Nepali Summer

the guys

Eugenia hangin' with the guys

I can't remember what's happening in this photo, but it might have something to do with the heat

Awkward "family" photo

I have some good friends

So this is a bandh?!?

The barn Aya and I called home for a few days and the rats call home for life
Breakfast in the village

Attempting to plant millet
This is my only picture of rhinos - if you look really really close there is a spot of gray. That's a rhino. I swear.
Sunset in Chitwan
Crossing the river
Rice
Refreshments courtesy of PLA, 3rd Division
Little village along the border in Birgunj

Stories

I was going to write about getting caught in landslides and bandhs, pee puddles and rain. I was going to write about cockroaches, the Boxcar Children, and sleeping with rats. How leeches strengthen friendships. I was going to tell tales of rickshaws and third world carnivals and ferris wheels. How when Cecilia and I first got to Delhi we were asked if we wanted to join a group of people from the hostel and go to Citywalk and we thought we were going on a walk around the city, but ended up at a Hard Rock Café in a giant mall that could have been anywhere, USA in awestruck panic. I thought about issuing a formal apology to Nepal for calling it dirty because I didn’t know dirty till I arrived in India. And I probably still will.

But my grandfather died the other day, and now more than ever I don’t know where to start. Being half way around the world means I can’t be there for the funeral. Can’t be with my family. Can’t sit with them and tell stories about him. The ones about the life he built for our family, his days in the Navy, how he met my grandmother. The ones about this affinity for ordering infomercial products and giving them to all of us – the bagel guillotines and the flashlights you have to shake for an hour to get 5 minutes of light. How he made soap-on-a-rope, and handles for cardboard boxes out of duct tape. How he sent my brother and me Al Hirschfeld clippings so we could try to find all the Ninas, and taped episodes of Fraggle Rock so we could watch them when we went to visit. Stories about how all of these things he did were because he loved us. Because he wanted to share with us what he found interesting. Because he was generous. Because he was excited about creating and discovering. Because being able to share new things with us or things he knew we liked made him happy. We could reminisce about his love of Chinese food. Being that I’m in Delhi I don’t even know if I can eat Chinese food in his honor.

The thing that kills me, the thing that makes my heart ache, the thing that really gets me, though, is how much I was looking forward to sharing my stories with him. Telling him I ate Peking Duck in (the former) Peking. Telling him about the trains in China and India. I probably would have skipped the part about the people lined up along the tracks pooping. Skipped telling him about the overall stench, and the poverty, and the disease. Glossed over the politics. Probably avoided the one about Mao. Might have let slip the one about having tea with the chief of the PLA and going to the cantonment. I’m sure I would have mentioned the heat and the rain. It’s unavoidable since it shapes every experience here, but it would just provide a context. Just in the act of telling him, all the good stuff would have come out. The grime overshadowed, put in its place as the backdrop, not the protagonist.

I was going to tell him all the things I learned, about my place and the places I had been, about my research. How I learned that there is never enough time for things. How I learned there is only time. I would tell him about the food - about the dumplings in a bag and momos, about the yak noodle soup, about the endless dal bhat, about the paan. I would tell him about the Great Wall of China, Mt. Everest and the Taj Mahal. About zip lines. About riding and washing the elephants… although again I would have avoided the part about how I was surprised to learn elephants poop in the water, something I discovered while trying to swim out of the way of some as it came floating fast towards me. I would realize, as I am now, that I have a lot of stories about poop: animal, human, other. And pee.

I was going to tell him about the friends I have made. The people who made my summer what it has been. The people I laughed with, and who I wish I could cry with now. The people I wanted to introduce to him. I was going to show him pictures. Blow them up as big as possible, and even though I know he still wouldn’t have been able to see them I think he would have liked them. I could have shown him my pictures of rhinos. Neither of us could have seen anything in those other than a mess of green anyway.

As I sit here, trying to make sense of him being gone, I am also trying to make sense of my summer. Somehow my understanding of both are getting tangled up all of a sudden. I am learning a lot about myself this summer. I am learning that I have a remarkable willingness to do stupid things. I am also learning that I am not the same person I used to be. Nothing profound, nothing meaningful, but I am just different. I came to this realization as our group set out on a walk in the jungles of Chitwan in Nepal in search of wild animals. And I feel it becoming even clearer as I sit in this hostel in Delhi trying to decide what to do now. I have always been a fan of mud pies, was never a girly-girl. I thought the frozen mice we kept in our freezer to feed my brother’s snake were cool, and I enthusiastically used to show them to my friends. But I have been known to struggle with such things as deadly animals and a lack of emergency facilities and my propensity to establish escape routes and sleep in my shoes with a bag packed at the foot of my bed is no secret.

Many years ago, when I sulked my way across the United States with my family on our journey Westward, one of our destinations was Glacier National Park. The terror I felt at the idea of being attacked by a bear was pretty intense. I avoided the outdoors, was skeptical of open windows, and shook my bear bells with such fervor that I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the forest service had banned me from national parks for life. The idea of a deaf bear, that my dad and brother thought was hilarious, was horrifying to me. So I found it fascinating that recently, as an adult with free will, I chose to seek out tigers, sloth bears (not the cute cuddly kind, but the claw at your face and tear you to pieces ones), and rhinos. This is a fundamental shift in who I am. I am still afraid of everything. That hasn’t changed. But somehow the fear means something different. It’s not as scary as it used to be, and on balance it is more motivating than debilitating. Because I share this trait of anxiety and fear with my grandmother, I know that this change, even if it is just temporary and circumstantial, would have made my grandfather happy.

When I left New York in May and said goodbye to him I had a feeling it might be the last time I was going to get to touch him and I had a hard time pulling away. I thought about not going. It’s cliché. I know it. All that self-sacrificing crap that people talk about, knowing that the other person of course wants you to go, and of course wanting to go yourself.

So of course I went. I don’t regret it. I just wish I could have shared my experiences with the one person I know would have savored every detail. When I try to think about my grandfather, try to be ok with him being gone, I can’t really do it. Not yet. I know that he struggled and must have been so frustrated by how limited he has been for so many years but he was quiet about it. I know I have probably been more frustrated for him, thinking about all the things he would love if he could have seen or been able to move more freely. Mostly he would have loved the information that is floating in the world today. He would have loved the learning and the discovering and the access that so many of us so easily take for granted. It’s not that my grandfather didn’t want to die. I don’t think he ever would have framed it in those terms. He just wanted to Live forever. Capitol “L” Live. Or maybe I’m just projecting. Maybe I just wanted him to go on. Wanted him to want what I wanted in the way I wanted. I guess now that doesn’t matter. I guess for now I will just miss him. And as I sit here trying to decide where I want to be sad, whether I should go back to NY now or wait and return when I had originally planned, I can’t help but think that maybe the best thing I could do is have a few more adventures, a few more experiences, a few more stories to tell him.