We purchase our drinking water. It comes in large 20-liter bottles. These are delivered by a small store down the street; we call
the storefront when we’re out of water and instruct them to bring two bottles
above Deka Office, to the foreign girls’ apartment. The answer is the typical
Nepali “Eh, la, la!” Sometimes the water comes within the hour; sometimes it’s
delivered by the afternoon. More than once, we’ve had to call the next morning
and scold whoever is in the shop. Usually they bring it right over then.
The water delivery guy just walks into the apartment
unannounced. Even if he did ring the doorbell, with all the electrical outages,
it would only ring half the time. He’ll make two trips up four flights of
stairs to the kitchen on the top floor—one for each bottle of water—then take
the empty bottles back to the shop. One hot afternoon, Roxy was working at her
computer at the kitchen table when the guy walked in. She was inappropriately
clothed for Nepal—her shoulders were bare—and was thus startled. This happened
not just once, but twice. I began telling her when I had called the water
delivery guy. She would then run to wrap a shawl around her, or pull on a
hoodie.
We noticed that, as often as we ordered water,
usually only six bottles would show up on our bill each month. “Its because the
guy gets a peep show every time he comes over here!” Roxy exclaimed. “He’s
giving us a discount on our water!”
I usually locked the downstairs door from the
inside if I was home alone. But this time, all my housemates had gone, and I had
forgotten to do just that. As I was working at my computer in my room, an unknown man just
walked in. “Is this the art institute?” he asked in Nepali. “No,” I replied
firmly. “Its next door.” He apologized, and turned to leave. I walked him to
our door, and locked it behind him. Erin pointed out later that, with the open
door and all our shoes lined up at the entrance, our place probably looked like
the art institute.
I was awoken from my Sunday afternoon nap by a
phone call from Erin. After some chitchat about where we were—I in Tikapur,
Kailali, having just come from the annual Easter rally, she in Pokhara visiting
a fellow researcher—she broke the news to me: she had flooded our apartment. It
happened on Holi—the day for flinging water and color at each other in South
Asia—of all appropriate days. The electricity had gone off while she was
pumping water; forgetting to turn the pump off before she left the house for Holi shenanigans, when the electricity came back on the pump started up
again and it kept going with no one home to shut it off. Oddly enough, only her
room and mine had really flooded. Not to worry though—all my stuff was fine;
they had reached home in time for only the carpets to get soaked. It looked
like the carpets would dry out and there wouldn’t be too much water
damage.
When I got back from grocery shopping, there were
two new people cleaning our flat. I greeted them with a “Namaste,” then trotted
up to the kitchen. Roxy was there. “So, we have a new didi?” I asked. This would make our third house help: the first, a
girl of sixteen, had unexpectedly quit; when that happened, the woman who
cooked for us had convinced our landlord to hire her sister to clean the flat.
Roxy rolled her eyes. “Oh, you missed it.” She
relayed that, after Erin had flooded the apartment, our landlord’s parents had
come over to inspect the damage and noticed how dirty the flat was. Roxy
explained to me that, because all of us had been out of town for a time, the didi had been given time off. So the
apartment had seen better days. Our landlord’s parents called our didi, fired her, and hired a new person—a
really sweet Christian lady who would often bring her middle-school daughter
with her. Roxy wished that our landlord’s parents had at least given
our didi a chance to explain herself.
I came home one Friday night to find forty people
in my kitchen. I corralled my housemate. “Erin, since when were we having a
party?” I asked. Erin stood aghast. “Oh no—I didn’t tell you?! I’m sooo sorry;
I really thought I had discussed this with you! Right, we were all just leaving
to go to a bar; I’ll start shooing everyone out!” Erin did penance by giving me
a dark chocolate bar—a much-appreciated present that I consumed in my time of
need the next time I headed out to the village for fieldwork.
When I arrive back from six weeks of research
outside the Valley, I looked at the white board where we write messages to each
other and calculate household expenses. Next to some numbers, a note was
written: “Rager (Tori not included).”
