NepalSpeak

"Eh, Raju, kahile aako?" asked the first voice.  Literally translated: Eh, Raju, when did you come?

"Oho, kya ho, Sainla?  Hijo aako" replied the second voice.  Translated: Oho, what's up, Sainla?  Arrived yesterday.

I overheard this exchange while I was walking down a dusty street lined with butchers' shops and fishmongers' shops in downtown Kathmandu.  The goat and boar carcasses and gaping fish in baskets were complemented by the produce on display at the vegetable market just down the road.

I looked around and identified the speakers.  There was no surprise.  They were a couple of rural youth, sturdy young men clad in typical daruwa suruwal.  The daruwa is a wraparound shirt with strings instead of buttons, knotting at the left shoulder and waist on the inside, and the right shoulder and waist at the outside.  The suruwal is a lower garment of genus jodhpurs - tight at the ankles, baggy at the hips.  The fabric was coarse cotton, slightly soiled but unpretentious like the wearers.  Both young men wore ishtacoats, waistcoats.  Chinese canvas sneakers with no socks and the ubiquitous topi, the Nepali cap, rounded off the picture.

As far as I could see, Sainla had been inspecting a butcher's wares, but promptly lost interest in the orange goat's head with the bulging eyes and the mirthless grin when he sighted his friend.

"How's the village?  Everyone all right?" continued Sainla.  Sainla means third son.  Families with many sons often refer to each by a name that reflects his order of birth.  The same system prevails for daughters, with the names ending in "i": Sainla's female equivalent is Sainli.

Sainla was tall, slim and fair, with handsome Mongolian features and a thin moustache.  Raju was also slim but short, with a swarthy complexion and his Mongolian face had fierce mountain boy features.

"Everything is fine.  Everyone is fine, though Kale's grandma passed away last month.  Where're you headed?"

"Towards down, but I am in no hurry.  So Kale's grandma passed away, huh?  Come on, let's go eat a tea and catch up."

In Nepal, you don't drink tea.  You eat tea.

The butcher, knife poised in hand, looked crestfallen as the two walked off.  He put down the goat's head, which he had been holding by the horns in his left hand, and casually threw the knife in his right hand at a wooden chopping block.  The knife dug in and stayed upright, vibrating slightly, as if in annoyance at being denied.

Suddenly feeling nostalgic, I moved away from the butcher.  Cultural butchery in Nepal over the last decade or so had been drastic and corrosive, like a cancer that cannot be denied.  I hardly ever heard the version of sweet country vernacular these two young men had spoken in anymore.  Civilization had replaced civility and in this bit of evolution, melody in language had lost out, along with hundreds of trees, thousands of birds, frogs, slugs and insects, clean air, clean water and human values.

I mused on the brief exchange I had just overheard.  In the uncivilized Nepal that existed in the old days, you mostly responded to a question asking where you were going by indicating that you were going "down" or going "up".  After having spent just about all of my life in Nepal, I still have to figure out where up is, or down.  Initially, I assumed that down meant any direction downhill in a country full of hills, mountains and Everest, while up meant any direction uphill.  Later, I worked out another theory: down was when you were heading downtown, up was when you were heading away from downtown.  I still don't know if I was right on either count.

I lived in Lalitpur City in Kathmandu Valley.  The Valley consisted of three major municipalities: Kathmandu itself, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur.  Way back in the pages of history, these three cities were actually three separate kingdoms. 

In recent years, political chicanery has added a few more municipalities to the sorely overburdened Valley.  Vote banks are being created along with political instability, pollution, sewage disposal problems, ghettos and traffic jams.

In my younger days, Kathmandu was the city.  Those living elsewhere in the Valley were rural yokels.  Like everyone else, I was in the habit of saying, "I am going down to town", meaning I was going to Kathmandu.  In my school days, my urbane friends from Kathmandu invariably refused to visit me in rural Lalitpur.  They considered it too far from civilization and too rustic.  Almost every single residence lay in the midst of farms.

Today's Lalitpur is a metropolis with just as much uncivilization as any other metropolis in the world.  Your eyes roam over the congestion of cement structures in the midst of more cement structures.

The Bagmati River that stagnates through the Valley divides Kathmandu and Lalitpur. Overall, Lalitpur is at a higher altitude than Kathmandu, so I guess there was justification in people saying they were going down to town.

Talking about the Bagmati River, there was a time when as a kid I could stand at one bank of the river at the famous Pashupati Temple and actually see the coins little kids were diving for on the riverbed at the opposite bank.  The kids used to yodel in delight each time a coin was bagged.

Nowadays the Bagmati is black, pollution-laden and almost motionless, except for the monsoon months, when it is a muddy torrent.  The only thing you can see looking down into the water is that it is extremely hazardous to health.

When I was young, people brought cattle to graze on the all-purpose common ground and soccer field called Tundikhel, right in front of my house.  There were a few common use bulls always hanging around, and the cowherds encouraged these bulls onto their cows by tweaking their tails, slapping their rumps and shouting, "Sarararara... sarararara...."  The bulls responded with bellows, grunts and snorts and lunges at the cows.

Dasain is the most important religious occasion for the Hindus of Nepal, and lasts for about two weeks in October every year.  When I was a child, funds were collected every Dasain from local residents for a ping, a swing at least 25 feet high on a bamboo frame erected in Tundikhel.  People waited patiently for their turns at this swing, and as they swung dizzyingly high into the air, yelled in exhilaration, "Salalalala... salalalala...."

There are no cows and no cowherds to be found nowadays in Tundikhel, which has been walled off and converted into a grassy soccer field with a jogging track around the periphery.  The only bull I come across is of the wrong kind, delivered orally, usually with a four-letter word tagged on.  I haven't seen a swing in Tundikhel for two decades now.

My neighbor reared chickens, and every day in the mornings and evenings her cry, "Turra... aah... aah... aah..." enticed her chickens to come for feed, as her husband sat nearby, puffing away at his gurgling hookah.  She is dead, and so is her husband, but her daughter-in-law continues the tradition, though in a less commanding voice.  The daughter-in-law's husband is generally away at work, and I don't think he smokes.

As kids we frequently encountered villagers gathered in rival male and female groups to compete against each other in dohori geet - duets.  Generally, there would be one lead singer, while the rest of the group would function as the chorus.  The groups were accompanied by a maadal (drum), and the lyrics were quite often extempore.  Whenever we came across such a singing competition, we would listen and watch agog.  We were under the impression that the winning singer had the right to make off with any of the losing singer's troupe for a romantic tryst.  To this day, I do not know if this impression was correct, and I am not interested in bursting the bubble.

People from remote areas all over the country still refer to Kathmandu as "Nepal."  For them, going to "Nepal" is generally a rare circumstance, with much ceremony attending departures and returns.  Many of them live in areas that are often more than a week of arduous trek away from the nearest road.  There is only one alternative to walking, and that is a hookah dream for practically all of these remote Nepalese: fly - by helicopter, at that.

The hookah is something else that is on the endangered list.  The only hookahs I see these days are inoperative, in curio shops.  People are into cigarettes nowadays, even the rustic type, who mostly holds his butt gripped in an "o" formed by his clenched thumb and forefinger.  The smoker's mouth forms another "o" as he applies it to his hand and drags.

"Aaramai?" is part of the traditional Nepali greeting.  This word literally means, are you at peace?  An alternative is "Sanchai?" meaning, are you in good health?

In Nepal, you eat a tea and you also eat a cigarette.  You are asked, "Chiya khani?" or "Churot khani?" by way of offer.  Chiya is tea and churot is cigarette, and to eat is khani.

Quite often, you are eating your chiya or your churot, when a friend of yours comes along, and by way of greeting asks you, "Eh, eating a tea?" or, "Eh, eating a cigarette?"  You may be sitting on your rooftop, soaking up the sun on a winter's day, when an acquaintance passing by looks up, catches your eye and greets you.  "Eh, gham tapeko?" he asks.  Eh, are you soaking up the sun?

It has never ceased to fascinate me, this quaint habit of asking you if you are doing something that you are very visibly and obviously doing.  It is meant as a form of courtesy, and is a very amusing but delightful and endearing Nepali trait.

This trait is reflective of the innocence that was.  That innocence, too, is on the endangered list.

And then there are the Newars.  They are ethnic Kathmandu Valley originals, at least in terms of the mixed bag that inhabits the Valley nowadays.  Newars have a known, recorded history in the Valley that goes back a few centuries.  Their native tongue is Newari, which is as different from Nepali as the moon is from cheese.

It is polite in Newari tradition to greet you by asking you if you have eaten your food, or your tea, depending on the time of day.  Because of the structure of verbs in the Newari language, many Newars sound odd when they speak in Nepali - they think in Newari, translate into Nepali when they speak and mangle the verb forms.

I remember when Javier Perez de Cuellar was the Secretary General of the UN and Francois Mitterand was President of France.  It was great fun listening to news readers slurring these names on the Nepali media.  I listened to the various versions with great interest.  I was not sure about the right pronunciation myself.  I did enjoy it hugely when the term "grand prix" was mangled to suggest magnificent male organs.

I remember also when I was taking a friend from Italy around the durbar square in Lalitpur, an area of considerable tourist interest.  Guiseppe was tall and rotund, with a round, shiny and hairless head.  A little kid loitering around said something to Guiseppe in a language I did not make out, and he laughed loudly.  He said something to the kid, and the kid responded. I asked him what the exchange was all about, and he said that the kid had first called him a laughing Buddha in French.  He replied in French, telling the kid he was Italian.  The kid came back in Italian, asking if Guiseppe would have a spare dollar or two on him.

I am not sure the kid was more than twelve years old at that time.

Quite often, when a guest takes his leave, he tells his host, "Basnus ai".  Please stay.  Whether please stay well, or please keep sitting, I will find my way out, I have never bothered to find out.  At any event, these parting words were meant to be polite and courteous.

The host responds by saying "Aundai garnus na".  Please keep coming.  In earlier days, the host generally meant well, too.

You just can't say nowadays.