Loneliness
Rudyard Kipling would have called it a bo-tree that I sat beneath. We called it pipal (pronounced ‘people’), the strangler fig, capable of engulfing temples and sending down roots from horizontal branches to form vertical trunks that would stand a dense grove, long after the original bole had rotted to untraceable oblivion. The Buddha sat among such pillars, but our Dhanukha tree was a small one, as yet, with only a single, foot-wide trunk and it had only me sitting up against the bole. To the north, there floated the necklace of pristine snow-peaks which was all that showed of the Himalayas, east to west, appearing and disappearing across the world according to the limits of vision. I sighed.
All about me the land lay still, or meaninglessly busy with the activity of birds, the passage of clouds, the growth of plants and villagers’ husbandry (or wifery) with which I had no concern. In all the world, there was nothing with which I had any business. I sighed. Kissooree, who ran the tea shop across the vacant bajaar grounds, had very nearly as much free time as I had on non-market days. Being of sympathetic and sociable nature, he approached. "You are very lonely," he told me.
"Nai," I told him, "I am just...looking at the mountains. They are very good."
"You miss your home." Embarrassing, but village life was an on-going education in life without privacy.
A youngster fresh out of college is bound to feel lonely, the crush of dormitory and class having just abruptly come to an end. The first thing a graduate looks around for is some group to which to hitch his wagon. The longueurs of leisure, exemplared by Bertie Wooster, were intimidating and, of course, provided a poor living. For many that hitch could be the military or a corporate sponsor. How many soldiers volunteered to fight in Vietnam simply for lack of an offer of steady employment? Marriage was a good but partial haven from solitude. I had joined the Peace Corps...and found solitude.
We heard that headquarters had tried placing volunteers together in different combinations, only to have conflict arise between volunteers forced to share difficulties. Peace Corps Nepal volunteers were scattered singly across the flat lands at the base of Nepal’s mountains. On the way to nowhere, Roganathpur, a market town two hours walk to the east, hosted Mark Koenig. Sakhawa, where Frank Heinze lived–another market town, but this one on the bus route to Janakpur, the district capitol–was an hour and a half by foot westward. A visit to either was usually an overnight excursion. Though half-a-dozen volunteers centered on Mike Frame’s house, the USAID agent’s in Janakpur, no other volunteers– or English-speakers, for that matter–were within walking distance. A week or two would usually go by between visits. But when we did meet, we found each other’s faces very welcome.
Nepal has two words for what we call a friend: saathi, means something casual in the line of friendship while dost signifies a very close relationship. Perhaps the distinction between you and thou, now fallen into disuse or any European language’s use of the formal and familiar forms of a verb recognize the same bonds. Surely, that we were dost explains the way our friendships have lasted.
Aside from English, we all had been tutored in Nepali, the national language. The people among whom we lived had not received the same education, but they were very hospitable and, as Nepali was related to Maithele in about the same way that French is related to Italian, many people who had frequent contact with me found it easier to learn Nepali–of a sort–than it obviously was for me to learn the language of the local villagers. Not that I spoke such fluent Nepali, of course. To this day, I can not be sure which language any of the words I recall come from–unless, indeed, they may be some invasive Hindi picked up from India then or later. A visit to Nepal ten years afterwards acquainted me with a linguistic survey of the nation, which had identified two hundred and fifty (and counting) separate languages among the hills and valleys. Clearly, no one could be faulted for selecting Nepali to teach us–our entire group found it had the signal advantage of being uniformly the wrong language.
Ponderous statements, for example, that the mountains were very good, made do for more articulate thoughts, such as that the brightly reflective snow peaks seemed to hang unsupported in the air, distance having swallowed the dim slopes below them. And that floating effect was lovely, yet unreachable, unreal, adding some sense of hopelessness to the tawdry dust and heat daily existence offered in contrast. The mountains were good, of course, and I had to be satisfied with that. And I did miss my home, and I had to accept that.
To explain that a field would require just so much of seed and fertilizer, converting tons per acre to quintiles per hectare, then to maunds, shers and powas per bigha, while counting in my head or on my fingers and depending on a farmer who had only the vaguest idea of a bigha’s size...well, it never went over well enough to give me the reputation of a technocrat. I would have lunged at the offer of a conversion table, but even that would have been seen only as a sign of weakness by the villagers, who, though illiterate, had instead near perfect recall of all factual data. My Nepali counterparts could quote entire texts from memory without the slightest hesitation. When I offered to look some figures up in a reference book, I thought I was clinching the authority of my answer to the farmer’s question, but his response was to the effect that if I didn’t really know, never mind. I never mastered the vocabulary to explain the worth of creative thought over rote memorization, and it probably would not have sounded like pedagogical wisdom, anyway. Spraying the thronging bugs in a field with the two gallon sprayer we could borrow from the District Agriculture Office, in Janakpur, if we promised to have it back quickly, was akin to going down to the pond to shovel water–you could be seen at work, but the promised hole never developed. Thus the planting and harvesting went on largely without me.
But people were curious about my life and personal background. These things I could expect to explain to an interested audience. Did my father have any land? Well, yes, we had a yard by the side of the house, about...half a bigha, I guessed. And what did we grow in it, rice? No, rice did not grow where my parents lived. I was surprised by the sense of relief that brought me. What, then? Well, let’s see, trees, there were trees..., and bushes and grass. Oh, an orchard. Mangos? Not mangos, they didn’t grow at my parents’ home either. They were, well, just some trees, whatever had come up. No fruit. Shade trees and weeds. This went down like the Titanic with the thrifty, land-starved farmers. I was paid almost nothing– thirty-five dollars a month to live on– but it was surprising what largess that translated into. Three hundred and fifty rupees monthly, baa-da-baa! And how much did I send home to my father? Well, none, actually. The thought hadn’t occurred to me, nor, I was sure, to my father. I ate it all by myself! "Aaaaah, I see," my elderly questioner said, turning to the rest of the audience. "His father bought him this job of no labor and high pay." I could not have been more humiliated. He turned back to me, his eyes shining with understanding. "Very good. Your father knows how to manage," he assured me.