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emma-commonlanguages · 2 years

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On my own in Nepal: 06.01-06.02

Dhundup took a while to emerge from the shower, but I saw him briefly at breakfast the next morning, before he left for school. I wondered if it would be awkward, but it was like any other morning, perhaps with an extra ocular glint. I lingered around the house in the morning. These were some of the hardest moments for me—the lingering, the in-betweens, waiting to go—feeling like I couldn’t go where I wanted to go on my own, though I probably could. Sometimes I found myself waiting for Dhundup to wake up or come home. These were my least favorite because they made me feel ashamed, waiting for a man. I wanted to be busy with my travels.

I was due to go to Patan that afternoon, where I’d booked a chic apartment in an old Newari building to stay for the next two nights. At lunch before I left, Dawa and Hiumaya told me to be safe, as a white woman on my own.

“You are very pretty,” Dawa told me in that daunting way my father repeatedly had before I left. Over the last few weeks I’d come into a new relationship with beauty and the bits of it I’d received, warned of its dupes and misgivings, without ever feeling sorry for myself.

“Would it be alright to return to my hotel from dinner in the dark… around 7, 8pm?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Dawa said.

He told me a story about a Scandinavian girl who stayed with them and came home from Thamel one night with a man who Dawa knew to be a gangster. Dawa warned her, but she didn’t have ears for it. She left to stay with him and days later when caught alone with him and 7 other men, she ran for the nearest hospital, fearing for her life. The hospital called Dawa, her one contact in Nepal.

We concluded a series of bad decisions led the Scandinavian girl to this situation.

“Don’t be afraid, just be aware,” Dawa said.

The conversation—almost an exact replica of the one I had with my own parents before leaving the States, except wiser—made me feel caught in the embrace of the closest thing to kin we can choose for ourselves 8,000 miles from the family I’d been born into.

Before I’d left for Nepal a friend had jokingly referred to Patan as ‘the Brooklyn of Kathmandu,’ and driving in I thought this must be Kathmandu’s own flavor of hip, edging antique and modern. I checked into the apartment I’d booked and relished in all the space I had to myself—dark wood and terracotta floors, local made rattan and reclaimed wood furniture, kilim rugs, and moderately tasteful throw pillows, a full kitchen I wouldn’t use, and a laundry machine I would.

I ate in the cafe at, I think what must be, the fanciest hotel in Patan. The chicken momos they served me were raw and the diarrhea I already had, continued. Ever since I started eating outside Hiumaya’s homegrown, organic, vegetarian kitchen, my stomachs been in knots, and I’ll forever associate the streets of Patan with a slow., guttural spin cycle.

The following day I wandered into the Durbar (Main) Square of Patan, visiting the museum, where I was most fascinated by the exhibits on Hindu Tantrism.

Lying dormant at the lowermost chakra is Kundalini Shakti, ‘coiled-up female energy,’ often represented as a serpent… By arousing and elevating her through the chakras to unite with Shiva, the tantric adept transcends his or her own ego and merges with cosmic consciousness… For most of humanity she will lie there, dormant and unknown. Only the skilled adept will arouse and control her.

I am not naive to the ways in which new-age tranrism has run awry, but I am suspicious of the ways in which religion has suppressed sensuality, the opportunity to release the divine within us. This unleashing seems to me like the frontier deepened spirituality.

From there, I roamed the alleyways, popping into artisan shops, stocking hammered copper and brass butter lamps, singing bowls, jewels, and linens, stopping at a kiosk for tea. I ate ramen for dinner at a far better Japanese restaurant that evening. The rest of my time in Patan was spent like this, enjoying my independence to roam.

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emma-commonlanguages · 2 years

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Love in Nepal: 05.30-05.31

Monday Morning was the day Jim and I arranged to meet up in Bouhda. It was Memorial Day in America, which felt like an appropriate day to meet up with a fellow American in Nepal. I was stoking up my courage to walk alone for the first time down from the house to Bouhda, about a 20-minute walk, but at breakfast Dhundup offered to give me a ride on his way to school, so I rode on the back of his motorcycle down to Bouhda.

At first I hung on to his backpack straps, but when we turned down a steep road and he released the brakes, I hugged his waist and we laughed, and I held onto him like that the rest of the way. He dropped me off at Himalayan Java, where Jim and I had planned to meet. I hugged him goodbye and walked away, wondering where the easy flow between us was leading, suspicious I knew.

Jim was sittting in the window overlooking the Bouhda Stupa. We looked at each other and sort of ducked our heads in that way of registering whether we were the people we were meant to meet, then threw our hands in the air and hugged when we knew the other was who we thought they were. He laughed at how everyone in the cafe would probably never guess we hadn’t met before and extolled the () of the internet, that otherwise we would have never connected.

Sitting down at the cafe table after ordering a latte he commented that I seemed balanced, that I must have good parents. We spoke about for a while, about living in California, then returned to Kathmandu. He seemed to me like a relic from the 60s in Kathmandu when the hippies fled here from the States.

He led me into a Dolpo art gallery, displaying an artist whose work he’d traded in the States, then onto another rooftop cafe where we shared a guava lassi. We passed through his hotel to pickup his iPad and standing in the doorway of his hotel room and my trust in him wavered. I worried if I’d wrongfully relied on his guidance in a foreign country. I wondered because he commented on my appearance a few times. He motioned me to come in, to show me the pigeons that visited his windowsill. I sheepishly took a few steps inside to peer over to the the window, smiled a bit, then backed out. I think he could sense my timidity and I sense he understood it because he then quickly slipped his iPad into his briefcase and we walked back outside.

We took lunch at healthy vegetarian restaurant called Utdulpa, sharing a mushroom salad and veggie mo:mos. I asked him more about his art business and listening made me muse about starting a South Asian fabric and clothing business, so we began plotting plans for me to frequently travel back and forth between Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Bali, acquiring silks, sarongs, khurtas, and () to sell back in the States.

When we said goodbye outside Utdulpa, my gut suggested he was a funny old man with a real open energy, who loved women, but I could trust him. We made a plan to meet at the Dolpo Gallery tomorrow morning to share a taxi to Thamel, where he planned to meet with business partners. He said he would show me around Thamel and take me to some tangkha galleries beforehand.

I walked home alone for the first time, and did okay.

That afternoon I messaged Dhundup and asked if he wanted to catch live music somewhere, tonight or tomorrow. Tomorrow, he said.

The following morning I was sipping seabuckthorn juice in the Dolpo Gallery when Jim walked in, in his large way. He sat while I finished my juice and then we went out to catch a taxi, an art of negotiation in Nepal because taxis don’t use meters anymore.

“Miro cuide,” Jim said, his head halfway in the window of the first taxi we’d flagged down, “tourist chaina,” which roughly means, ‘I am white, tourist no.’ The Nepali word ‘cuide’ literally translates to ‘light eyes,’ and it’s how Nepalis refer to Westerners, though rarely to our faces, so the taxi driver was a bit astonished to hear Jim refer to himself as such. Jim negotiated his price, adding in a banana for extra negotiation leverage, and we tucked into the taxi.

Inside, Jim told me to try to avoid getting in taxis with young men. “They have less to loose.” Instead, he advised flagging down old cabbies—who usually had a wife and children—or cabbies with a Buddha on their dashboard—who usually had a sense of karma.

As we passed the Grand Palace, we spoke about they 2008 massacre, in which the king’s nephew assasinated him to take over his reign, only briefly however because -. For years following, armed guards surrounded the Grand Palace, at practically every gate post, Jim said. It occurred to me how politically unstable Nepal was until recently with -.

Halfway there, the skies opened up. Even with the windows rolled up, water leaked through. We got out across the street from the Garden of Dreams. Jim wanted me to peak in to see if I wanted to come back later. We peered into the garden’s finely manicured lawns and clean fountains beyond the ticket counter. It looked nothing like Kathmandu. And promptly left because a guard yelled at us to pay.

We wandered into main part of Thamel. The streets were more commercial than Bouhda, and busier with white tourists, some even in denim shorts, which I hadn’t seen since leaving Washington. Jim led me into a tagkha shop he worked with. The shop owner’s wife sat on the ground inside, folding clumps of cotton and string into tampons. We spoke with her for a while then wandered on, into pashmina and rug shops and cafes. Jim knew the owners of all of them.

We ended at the site of the gallery he used to own in Thamel, ‘Lotus Gallery,’ now a trekking shop, owned by the guy he opened the gallery with and drank tea admidst counterfeit North Face, Ac’teryx, and Moutain Hardware puffer jackets and dry-fit pants.

Jim and I parted ways, I ate chicken tika at The Third Eye, an infamous Indian restaurant in Thamel, wandered around on my own, then settled into a cafe once I grew weary of people hassling me to buy their cashmere and wool. Dhundup met me there about an hour later. I drank a beer and he drank watermelon juice. He wasn’t drinking because it was SAKA DAWA, a period of time between June and July’s new moons when the Buddha was born, became enlightened, and died, which Buddhists honor by not drinking or eating meat.

From there, we went to Purple Haze where his friend was playing in the band. We took a table in the balcony and ordered a pizza and another beer for me. The beer bottles in Nepal are ()mL each. I felt drunk only a glass into the second one and couldn’t finish it. The band played American covers, a bit cheesy, but I was enjoying myself. Dhundup periodically asked if I was okay, in the British way, meaning ‘how are you doing?’ but disinterested in a long answer, rather than the way Americans alarmingly ask the same question. This question and response and the rest of our intermittent conversation between songs took place in whispers in each other’s ears.

We decided we wanted to go dancing afterwards, so he took me to an empty club. Empty because it was a Tuesday and because it was off-peak tourist season. We stood on the side of the square dance floor, surrounded by green floor lights and guards, contemplating whether we’d stay or go, and he pulled me into the middle. We started dancing, goofily while the guards maintained their stern expressions. I felt bloated and oppressed by my fanny pack, stuffed with a rain jacket, around my waist, and slightly awkward in my day hiking shoes, but I danced anyway. A few other pairs, sitting in various corners of the club, joined us on the dance floor. He had this shyness about him, which broke into confidence. He spun me around. And around the same time, we decided it was time to go home.

We wandered through alleyways of Thamel to the street where he’d parked his motorcycle, which was safer than the main streets of Thamel, he said. Before he put his helmet on, we stood on opposite sides of his motorcycle, and I wished he’d reach across and kiss me, but he put his helmet on, strattled the bike, and motioned me to do the same.

The streets were empty, it was 11:30pm, maybe. He meandered in the left lane and sped up on the straightaways. I flinched and held on tighter when he did this. I wondered if that encouraged him to keep doing it, so then I tried not to react. The air felt fresher at night.

At home he asked if I wanted tea. I said yes. He told me to go freshen up while he prepared tea. I met him in the kitchen and started walking towards the couches in the living room with my tea, but he redirected me to his bedroom. I think we must have switched positions a dozen times—me in his desk chair, him on his bed, me on the floor, him in his desk chair, us both on the floor with a map of Annapurna splayed out, me lying flat on the floor. He told me I could lay down in his bed if I wanted. We started watching the Jimi Hendrix movie, me laying down in his bed, him kneeling on the floor, leaning on the bed. We carefully arranged ourselves as we figured out how to arrange ourselves in relation to one another.

I could feel myself falling asleep, so I told him I ought to go to bed. He said okay. We hugged goodnight, and as we pulled out of it, we looked at each other and said, “thank you.” I maintained eye contact with him, curious and confused, even when he started leaning in. He kissed me, almost urgently, as if he was riding a stroke of courage. His lips were big and slippery and coaxed mine open. He pulled me in closer, our hips flush, I could feel the bulge in his pants between the layers of our clothes against me, my vulva suddenly intensely there. Taken, I let him land me in bed as we continued kissing.

Momentarily lit and extinguished, I wanted that to be it for the night, so I wished him goodnight, but he hugged me tighter and asked if we could finish the movie in his bed, or my bed. I shook my head and turned around. He hugged my waist from behind, playfully. Then let me go. We stood outside his doorway for a moment, unsure how to part. “Okay, see you tomorrow,” I said.

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emma-commonlanguages · 2 years

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Family in Nepal: 05-28-05.29

“What will you do today?” Mary asked breakfast.

I felt the panic of having no definitive plan or one reliant on contingencies. I told her I thought I’d walk down to the Boudha Stupa. I asked if she’d like to come with me. I was scared to walk the streets alone. I didn’t know it then, but my fear was just that—fear, and not intuition; culture shock, not suspicions of real danger, though I knew to still be cautious, navigating foreign places on my own.

Dawa looked at Mary in a way that suggested agreeing was her duty. “She’s your American sister, you share the same passport” he said in a soft, jovial tone, and in Nepali, which I later asked him to translate, “she’s paying us and we’re paying for you, so… go on.”

I pleaded him not to guilt her into it.

But her outstanding plans for the day were to clean her room and nap, so she seemed content to put these tasks off and come with me to the Bouhda Stupa. Hiumaya gave us each an umbrella in case of rain and we headed out.

My first memories of the streets of Kathmandu are in Mary’s wake—wearing flowing floral pants and top, carrying a rusty periwinkle umbrella, her silky black hair tied in a low bun, revealing a set of small gold hoop earrings. She’d grab my forearm before crossing the street, which made me feel my situational vulnerability despite being 10 years her senior, but it also made me feel cared for.

The streets narrowed and through an alleyway we caught our first glimpse of the Bouhda Stupa—blue Buddha eyes and a squiggly nose, painted on a golden steeple. Mary touched her head, heart, and head again in reverence. We emptied into the Stupa and Mary led me in three ‘koras’ (ritual circumambulations around the Bouhda Stupa).

“You do either an odd number of koras or 108 koras,” Mary told me. We did three.

Monks anointed smaller temples around the big temple with holy water and people lapped the Bouhda in a series of motions, touching their foreheads, mouths, and hearts with prayer hands, then bowing, and completely splaying their bodies horizontally on the wet, stone ground. “I wish I could tell you about the history of the Bouhda Stupa, but I just don’t know,” Mary said. I’d never witnessed such sheer devotion.

Mary pointed out her favorite restaurant for pizza, ‘The Roadhouse Cafe’ and ‘Himalayan Java,’ infamously loved among Westerners. We peeked into monasteries and spun the large prayer wheels, engraved with the Sanskrit letters representing ‘OM MANI PADME HUM,’ in dizzying circles.

We wandered into the larger White Monastery off one of the alleyways running north from the Stupa. The white buildings appeared dirty and forgotten. Monks walked swiftly in pairs and groups across our path and classroom chanting dissipated across the courtyard. Mary was fascinated by the squirrels in the trees. When sightseeing felt complete, we returned home, back up the hill. Mary had me lead the way, testing if I knew my way back.

The next morning, I similarly woke up with an idea of a few things I might like to do but timidity about executing them alone. At breakfast Dawa told me one of their neighbors, a fellow Tamang, had died of diabetes, and that today was his death ceremony. He asked if I’d like to come, suggesting that though melancholy, it would be a good way to experience Nepali, and more specifically Buddhist Tamang, culture and rituals.

Dawa, Hiumaya and I walked through the neighborhood to their local monastery where the ceremony was to take place. In the beginning, it was a lot of sitting, while people filtered in and out of a prayer room where the body was wrapped in khatas.

Dawa introduced me to his niece, who was sitting across the table from me: “You know Tom Kelly? Chadani used to work with him, photographing for National Geographic.” I wasn't sure I knew who Tom Kelly was, but we fell into conversation easily.

Chadani seemed instantly cool to me, wearing a white peasant top, jeans, and white sneakers. She had a tattoo band around her arm and Sanskrit letters on her chest under necklaces. She asked about my plans in Nepal and we spoke about the best places to trek in monsoon season. She shared photographs of snow peaks and children, ravaged of innocence, from her latest trek in Manaslu. She spoke impeccable English. She told me the other Tamang women never spoke to her, that as an unmarried, independent, career woman, they didn’t relate.

Men were hanging garlands of marigolds on a blue pickup truck in the monastery courtyard. I asked Chadani if that’s how the body would be transported. She said yes, to the cremation site. Everyone would follow in buses. We continued on like that for the rest of the ceremony, me whispering questions in her ear, her patiently explaining, monitoring my disturbance, praising perceived bravery. I asked if we would watch the body burn. She said we would, that some gurus believed watching a body burn expedited one's path to enlightenment.

She told me that in the last year she’d held death ceremonies for her mom and sister. Her mom died first, then her sister of depression. Everyone thought her dad was next, but Chadani took him on holidays and kept him occupied. Dawa said whatever she was doing was working. Her boyfriend died last year too, she told me. I looked in her eyes for pain and just saw resilience.

Bustling and reconfiguration suggested people would carry out the body soon. I wasn’t sure where to stand. The man’s daughters stood behind an altar holding up butter lamps as a set of four men emerged with the body, wrapped in khatas, crumpled and limp in a carrier, constructed of plywood. Women started wailing in protest.

The cremation site was on top of a hill, which we climbed to on a winding path behind the funeral procession. A mentally ill girl in a slouching red knit top and blue jeans, roamed between the two cremation platforms, barefoot, picking up bits of trash and putting them in her mouth or throwing them on the piles of logs where bodies would burn, snickering. The same emoting women, who I could only assume were close family members, gathered together on benches, attempting to appease each other’s seeming uncontrollable weeping. Other women passed around cups of Coca Cola, Mountain Dew, butter tea, and water bottles.

A group of ten monks sitting across from each other under an overhang trailed their fingers across prayer sheets, chanting, and occasionally breaking to play various instruments—flutes, trumpets, conch shells, drums, and bells—and drink butter tea. They looked bored with it, I thought, as if numbed to ritual. I tried unsuccessfully to make eye contact with some of them. Maybe their boredom wasn’t boredom, but sheer focus and meditative flow.

After an hour of puja (prayer), the men lifted the body out of the carrier and set it on the pile of logs. The monks passed plates of rice and dhido and vessels of milk and honey down an assembly line of people to pour on top of the body as blessings and purification modalities. Finally it was time, as indicated by the monks, and they lit the log pile on fire. I turned away, looking behind a few times in fearful curiosity, until Hiumaya motioned at me. “Let’s go home,” she said. Unready to accelerate my path to enlightenment, I agreed.

Nights at dinner with Dawa, Hiumaya, Dhundup, and Mary softened, became more familiar. They began making jokes at my expense as they’d always done to each other. I felt that homey matter undulating, yellow in my chest now.

I thought about how had I not gone to ecstatic dance that one Sunday morning in San Rafael, California, and met Ford, I wouldn’t have met Jim, and I wouldn’t be here. In wonder, I quietly honored whatever pulled me out of bed that morning, knowing it wasn’t chance, but rather leading me somewhere, on my way.

One night after dinner Dhundup and I lingered at the table to discuss trekking plans in the Annapurna Region. I had a meditation retreat starting June 3, ending June 8, and he had an expedition with school leaving June 12.

“Unfortunate timing,” he said in a way which made me wonder exactly what he felt like we were missing out on.

But he said he would set me up with a guide. Or, he said, I could go with Dawa, who was leading a group from Singapore on a trek in Solukhombu, his home village, starting June 12. Either way, we agreed to go on a mini excursion somewhere between June 8 and 12 to Shivapuri, Chitwan, or Bandipur on my way west to trek in Annapurna from Pokhara.

I tried to trust whatever was unfolding, but found myself neaurotically trying to understand and control the right place to go—Googling various trekking outfitters and guides, emailing several of them, looking up routes and itineraries—over the next several days.

Earlier that day Dhundup had been listening to ‘Gimme Shelter,’ which I felt surprised to hear far away from home, so I made a comment. After speculating about trekking plans, he brought out his clunky laptop and we started sharing music. He played American bands, which were popular in Nepal for some time: Scorpions, Pearl Jam, James Blunt. I asked him to play me his favorite Nepali music. He played Albatross, a Nepali folk band, and Uniq Poet, a Nepali rapper, including ‘Straight Outta Kathmandu’ after ‘Straight Outta Compton.’ He knew more about some American music—when bands formed and broke up, the stories behind records, who they were singing about and for—better than me.

We said goodnight, pregnant with wonder of whether there was more to say or do.

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emma-commonlanguages · 2 years

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Getting There: 05.25-05.27

“Now tell us again how you got connected with your host family in Nepal, Emma?” My mom asked, provoking a dinner table share.

We were sitting on the patio at my parent’s country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland with several of their friends after finishing a round of pickleball. Though my upcoming travels were powered by common privilege, to my parent’s friends I think I seemed like a strange female specimen—preparing to travel in faraway, developing countries alone. Who’s child is this?

“Oh, friend of a friend.”

“Which friend?” my mom implored.

I inhaled, “You don’t know him… It’s this guy named Ford, who I met at a hippie, ecstatic dance party in Marin.” I laughed at myself. And my parents’ tennis-skirt and polo-shirt clad friends laughed at me too.

One of the men chimed in with an unsolicited, suggested detail addition: “Tripping on mushrooms?”

“Yes, tripping out of my mind on ‘shrooms” I flattered the dad joke, which I hate to do, but sometimes it’s necessary and efficient to carry on with the conversation’s main topic. Laughs at the table trailed off. They seemed to be assessing the joke’s grains of truth, then looked back up at me, expectantly.

“So Ford introduced me to his friend Jim, who has spent a lot of time in Nepal, collecting art and selling it back in the States. And Jim connected me with his friend Dawa who runs a homestay.”

On the night of Wednesday, May 25 when I was due to leave for Nepal, I checked over my packing and tried on my 50L backpack. I’ve had the pack since I was 15 from an Appalachian Trail backpacking trip, which I would angstily tell you then had changed my life.

“Looks like a pretty big load,” my dad commented. I had been over my selected items several uneven times myself and once for final ratifications with my mom. I couldn’t possibly imagine pairing anything down. Adding a last minute sixth pair of underwear felt indulgent. “Reasonable, though,” he assured me.

My parents couldn’t drive me to the airport because they had a cocktail party at the French Embassy. We said our goodbyes—mom in a white eyelet dress, French flag broach, a family heirloom of a fringed shawl, and a Chinese wooden clutch, all of which I’d helped her pick out, dad in coat and tie, and me in a long gauze Indian skirt and trekking shoes, which would become my fashion-compromised, practical uniform in Nepal.

“Ciao bella,” my dad offered his final parting words, halfway out the door, feigning chill. But I felt his love, urgently.

Largely, my parents voiced support and excitement for my travels, but in the month leading up to my departure, they also voiced fear, which though reasonable in moderate quantities, felt weighed down by their own baggage in excess. And ever since I’ve attempted to parse out their fear from mine.

“You just wouldn’t want anything to happen that would ruin your life.” My dad said over the phone.

I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom in San Francisco and, in denial of knowing exactly what he was thinking about, I wondered what he had in mind. You just wouldn’t want anything to happen that would ruin your life, a haunting refrain.

How could I take caution and not fear from my dad’s warning? How could I act smartly and conservatively, while still savoring my experiences, without having my experiences dominated by fear of predatory men?

My mom purchased me a personal keychain alarm system and in the car she softly asked if she could please track my phone’s location. So we set up location sharing services on my phone and GPS watch that afternoon.

I found my own way to Washington Dulles Airport. Waiting in line for check-in, the edge of myself felt thin against the airport air conditioning. I learned my pack weighed 13 kilos. And I had the sense—with all my belongings for the next 2 months on my back—that something like home was under my skin.

I slept all the way to Istanbul.

In Istanbul I received a text from my mom that I’d left a mailing with a new debit card on my bedside table at home and I realized the debit card in my wallet was due to expire in 5 days.

I started panic-Googling, texting back and forth with my mom, and searching my bank’s Help Center for an answer to, it turns out, an infrequently asked question. My 1-hour airport wifi expired. Shit.

Before we got disconnected, my mom and I decided the best thing to do was for me to place a collect call to Capital One. I went looking for a pay phone. An airport official came over and asked if I needed help after observing me standing there for a while, incessantly pushing the telephone switch hook and other buttons. But he didn’t know how to use the phones either. We struggled together for a bit—picking up, dialing, hanging up, clicking, beeping, and giving up at a long monotone beep.

“I can get you an additional free hour of wifi, it’s within my authority,” he offered.

We walked over to the Wifi kiosk. He swiped his passport card through the reader, which I thought was funny—was he giving me his personal free wifi hour?

“This is risky, but…” He read me off his passport card number and the password the wifi kiosk randomly generated.

Ok, I thought, grimacing, this *is* his personal free wifi hour. Sketchy? Sort of. But I was desperate to figure out how to get myself a new debit card overseas. I thanked him and prepared to scurry off.

“Now, can I ask you a favor?” he asked.

“Sure…?”

He seemed to fumble for a moment, trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say next: “Can I have your phone number?… I want to practice my English… It’s okay if not.”

I stared back at him blankly. “Oh, my phone number doesn't work outside the U.S.”

“WhatsApp maybe?”

“No, sorry.” I walked off. Oh my God. Benign, but I took it as a warning of how I would stand out further east—blonde hair, blue eyes—and the tricks men might try to play if I let them.

Several minutes later he found me sitting down at a random gate.

“Ma’am I need you to log off the wifi. My colleague told me what I did was highly illegal.”

He stood over me, watching as I logged off. He apologized and thanked me in quick succession, then walked off. So bizarre.

I decided to turn off airplane mode and incur international charges to call Capital One, which had always been the easiest thing to do, though I resisted it, neurotic about limiting international calling fees. I arranged to have a new debit card sent to the homestay in Kathmandu. I’m praying it finds its way. When my gate was announced, I walked to a faraway terminal, where I hoped I’d never see the airport official again.

I slept intermittently on the flight from Istanbul to Kathmandu. There were several young girls on the flight who kept singing Katy Pary, “I kissed a girl…” That was the only line they knew. A good legacy for Katy Pary, I thought, subconsciously normalizing girls kissing other girls among the Nepali youths. They exclaimed “Nepal, Nepal!” when at 6:15am we landed in the cradle of the Himalayas.

I surprisingly wound myself through customs without a hitch. Somehow, when I walked out of the airport into the morning smog, it was just me. I felt like a celebrity, begging for anonymity. I squinted at the line-up of people holding up signs for airport transfers. Though I had arranged an airport pickup with Dawa weeks ago, from our latest communications, I was unsure if it was confirmed.

Before fears of finding my own way to the homestay could totally settle in though, I deciphered my name in red on the largest sign in the lineup. I was so relieved. I waved and a spontaneous smile developed under my mask. The guy holding the sign, who I presumed to be Dawa’s son, pointed at the sign inquisitively. I nodded. He backed away from the guardrail and started walking and I followed on the other side.

“Are you Dawa’s son?” I asked across the guardrail. He nodded. He introduced himself as Dundhup. He had long black hair, tied up in a low bun, broad cheekbones, and a sweet smile.

When we met at the end of the guardrail he took my backpack off my shoulders and replaced it with a light yellow khata—a silk prayer scarf, which symbolizes purity and compassion for arrivals, journeys, and departures in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. “Welcome to Nepal.”

We rode through Kathmandu, past the Buddha eyes of the Swayambhu Temple, its stupa teeming with monkeys. After formalities and establishing that it was not only my first time in Nepal, but my first time in all of Asia, we spoke about trekking in the Annapurna region. He told me he led a couple on their honeymoon around the Annapurna Circuit 4 years ago and that now they were expecting a baby, which made him very happy.

I think it was then, in the rear view mirror, that I realized he was handsome, though maybe this happened later. Whenever it was, it was something in the way he puffed air into his mouth while thinking about a question I’d just asked, which reminded me of a poet I had a fling with in California. And isn’t that how all attraction begins, maybe—some sort of reminiscence?

At one point he rolled down the window to greet two young people he knew on bicycles. “Those are my classmates.” Kathmandu, at least his Kathmandu, felt smaller to me then. I learned he was getting his Masters in Adventure Tourism.

After a narrow and windy stretch, we pulled into a red wrought iron gate and parked.

“Welcome home,” he said. I laughed at how natural it sounded.

The house was a 2-story stone villa, painted maroon, with navy and gold pillars and French-style windows.

“Would you like the tour?”

I followed Dhundup, bearing my backpack, around the side of the house to the vegetable garden and the cow shed. I peeked inside the damp, dung-smelling interior and three sets of eyes glistened back at me—two grown cows and one baby.

We rounded a corner to a doorway where a man and a woman were descending the stairs.

“Mamma and Pappa,” Dundhup said with an open, outstretched palm.

The two of them cupped their hands in prayer and bowed. “Welcome, dear sister,” Dawa said, as he anointed me with another Khata, this one bright white.

Dundhup led me around the backside of the house. We idled under their mango and avocado trees. He told me about the recent hail storm, which knocked several baby avocados to the ground.

On the roof, I exchanged my first and final words with his grandmother: “Namaste.”

“She doesn’t talk much,” Dhundup assured me.

I met their dogs: Pangrey (which means black and white in Nepali) and Gyurme (which means stable in Tibetan). And from up on high, he pointed to my future as a nun. Kopan Monastery—where I’ll attend a 5-day meditation retreat—sits, gold and red, on top of a hill north of their house.

In the kitchen, Dawa gave me a warm and long hug. Something like home, which I’d felt in the airport, pulsated. And though she didn’t volunteer it the way Dawa did, I hugged his wife Hiumaya (her name means fresh fallen snow) too. Hiumaya prepared tea and banana pancakes for Dhundup and me.

I spoke to Dawa for a while after breakfast on adrenalized fumes. He unboxed a tupperware of medication and told me about his heart. He’d recently been hospitalized when its beats slowed. He explained the injection he’d received through his wrist and that so long as his beats maintained a certain cadence, he could avoid open heart surgery.

Dawa’s name means he was born on a Monday. I told him I was born on Monday too, so he named me Dawa Dolma. Dolma is the green tara, the goddess of youth. Him and Hiumaya referred to me as Dawa Dolma almost exclusively from then on.

He told me about their last name, Tamang, which means ‘horse warrior,’ in Tibetan. Tamangs are a larger enthnic group, which fled Chinese persecution in Tibet for the north hills of Kathmandu Valley on horseback. I would meet several more Tamnags over the coming days, all of which were referred to as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters,’ even if distantly related.

Dawa told me about his days as a porter, carrying heavy loads through the Himalaya. His tokmas (walking sticks) hung on the opposite wall. “This is how I became who I am,” he told me. Some of them were so small. “That’s why I keep my tokmas on the wall.” I only partly knew what he meant then. Portering was how he made a livelihood, how he pulled himself out of poverty, to live in this home, to provide for his family. I would learn later that he’d started as a porter at age 9.

The income became unreliable, he told me. People became more flaky with the advent of the internet, canceling treks last-minute, which had been planned months, years in advance. So Dawa looked to America for work.

Joan Halifax Roshi, Founder and Head Buddhist Teacher at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, hired him to tend the gardens there. Unbeknownst to them, Hiumaya and Dawa moved to New Mexico, pregnant with a fourth child.

Mary was born in America, named because the doctors declared her a ‘miracle baby.’ They said she wouldn’t make it. Her heart was too weak. “Maybe she has a heart like mine… Maybe it won’t cause her trouble until she’s sixty,” Dawa speculated.

Jim had told me about Mary before I arrived, that she was beautiful and that despite her age, everyone agreed she was the smartest in the family, smarter than her two sisters, one a physician's assistant, the other a computer scientist, which I thought must be the case when I met her.

“Oh, I can tell you just got sleepy,” Dawa said the same moment I realized my face involuntarily sunk.

I napped until lunch. Then napped again after lunch. Complete surrender to the jet-lag, but I was told that night they would take me to their cousin’s 2nd birthday party, so I wanted to be rested.

The ride over was bumpy and the streets were dark. Dhundup drove. I was squished in between Mary and her aunt, who we picked up along the way. The lights were off in every shop and street lamp, but people still attended to their Friday evening meeting and shopping. A friend had told me to be prepared for the ‘power shedding’ that sporadically happens. I couldn’t imagine myself ever walking these streets alone.

The birthday girl sported a pink and green floral tulle dress the night of her party. The family lit candles, sang happy birthday, and ate cake before dinner. What does this say about Nepali culture? I thought.

Dhundup poured me a beer—Nepal Ice—and our conversation resumed from the breakfast table. We had been discussing astrology. And after clinking beers, we uncovered that we are both Scorpios and exchanged a knowing, chaotic glance. Our conversation flowed so easily, despite coming from worlds away.

They served soya beans, french fries, and dahl baht and we ate around the coffee table in the living room. The women kept exchanging concerned looks and Nepali words, subtly motioning to my plate. I asked Dundhup what they were saying. And he said they were worried I wasn’t eating enough, even when I cleaned my plate. “Pugyo,” I learned, means, “I’m full.”

I fell asleep immediately upon returning home.

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emma-commonlanguages · 2 years

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Before I left San Francisco, my friend Milan, pictured lovingly with me here, read me this chapter called ‘The Age of Silence’ from Nicole Kraus’s The History of Love:

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing wesay now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. [and...] The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one’s face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one’s lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because they didn’t go around with the illusion that they understood perfectly the things other people said, they were used to interrupting each other to ask fi they’d understood correctly. Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say, Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I’ve always been right to love you. Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

Aside from one exception, almost no record exists of this first language. The exception, on which all knowledge of the subject is based, is a collection of seventy- nine fossil gestures, prints of human hands frozen in midsentence and housed in a small museum in Buenos Aires. One holds the gesture for Sometimes when the rain, another for After all these years, another for Was I wrong to love you? They were found in Morocco in 1903 by an Argentine doctor named Antonio Alberto de Biedma. He was hiking in the High Atlas Mountains when he discovered the cave where the seventy-nine gestures were pressed into the shale. He studied them for years without getting any closer to understanding, until one day, already suffering the fever of the dysentery that would kill him, he suddenly found himself able to decipher the meanings of the delicate motions of fists and fingers trapped in stone. Soon afterwards he was taken to a hospital in Fez, and as he lay dying his hands moved like birds forming a thousand gestures, dormant all those years.

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms—if you find yourself at a loss for what [to] do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body---it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less. It’s not that we’ve forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs-up: all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it’s too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other’s bodies to make ourselves understood.

This is a blog about finding common languages in South Asia.

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