plate at the end. A Newari phrase appeared out of the ether: ghataa, enough! The servers crinkled the corners of their eyes in amusement and gave me little dollops whenever I blinked. There must have been 20 dishes. I remember buff meat; potato and bamboo shoots; something red and very spicy; another incarnation of the daikon achar; assorted buffalo entrails prepared dry (I identified my three little morsels as liver, tripe, ear); another spicy meat broth or other; and raksi. Most everything was perfumed with mustard oil, in which a trace of red onion was fried to a crisp brown. Fenugreek, chillies, turmeric, always. But more subtle permutations of spice, too, mysteries to unravel. At one point a glistening round gulab jamun (a classic Indian sweet, Newar by extension?) was dolloped aboard, "to protect the liver" after the raksi--while the raksi aids in the digestion of the heavy meats, helps the diverse clientele in the bar of the stomach mingle without resentment or mutual suspicion. Nice. At long last, after my world had been focused down to a brass plate and an endless mingling of colors and flavors, came the gentle winding down. A sour, sulphury-salty red broth fell from the sky, lip-smacking after all the preceding richness. Another soupy item, too, bitter and aromatic stewed fenugreek seeds doled out by the tablespoonful or so. Then a scant teaspoon of sprouting raw mung beans, I think they were, and finally a flourish of thick, sweet yogurt. Digestive upon digestive ensuring the continuing health and capacity for gluttony of a people that have attained the status of culinary genius; Ayurvedic principles applied rather perversely, in order to enable otherwise unthinkable levels of consumption. This was truly a feast, of a magnitude I'd never experienced, medieval, almost, in its proportions.
On top of it all I swilled the last of my raksi alongside my compatriots--we were all damn friendly by this point--and ate my gulab jamun with an inward wink at my liver. Handwashing in the dark, much back-clapping and joking, a rare cigarette to celebrate the occasion and give final impetus to my digestive process. Out into the night, in a taxi who's driver had apparently never left the confines of his native Patan--I shouted directional queries out the window at bicyclists and, once in familiar territory, navigated with growing confidence to the house of the American couple. I was only an hour and a half late in the end, quite wthin reason given the circumstances. Their dinner looked good, and I would have called it quite elaborate on any other day. But, except for some Rosh Hashanah apples and honey hours later, I'm eternally grateful they didn't make me eat anything.

an upheaval, an uprise . . . an upchuck

It had to happen sooner or later--the dreaded, violent pangs of my digestive tract turning itself inside out. It hit my last night, after a beautiful afternoon of walking up to a Buddhist nunnery high in the hills that ring the city. My enthusiastic friend Dinesh had suggested the walk, me not realizing we were talking about a half-day excursion up a steep and winding dirt road. In lieu of sufficient water I was reduced to greedily slurping at the mealy apples and bland oranges we had bought down below in Budhanilkantha; at the top, tired and sweaty, I added to this churning brew some salty Tibetan tea, potatoes and flattened rice. I can't blame the water here for this intestinal insurrection, though I did drink it untreated from the taps on this pristine hillside; no, this ailment was a result of prajaparadha, the Sanskrit Ayurvedic term for "crime against wisdom." I ate when not hungry, just to be polite to our gracious host nuns, and mixed the verboten combination of fruit, dairy, and starch in an already struggling stomach. I made it back down the mountain fine in the dusk light, but barely survived the close, smoggy microbus rides back to my shared apartment without giving my guts their due. I'll spare the gentle reader my analysis of the physics of projectile vomiting.

I'm convincend it's good to have thorough purge once in a while--it breaks the routines that life can so easily slip into, gives a sense of perspective through its feverish lens of squirming self-pity. The real payoff, if I may be permitted a moment of masochism, is the following day, today, the day of shaky convalescence that closely resembles a mid-strength hangover. I did little but sit in the apartment and sweat, and read The Grapes of Wrath. Good timing, too: today there was a bandh, a sort of citywide strike that can be described either as popular protest against the latest governmental outrage or as blackmail--as in 'we'll shut down this city until you pay (up) for what you've done'. I'm certainly in no position to judge. So as always happens on these days, the city ground to a halt, tires burning in the street, and instead of fighting through it make some hoped-for appointment with a some contact who is probably staying home anyway, I too put my feet up. Around 4 PM I decided to give wings to a rather curious craving, for sweet black coffee. Being an inveterate meddler, I added some American Ginseng powder and some bitter liver tonic herbs along with the cardamom and sugar, and indeed the concoction perked me up, without the nervous twinge that coffee usually delivers to this Vata-Pitta constitution. I even found the appetite to eat some naan; I'm a new man.

Being sick oneself is a fine opportunity to take a look at folk medical beliefs. The operative one in this case seems to say that one should eat, not fast, when one's stomach is upset. I tend to think it depends on a number of factors, like just how nauseous and feverish one is, and am glad there was no Nepali aama around to force feed me in the night. As with many such beliefs in this part of the word, however, there may be an Ayurvedic basis for it (or, conversely, these tidbits of folk wisdom may have preceded the formal codification of Ayurveda a few thousand years ago). The concept of agni, digestive fire, is central to Ayurveda, and a certain logic argues that when the fire is weak it's necessary to feed it so it can grow strong. This has to be done carefully, so simple foods are appropriate, like plain bread, or the quintessential Ayurvedic convalescent food kichari, a stew of split mung beans (mung daal) and rice. Even now I can feel the dull flames in my beat-up belly lapping with renewed vigor at the starchy fuel I've just laid on top of the coals.

Another area where Ayurvedic concepts run together with everyday, popular conception is in the realm of heating and cooling foods: black (urad) daal, most meats, and sesame seeds are examples of hot or heating foods that are best consumed during winter. Similarly, when one has a cold (a Kapha disorder, Ayurvedically speaking), one should avoid cold drinks, yogurt, cucumbers, and other cold or cooling items. This seemingly simple (if unfamiliar) notion is not as straightforward as it seems, though, since Nepalis have no qualms about eating blazingly hot/spicy food in any weather. A lapse, a blindspot in the system? Perhaps not; it is well-documented that all the major chilli-eating cultures are distributed in tropical and subtropical latitudes, and that chilies have a cooling effect in the long run since they promote sweating. Thus hot peppers are hot in the short run, with their digestion and metabolism-stimulating effects, but ultimately cooling. (Fellow students of Ayurved, what do you say to this potentially blasphemous piece of thinking? Are chillies hot in taste, hot in virya and sweet in vipak!? They certainly don't seem to promote constipation, as they should if they had a pungent post-digestive effect.)

I should use the occasion of this otherwise rather trivial and self-centered entry (sorry, Beth, not to continue along yesterday's lofty train of thought) to relate another vignette or two about life in Nepal. In addition to the bandh, the water ran out today. I don't know how widespread the outage is, but the flow from our tap dwindled to a trickle this afternoon before drying up completely. This annoying cloud has a definite silver lining in that we're no forced out to the dhunge dhaaraa, the neighborhood water tap, to fill jugs for domestic use. Everyone is doing the same, so it becomes quite the social event. A quintessential Nepali experience, as bathing at said tap will be if the water doesn't start flowing soon.

Tradewinds a-blowing

I'm back from Dhulikhel, a moderate-sized old Newar (and new tourist) town just outside the hustle and bustle of the Valley. I returned with spoils: a glass Horlicks jar filled with waterbuffalo ghyu (clarified butter) and a one liter soda bottle filled with mahi (buttermilk, the side-product of freshly-churned butter). To find good quality dairy products, you have to look outside domain of the monetary economy, which means you have to go to the villages which still make up the most typical kind of community in hill Nepal. In the city, ghyu is adulterated with hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and milk comes from (I have reason to suspect) from grain-fed, antibiotic-laden cows in crowded dairies without a shred of greenery in sight. Then it's watered down, and probably reconstituted with added powdered milk before being sealed in plastic baggies and distributed for Kathmandu's morning chiyaa.
As a westerner in Nepal, it's hard not think about issues of "development," bikaash, a word on everyone's lips. It's impossible to argue that Nepal is just fine as it is, what with the glaring social and health issues that plague these hills, from appalling infant mortality rates to young women being sold into the Indian sex trade . . . it's a long list. But the supposed solution of development is rife with problems of its own. This is an enormous debate that I've hardly dipped my feet into, but even a casual glance into its murky depths is startling enough to provoke a double take.
In Panauti, a two hour walk from Dhulikhel that Alden and I stretched into a 6 hour walk by stopping to share an avocado (a novelty--is it a fruit? a vegetable? with salt and chili peppers, an achar? not many converts to this strange fleshy bulb) with some tea house locals, to discuss rice varieties and crop rotations with a peasant farmer who then asked for 1000 rupees for his trouble (we gave him 55, too much for 15 minutes of work; he said, 'we're poor people, what can we do?'), and to investigate an egg-production facility that employed 10 workers and housed 15,000 hens--in Panauti, after walking and talking all day, we settled down for some momos at a hole-in-the-wall and found ourselves in another in-depth conversation with some young men. These guys were under 30, and like most of their demographic group, they were consumed with scheming their way to America. All their friends had already left: how, they asked, could they get by here, working their fathers' terraced rice paddy fields, when the snack (fried buffalo meat) and drink (whisky and coke) they were enjoying cost 300 rupees? The issue at the heart of these guys' rhetorical question, of course, is that of modernization: the lead of advertizements and peers demands consumption levels well above what a simple subsistence-based economy can support. The question wouldn't arise if these men had contented themselves with chiura (dry, flattened rice) and yogurt washed down with locally-distilled raksi. One foot in the fast-flowing current of the global economy immediately pulls the other one in too.
In situations like this one, I always feel obliged to speak of America's problems. Lousy food, I say; bigrieko (broken) families. Lifelong debt, too much work, not enough satisfaction. I'm not the only one to notice the irony: Nepalis flock to America while Americans like me aim for "third-world" Nepal. Yet as I write America's unsustainable, growth-based economy is in shambles, toppling in on itself. Meanwhile, the local traditions I place so much value in, from Ayurvedic medicine to traditional agriculture and cooking, are losing their integrity due to pressures emanating from the West. The middle-aged Baidya I met in Dhulikhel no longer follows the family tradition of making his own medicines from herbs he has gathered--the mass-produced Ayurvedic products from India are fine, and there's more money in them. He still knows the theory, reads pulses, but his son is training to be an Allopathic doctor.
That's my spiel for today, except that I don't want to end on a sour note. Who was who said 'expect the worst, hope for the best?' Wallowing in the mud makes the starlight look awful bright. There are rays of hope here, and in America too. Or call them flowers growing out of toxic ground--now we need them to cross-pollinate. For the fate of globe is all bound up with itself, every seemingly loose end connected to the rat's nest tangle of the whole. This has always been true in an abstract sense, only now it's painfully concrete. Nepal needs America, and America needs Nepal.

Hospitality

Asti means 'the day before yesterday.' but it can refer to any day in the recent past, especially if you can't tell where one ends and the next begins or don't care to figure it out. Asti, rhymes with "moss tee". So asti, after a long day spent touring around the outskirts of Kathmandu with an American friend and a Nepali one, I was ready to put my feet up. This same friend and I had an invitation to dinner at the house of another Nepali acquaintance. We climbed into a bus, which followed the trail of black smog around some of the city's major roads until we got to Swayambhu, the 'monkey temple.' Here we waited and waited amongst honking traffic and fruit vendors for this friend to appear. The sun set. The power went out. We waited. Finally, after dozens of distorted phone attempts it became clear that he meant to meet us at the other police station, by the other gate of the temple. We took a cab and there he was, waiting patiently. Steeling ourselves with the thought of imminent refreshments we followed him through narrow alleys to the house he was sharing with, he said, a couple of sisters. Inwardly I relished the thought of a nice quiet dinner, just us and a few young Nepalis who, I thought, wouldn't be inclined to ask endless questions about American life. We could catch our breath, fill out bellies in peace. Well. The universe is a contrary bugger, but I'm beginning to suspect it usually knows what's good for us, and some times it rubs our faces in it. Up the stairs we go, into the sort of Southasian living room that has many a Westerner scratching their head (is that a Swiss chalet poster on the wall? Or a gingerbread house? What does 'love is one flower for your bouquet life' mean? etc. etc.). No women of a sisterly age are to be seen, but there's old Amma and four grandcildren. As if the cement doorway were a revolving door, in come neighbors, friends, relatives, finally the promised didis, everyone with questions for us, it's true. By this time we've been served some khaajaa (see preceding post), peanuts and pickled daikon, along with some cloudy homemade raksi. There's nothing much else to tell--we ate and drank, and then ate again when at 10 0'clock or so when the khaanaa was ready. Goat meat, in our honor, flavored the rice mountain with its spicy juices. There was no peace, or at least no quiet, but lots of stories, jokes, impersonations, schemings--just lots of living, as people with big families do. I learned a few words of Tamang, and heard tales of the family's home village in the hills of Kabre east of the valley. People recently moved to Kathmandu usually like to talk about their family homes amongst quiet, lush hills. They'd rather be there, you'll hear. In those same towns, talk to a youth and chances are you'll learn how backwards it is there, how it's not for him, this country life, no, he's going to the city where there's opportunities, and money.
With what looked to be and indeed turned out to be another busy day ahead, I somewhat guiltily declined their offer that I spend the night. My friend accepted, and found himself sharing a bed with who knows how many family members, eating daal-bhaat again with all of them crowded into the kitchen in the morning. I'd tumbled out of their cycle, back to my own mattress and a house whose quiet was almost disconcerting. It's nice, though, to feel that if ever I find my way to that Tamang household they'll make room for me in their lives' daily rhythms as if I never missed a beat.

Rice vs. all comers

21 September / 5 Ashoj

I'm staying at a friend's place in Bhatbhateni, a relatively quiet, Westernized/ritzy neighborhood north and east of the heart of Kathmandu. The worst thing about not living with a local family is not being fed. This may be a blessing in disguise, though, since in this context being fed is reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel. The tradition of hospitality runs strong here, and that mostly boils down to food and lots of it. And for the un-initiated, Nepali food* is quite a strange beast.
By food, I mean rice. The Nepali word for food is 'khaanaa,' and it is literally synonymous with daal-bhaat, the ubiquitous staple of boiled rice and thin lentil/pulse broth. Of course everyone eats other things besides--boiled eggs, fruit, milk, tea, momos (tibetan-style dumplings), chowmein, all kinds of meat (except beef), chowmein, and, increasingly, chips, fries, soda, and pizza. Or chiura, dry flattened rice,but this doesn't really count as rice at all. Everything just listed falls into a different category altogether: it is 'khaajaa,' roughly 'snack food.' One might eat it in the morning, before the mid-morning khaanaa, or in the afternoon with tea, or while walking down the street. But it's not food, really. Just 'time pass,' as the Indian Anglicism goes.
So twice a day, if all is going well, you have your daal-bhaat. It comes on a metal plate with a lip around it to contain the juices, or a TV-dinneresque subdivided plate. Either way, if you're focusing on the meal in front of you the various colorful adornments aren't likely to distract you from the dominant feature: the mountain of rice. For starters--and you will be given more--it's about 4 times as much rice as you'd get with your beef with broccoli at a Chinese place in the states. It's white, and fluffy, and there's a ton of it. There's also a small metal bowl of daal, your soupy lentils, one of dozens of kinds of whole or split legumes, with or without floating bits of vegetables, spiced or plain. This is for lubricating the rice, and for adding some protein. There are one or two vegetable dishes, unless it's special occasion (you're a guest in someone's house, say), in which case one of these is a meat dish, probably goat. Almost every meal of daal-bhaat includes a potato dish, which counts as a vegetable, much to the chagrin of the gringos who may at this point throw their hands up in despair of something green. Luckily for them, it is equally common to find some sort of saag (cooked greens) as the other veg dish. All these vegetables are intensely flavored--with ginger, garlic, cumin, coriander, ajwan, fenugreek, chilies, mustard oil--and plenty of salt. It's no coincidence that there ain't a whole lot of them, just enough in fact to flavor every mouthful of rice. For this same purpose the plate always includes an even more concentrated source of flavor, the achar. If you got a quarter cup of tarkari (veggies), the achar will amount to maybe a teaspoon. It's generally so spicy, salty and/or sour that you wouldn't want much more than that. Popular achars around here are either toasted sesame seed-based or tomato-based, pasty or runny respectively. Finally there may be some raw onion, or daikon radish, or cucumber--western concessions, I suspect, for those who clamor for salad. This is not the country for salad-eaters.
So how do you tackle this smorgasbord? Well, you roll up your sleeves, wash your hands--your right hand, anyway--and dig in. Eating with your fingers is a much more sensual experience than employing a metallic middleman. You 'taste' the food twice, feeling its temperature and consistency before it enters your mouth. There's an art to this kind of eating, of course, and takes a few times before it's comfortable for a bideshi (foreigner). But soon you're mixing away, balling up perfect mouthfuls of wettened rice, a morsel of succulent potato, a twist of bitter mustard greens, a trace of fiery achar. And if you're not careful you'll look up just in time to see another avalanche of bhaat cascading down on top of it all, and a wickedly-smiling woman's face. Don't hesitate. Accept your fate, stretch your stomach, and soon you too will be a rice-eater, someone who can't be satisfied with anything else edible. For the slightest sign of hesitation will prompt protests of 'mitho bhaena? isn't it good?' and you'll have to do overtime to make up for your rudeness.

The daily necessity of eating provides plenty of opportunities for cross-cultural comparison, above and beyond the content of the food. My friend Alden and I have been frequenting a hole-in-the-wall near his place, where a stout and sassy Gurung or Tamang woman serves up daal-bhaat twice a day for fiftee rupees a plate (less than a dollar). Never mind the fact that she's 4 foot 2 and I 6 foot 3 and our weights are roughly equal--we're about equally far our on the no-man's land region of the bell curve. I'm more interested in how she interacts her customers, joking with them, handing them single cigarettes, grubby glasses of homemade liquor. From the first time I met her she took me in stride and called me "Babu." This is not a Kansas family restaurant. If I thought of the place as a restaurant at all, I'd be amused by the juxtapositions of American popstar posters next to Buddhist images on the mildewy walls, and perhaps annoyed when the rice is cold. After all, you have to come at the right time! Where's the menu, anyway? And what's that chicken doing underfoot, pecking up rice from one end and fouling the place up from the other? Come next week, babu, and you'll find him on your plate.


*'Nepali food' is a bit of a fiction, as there are hundreds of ethnolinguistic groups in this country and no two of them shares exactly the same culinary culture. The high-Himalayan peoples eat very little rice, and lots of barley and yak products and potatoes. In the Terai, Nepal's southern plains region that borders India, you're apt to find roti (wheat flatbread) as often as daal-bhaat, and the spicing of the 'curries' (meat or veg dishes) will be more North Indian than what I've described. Newar food, dspite coming from Nepal's heartland, is different again and absolutely unique. But it's true that daal-bhaat spans many of the ethnic or tribal divides, and the differences frmi one plate to another don't outweigh the basic commonalities.