Political and Seismic Instability

I am sure you have read in passing about a food institution of ours, Nhucches, the neighborhood organic restaurant. Thank god for Nhucches, I never dreamed I could get a field greens salad of such quality in Nepal. Plus the owners are really cool. They are cut from the same mold as Jon–socially and politically conscious foodies who are intellectually particular and bordering a bit on hedonistic. I am thankful that Jon has akin people with whom he can pal around.

This restaurant has a market that sells sundries from a cooperative that buys organically produced goods from all over Nepal. They have great rice, lentils, chickpeas, other beans, honey, tea, fresh veggies, herbs and eggs, as well as a wonderful artisanal goat cheese made by some French guy who lives here. For a $1.15 you can get a small wheel of wonderfully creamy, flavorful cheese that is typically unheard of in Nepal, where ripe yak cheese or overpriced old imported cheese is most prevalent.

We often buy both dry and fresh goods from this market, as well as eat at the restaurant about twice a week. During our first shopping excursion we bought a kilo of brown rice from Jumla, the far most northwestern district. It is delicious rice that we constantly have to nag our cleaning lady, Virginia, to cook for us. For some reason brown rice and black lentils are considered poor people’s food. The more healthy alternatives are not coveted like basmati rice and yellow daal, which are typically served in high cast or wealthier homes. So alas we struggle because our tastes are more aligned with traditionally low class cuisine.

One day as I was haranguing Virginia to cook the brown rice, she brought to my attention that all sorts of little bugs that looked like weevils had invaded, and claimed this was why she had not been cooking the rice.

I mentioned it to the shopkeeper. They said I should just bring it back and they will give me some new chamal (the word for rice that is not yet cooked, I think there are about five different Nepali words for rice depending on what stage it is in its life.) It was my intention to return the rice, but then figured we would probably have the same problem with the next batch. Since we had transferred the chamal directly into an airtight canister after buying it, the weevil eggs were definitely in there as it was packaged. It seemed a waste to return it and I was not sure how to deal with a new batch of rice to avoid the same problem. I could have put the rice out in the sun and bake it, which might kill the eggs. Yet that would also involve buying a nanglo, a big flat circular shaped weaved basket that people spread and sort rice on. (The women have a knack were they flip the rice along the slightly raised edge and it tosses the rice, which is heaver, toward them and leaves behind the remaining shaft and grass for them to pull out.) At this point I was tired of buying household items and did not want to bother, so instead I just picked the weevils out of the rice by hand and dropped them in a glass of boiling water.

I figured they could not have eaten too much and the rice would get boiled in the pressure cooker, so that should kill anything remaining.

Virginia was a bit shocked when I told her what I did and requested she cook the rice. I asked her if what I did was strange and if Nepalis would not do it, would they rather throw away the rice? She said no of course they would not waste chamal, they would do exactly what I did. So she made the rice that day but since she does not have the knack of cooking brown rice it came out a little soggy. I was absent from lunch that day, out working, but Jon said Virginia expressed that she did not really like brown rice. (His Nepali is getting good enough that he can have a conversation about food and people’s likes and dislikes.) Since then she has not cooked it. I am not sure if she really is not into the rice, or is freaked out about the weevils (which in Nepali they call maggots, it is the same word they would use to refer to maggots on meat, which we would definitely not eat). So alas our delicious Jumla organic brown rice sits there.

It has been my experience living in Kathmandu that I get a congestion cold every six to eight weeks. I think that the pollution exacerbates this tendency or maybe it is the root cause, I am not sure. Well like clock work Jon caught the cold in our sixth week here. I caught it a week later from him. These days everyone has it, because of the change in weather, so they say. It is highly contagious, quickly moving amongst the population. There are many vulnerabilities, getting sneezed on in the tight confines of a public bus, or grabbing a pole to balance yourself the same way another person had done immediately after he coughed into his hands, or shaking hands with anybody, or having a snotty nosed kid climb all over you, etc. (The NYT exposé on which American politicians use Purell comes to mind.)

It is a nasty cold that fills your head and lungs up with a thick mucus that throws off your balance, makes you feel like you are perpetually drowning, and keeps you from lying down to sleep because it intensifies the drowning sensation. As the mucus moves into your chest you develop a terrible cough that hurts but helps heave up the mucus.

Jon’s cough developed before mine so he asked me to get some cough syrup. I went to our neighborhood pharmacy and was given a cough syrup called Bronchodyne, with a picture of a lung on it (see picture). This Bronchodyne was a new one on me but the lung convinced me that it would probably be effective. I often rely on pictures on medicine labels because I am not very good at recognizing chemical components, a skill that is necessary to decipher what the different medicines are for. Most of the drugs are generic from India and Bangledesh, so things are not referenced by a drug brand name the way they are in the states.

Well it turns out this Bronchodyne has twice as much of the active component in robitussin that makes you loopy. So in other words, instead of having to drink a bottle of Robitussin to induce a high-like tripping effect, you only have to drink a half a bottle of Bronchodyne. Well believe you me, I have come to discover that feeling as if you are tripping is none too pleasant when you simultaneously feel like you are drowning from too much mucus. The stuff was scary.

The next time Jon asked for cough syrup, I got something called Benedryl. In a hurry, I unwittingly took the bottle the pharmacist gave me when I asked for cough syrup without inspecting it. We have not tried it. We were too scared that it actually is Benedryl and we would be subject to another weird high. Or even worse it is a Benedryl knock off that turns out to be something completely different (there are a lot of brand knock-offs here). Luckily our colds are gone so we won’t be motivated to research this bottle of Benedryl’s ingredients for another six weeks. Good thing medicine is super cheap here so all our errors are not causing us too much expense.

Nepalis love their scotch, and Royal Stag seems to be the most popular scotch in Nepal. We were buying it regularly until DC told us to steer clear of it on the basis that it’s frequently counterfeited. I won’t speculate about what goes into counterfeit scotch. But this might explain the royal hangovers.

Royal Challenge is a brand I’ve seen on bottles of scotch and cans of beer in some of the stores. I have yet to take the Royal Challenge.

There’s a flaking billboard at one intersection in town, and I haven’t had my camera handy, but it advertises a whiskey called Royal Warrior. I haven’t seen this one in the stores. If I do, will I buy it? Would you?

I also wonder if these brands will need to be renamed if the king is stripped of all his governmental powers. “The People’s Stag” does have a nice ring to it.

Laurie flew down from Pokhara for the five-day Tihar holiday. On the night she arrived was Laxmi Puja, when Hindus in Nepal invite Laxmi, the goddess of wealth, into their homes by making an offering on the street in front of their doorway, and a path leading from there into the house. We went out in the evening to get dinner, heading for Thamel, Kathmandu’s tourist district, thick with restaurants and open late.

The narrow street from our house to the chowk was lively, though normally it’s deserted a few hours after dark. Children were going from house to house singing a song that would become familiar over the next few hours. At each door they carol and are given money. Women were tending to the butter candles that lit the pujas in front of their doors. All of the shops were open late. Boys were throwing firecrackers from the rooftops, and an occasional bottle rocket would sparkle into the sky and pop. We followed the narrow street along the back wall of the Russian Embassy and down to the chowk. On the steps of the electronics shop where we bought our cheap Chinese phones there was a band sitting and playing, with drums and an electric guitar run through a little amplifier, and an audience of a dozen people standing in the street. Many buildings were decked out in strings of colored lights but none so brightly as the businesses on the chowk, and along the main streets our taxi driver drove on the way to Thamel. Jaya Nepal Hall, a movie theater near the royal palace, had at least a hundred strands strung from the roof to the compound walls making a pavilion of lights. Laurie said, If there’s a power outage we can blame it on Jaya Nepal.

The driver had to let us off at the end of Tridevi Marg, the street leading into Thamel. There was a cordon closing the street to car traffic, beyond which was a dark stretch and then the backside of a bandstand set up for a dj to play thumping beats for a crowd that filled the street from curb to curb. We squeezed through along the sidewalk and into the press of people dancing under clouds of laser-lit smoke. We emerged from the back of the crowd into the remnants of a street fair where the last few vendors were selling soda and snacks, and dogs, some with red tikka stains still on their heads, were nosing through discarded food wrappers. There were many foreigners in the crowd, some in families, some riding passenger on bicycle rickshaws.

We passed with relative ease through Thamel where on most nights legions of hawkers dog yours steps trying to sell you blessings and trinkets and hash and you have to watch that your feet aren’t run over by the taxis and motorcycles contesting every spare inch of roadway. Tonight, the hawkers seemed to be occupied elsewhere and the taxis were on the other side of the cordons. We went on Laurie’s suggestion to Cafe Mitra, her favorite restaurant in Kathmandu, the doorway to which is near the end of a narrow brick alley. From there you climb narrow uneven wooden stairs, avoid hitting your head on a low lintel, and step into a cozy dining room with windows overlooking the street. The main dining room on the second floor was full, mostly of foreigners, so we were led to the third floor dining room, where we were the only diners for most of the evening. We had cocktails and salad, Amanda ate a grilled fish, Laurie ate pasta, and I dismantled a pair of quails. We talked Nepali politics. On our way out, a group of boys waiting in the alley hit us up with an express version of the deusi song, ten seconds at most, and then claimed to be insulted when it only earned them twenty rupees. A longer version was in our near future.

When we arrived back at our house, a boy with a guitar in his hand followed us through the gate and stood there assessing us as we were greeted by our landlord Vishwa and his wife Kalpana. Amanda said, laughing, He looks like he’s going to hit us with that thing. The boy disappeared back through the gate and returned in a moment with over a dozen companions carrying a drum kit, a tambourine, another guitar, a bass, a microphone and stand, an amplifier, and speaker cabinets. They were singing the same song the children in the alley had been singing, but with a good deal more vigor and volume.

One of the older boys approached Vishwa with a power strip in his hand and asked if they could plug in. Vishwa ran an extension cord for them. A few sound checks produced some feedback and the loud persistent hum of ungrounded electric guitars. Vishwa tried another outlet for them, running the extension cord this time through his living room window. The tinkering continued, the singing and clapping faded, then was picked up again when the sound system still wasn’t ready. We were getting a little impatient but we waited with good humor. The girl who is Vishwa and Kalpana’s live-in helper brought their three-month old baby out for Laurie and Amanda to ooh and ah. He’s a cute and fat and utterly calm baby and the crowd of boys adjusting their sound system didn’t faze him. It took them twenty or thirty minutes to get situated. Finally they played three long rousing songs for us, enticing Amanda and Laurie and I to dance during one of them. The neighbors looked out from the third floor window. They finished with an electrified version of the deusi song during which Kalpana set out their hard-earned tributes, a copper plate with rice and money and an apple with a burning incense stick in it, all of which two of the boys carefully transferred into a knapsack full of other such rewards.

It was a late night. Amanda thinks they waited up for us to return.