Speaking in Tongues

During a puja last week, Ramesh, one of my best friends in the village, pulled me aside and gave me a kiss.

A Hershey’s Kiss (had you for a second there, didn’t I?). It had been many months since I’d seen one. I unwrapped the miniature cone-shaped morsel, popped it in my mouth, and let out a sigh.

“I had like thirty of them yesterday,” Ramesh said, beaming. “My cousin brought a lot. He’s visiting from America. You have to meet him.”

Two days later, after measuring a neighbor’s land to plant some pomegranate trees, I met up Ramesh and his cousin, Bahrat. Ramesh, who teaches at a local boarding school, is also a pandit (Hindu priest) and casual gardener. Bahrat has been living in Texas for the past two years and has returned to his homeland for a few weeks. He and his younger sister Radha, a forestry student living in Kathmandu, have come back to their village to visit their primary school, former home, and grandparents. They invited me to tag along. Before we left, Radha dashed back into the house and returned with a handful of Hershey’s Kisses and bite-size Three Musketeers for me, and then we set out.

And now for a long, rambling aside: Even after 17 months in Nepal, I often question whether people in my village always grasp the content and intent of the things I say. Despite my adequate vocabulary, I’ve found that trying to explain certain, complex things (like the germ theory of disease or evolved resistance to pesticides, for instance) is usually a hopeless undertaking. More than a lack of education, which a simple provision of new information could amend, gaps in knowledge have already been filled by speculation, superstition, and tradition, which can be very difficult to supplant. The importance of hand washing at proper times with soap and water (which, the Nepali government estimates, could cut rates of diarrheal disease in half) is marginalized when most people believe that their recurrent stomach problems are caused by the cold. In a country where rice is synonymous with a meal, encouraging people to eat fewer carbs is like trying to get a fat person to take up less room.

Well, I knew behavior change would be hard and slow, demanding a great deal of effort and for indeterminate results. But I was not prepared for the feeling of social isolation that comes with being a constant outlier. Some days I am the American expert on nutrition and agriculture, from a country of great wealth and knowledge; other days I am simply an oddity.

Why, for example, anyone would want to eat anything other than rice is a mystery. What do you want then, roti? Noodles? Trying to describe American cuisine (waffles, sandwiches, barbeque, spaghetti) is exhausting and futile—I doubt that the images my descriptions conjure come even close to the real thing. Even when it does, the sentiment elicited is incongruous. Take a salad: for many villagers, eating a salad for a meal—which contains no rice, no bread, but almost exclusively uncooked vegetables—is a foreign, unappetizing prospect. There is nothing to legitimize what I say, no one to nod their head and say yes, that is a salad, many people eat them, and they are delicious.

To come to the point, linguistic and cultural fluency are two very different things, and even when people understand me, I frequently doubt that they understand me. I’ve found that Nepalis who have spent some time stateside are far more likely to understand where I’m coming from (having been actually been where I come from). So I jumped at the opportunity to chat with Bahrat. We immediately began relating our experiences of moving to another country: dealing with culture shock, learning a new language, adjusting to the diet, and more. Call me ethnocentric, but communicating with a Nepali who knows the language of baseball and Christmas and Coldplay and pizza is oddly comforting.

We visited their school (where the headmaster solicited me to raise $40,000 to construct a new building), their old home (which was completely changed from their memories of it), and eventually ended up back at their grandparents’ house.

Earlier in the day, we’d visited another school where I’d given a mushroom training. As a token of thanks, the teachers had given me a large bag of mushrooms to take home. When we arrived at their grandparents’ house, I began setting aside a portion of the mushrooms to give to my friend’s family.

The grandfather, a Hindu pandit like Ramesh, walked over and commented that there was disagreement as to whether mushrooms were acceptable to eat for pandits, as they weren’t green.

“But that doesn’t make any sense, grandfather,” Radha said. “We eat all sorts of things that aren’t green.”

“All other plants are green at some point, so there is green within them” he replied.

I was already aware of some of the dietary restrictions for pandits: they cannot consume eggs, meat, fish, hot peppers, garlic, onions, or alcohol. But this was something new. Curious as to some of the other constraints and their justifications, I began peppering him with questions.

“Why aren’t pandits allowed to eat hot peppers?”

“Hot red peppers are red because of anger. They make the people who eat them angry,” was his matter-of-fact response.

“But you are allowed to eat other red things, yes?” I asked. “Like tomatoes?”

“We can eat large tomatoes, but not small ones. And not too many. Tomatoes are red because of greed.”

“What about pomegranates?”

“Pomegranates are actually very good,” he answered, “because (and then he said something I didn’t understand). People who eat a lot of pomegranates are very agreeable.”

“I see that we aren’t allowed to eat red peppers,” Radha, piped up. “But why aren’t we allowed to eat hot green peppers?”

The pandit considered this question for a moment. “Green hot peppers are concealing their anger, which is why they appear green, not red. But the anger it still there.”

“Are bell peppers acceptable?” I asked.

“Bell peppers are fine.”

“Why?”

“We are not supposed to eat things that make the tongue dry, because the job of a pandit is to say prayers and he cannot do so if his tongue is dry. Bell peppers don’t have that effect.”

“So what other things are pandits forbidden from eating that make the tongue dry?”

“During prayers for rice, we cannot have milk…”

“But grandfather,” interrupted Radha. “We have panchamrit (a five ingredient holy mixture that contains cow’s milk) during that ceremony. And isn’t there milk in panchamrit?”

“Once it is mixed with the other ingredients, it is no longer milk,” said the pandit.

Ramesh (who has studied a bit of science and on occasion will pull out phrases like “specific heat capacity” and “anaerobic respiration”) jumped in. “But grandfather, no chemical reaction that occurs, such as when sulfur is mixed with…”

His grandfather stopped him, “It is no longer milk.”

Risking sounding impertinent, I put forth, “So if you cook the mushrooms with four other ingredients—say, some oil, salt, cilantro, and cumin—would you be able to eat them?”

“Yes, I think that would be fine,” said their grandfather, with a big smile.

We all burst out laughing.

I hear him, I understand his words, but they are absurd. That night, I called a volunteer friend to relate the story.

“That’s crazy right?” I ask at the end.

“Oh my God, yeah. I feel like you should write that up. That reminds me of this ridiculous thing that happened to me last week…”

I am accepted, validated. But tomorrow I will be explaining something, in smooth Nepali, to some villagers and they will shake their heads, bewildered. Like the pandit, I will be outnumbered and will have no one to turn to.

It drives me crazy, but such is Nepal, and I am here.