The Real Housewives of Sukhrwar: On Family and Female Experience

One of my Kathmandu housemates, between her work as a researcher and photographer/ videographer with an NGO that works in the hill regions of Nepal, has spent a lot of time in various Nepalese hill villages. She made the comment one day that, instead of a reality television show about wealthy women in New Jersey, a similar show about the lives of Nepali village women would be so much more stimulating. In her honor, I’ve put together the following confessionals based on actual events and experiences in and around Sukhrwar. I’ve changed names, the order of some events, and embellished these occurances, so these should be read primarily as fictional, not factual.

Friend’s Aama (mother): So my daughter left to visit friends in another district last Dashai (fall festival time), and then, when we tried to call her, her mobile was either switched off or busy! After a few days, we heard rumors that she had eloped! I went to all my friend’s houses asking them if they had heard from my daughter at all—I even asked our foreign bahini (younger sister) to call her, and even she couldn’t get through! Everyone was kind—they gave me jaar or raksi (home-brewed rice beer and distilled alcohol), they consoled me—but I had such a hard time giving tika to my niece on Vijaya Dashami, because she reminded me that my own daughter wasn’t here! Well finally, we heard from her, and yes, she did get married. Well, she said she was married, but we hadn’t thrown a bhoj (feast) for her, so we decided to do that, to let everyone know that we accepted this marriage. We decided to have it over Maghi. But then she called to ask if we could postpone it three more months! We couldn’t do that—until we had this bhoj, it was as if she wasn’t married, and we had already invited everyone! We told her she HAD to show up! She came so late—we had guests from eight or nine in the morning, and we fed them and gave them tika, and she finally arrived at seven in the evening with her husband and new mother and father-in-law. They came in a jeep from Kailali (three districts west of Dang). Well, we all—the whole extended family—gave them tika and money. My husband and I even performed samdi-melon*. But it was so sad when she left the next morning; she was crying really loudly and had to be carried into the jeep. It’s so sad when a daughter is taken from her family!

* where the in-laws exchange tika and gifts; a tradition in Tharu weddings.

Maili Chori (middle daughter): The foreign bahini (younger sister) was so shocked that Sumitra cried so loudly at her wedding. She thought that because Sumitra had chosen her own husband that she should be happy! She was shocked that all of Sumitra’s aunts also cried! I asked her if mothers ever cried at their daughters’ weddings in her country? She said yes, but it was tears of happiness! Imagine that, happiness! Ours cry because a daughter is being separated from her family! She will encounter so much dukha (pain and suffering) as a new bwari (daughter-in-law) at her new house! I cried a lot at my wedding, my brother’s wife cried a lot at hers—we all cried at our weddings! I mean, we didn’t know how we would be treated! The foreign bahini even said that, in her country, if the bride cried like Sumitra did, the wedding would stop! Well, I told her, there’s no stopping the wedding here, no matter how much a bride cries!

Visiting Ethnographer: Sumitra gave me conflicting messages at her wedding bhoj; in conversation at first she was like “you HAVE to find a husband QUICK!” and then went on to detail how she had such a bad feeling now that she was married, complained that she would have to live separate from her husband—she wasn’t going to just give up her teaching job in Kavre so she could go live with her husband in Kailali; it was so hard to find work in Nepal—and that she would now waste half her salary calling him on the phone, and commented that maybe she did badly by eloping. And after describing all their marriage dukha to me, all the women I talk to want to know when I’m getting married, and if my parents are looking for a husband for me or if I have to look for my own husband?

Chora [son]: So it’s nine in the morning and I’m eating my daal-bhaat [rice and lentils, the common, every-day Nepali food dish] out back, and making the warm mash for the goats over the fire, when kaka [paternal uncle] shows up drunk on the road. He’d drunk too much jaar at the wedding. He’s the husband of my paternal uncle’s wife’s sister. We just all call him “kaka.” Anyway, two of the village bhais [younger brothers] were trying to get him to calm down and come with them, but he started throwing mud clods at them. He also kept making motorbike sounds, like he was going somewhere. Anyway, he sees me eating and comments that wants to eat too. He disappears down the road, and the next thing I know, he’s coming in my front door! So I call the two village bhais, who come running, I push him out the front door and close it on him and he’s cursing me the entire time, and finally the bhais drag him down the road. What’s more, the fire can’t seem to stay lit this morning; I won’t be able to finish making this mash before I leave for the office. Shyam’s mom* will have to finish making it later.

*Men often refer to their wives as the mother of their eldest son.

Sumitra: I told our foreign bahini to help my didi (older sister)* with the face cream I got her. The instructions are in English, not Nepali, and my didi can’t read well anyway. My didi liked the face cream I use, but the shopkeeper said this one was better.

*Didi doesn’t always refer to one’s actual older sister; it can be any female relative or close friend’s sister. In this case, Sumitra is referring to woman I refer to as “bwari” in her confessionals.

Visiting Ethnographer: So this stuff that Sumitra got my didi is basically facial bleach. It says there’s no side effects and is perfectly safe, but still cautions the user to try a bit on their hand to see if their skin gets irritated. My didi said that she’s trying to get rid of some dark spots on her cheek, which resulted from a bout of acne she had when she was younger. 

Maili Chori: So we’ve all discussed this, and we’ve decided that it must be the hawa-pani [weather or environment] in her country that makes our foreign bahini so fair. Maybe if we went to her country we would come back all fair as well?

Bwari: So I noticed that my foreign bahini didn’t wear churra (glass bracelets), tikli (adhesive decorative sticker worn between the eyebrows), or sindur (red powder worn in the part of the hair), so I asked her: is she married? She said she wasn’t married. I asked her how people recognized a married woman in her country? She said that women—and men!—wear a gold ring on their left ring finger. That’s how they recognize a married person. Imagine being able to recognize if a man is married! Here, most men don’t even let on that they’re married…

Visiting Ethnographer: Sumitra told me quite pointedly that I needed to buy a new kurtha the other day. Well, she’s been seeing me wear the same four kurthas for over a year now, I guess they’re getting shabby?

Pahadi (non-Tharu) Bwari: So we’ve all discussed this, and we think that our foreign bahini (she’s actually my didi though—I’m twenty-three, she’s twenty-seven) must wear nicer clothes in her country. I mean, in movies people from her country wear nicer clothes. But I’ve only seen her wear jean-pants once. 

The Real Hunger Games

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.