I have returned to Kathmandu from Nalma, but my heart is still there in the hills. These days the honking of traffic seems more aggressive. The balloons exploding at a nearby birthday party feel more like gunshots. The roads are bumpier and my bike is in worse shape than I remembered. All normal inconveniences of living in Kathmandu, but I haven’t quite readjusted to finding them inconsequential.
I miss the way the people of Nalma called out “Kashi” (littlest sister in Gurung language) to me as I moved around the village. Here in Kathmandu, the only acknowledgments I get are teenage boys calling me “khaire” (a derogatory term for a white person) and asking if they can “get a ride” as I pass on my bike. In Nalma, I certainly didn’t know everyone, but everyone knew me and didn’t treat me like a tourist who had dropped in for a week. They spoke to me in a mix of Nepali and Gurung (their local language), knowing I wouldn’t understand everything but hoping I would get enough to know they were curious about where I’d been or if I’d eaten.
Of course, I had always just eaten. It was impossible to walk two minutes through the village without being called into someone’s home for a cup of sweet milk tea, or the local rice liquor pa, or a plate of salted and spiced cucumbers, or a handful of bananas, or a packet of biscuits, or another plate of dal bhat (rice and lentils). As I understand it, in Gurung culture guests are like gods, so everyone wanted me and my three friends (who had come to Nalma for the same ghatu dance festival) to sit in their homes and enjoy a snack. While this made it difficult to follow through with even the loosest of plans, I had the opportunity to learn about the residents of Nalma on their own terms, in their own homes.
As you walk through the gate of someone’s home, there is often a small stable with goats or chickens or a water buffalo to greet you. One home I frequented, that of the TikTok Aunty, even had beehive boxes. Most homes have a small open area in front of the house where laundry and crops are dried in the sun. Then on the covered porches, a spread of treasured, framed family photos. I loved this part of being invited for tea – sitting on the porch, listening to the animals squawking and chewing, and examining family photos to understand who was related to whom in this village. In Gurung culture it is somewhat encouraged to marry cousins or other relatives, so most people in Nalma could claim a pretty direct family relationship to quite a few other homes. They would sit on their porches and gesture up and down the hill, identifying this house as the in-laws’ son’s home and that house as the uncle’s previous home and another house as the one they were born in, but no one lives there now. After the family tree had been clarified and the tea had been consumed, people would show me their TikToks or ask for help on operating the camera their son had sent from Hong Kong or take me into their kitchen sheds to roast corn pulled from their fields over an open fire.
During my first visit to Nalma, it was cool in the mornings and picked up heat to an unbearable point until the early afternoons. Then around three every day a wind would rip across the side of the hill, pulling the prayer flags against their poles and rattling the tin doors and roofs. By the time I visited Nalma again, the windy season was over and the rainy season had begun. It rained at any and all times of day and night – sometimes a light sprinkle, sometimes a sudden downpour that turned the walking paths into hill-rivers. Hail fell several times, damaging the crops and delaying the start of the rice-planting season by a day, since it is village practice not to work in the fields the day after hail falls.
The different days of weather brought different types of insects too – on windy days the big spiders, and after rains came ten-inch worms and cockroaches and mosquitoes and land-leeches and June bugs that squeal when you grab them. The people of Nalma tell me not to be afraid of cockroaches because they are harmless, but to watch out for millipedes because they crawl into your ears and chew on your brain. I have a blanket policy of avoiding all insects.
I loved the evenings the most. Cool air would move in, and the sounds of the village would shift. When there was electricity, you could hear people watching football matches or listening to pop music as the sun disappeared. When the electricity wasn’t working, it was just the evening orchestra of crickets, frogs, and the asapaku bird. I would sit out in the courtyard after a plate of rice and chicken with Raju dai and Sumita Bauju, the couple who hosted me, and try to understand the conversation. Or I would head over to Gurubaa’s shop to sit in the light, snuggle his great-grandson, and watch people come and buy their needs for the evening - a single cigarette or a liter of Mountain Dew or a sharpened stick for the next day’s plowing work.
Sometimes the evening orchestra would be briefly interrupted by a single shouting man announcing news for the next day. Like many rural places in Nepal, Nalma still holds on to the tradition of the katuwal, or town crier, for spreading the news. It’s a particularly useful practice in Nalma, with its houses spread along a hillside. The man who makes the announcements positions himself somewhere down the hill, shouts, and then moves to another position to the west, shouts again, and then positions himself a third time for the final shout. He shouts to announce no work the next day because of the hail, or an upcoming meeting because of ghatu, or the death of a villager.
When he’s not spreading the news, he spends most of his time wandering around the village, drunk, hands clasped behind his back in typical village fashion. He calls himself “Ghore dai,” and as a Dalit (or, politically incorrect, “untouchable”) person, he is excluded from many of the events that he announces. I never learned which house was his, but it’s very clear which part of the village Dalit folks inhabit. There is a main walking path that winds through the village; it is well-kept, paved with giant slabs of stone, and with a drainage ditch on one side. As you reach the eastern edge of the village, however, the slabs of stone stop abruptly and the path curves and slopes downward, becoming harder to walk on and made of mud that washes out in the rain. The people who live in this portion of the village still buy from Gurubaa’s shop and send their children to the same school as the Gurung children, but their daily lives and their part of the village otherwise appear to be quite separate. It’s a reality of caste-ism that is everywhere in Nepal but sometimes more obvious – and perhaps more complex – in places like Nalma.
With these thoughts, feelings, and memories, I bumped down the hillside in a speedy jeep away from Nalma and back to the main highway. I sweated my way back to Kathmandu, not sure how to process everything I had seen, not sure how to adjust myself back to the noise and the dust and the aggression of this city. For two days I cleaned my apartment instead of going outside, and finally I bought a table upon which I could put my laptop and write this blog post.
Until next time, Nalma.
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