WANDERING NATIVES
Just before the beginning of the fall semester, I move into a flat in a neighborhood named Tinchuli, about a 10-minute walk from school. The place is filthy, which isn’t a comment on Nepal so much as the living habits of my friends, a couple of foreign students who clear out of Kathmandu for other destinations — London, Lhasa — as the next school year comes on.
The rooftop apartment, located on a low hill, is comprised of three rooms and an open-air patio. A pile of trash liquefies in a corner, fruit flies circle slowly above something in the bathroom, and after dark, castoff food wrappers grow cockroaches the way discarded grain sacks once grew mice in medieval Europe.
But I can’t seem to make myself mind. Someone has slung hammocks from the rafters of the tin roof over the patio, and on hot afternoons before the rain starts I can catch an updraft from the street, peel off my sweat-soaked shirt, and perch on a railing to watch lightning arc out of the city below.
Like a lot of Nepal, the scene is half havoc, half laughter. Bright Buddhist prayer flags flicker from the rooftops of surrounding homes, and at the edge of the vacant lot behind our building there’s an old farmhouse — brick walls, a tile roof streaked with lichen, a tethered calf beneath a lime tree. It’s a welcome contrast to the jumble of haphazard concrete housing stretching far into the haze around us.
I’ve heard Kathmandu called the biggest village in the world, and that feels about right. We live cheek-by-jowl. Most mornings I sit on my rooftop for about a half an hour as our neighbors bathe at the tap behind my house, hang up the laundry, or toss grain to the pigeons. At night, with the windows open, my unfurnished room becomes an echo chamber for the homes nearby.
I can listen to the movie on TV next door or catch bits of conversation as the boy across the alley chats up his girlfriend via Skype.
In May, I quit my job at a newspaper in Colorado and flew to Nepal to study Tibetan and guide a trek in the mountains. Various Tibetan dialects are spoken throughout the Nepal Himalaya and by many residents of the country’s larger cities. I hoped that by learning some of it, I’d open new doors in an area where I’d studied and traveled before. But just before the trip I started worrying I’d made a mistake. By attending school maybe I wouldn’t see much more than the inside of a classroom.
I shouldn’t have been concerned. I soon saw that even in a room with a bunch of Westerners, Nepal seeps in through the cracks. Learning the language was offering me glimpses of Tibetan culture I otherwise would have missed.
Zombies and other secret business
One day we receive an impromptu lesson in the supernatural. Our teacher (who grew up a few hours from Lhasa, Tibet’s capital) explains that when Tibetans visit a neighbor’s house, they often ask, ‘Yar yong na drig gi re pe?’
But that sentence doesn’t mean, ‘May I come in?’ Instead, it means, ‘May I come up?’
He tells us Tibetan homes have traditionally been built with extra-tall front steps as a defense measure against the undead. In their decrepit condition, Tibetan zombies apparently have trouble climbing stairs, and they infest the Tibetan plateau in such numbers that they’ve become a valid architectural concern, sort of like, say, insulation or well-planned wiring.
Many Tibetan words are composites, with each syllable an idea in its own right; it’s tempting to pull apart the syllables and rummage around the meanings within them.
For instance, zombies are rolang. Ro means ‘corpse.’ Lang means ‘awake.’
Other examples aren’t tough to find. Nyingru is the word for ‘courage’ and ‘endurance.’ It’s built of the words for ‘heart’ and ‘bone.’ Toilet is sangchoed. The first syllable means ‘secret,’ the second, ‘business.’
The verb for marriage is chang sa gyab, literally, ‘chang place make.’ Chang is a kind of homebrew beer, and our teacher laughs as he says it plays a key role in Tibetan weddings. Maybe some things are true wherever you travel.
War + Person = Soldier
Our class gives us glimpses into Tibet’s political situation as well. We rarely discuss it directly, but it comes up anyway.
During language drill one morning, we practice completing the phrase, ‘There are many … in Tibet.’ We recite, ‘There are many yaks in Tibet;’ ‘There are many snow peaks in Tibet;’ ‘There are many unhappy Chinese in Tibet.’
While studying adverbs, we’re given, ‘Close the door quickly or the soldiers will come in.’
Soldier is magmi, ‘war person.’
These sentences don’t seem like focused propaganda. Instead, I get the feeling they just came to our teacher’s mind as he prepped for class. But they make it even harder to overlook the reality behind the large Tibetan presence in Nepal.
The neighborhood where our school is located is home to a major refugee population. In response to the Chinese occupation of their homeland, Tibetans have fled over the Himalayas in great numbers for the last half-century. According to a refugee center in Kathmandu, more than 2,500 Tibetans crossed the mountains annually in the years leading up to 2006.
But recently, Nepal has become less of a haven.
In 2007, after a decade-long insurgency, Nepal’s Maoist party came to power and began making overtures to China. Over the ensuing months Nepal beefed up its border security and began taking a tougher stance on Tibetans already inside the country. The number of refugees arriving over the mountains has reportedly dropped by more than half, and it has become harder for immigrants to obtain refugee cards or other citizenship papers. Many Tibetans say they stay off the streets after dark, fearing extortion, harassment, and arbitrary arrest at the hands of the police.
The situation is complicated, and some Tibetans tell me they sympathize with Nepal’s predicament even as they object to its actions. It is one of the poorest countries in the world and has plenty of problems of its own. Recovering from a civil war, lacking a constitution, and jolting from provisional government to provisional government, Nepal is arguably in no position to antagonize China, a major aid donor.
Still, many voices are crying out for human rights.
One of my teachers missed the first month of school this summer. The day I arrived in Kathmandu he wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Caught near a pro-Tibet protest while walking home, he was sent to prison in a wave of preemptive arrests leading up to the Dalai Lama’s birthday, an event that triggers mass celebrations and typically sets the Nepali police on edge.
He was detained for a month, but he mentioned it just once in class. Speaking in English, he started to say, ‘During my time in…,’ but caught himself mid-sentence and slipped in a joke instead: ‘…my small retreat.’
In Tibetan, a hermitage is a bhenne, or ‘lonely place.’
~ After a stint as a writer for Moonshine Ink, Tahoe native Terray Sylvester moved to Colorado, where he spent about two years working as an editor and reporter for The Sopris Sun newspaper in Carbondale. He quit that job about six months ago and has been traveling ever since. Comment on this column below.
