Dinner-time Ritual
“In Italy,” I told him, “there’s an entire chain of butcher shops that specialize in horse-meat.” Ten years of age and not about to have anything put over on him, my grandson was squinting hostilely at the plate where his mother had put dinner. “You should be glad your mother doesn’t serve you fried foal, maybe colt cutlets.” The looked-for eruption of Ehw! Ick! and gagging sounds served to distract him from his plate. Since he still refused to look grateful for what his mother had labored over steaming pots to produce for him, I added, “Of course, they also had a very nice line of donkey sausages and fresh-killed pigeon.”
The more inclusive term, wholesome, may be defined as the opposite of that which is contaminated, dirty, but the meaning of contamination varies according to what sort of substance or quality does the contaminating, and in Nepal the word often meant something quite different from what was meant by it at home in the United States. The doctor Peace Corps Nepal provided to oversee our health wished we would eat only freshly peeled and/or par-boiled fruit, boil all drinking water for twenty brisk minutes beforehand, and add twelve drops of iodine to any glass of water ten minutes before guzzling it, if by far-fetched chance we were caught away from sterile, home supplies. He took it as perversity and defiance when we fell ill, as we did frequently, repetitiously, violently with dysentery, worms, malaria and mysterious fevers. Indeed, the need for this sort of precaution was drummed into the population of foreign visitors quite widely.
Two British women, linguists working in the country at about that period, lived in a posh neighborhood of Kathmandu, just next to an American couple, whose pre-teen son developed the habit of dropping over the garden wall for a visit at tea-time. Nothing loathe, one day the linguists offered the young mooch a banana, which he accepted with gratification but not, they felt, with courtesy becoming to a gentleman. “What do you say?” they queried the lad. He looked startled; he never said anything before eating a banana. What could these Brits have in mind, No honks? Grace? “What do you say when someone gives you a banana?” the linguist prompted. “What I was looking for was, ‘Thank you,’” she later told me. The boy looked at the banana in his hand, plump yellow, with black marks indicating ripeness. Harking back to his mother’s most frequent admonition, he made a wild stab at an answer. “Is it boiled?” he asked.
I can remember wondering if it would help for me to put a few drops of iodine on my hand before slurping cool water from a hand-pump, or if eating delicious bhaji, fried onions covered in batter and bajaar dust, could be counteracted by taking a swig afterward directly out of my iodine bottle?
The rest of Nepal’s population went happily about its business, eating and drinking whatever good fortune offered, with never a thought for floating spores. In fact, the vocabulary I acquired offered no word for micro-organisms and, in my home village, bacterial infection was not even a theory. My efforts to explain the causes of disease foundered on the fact that the word, kira, bug, was the only one at my disposal. It was a very popular explanation, oft requested: not only did I drop red stuff in all my water, but I saw invisible bugs on my food. The belief that I had been sent there as entertainment until television could be introduced was only forestalled by general ignorance that television existed. Walking away after an effort of mine at spreading enlightenment, one visitor told another, “And you should see his ass, it’s white as a sheet of paper.”
Besides, everyone knew what caused disease–either the gods, or raksha, demons. Either you had done something to deserve sickness or one of your previous incarnations had. Looking honestly into his own heart, who could not find guilty justification for a bout of diarrhea? Of course, less self-critical people might not acknowledge such short-comings in their own behavior. For them the explanation was that enemies must employ witches, dayn, to cast evil upon them. No one I spoke with had ever done such a wicked thing, nor did anyone know a dayn, but they were certain that other people did.
Soap was not considered a useful thing to have about the house. In fact, my early efforts to lather up before dousing myself in the pokhari, the village pond, were loudly discouraged for the very good reason that suds in the water were bad for the fish and for the valuable livestock that drank from that source, not to mention the poorer people, who got all their water there, as well. If a pot needed scrubbing, a bit of mud and a handful of straw would scour the metal shiny in a trice. Who needed soap?
For all my strange preoccupation with cleanliness, I was considered quite a dirty person. To be properly clean demanded two baths daily–one upon arising, another before the evening meal. Words muttered during the process were considered as important as the water and a lot more useful than soap. I hardly ever managed two immersions a day, certainly not in the winter. That I knew no words to say while bathing was not considered important, for I had been born without caste and there was really no way of improving on my state of uncleanness.
Still hoping that my grandson would absentmindedly eat his dinner if distracted enough, I asked, “Well, why wouldn’t you eat horse meat? You eat chicken.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but you ride a horse.” He had me there, you sure couldn’t ride a chicken. The challenging thing about arguing with your grandchildren is that you have to help them with their side of the debate. And he had a valid point, if not perfectly expressed. We have a social bond with horses, who help us with their strength and speed, if only on television. My Friend, Flikka, was a very popular tv series in my childhood, based just on the attractiveness of the strong, graceful and loyal personality of the horse, though I happen to know the particular horse who starred in Flikka was a real bitch off-screen and would stab you in the back, soon as look at you. We don’t cannibalize movie stars because they really are in bad taste.
“Would you eat dog-meat, then?” I asked. “You can’t ride a dog.” Eew, ick, gag, choke–point taken, he would not. “Of course you wouldn’t,” I agreed. “Dogs and cats are our friends. People keep them as substitute children, or in your case, as extra brothers. You don’t eat family. You don’t eat people, and dogs are little people, right?” He went along with me on that one.
So I told him the story of the blond American girl who saw a window-full of puppies in Manila and said that she would just love to buy that cute little white one with the brown spot on his back. Accommodating, as always, the locals promptly brought her a brown paper package containing the nicely cleaned and quartered puppy all ready to cook. In the Philippines they have no social contract with dogs. My grandson was perfecting his sounds-of-disgust repertoire to an amazing degree, and I hoped he would shortly exhaust the sensation, the way the nose wearies of a persistent smell. “But it is perfectly possible to eat dogs. Their meat is just as tasty and delicious as chicken and if you grew up in the Philippine Islands, very likely you would eat dog. Here, in America, we don’t, but the reason you don’t eat these animals is not that they aren’t edible. It’s the same with horses.” I was losing him, I could tell.
“Okay, look,” I said, “you would take a bite of food from your mother’s plate, wouldn’t you?” He managed to look both disgusted and embarrassed at once. “Well, your mother would eat an apple that you had already taken a bite out of, wouldn’t she?” He was mildly indignant–of course she would. There was nothing wrong with his food. If he could eat it, certainly his mother should. Mothers change dirty diapers, too, he knew from daily observation of his youngest brother. Mothers were highly resistant to pollution. “Now, if you saw a strange man begging on the street, a dirty old man who needed a shower and hadn’t shaved for days, and he offered you a bite of the apple he was in the middle of eating, would you take a bite?” Ice-skates on special in hell first. “Okay, okay, suppose the dirty old man had only taken one bite of his apple and you could take your bite out of the other side, would you go for it then?” Sooner would a sumo wrestler pass through the eye of a needle, I gathered. “Then suppose the dirty old man hadn’t even taken a bite of the apple, he just held it in his hand. How about taking a bite then?” Chickens would pucker up and kiss first. “Well, suppose the old man wasn’t so dirty, and he shaved, and suppose he was someone you knew. Suppose it was me offering you an apple from a bag I had.” Well, Uncle Wiggly, if the space heater didn’t shoot off a sudden blast of hot air that rang the wind chimes next to the budgie-cage, causing the little bird to fall off its perch into the rice pudding..., maybe. “Well,” I asked, “suppose I hadn’t shaved, how bout it?” Okay, he could eat an apple if I hadn’t shaved, hadn’t taken a shower that morning...or the day before...maybe for a week, right. “Suppose I took a very small bite out of one side of the apple, could you still take your bite out of the other side?” Well, he supposed, he said, stirring some food around on his plate.
Moving in to close the deal, I pointed out that the apple in question was no more dirty when I offered it to him than when offered by a stranger. Our teeth were probably just about as infectious and our hands probably served equally as disease vectors. I wouldn’t eat the old man’s apple either, I told him, but I would eat food prepared by strangers in some restaurant, despite the fact that several times I had been desperately sick with food poisoning which I had gotten that way. The difference was in the way you looked at it, not in actual cleanliness.
Just outside my house, in Govindapur, there was a brick-lined, dug well, about fifteen feet deep to the water-line. It sat flush with the ground, lacking any retaining wall or cover, so it was a real hazard to running children or night-walking American, so-called agricultural experts. Frogs lived in it and could not be caught in a bucket; toads drowned in it and had to be fished out all bloated and white in the bucket which was to hold my drinking water; a checkered snake made its home among the loose bricks near water-line, feasting on frogs, toads and struggling insects before spitting in the water and emptying its bowels. Being situated on the road which passed east through the village, this well got a fair amount of foot-traffic and walkers were bound to be hot and thirsty in the midday heat. If some of the village children were loitering about, probably to see what entertainment I could provide, sometimes passers-by would ask them to fetch a bucket and rope to draw water for them and maybe their oxen. One day, two men strode up and asked little Dukhia who it was that drank from this well. “We all do, even the sah’b,” Dukhia told them, tossing his head in my direction. “I’m not drinking it,” the man’s companion said, and they went with quick steps on their thirsty way east. I had a pretty clean bucket, too. It was never used to feed a cow or mix manure and clay for smoothing floors, though it probably would have benefitted my cooking-area floor if it had been. You should have seen some of the rusty cans other people used to raise water. No inspection of my bucket would have made my well acceptable, however. Bacteria were not in question. I was formally soiled, not part of the family– ritually unclean. When someone had to climb down into the well to fetch out a bucket whose rope had parted, I was forbidden the pleasure. A grumpy man was fetched who made the climb in haste because he was very busy and because of the snake. If I had immersed my out-caste body in the water, it would have contaminated it past using for most of my neighbors.
Of course, the people of Nepal took jati, caste, into consideration when relating to one another. It was officially banned by law, but no one paid any attention to laws, not where they came into conflict with tradition, anyway. The various jati were grouped into four large categories which were commonly characterized as parts of the body–the body politic, at least. Brahmins were seen as the head, chhetriya, one-time warriors, perhaps because they were once so well-armed, were seen as the arms (the King belonged to the chhetriya), vaishya, the largest group, were traditionally the body–farmers and merchants of myth and, finally, the sudra group were seen as the feet: feet being in constant contact with the earth, were deemed dirty at all times. The sudra were what we called untouchables, in our careless ignorance, because no one in a higher group wished to touch them. In fact, to each class, members of the groups below were considered more or less untouchable. In addition to the priesthood, members of the Brahmin jati had established themselves as the dominant force in the catering trade: everyone would eat their food.
As a foreign-born individual, I had been asked what my jati was and I happily said that I didn’t have any jat. We Americans were free of such things, I optimistically believed. I thought I fell outside this system of classification, but just as an American of mixed race (Barack Obama, for example, President though he be) is considered “black,” though he might, with as much justification, be called “white.” I fell by default into the lowest category. There were people, I heard, who feared the very shadow of a low-caste person. The men who did not drink from my well feared my touch on the rope by which I lowered my bucket into the well. A physically dirty bucket belonging to some more respectable person would have been quite acceptable. Like Bilbo Baggins, I was rich but not respectable. If I had it to do over again, I would tell everyone that my family was American chhetrya; anything good enough for the King ought to be good enough for me..., for anybody, when you think about it.
If possible, all Peace Corps volunteers ought to have their sense of humor removed in training, but Heinze just couldn’t resist teasing the children of his landlord, who was also Pradhanpanch, the Mayor, of Sakhawa Bajaar. A small, brown horse had died in the now-deserted market square, just outside Heinze’s room. The Pradhanpanch’s three children were watching with interest as several men from the Dhom jati labored to lash the animals feet together so that they could carry it off, hanging upside-down from a pole. Dead animals were the exclusive domain of the lowest of the low castes. The men had draped a couple of pieces of clothing, a shirt and one or two head-cloths, over the low branches of a small tree nearby. They were climbing in this tree to get the best view of proceedings, when Heinze caught the children. “Ah-ha, you’re un-clean now!” he cried out. Wait till your mother finds out that you touched the Dhom’s shirt.” He thought he was clever to have found a flaw in the system, by which the prejudices of caste and class might be brought down. After all, how could anyone find their own children suddenly impure? His amused whistle-blowing led to the children’s mother dragging them upstairs where she closed them all in a room. Loud voices, tears and crying followed as the three children were scolded, which was all and more than Frank expected to happen. He admitted later that he felt quite bad about the matter. Clearly, the ritual contamination of a Dhom could be countered by the ritual sanctification of a cow, that most pure of animals. And what better way than by drinking the cow’s urine? The children stayed mad at him for days.
The Dhom’s shirt was not actually unhygienic, no more than any working man’s upper garment would be. The cow’s urine had no medicinal properties, even if the children had been exposed to an objectively verifiable source of infection. One can imagine a holy man, centuries pre-Ramayana, succumbing to the Demon of the Afternoon, which, we are warned, causes monks to rise from their meditation in order to spread their wisdom across the land. Having, as the saint would have seen it, finally risen above false dichotomies–self and other, clean and filthy, silly and profound, master of detail and tendentious bore– he would have seized on the perfect logic embodied in his demonstration (“Watch, madame...,” ) that harm did not come to him from contact with animal waste products (...and you will see that it has no effect at all!), not even if he were to imbibe them. In fact, he remained as saintly as ever, with a placid urine-drinking smile reflecting the footlights of history. Where one remained sanctified despite dwelling with corpses, drinking from a human skull or the occasional cup of bovine urine, substitute the words because of for despite. Reverse cause and effect in the minds of observes, as often happens, and scroll on fast-forward some millennia to Heinze and the Pradhan’s children. It was fitting that an imaginary problem would be resolved with a symbolic remedy, but how much more efficient to decide the problem of social contamination did not exist in the first place.
Ritual cleanliness has to do with the way a person, an object or a food is seen as acceptable, based on qualities quite apart from causing illness or spreading physical dirtiness. Here the objections are supported with vague criticism –“It’s bad (to show disrespect to authority, to loan money at interest), it’s disgusting (asparagus, squid)”– or untrue generalizations–“They’re all thieves, immoral, greedy, drunks...” in the effort, never more than partially successful, to provide a functional rationale for the designation. Where a causal relationship justifies characterizing a thing, ritual need not be attached to the term cleanliness and there would be a real-world based mechanism for making the un-clean once again clean.
Developmental psychologists tell new parents that, on average, a new food must be offered to a young child ten times, before it will be accepted. This inherent resistance has, no doubt, prevented many a poisoning. Where ritual cleanliness protects from actual risk (such as taking food from strangers), wouldn’t it be better to justify avoidance behavior by explaining the actual danger? If ritual masks irrational and non-functional behavior, it would be best to acknowledge that and consider changing to more functional ways of acting. Continuing with behavior based on ritual considerations (not eating pets), is more acceptable if it is decided upon consciously. The sociology of caste is a long story, but clearly it does not serve real-world ends and, like any bad habit, costs more to support than it is worth in gratification.
“So, think,” I said to my grandson, “is the reason you don’t want to eat that lovely tofu your Mama cooked just for you that it is not good food, or do your think it might be dirty, ritually unclean?”
“Disgusting!” is what it was. I was shoveling back the sea and losing to a rising tide. Reason’s impotence in the face of emotion is the general theme of human history, so at least I was still keeping respectable company. By now it is impossible to trace the thought back to its first utterance, as so many people have said words to the effect that one thing we can learn from history is that we do not learn anything from history–probably Herodotus’ copy editor.
Even I, in my lowly state, found favor enough in the eyes of some of my Nepali neighbors, that I was approached twice by elderly gentlemen who offered to arrange my marriage. “Caste no bar, sah’b, and I promise you a Brahmin girl.” If you have seen a pin-ball machine, you will know what bright, clanging confusion filled the inside of my head on these occasions. Though it was the poorest nation in the world at that time, though the average life-span was forty-four years, though the region was all but cut off from the world by lack of commerce, absence of passable roads, lack of newspapers or literate people to read them, or even radio broadcasts, the villagers were aware of their position and would have liked to catch on to modernism, whatever it might be. I was educated, came from a high-prestige nation and I did not depend on the monsoon to ensure that I would make it through the next year. For all this, money was efficient shorthand. Nothing removes stains like filthy lucre, the fullers' earth of social interaction.
In my panchayat, or township, there was a village inhabited primarily by Dhobis, hereditary washermen. They were very low caste, the source of their contamination being regular contact with the soiled clothing of strangers, so I never brought up my uncle, the dry-cleaner in conversation. However, they had moved into the area when it was raw jungle and owned land, so they did not wash anyone’s dirty laundry. Certain families among them were considered very well off, even desirable marriage prospects. Prosperity’s rising tide was lifting their boat, washing it clean in the process.
“Anyway, tofu’s lucky, did you know?” I asked my grandson when his mother went back to the kitchen. “Yeah, they say that if you eat tofu, you’ll get money.” He cut a piece open with his fork, speculatively. After a quick glance around, I said quickly, in a lowered voice, “If you eat that before your mother comes back, I’ll give you five bucks.” The reason I had waited for his mother to step out of the room was that she very likely would consider the offer of money to be somehow sullying..., well, dirty.