That now defunct strip was my way of trying to explain the hilarity of my break-in phase as an expat. Then my world was upside down, everything about living had become less tragic: The culture, the language, and the sensibilities. I once complained to a Baba about my constant diarrhea, and can’t forget his advice: “It’s not diarrhea, its just life.”
I loved not being able to understand what was being said, and instead I could just fill in what I would like to hear. Most Western therapists would diagnose that behavior as insanity, but I savored the experience, after listening to utter nonsense for most of my life. Being dulled to sleep with 40-odd years of Orwellian double-speak is enough to make anyone comatose, and also slightly retarded. So my early Nepali years of not understanding anything except for the obvious were a welcome sabbatical.
However, the western world always finds a way in. Penetrating via WiFi is that tired old new world left behind, for reasons yet to be revealed. This new-to-me Nepali world is one where I can travel back in time, and I can walk about life as I did when I was growing up in the village of Poughkeepsie, New York.
Before moving to Nepal, I was missing the landscapes filled with people playing games and at the same time getting the laundry done and the shoes repaired. I don’t want to miss that again. How about you?
Poughkeepsie was originally named by a now extinct tribe of Americans. These were Americans whose only marks left on the beautiful valleys, hills, and rivers of Upper New York are the strange tribal names of hundreds of villages. These great tribal castes that once ruled New York lived in huge villages, the likes of Canastigaone, Kowogoconnughariegugharie, and the more pronounceable Oneida. Village life then was just like village life here, but without a good rice patty.Nothing is left of that culture, where the nations of Seneca, Onondaga, Mohawk, and Iroquois once grew grain, sacrificed game, and raised tons of children. But while growing up, I saw native ghosts everywhere, in anything not whitewashed over and renamed into something Anglican. (For example, New York was renamed as a reference to York, England). As a young man, I was intrigued by these great Americans –the ones who smartly worked the land with bare hands and in sandals, and lived among communal dogs and garbage heaps and even shopped at small family-run cold stores. I was excitably intrigued whenever I imagined what life must have been like in a pre-prefab society.
But now I have no need to imagine; all I have to do is walk out my door. I tell my Nepali wife: It’s like I can relive my childhood, wandering from one small village to another, enjoying the variety in which real people exist. In 2002, I discovered Fewa Lake just as I discovered Lake Minnewaska in 1968. I found old canoes and quaint hotels commanded by good people, and not the GQ and Marie Claire clown-crowd found in upstate New York today. Back then there was even a Pokhara-like Bat Cave, where for a few pennies, we crawled through with candles and wonder.
Now closed, there are no more Bat Caves. At worst, there are crack caves where kids crawl looking for food while mothers cook up meth for breakfast. At best, there are huge amusement complexes named after corporations, and costing more then 15,000 per family. Then there are the overwhelming anti-attractions of my birth village: Joblessness, poverty, despair.
In Nepal, you can still sit down with a complete stranger and chat over tea. You can’t do that in the America that was once full of complete strangers chatting over tea - full of children turning wheels with sticks and flying kites, full of mangy dog packs sleeping in the sunshine, and full of women sorting things while men toiled. America was once a place where people did not fear each other individually, only feared what outside tribes might do in the night. There were no pedophiles, serial killers, or malicious stalkers. A little abduction perhaps, but nothing too serious. It was an America where fathers played with babies and grandmothers lived with sons and there was at least one puja going on everyday. It was a land very much like rural Nepal is today.
America was once a place where elders gathered at chautaris while tailors fixed shoes. It was a real matter-of-fact land, and not a fantasyland of zero-interest sub-prime mortgage and credit card scams. The people were proud, hardworking folks who could take the hard times and make the best of them. Well, that’s what the ghosts told me. It’s really hard to exact the truth now, as the past is paved over, and buried so deep that even anthropologists can’t dig it up.
Which brings me to the point of this first column. What is it that is being paved over today, here in our small bit of Nepal? I am excitably intrigued to figure that out. How does this paving and bleaching process work? I’m not just talking about the paving of roads, but of minds. Where imagination is flattened museko pitho. Where the invaders of the free enslave the wanting with flashier cars to drive, snazzier refrigerators to chill out in, and better homes and gardens.
You may disagree with this premise (please let me know if you do), but expats should have a “back-to-the-future insight” on such topics as “progress.” I say the place that we are traveling to is somewhere between hell and a hand basket. The day the shopkeeper doesn’t offer tea is the day we need to stand up and shout. When there is a need for a national alert system to find kidnapped and murdered children, the time is past to say enough is enough. When corruption is so corrupt it feels good and just, this is when we need to wake up. When everyone is armed with a Glock instead of a Kukhuri, these are all signs of the great demise. In Nepal, we are now on the rising side of that demise. The middle class is being refined, fattened, and readied for slaughter. And that’s the good news.
This monthly rant is about what’s going wrong – or sometimes even right – in the East and in the West, and on what I miss most: The times when almost everyone was nice to each other, respectful by default, and heck, even honoring each other as like beings sharing the same miserable – or bountiful – existence. (Isn’t that the definition of Namaste?)
Before moving to Nepal, I was missing the trust of a younger person’s eyes on the street, the sight of fathers playing with children, landscapes filled with people playing games and at the same time getting the laundry done and the shoes repaired. I don’t want to miss that again. I want to remain excitably intrigued. How about you?
(Writer is quirky-kinda expat happily living in the Kathmandu valley with Nepali family, friends, and a very large dog.)
studios.phoenix@gmail.com