Knave-like calm

Oped >> Lead Article

PRAWIN ADHIKARI

NOV 01 - The couple from California has travelled a long way to see Nepal. They are prepping for a trip to Ghorepani by pootling around Dhulikhel. The woman from Sacramento takes a small step back when an old Nepali woman takes a step forward to return the gaze: perhaps budhi-aama doesn’t see very well the glint of fascination in the foreigner’s eyes, so she must get all up in her bidness, yo! “Why did you ask my age?” asks budhi-aama.

“No reason,” the Californian is flustered. “For reference,” she says. Poor woman, the way she shrinks back apologetically is too apparent, too unnecessary. Budhi-aama’s goats have also pootled away: their teeth shaving the landscape, they perhaps greedily eye the thick garland of marigold around the Kali temple at the top of the hill, preserved and cared for by the army. A minute earlier, the Californian had asked me to guess budhi-aama’s age. I guessed seventy-five, asked her, and she replied: sixty and sixteen. Life must seem particularly long when you live not the continuous tape of annual increments, but in leaps between twenty-year marks, with each interim year a potential grave-fall. But the stick in budhi-aama’s hand is thin and polished-for the backside of a prancing goat, not for her to lean upon.

“Don’t worry,” I tell the Californian who wonders if it is alright to ask people their age here. She has recently been flattered by thirteen year old girls who put her age at forty five, although she is a full decade older. “If people live to be her age, they are proud of it. They’ve lost most of their friends and some children by that age, and everyday must be a blessing and a burden to them.” What a thing to say to a stranger, about a stranger. It makes me want to shut up. But the Californian asks me what I think of what is happening to the country.

I don’t like what is happening to the landscape. Problems in the urban centres are the result of problems in the rural areas of the country. “Californians buy big cars. American government buys Saudi oil. Saudis build tall buildings in the desert. Nepali men build these tall buildings. They send their wages home. Their families want to buy new stuff with the cash that is wired to them. Roads are built to take ever-new stuff to the villages. That, in short, is our experience of development.” The explanation works because it includes the Californian in a role in which they excel: self-hate for being the most prosperous group of people on the face of the planet, martyr-like appetite for blame for the problems of the rest of the world. I am not sure if I have spoken the truth to her.

Jess and May, twins from Sheffield who have freshly taught me the word pootling, are ready for some more pootling through the villages on the other side of the hill: aimless and languid wandering. We tell stories-they of a dance-off in Manchester that May won on their twenty-fifth birthday, me about my mother’s father and his hunting stories. We walk to the grassy field beneath the communication tower. The land drops dramatically to the south; the grass has dried to a waxy yellow shine and is slippery underfoot, and the long trough of a narrow valley points to the east, blued and hazed with the water breathed out by a thick forest. On the northern horizon a panorama of the Himalayas, with Mister Everest just a pointy black rock dwarfed by genuinely dramatic mounts and ridges of snow. And all around the honeyed glaze of a late-October sun.

Budhi-aama materialises on the ridge of the cliff ahead, climbing out of the grass like an apparition, her dhoti hitched up mid-thighs, slapping the grass with the thin switch in her hand. I remember leaning in to ask her the question about her age earlier, and how she had eagerly leaned in, locking my face with hers, my eyes with her eyes. She has a full set of teeth, face folded like the mouth of a purse that must hide too much. Her goats come to nibble at my toes. A kid is particularly pretty and Jess gives it a slice of an apple. I am polishing an apple on my shirt when budhi-aama comes to stand between me and the valley. I offer her the apple.

“No, no, it is your food,” she says. I insist. She insists right back. I pat my belly and say, “Look! Do you really think I need more food?” She laughs and takes the apple. May scampers out of the bushes and complains about sharp grass that poked her. Budhi-aama looks at each of us. “Where are you from?” she asks. May slices the apple into really small pieces which budhi-aama bundles them into her waist-wrap patuka. She stands there and gazes to the south, too, although I can’t imagine how she can see that far into the approaching world.

And then I fall into a knave-like calm, an absence of thought. Budhi-aama goes to stand by a jutting rock that looks like a crow diving into the abyss. Below her the grass flames in yellow and above her the sky is flecked. The sound of crickets becomes louder. Buses honk and race along a highway hidden by tiled roofs and pine-ridges. Work is working itself into a pleasant knot far in the recesses of the thinking mind, but here is only the inquisitive nibble of a month-old goat kid. As on budhi-aama’s legs, the sun layers itself as a brown sheen over my arms, neck, nose, pockets of lasting warmth. I don’t ask Jess if there is a Sheffield word for sitting in the sun like this, like a log left out to cure, immobile like the grin on an old tiger skin, like the wind-worn roundness of a chalk-stone atop a hill, like a shiny thin stick planted into the ground by an old goatherd. Nothing in this moment is for reference. All is for experience of the unforgettable, inexplicable sort.