The funny thing about research is, sometimes you don’t really seem to be doing it – especially in the early days of a large project. A lot of the work is thinking, planning, reading, and re-thinking; on a day-to-day basis, there is not that much to show. Of course, in the end, a large report or a book or some end product comes out, but in the in-between times, you often reach the end of a week and think: did I do anything at all?
Here's what I did this week, to give you a little slice.
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY:
Early Saturday morning, with a few friends, I hopped a bus to the edge of the city. From there we began to walk up, up, up to the top of Chandragiri, one of the hills surrounding the Kathmandu valley. Most people take the fancy new cable car up this hill, but we wanted a bit of exercise and adventure. Along the way, we met one GIANT slug and far fewer leeches than I expected (in Nepal during monsoon, the leeches live on the hillsides. It’s terrible). There was, fortunately, no rain, which means unfortunately I got quite sunburned. We expected the walk to take three hours, which meant it was actually six hours. We spent the night in Markhu next to a once-beautiful but now mostly-drained lake, and in the morning took a boat and a short (steep) hike to a striking (literally) waterfall. See below for video evidence of me being pelted by violent water and temporarily losing all brain function.
MONDAY:
Upon returning to Kathmandu on Sunday night, I learned that my refrigerator which appears to be from the 1960’s was no longer working – just keeping things warm and dumping water all over the kitchen floor. Also, there was no electricity in my neighborhood and no water in the apartment because the switch that makes the machine pull water from our well had flipped down. So I went to sleep and decided to deal with things in the morning. Luckily the electricity and the water was back by then.
Monday involved a 5am phone call to my mother who was celebrating her 60th birthday on a boat on the St. Croix River, followed by an hour of laundry. Like most people in Nepal, I wash my clothes by hand. I actually don’t mind doing it, now that I know how to do it well and efficiently, but it does take time. You have to soak the clothes in water and powdered detergent, and then rub each item with a bar of soap, knead each item to work a lather through the fabric, and then rinse everything until your fingers no longer have a greasy feeling on them. Then of course you have to wring out the water, carry the laundry up to the roof, and dry it in the sun; these days you also have to lug the laundry up and down from the roof several times in a day because of the intermittent rains.
After laundry and quickly cleaning the apartment, there were emails to do, film editing to continue, a production meeting to be had, and a theatre company meeting to be Zoomed into. Often an in-person meeting means a several-hour endeavor: getting across town to the location, waiting for all parties to be ready, and then two hours to discuss all the necessary details. Almost inevitably there will always need to be another meeting, because decisions cannot be made too quickly.
TUESDAY:
More emails, more film editing, more running up and down the stairs with damp laundry. I managed to submit a proposal for an upcoming creative project that is happening with my theatre company here in Nepal. I took several phone calls from people who were interested in submitting their own proposals but needed clarifications on certain details. On the way across town to meet up with an old acquaintance, I finally picked up a saree I had ordered a month ago.
Quick summary of this saree saga: at a friend’s wedding at the end of June, I was invited to another wedding. I had already worn this blue saree twice, so socially I needed to get a new one made. My very fashionable friend Ranjana took me to Indra Chowk where you can find good quality clothes for cheap. We ordered the saree and said we needed it in five days. Two days before the wedding reception, I returned to the shop to find they had done a terrible job with the blouse. With a long back and forth that was partially in English, partially in Nepali, and partially in Hindi (which I do not speak), we agreed that they would find better fabric and make a new blouse. They insisted it would be ready right at 2pm on Friday (the reception was at 6pm that evening). So at 2:15pm on Friday, I arrived at the shop, totally drenched from the sudden, torrential downpour. When the shop staff offered me a cup of tea, I knew they were about to deliver bad news. Sure enough, one sip into my tea, I was informed that the blouse wasn’t ready – in fact, it wasn’t even started. This was the Friday before Eid, and as most of the tailors are Muslim, they had been busy; a fair point, of course, but it was them who had told me the blouse would be ready by 2pm. By this point, it was 2:30, the rain was dumping down, and I had to find a cab to get to my Nepali lesson at 3pm. The shop manager said he would make sure the blouse was ready and have it delivered by 5pm to my apartment, which is the opposite side of town from my Nepali lesson. Soaking wet, I arrived by taxi to my Nepali lesson fifteen minutes late and then realized I didn’t have enough cash to pay the driver, and the nearby ATM was broken. I borrowed some rupees from my Nepali tutor and tried to focus on conjugations, fuming about the ridiculous waste of time and money that this saree had become. At 4:15 when my lesson wrapped up, the shop manager called to say the delivery was already on the way to my apartment and would arrive in ten minutes – but with the rain still coming down, it would take me ten minutes just to find a cab, and another 45 to reach home! I told him to cancel the delivery, and then I just went to the wedding dressed as I was: fuming, sopping wet, leather shoes ruined from the rain, left hand nail polish done but right hand not started, carrying my huge backpack full of laptop and work items for the day. In the end, no one cared and the wedding was still fun. Ten days later, on Tuesday, on the way to meet an acquaintance for a happy hour, I finally picked up the damn saree and didn’t even bother to tell them that the blouse was too big.
A picture of the dried-up lake because I'm too sore about the saree to post a picture of that.
WEDNESDAY:
Next week I am participating in a research conference to share my progress in researching ghatu. I had submitted my poster PDF a few weeks ago, but the video was to be submitted by Wednesday of this week. The video portion was essentially complete, so I sat down to work on the audio before heading to my Nepali class. I was still in my pajamas and had not brushed my teeth yet because the toothpaste had run out the night before, when two men showed up at my door. They had come to fix the refrigerator. We had to call the landlord to make sure he was aware of these repairs to his antique kitchen appliance, and because he’s in Canada at the moment and was deep asleep, it took time for him to understand what was going on. Letting go of any ambition to work on the sound editing, I spent the morning trying to understand what the fridge technician needed: a stool (I only have a wheeled office chair), a cup of water with some shampoo (I use bar shampoos, not liquid), a pair of hands to hold a pipe in place while he used an open flame to weld it to the back of the fridge. I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to active welding. In the end, the fridge has started to put out cold air again and drips less water on the floor.
I forgot to brush my teeth and left for my Nepali lesson, stepping over the cat diarrhea that had appeared outside my front door. After that, I met an old friend for lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, a Syrian place called Taza. We can talk for hours, but I had to cut us short to rush home for another production meeting on Zoom. Three hours later I stumbled away from my computer and into the kitchen to make dinner, and then back to my computer to work more before sleeping.
THURSDAY:
The video deadline had already passed, and the sound editing was barely started. I sat down to begin work at 9am, trying to line up the sound of the madal with the image of the hand landing on the head of the drum – the results are mixed. I got up once to eat and once to shout at the cats yowling and brawling outside my window. At 5:30 I finally emerged from the depths of Audacity and VLC and my computer’s simple Microsoft Video Editor software. The short film, a feature of ghatu in Nalma, was complete. Not perfect, not final final, but done enough to submit for this conference.
By this point in the day my health felt a little off, but I had an evening event to attend. I hopped on my bike and cycled across the valley to a small hill city called Kirtipur. This is an area I really love but do not visit often enough. It’s fairly easy to get to the base of the hill, and then to visit any part of Kirtipur you have to walk up the very-steep roads to see the temples and the old Newari settlement, scattered around sloping mazes, with spectacular views of the southern hills of the Kathmandu valley. Sweaty and exhausted, I finally found the area where the event was supposed to have started thirty minutes before. Of course nothing had started, so I had time to catch my breath, stop sweating, and catch up with some people I know. We went to one of the local temples to ask for blessings from the god of music, dance, and theatre; this event was the first public performance by a local group of women of a traditional music form they had been learning called dapha. They wanted to ask the gods for forgiveness before doing their performance, in case they made any mistakes while performing.
Two hours later, we were still waiting for the event to start. I hadn’t eaten since the morning, and with my health dropping and my hunger increasing, I started to consider just leaving to eat somewhere else. Right as that thought crossed my mind, the musicians walked into the community center and set themselves up to start performing for us. A chorus of nearly thirty traditional Newari flute players, accompanied by two dhime drummers, churned out traditional and pop tunes while women from the community center served everyone plates of samay baji, the traditional Newari staple meal. I stuffed my face with beaten rice, spicy meat, dry-roasted soybeans, very spicy tomato chutney, bamboo soup, fried spinach, and aila, the Newari hard liquor.
I had barely finished eating when my friend Pushpa, who was hosting the event, pulled me onstage to join the circle of dancing people. Different individuals offered a dance step, and everyone followed; then another step would show up, and we would all shift to that one. Soon a man brought a plate full of rupees forward for us to dance around, because we were all dancing so well (it’s common to offer money to dancers when you appreciate them). The tempo of the music increased, and we all just danced faster, the circle of people growing as more people finished eating and wanted to dance through their digestion. The flute orchestra and the dancing circle seemed to be in competition: who would get tired first? As we danced more complicated and faster steps, the flute players picked up speed and pushed us to move even more quickly. So we leaned into it and goaded them on – could their fingers move fast enough to match our feet? Just when I thought I might throw up all the meat and beaten rice, the music and the dancing ended in a big flourish and lots of laughter. I grabbed my bag and helmet and headed out into the rain to find a taxi home, feeling a fever setting in.
FRIDAY:
It’s been a slow morning today. I feel much better than I did last night, but I’m not in full form. Everyone is sick these days, some with giardia, some with never-ending sneezing, so it was only a matter of time before I caught something. It feels like exhaustion for the most part, so I will try to work on easier things today, like this blog post and catching up on ghatu reading.
My bicycle is still in Kirtipur, chained to a pole somewhere on the top of that hill. I’m hoping that the drunk man who so desperately needed me to pay attention to him yesterday won’t be there when I go to pick up the bike today before my Nepali lesson. I’m hoping too that these heavy clouds wait to break until after I’ve gotten the bike and returned to the city (never mind – it just started to rain). Perhaps with a lowkey work day and an early bedtime, I will be fresh and ready for the Teach For Nepal 5K Walkathon tomorrow. Maybe next week I will have more time to read and write about my actual research topic.
At least there will always be time to snuggle with floppy puppies.