Living in Kathmandu
feels like urban camping most of the time, especially in the constant fight
over resources like water, gas, and electricity during the winter months. If
you’re lucky, maybe you have a gas geiser; otherwise, its best to take showers during
the day, because even if you don’t have solar panels, the black holding tank
soaks in the sun’s rays and heats the water anyway. If there’s no sun, you
could boil water and dilute it with cold tap water for a bucket bath. Maybe you
have to take a bucket bath anyway, because you forgot to pump water when the
electricity was on (there is up to seventeen hours of loadshedding a day during
the winter), so there’s not enough water for a shower—or to do dishes. So, if
you want a private bath or don’t want to haul the dishes downstairs, you have
to haul buckets of water up two flights of stairs from the well in the
backyard. Or maybe the well is dry, or the city water is scarce, so you have to
purchase a tanker of water. Any water you want to drink you have to boil and
filter. Its best to clean all vegetables you want to eat raw in iodine water. If
you have multiple gas cylinders, its best to have them from different gas
companies. That way, when gas shortages come, you don’t have to rely on one
supplier. We haven’t gotten this desperate yet, but a few winters ago, between
all the gas, electrical and water shortages, my Scottish neighbor couldn’t get
over the fact that, despite living in the nation’s capital city, he had to boil
milk for his kids over a wood fire in his backyard!
Recently, I decided
to think of Kathmandu as a village on steroids. I mean, my neighbors raise
water buffalo, have milk cows, and burn dried cow patties at night to keep warm
(which they slap on the side of the cow shed facing the road to dry in the
sun). My landlady grows vegetables in every bit of yard not covered with
cement—why pay for vegetables when you can grow them? If I think that way,
maybe I won’t get so upset when the electricity goes out next time, or my
internet isn’t working.
My ideas of resources
and urban survival were made to look like first world problems when a pastor’s
daughter in a village I recently stayed in commented to me that she spent six
days camping and fishing (in the cold damp
Kailali winter!) all by herself by the river sixteen kilometers deep in the
nearby jungle! She came back one day for church, but her father took her right
back out to the river after the service was over! Knowing that the Tharu fish
with nets and traps, I asked her why she couldn’t have come home for a few
days, then gone back out to retrieve her catch? She said there were sixteen
other people there too—she had to make sure they didn’t steal the fish caught
in her nets! All those fish were for the Christmas feast her church would have
in a few days!
[It took this
incident to make me realize that the Tharu could be classified as
“hunter-gatherers,” the classic people that anthropologists study. Frankly,
that’s just weird to think about, because after living in Tharu communities all
this past year, I’ve come to admire their resourcefulness and creativity as
people, and “hunter-gatherer” seems like some exotic, non-human specimen.]
Despite the fact
that the Tharu rely heavily on agricultural work—rice is the main crop, but
wheat, lentils, and mustard are also major crops—and raise numerous kinds of
animals, they also rely heavily on the natural resources around them. In
addition to eating the fish caught by the pastor’s daughter (these were not
minnows, as in Dang, but actual fish with meat on them) I was also served
something called gangaria—basically a
water potato, culled from the jungle streams—and forest bean pods called tata, both boiled over the fire. I have
not been served snails or rat yet, but I do know that the Tharu eat these too.
The church I visited recently took a trip into a nearby forest to get firewood
to cook their Christmas feast, and during their foraging, one of the men and
several of the children sped off after a large forest rat upon disturbing its
nest, with the idea to make a meal of it (unfortunately, they were unsuccessful
in catching it). On my most recent trip to Sukhrwar, some of the neighborhood
boys (ranging from age nine to twelve) caught a large field rat and trooped off
to build a fire to roast it. One of the fathers commented to me that a field
rat was good eating; the ones around the house however didn’t taste as good!
My Sukhrwar didi
goes to the forest before each festival to gather leaves to make plates and bowls,
and to get some firewood. She and her sons fish in the rivers and irrigation
canals for minnows and crawfish. She often makes her own rope from grasses to
bind the wood she forages—and to fix her the broken thong on her flip-flop so
she can walk home. Tharu men and women weave numerous kinds of baskets and mats
out of bamboo, also gleaned from the forest, and dried bamboo makes good
firewood. I’ve seen women gather reeds and brush from the forests and streams to
make various kinds of brooms and baskets, which they use around the house but
also sell in the bazaars. There are probably lots of other things the Tharu
gather from the forest that I’m unaware of.
I’m continually
amazed by what I am served in Tharu homes—all the food has been grown or
gathered locally. While winter is much more miserable, there are more
vegetables. Coriander, dill, and various kinds of green leafy vegetables grow
on their own around the potatoes in the field behind the house. My didi’s older
brother’s family has a large garden down the road where they grow cabbage,
cauliflower and tomatoes to sell in the bazaar. Being a relative, my didi is
free to pick from the garden what she needs to feed her family. As a result, we
have tomato chutney to flavor our food, and potato and cauliflower curry most
days, in addition to saag (green
leafy vegetable). The Tharu love having jhol
(gravy or juice) to eat with their rice; my didi has been making sinki ko jhol a lot recently—radish
stems dried, smashed, fermented for days in the sun then dried out till they’re
bleach white; these are then cooked with potatoes, oil, chilis, salt and
turmeric to make a sour soup. If there is a family wedding, my didi will bring
home leftover goat meat. As much as my hosts apologize that the food is simple,
I love that I know exactly where it all came from.
Tharu houses are
also made of local materials. In Kailali, with forests a little more numerous
than in Dang, many houses are actually made of wood, or alternatively straw or
bamboo, and then covered with adobe. The home in which I stay in Dang is made
of unbaked clay bricks, and then covered with adobe. Each Dashai, my didi
brings various colors of clay to re-mud the inside and outside walls—a whitish
clay for the inside walls, which she said she brought from a place further away
from the village (and “brought” means carried in a basket balanced on her
head!) and the normal brown for the outside, which she brought from the river
about ten minutes from the house. I’ve also seen yellow and a deep red, also
from different kinds of clay found in different areas of the district, used to
decorate houses.
While the houses in
Sukhrwar do have electricity—my didi’s husband says they were married in
February and the electricity came around October of the same year, so they’ve
have electricity about 13 years now—they’re not entirely dependent on it. Sure
they have phones that need to be charged, my didi’s husband works off his
laptop, and its nice for the boys to have light in the evenings so they can do
their homework, but life doesn’t stop when the electricity goes out for four to
six hours at a time. While they do have a gas stove, they also cook off of
gobar gas (gas extracted from cow dung) and wood fires (which also serves to
warm everyone up and create a social circle during the winter). They have a
well out back that my didi proudly says has never run dry, even in the dry season.
Undoubtedly, a Tharu
tribute would last longer in the arena than I would.
