It had been a rough couple of weeks. I had the misfortune of being in the first group of volunteers to leave Narayanghat the day after swearing in. We were to leave early, by 6 o’clock.
We were the volunteers to the southeast, just three hours away: Jane-Erie, also going to Birganj; Patty, a forestry instructor heading to Hetauda (due east of Narayanghat, due north of Birganj), where we would turn south towards India, and Birganj; and Lee, a science teacher going to Kalaiya, a rural village near to Birganj.
Emotions ran high and I hadn’t expected to see so many people in the morning wishing us off. Since leaving the States, I’ve been the one leaving, never the one to stay behind to wave and smile people on their way.
After two months of incubated friendships, many of us were parting ways with close friends—sometimes it felt like my only friends—with whom we’d shared some phenomenal experiences, until we’d meet again at the All Vol, the ‘all volunteers’ conference in January, seven months away. What I’m trying to say is that it was sad. Really sad. Grown-men-crying sad. Women wailing and beating their breasts sad.
Of course there were some of the easy goodbyes, the token, “We’ll write.” It was exactly what I didn’t need to endure as I was driven off into what I knew would be facing an awful few weeks. In a matter of hours I was unloading my bags into my new deraa, wondering, bedless, “What now?”
I left for a hotel, overwhelmed by the settling in I would have to begin in the morning. The enormity of a simple task of, let’s say, finding a bed turns into, “How do I ask to buy a bed in Nepali without buying a water buffalo?”
That night, eating alone, thinking about people who I missed, people who I knew where finding out how much the presence of others had made our previous adjustments easier, more communal. But now I alone. A-lone. Just me. Big time. Lonely? Yes. Acute? Indeed.
There were a couple of other volunteers who lived near me in Birganj, Luke and Rob, but both were gone from site for the next few weeks. All the anxiety and sadness that I had felt leaving the States at the time had been manageable, but now it began to erupt, almost uncontrollably.
Staying in a hotel then was awful. Nothing accentuates loneliness more than sleeping in a room overtly symbolic of the transient nature of my presence. And here I was, doing two years hard time in the inferno-like heat of Birganj, spending one more night in one more bed that I’d never see again.
I was not sure of being a nomad-by-choice. I had eaten at Himanchal Cabin, a restaurant with a staff that speaks comprehensible Nepali, in comparison with Birganj’s large Bhojpuri, Hindi, and incomprehensible Nepali speaking populations. (A combination of all three of these is something I call Hippurali.)
But man was it depressing. It was like I was in Hopper’s Nighthawks, but alone besides the soda jerk, who could only speak Nepali and with whom I could only discuss in-season fruit, let along my feelings of unrelenting depression. Now that would be a painting. Luckily that was all weeks ago. I might have not been able to make it if I hadn’t broken the rules though.
We’re not supposed to leave our site (also called “post,” as in a big stick that is stuck in the ground that doesn’t move) for the first three months, which isn’t that tough since we’re just getting settled in and beginning our work (I had walked into the school year in-progress and was playing catch-up with the book as my students hadn’t had an English teacher yet).
It was announced after I had been at school for two weeks that we would have a long weekend in celebration of the Buddha’s birthday, born in 5 BC on a Sunday, apparently in Lumbini, a village west of Narayanghat by about four hours.
A good friend, Chelsea, had taken her assignment in Gaidankot, the village where our training had taken place. Her school, in fact, was about 500 meters from our training site. She had found a deraa near Narayanghat.
Chelsea was living with Shana, another volunteer from our group who worked with an NGO that promoted sexual health awareness and offered assistance to sex workers. Good work. Interesting pamphlets.
Matt, a science teacher (secretly a Canadian) with whom I’d drank Glenfiddich with at the bar way back in San Francisco, also lived nearby. It was going to fun, old times recaptured, and it was going to save me from the endless depths of my discontentment.
Then on the morning I was to catch my bus I heard on the BBC that Nepal’s Prime Minister, Deuba, had dissolved the Lower House of Parliament, a major elected body. Nepal had been under a state of emergency since the previous November and the House was to vote to either reinstate or discontinue the state of emergency, which, in effect, is martial law.
I live under martial law. I never thought about it like that before.
The police and army are a constant presence. In the mornings at exactly 5:30 am I am passed by a formation of army or policemen, marching armed and in gear. Apparently the House had told the PM that it would vote against reinstating the State of Emergency.
So the PM took action by getting support from the Crown to simply do away with the elected (and also dissident) faction of the government. I expected to go home then, that Peace Corps would be calling me shortly to warn me of the riots.
But there weren’t any riots. There wasn’t even a peep of social unrest. I had been told about a Bollywood actor (or actress) had been quoted as making anti-Nepali statements, and there were huge displays of violence in Nepal. Buses were burned.
There were riots and the army and police had to be deployed until the actor could assure the public he had been inaccurately quoted. But for half of the government being tossed aside, there wasn’t even that. The buses ran on time, my bus with me on it, and I even got to Narayanghat ahead of schedule.
The Makalu line is the one to take. Outside the Makalu ticket office in the bus park there is a gorilla-like man working for Makalu, who chants, quite passionately as if he’s trying to get a batter to miss a pitch, “Makalu, Makalu, Makalu, Makalu, Makalu. Hey! Makalu . . .”
It wasn’t until this past Tuesday when I went to Kalaiya to visit Lee that I had a bad bus ride. Nepalis are not used to being in moving vehicles and on any given bus ride you’re definitely along with one or two people not at all used to moving, ergo the potential for someone suffering from motion sickness is exponential to the amount of people on the bus.
See, local buses are what you take between the big city and the villages. Local buses stop and pick up anyone—or any thing for that matter—along the way. This is also means that most of these people on local buses are rural folk, less used to vehicular transportation (in contrast to donkey-powered cart transportation).
We were so close to being in Kalaiya when this woman two rows ahead began to lose it. Boy howdy did she.
I first saw the men sitting in front of me jump up into the isle as the woman made quite a mess of herself before she got her head out of the window and made a mess of the bus. And then I sat and watched streams of vomit splash along the outside of my window.
Suddenly, turning to talk to the man next to me who had been pleading with me to give him a US Visa was the better option. That’s why bus rides can be awful. But not for my big return to Narayanghat.
The bus arrived early and I had enough time to take a tempo to Gaidankot to visit my host family. I saw many old faces, drank chiye at all the old pasals, and was appalled by the same tremendous wave of heat that is Narayanghat.
It was nice though. It didn’t take long to feel an absence of the people who had made these places special. My host family clearly had no idea of what to do with me. I sat in the room where I’d grown up in Nepal, although it had become again what it had always been, my host parent’s room.
I could see that as long as I was in Nepal, I would be a drifter. In the early evening I met Chelsea on the Narayni Bridge. She and Shana were living with the old host family of one of the language teachers, followers of Sai Babba, the most popular of all living Hindu Gurus.
I have only met one Nepali who didn’t like Sai Babba. He ran the Nepali Guest House, a hotel in Narayanghat with the finest daal bhaat around.Andrew and I were eating lunch one day when he began examining an extremely kitsch photo Andrew had bought of Sai Babba.
It was a gold-inlayed photo, sort of like one of those Gustav Klimt posters you can buy in the mall’s art-mart. He had said, in Nepali, “What a great picture, but what a bad man.”
The followers of Sai Babba, as far as I can tell, have two distinguishing features from other Hindus. First, they hang pictures of Sai Babba instead of orthodox Hindu gods. He’s a funny looking man, somewhat portly in an orange moo-moo, sporting a massive, Harlem Globe-Trotter’s-esque fro.
They also keep a miniature, ornamental chair near their Sai Babba shrine, a sign of respect and hope that, perhaps some day soon, Sai Babba will pop by and need a place to sit.
Secondly, the have a daily call to prayer that initiated by a high pitched bell, rung with incredible fervor by a true believer, at lease every morning at 5 AM, even if company’s present.
The weekend went well. All sorts of people showed up from the area. I met a volunteer, Renee, a science teacher stationed in Monglepur, 30 minutes by bus from Narayanghat, who had gone to UNT, who had finished up in the fall of 1998 and who had lived in Bruce Hall that semester, my old dormitory at school.
We knew a few people in common, namely Bean, my old roommate my first semester in Bruce. There isn’t much to say about what actually happened that weekend, but about what I saw, what I felt, and how far I have come since then. Birganj is home, and I feel planted. There was one really special moment.
We had gone to Sarauha, a scenic, tranquil city on the edge of the Chitwan National Park, the home to the Bengali tigers, where elephants are a common sight on the road than cars or bikes. To go to Sarauha, you take a bus east from Narayanghat and then south at the city of Tandi Bazaar, when the scenery becomes more distinct.
Instead we walked most of the way from Sarauha back to Tandi, through pastures with dozens of water buffalo, to see a clear horizon where the sun was setting. There were seven of us and I felt then that I was really apart of something cohesive. We crossed a small foot bridge and then came to the main road. And tempo happened across us and we decided to hitch it back to Tandi Bazaar, even though it was more than full.
Matt took the roof with two other Nepalis, and Shana, Renee, Naomi, and myself hung to the sides and back of the tempo as it buzzed along rural Nepal. It was cool by then—evening is the only time when Terai weather is bearable—and scenery rolled by not unlike summer trips across Kansas to visit grandma’s.
Boy, that’s some sentimental garbage.
But emotions seem to run high in Nepal. Things are better now, good even, and I’m looking forward to a summer full of adventures. There’s a Fourth of July party in Janakpur—four hours by bus. I’m planning on going: many friends, many stories, and many chances in buses to be sprayed by vomit.
