Dust, Heat, Flies
Before we left for Nepal, they told us it would be hot and there were flies. The problem was in my hearing. I had no idea what it meant to be hot or for there to be flies. And they never even mentioned dust.
Before we left for Nepal, I would have told anyone that I liked hot food. I would have had no idea at all what I was talking about because I had never been anywhere near hot, spicy food; I hadn’t even been close enough to reach it without changing planes. I did have an uncle who ate cherry peppers with his hoagies. In our family, he was the very form of formidable and mirror of machismo. He kept a lit stogie behind his ear. At a guestimate, prior to my arrival in Nepal, I may not have consumed a cumulative lifetime total of one entire red pepper.
But my Govindapur neighbor’s wife used to prepare a small pot of vegetable subji with her every meal, into which she’d put a paste she ground on her lori-pati of as many hot peppers as she could grab from a wide-mouthed clay jar with one hand. She had bigger hands than I did; we measured one time, palm to palm. Her grasp had to contain thirty to fifty fiery little chillies ground up, seeds, stems and all. Volunteers living in Chitwan District said villagers near the national park could not grow mirchai or keep them in their house, because rhinoceroses were so fond of them that they would ramp right through a fence or even a house wall to get them. And once the small-but-stubborn mind of your average (call it "garden variety") rhinoceros is made up, what’s a body to do, go "Hat-hat!" and belabor its rear with a stick? The best hope would be that it might not notice you and your lathi as it stood in the rubble of your kitchen, savoring the delights of stolen chillies. Those chilli afficionados determined to eat hot would buy their mirchai in distant parts and tie them up in a bundle which they would sling over a high branch somewhere out in the jungle. When they wanted some to cook with, they would lower the package on its rope and take just what was needed for that meal.
What my neighbor’s wife put in her food were rhino-stoppers . Forty tears-to-the-eyes, breath-stealing, hiccough-inducing little incendiaries that made her food so hot no one outside her family could eat it. They couldn’t wean their baby, though he was toddling around with a full set of teeth, because of this habitual use of chilli pepper. Smoke from the evening fry-up would drive vermin out of the house and, I’m convinced, eating that food kept them all free of tooth-decay and intestinal parasites. And she was only at the far end of the local spectrum, not off the chart. It was quite a curve, learning to eat the first few month’s meals; but afterward I could say with calm authority that I knew, as I only thought I knew before, what it meant for food to be spicy.
When we staggered off the plane in Calcutta, after twenty-two hours in transit, the sun blinded me for the entire day and the heat picked us all right up by the front of the shirt, making the back stick. When we again came down the plane’s steps, in Kathmandu, we did it much more anxiously and the relatively temperate climate at four thousand-plus feet was very welcome. Almost immediately, they trucked us down out of the mountains to a weedy field near Birganj, where the sun’s rays could start the process of baking out every last erg of energy. I’d never been in anything like such heat. I hadn’t known it was possible. With a smirk, Mills Boone told me it was just like Texas. But then he did that thing with one eyebrow up and one down, which used to make him look so confiding and earnest, adding that everyone he knew had air-conditioning and swimming pools back home.
Why they sent us to the sub-continent when they did, can only be explained by just the appalling sort of ignorance of it’s own main business, which you would expect of a government agency. After all, I had originally applied to be sent to Brasil. We arrived in April, the middle of the hot, dry season, after the cool, dry winter and before the rains, which began the hot, wet season like clock-work on May 15th. That was about the only clock-work I encountered. The April landscape blazed with light. For months, it was impossible for me to scan farther than a yard ahead any time before sunset, until my eyes grew accustomed to light and I developed a powerful squint. Clay soil turned to hot, white powder, sometimes deep enough to entirely bury my feet and give me second-degree burns on their tops as I hurried along. Breeze through my window was too hot to sit in. We could dry our clothing, after bathing and washing it, by simply waving shirt or lunghi about in the air for a minute or so. As far as the horizon, the glaring landscape was seared, dry and lifeless–the rice bowl of Nepal, they told us.
They say, the reason the English set about conquering what was to become India was that they wanted the cotton cloth–"muslin"–sold by Moslem merchants on the Bay of Bengal. The gold reserves of Europe were being drained into the coffers of the east as they had no merchandise to trade which the Indians wanted. Just imagine arriving quay-side in Calcutta with a load of wool blankets and fur coats.
At night, temperatures would drop below one hundred in early May. One idle afternoon, Mark Koenig propped a thermometer he had been sufficiently foresightful to have brought with him on the flat roof-top of his house, where we had retired at the hour of dust, to catch whatever air might be stirred by cattle returning home. It registered a hundred and twenty. In the dry season, sweat was not much of a problem, as it passed directly off as vapor, never taking liquid form.
When anyone or anything moved, man, herd or air, it raised the dust. Sudden tantrums of hot wind, could bring the countryside to a blind halt. A single man would be followed by a faint plume, a party trotting bajaar-ward raised a column. The herd returning after a day’s heat would be followed by a looming cloud that covered the village and could be seen for miles. People could look across the fields to see if distant air revealed anyone moving. Going the children of Israel one better, terrai-wallas had both their pillar of dust and a pillar of fire by day contributed by the brass-faced sun. If you breathed, your nose caked with dust. If you opened your mouth, you ate powdered earth. It was in the food, in the water, in the bottle with the pills you took for the diarrhea caused by the swarming parasites whose spores and eggs blew in the dust. Cow dung turned to dust and flew. Human waste turned to dust and landed anywhere.
It was recommended that we boil our water for twenty minutes before drinking and drip six drops of iodine in each glass of water, allowing the glass to sit for ten minutes before gulping it down. A glass of water was nothing compared to what anyone lost each minute beneath the broiler of the sky. For presumptuousness, the gods placed Tantalus up to his chin in wine until he tried to drink it, when it would instantly drain away. Sitting in a restaurant, watching a glass of water for ten minutes, the only water we’d seen for hours, was something similar. And when the time has passed or our nerve gave out, it drained away equally quickly, leaving us very nearly parched as before.
I did have a bottle of wine, Chateau LaSalle, made by the Christian Brothers in California, which my saintly uncle and aunt had bought for me when they visited Peace Corps training at Cactus Corners. It tasted wonderful, when I drank it in Kathmandu. But the bottle, with its utile screw-cap, turned out to be the best part of the gift. In that day it was a thought which had not been thought to carry a canteen or water bottle. They were made only for the WWII military or Boy Scouts. To be seen with one placed the bearer in one of those categories. We all carried jholas, shoulder-bags, for necessary items, anything from a sleeping-bag to a two-pound sher of rice. I took to carrying my wine bottle filled with iodine-tinged water, so that I could have it nicely aged when desired and so that I could get a good liter of water at a single draught. It was a life-saver. Peace Corps should have issued old wine bottles to all volunteers.
One day I was waiting for the narrow-gauge train to take me from Janakpur to Jaleswar and as I stood in the crowd, baking in the light, I occasionally would swig from the bottle. Now, it was freely and safely assumed that a sah’b would not understand anything said in his presence, but as time wore on, that had become a less safe assumption. I heard one person ask another what he thought I was drinking? The answer was, "Whiskey, sah’b lok drink bahut quantities of it." I was embarrassed, but, like any addict, not enough so to make me stop. By the middle of my first year, I had acquired a taste for tincture of iodine in my water. Maybe it was the alcohol.
The only things happy at that time of year were young goats and flies. Between sunrise and sunset, I could be sure of hitting at least two flies, if I moved my hand in a quick sweep in any direction. Eating meals required the development of special coordination, fanning with the left hand while shoveling up dhal-bhat with the other. Once, when I had been invited to a special meal at a friend’s home, two furious flies locked in anger or copulation fell out of the air to land in the brass cup of my dhal, where they buzzed wetly, like an Evinrude with spark-plug trouble. I didn’t know what to do. If I were to lift them out with my right or eating hand, I would then have to go on eating with their contamination on my fingers, which repulsed me. If I were to lift them out with my left hand, it would repulse my friend, who sat watching me eat in solitary splendor, as the niceties of juto were stringent. If I did nothing, I would have a mountain of dry rice to gag down, like a python swallowing a mummy. My host suggested that I just dip them out of the dhal and go ahead, after all it was just a couple of friendly flies. I was never able to come to terms with flies, though I came to grips with them often enough. Everyone else in the village regarded them as insignificant. I watched with fascinated horror as a person would ignore a fly walking across his face to drink from the corner of his eye. I can’t remember what I did, Dr. Freud.
Heinze, swaying with a snake-charmer’s fascination, held a row of us in his thrall as he slowly unfolded the story of a boy sneaking up on a clump of flies which had settled for the night on a string which dangled from the ceiling of a closed chia passal, a glass of boiling water in his hand. Slowly Heinze raised his hand and we all shrank back powerless to break eye contact, demonstrating how the boiling water ended their suspense. As if sucking on a sweet, Frank went on to tell us how he explained to the squirming lad that for the life of each fly he had boiled to death, he would spend an additional eternity frying on the spit in hell, and then be re-born as a fly, which would be slowly lowered into a pot of boiling water by a boy who would then burn in hell. Perhaps then the fly could be reborn as something higher, a pig eating feces in a village, eventually an untouchable cleaning outhouses for sah’bs with long white parasites that would squirm in the light.
It must have been the heat that made everything so energetic. Cast the least morsel of food on the ground and it hardly bounced before a flock of sparrows would descend screaming upon it, greedy to get what they could before two-colored crows bounced pugnaciously across the ground . Pigs, dogs and cows competed for anything that lasted as long as it took for a stroke of a temple bell to fade away. Monkeys, jackals and vultures circled on the periphery of the settlement, alert for any chance.
And then the rains came and what was dust became mud. What was hopelessly barren greened up, seemingly overnight. Sweat would bead on the face and pool in the hollows of the eyes at night. Machhar, the mosquito, ruled the night and sang in every ear.