Buffalo

 In an earlier post, I talked a little about gratitude. In relation to existence in the host country.  Particularly, in the context of children born of immigrant parents. How about immigrants ourselves? How do we feel? Do we feel grateful for the life in this country? Do swells of tender emotions tap our rib cages when we ruminate about our transplanted lives? 

A simple and untainted "yes" is hard to muster for myself. It may have been the case just a few years ago.  But the ugly underbelly of bigotry pervading a substantial chunk of this society that we have witnessed in the past few years makes this question more nuanced. It provokes thoughts.  But not a plain and reflexive emotional assent. 

A quest for answer, takes me, personally, to an evening in Ukhubari, Luintel, Gorkha. 

It must have been an autumn dusk. Harvest over, autumn heralds a brief period of freedom for cattle. At least at our household. With no corns or soybeans or barley or wheat at risk, we grant our cattle a release from the leash. To roam about in the terraced fields, grazing the stumps of harvested produce, grass and weeds on the sides, perhaps starting to change colors, tree offshoots with still green leaves accessible through some stretching. It is hours-long endeavor. You need to let the cattle take their time. To explore the field, graze at their own pace, feel satiated, before you can convince them to return back to the shed confines (goth, we call it) and likely stay leashed. 

The success of this grazing affair hinges on manifold variables. How hungry is the cattle when you embarked on this effort. Is the temperature outside pleasant. Is the grass plentiful. Perhaps the taste of the foliage. Does it feel tired. Has it had enough time to gallivant and explore. Does it feel full. But, I think, most importantly, who the person is shepherding them. 

A skilled person herding these cattle is endowed with an intuitive ability to sense the variables, have patience until the timing is right, and then exert their authority. The cattle follows their master, without dissent. It is a smooth business without much of drama. It is as graceful as the slow descent of sun behind the hills, effortlessly extinguishing the cacophony of village life into stillness of the night. To be dotted with decibels borne of crickets, cicadas, crying babies, coughing adults.  

Graceful, it was not, my evening with the water buffalo. I decided that it was time to go home, grazing was over. But she declared that she was not ready. A tussle ensued. Thirteen-year-old me, sensing defiance from a mere buffalo, decided to firm up on my assertion. She, I surmise, might have felt belittled by a child. A skinny, little boy barely pubertal trying to dictate the terms of my freedom? She must have felt incensed by the insolence of a puny boy trying to act authoritative. I will teach you a lesson, you bitty imposter of a master, she must have thought. She ran away. I chased after her. I must have had a stick with me. I must have given her good rounds of beatings. She was in no mood to comply. She was getting farther away from home, not closer. Darkness of the village night was descending upon us. I could be chasing her all night. She might get into the forest. She might fall off a cliff in the darkness and die. Our prized source of milk, calves. Crown jewel of possession and property. 

I do not precisely recall how she ultimately returned home. My aunt or sister or grandmother might have joined me or taken over from me. It might very easily have been a banal affair thereafter. But I remember a distinct sense of helplessness and failure while I was haplessly struggling to get the buffalo home. A sharp awareness that this commotion had everything to do with my weakness. Village kids of my exact age would do this without a sweat. Their body language, sounds would make it clear that they meant business. The cattle would comply. I was keenly aware that our buffalo was acting out of internalization that I was not worthy of respecting as a master.  

In days like this, a deep sense of helplessness would drown my conscience. In a village with perhaps less than a hundred household, everyone known to each other, nearest road hours of trek away, and the only source of awareness of a larger world the sounds emanating from a transistor radio, the moments of isolation felt profound and hopelessness grimmer. Deficient prowess to thrive in this village was evident in everything I did- climbing trees, falling the offshoots with sickles, sharpening the sickles, swinging a hoe and tilling the land, throwing rock at birds and striking them, clearing out weeds, carrying the gagri (water pot), milking the buffalo, carrying hay to feed the cattle. Probability of my skills and agility improving was meager. Was there an escape from this failure? 

A series of life events later, here I am, in an entirely different part of the world. Perhaps it is a product of an assortment of factors- endowed privileges, accidents, luck, hard work. Claiming it as my own deed or achievement is largely meaningless. Regardless, that sense of deficiency, pervasive in my despair over the buffalo's resistance is no longer the dominant sentiment. I seem to possess certain skills that had a place in the world. These skills are valued and put to everyday use. There is a vocation, whole profession in fact, that demands of this skill. In my good days, when I have succeeded in summoning the goodness, I even savor joy in my daily work. 

We have found a mutually beneficial arrangement for my presence in this country. How the mechanics of individual's life functions to reach their productive milieu is perhaps a complex question. But as I scan my own life events, it feels as if what appeared as entropy of an individual existence is actually a constant sorting, striving to achieve a more productive and amicable state. In that sense, it does not feel terribly unnatural why we uproot our existence in the country of our birth and settle in a new country. And  voluntarily subject ourselves to lifelong adjustments in many manners.  In a space where we nurture a sense of worth.   

That is perhaps where I locate my gratitude. To the space afforded to cultivate a conviction of merit, if I were to ascribe that emotion in my relationship to the host country. In fact, a profound gratitude, incomparable to any other societal relationship. Something that brings out the better in you, values you. But, it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on gratitude. This relationship is inherently transactional. It is contingent upon the mutual fulfillments. And if indeed, the terms of transactions are severed, I suspect, gratitude is a fizzling force. 

Dev

 In an episode of Aziz Ansari's Netflix show, Master of None (Season 1; Episode 2), Ansari's Indian American character, Dev, strolls with his Korean American friend Brian along New York streets, navigating Asian folks doing Tai Chi in an inner street. They have just come out after having tea with Dev's dad and his friend Dr. Ramaswami who arrived from India the same day. During the tea conversation, Dr. Ramaswami discloses that Dev's father was working at a zipper factory at Dev's age. For two years, he worked at a zipper factory to earn enough money for medical school costs. Dev appears touched by that revelation about his father's past and fiddles with that information through the stroll with his pal. Brian tells of his own parent's hardship. "Isn't that the gist of every immigrant story, that it was hard?" says Dev. And he persists, "It's pretty crazy. All of us first generation kids, we have these amazing lives. And it's all 'cause our parents made these crazy sacrifices."

This banter, in my mind, highlights some of the pervasive and dominant narratives involving immigrants and immigrant kids. One is that, immigrants come to this country searching for a better life, escaping hardships in their countries. Implicit in this is a story of struggle back home. Some form of heroic struggle to escape that hardship. And then genuine interminable hard work in this country to nurture a better life for themselves and their families. Another one is that it is a privilege to be living in this country for all forms of mightiest reasons you can conjure. Dominant economy, superpower, melting pot of myriad cultures, most innovative, most free....choose your inebriety. 

While there may be some truths in each of these narratives, I suspect it is oversimplification at best. Even if we were to look at just this specific conversation and context, these artists have made a significant leap to come up with this dramatized conversation for an entertainment medium. In reality, Dev's father is more likely to be a brahmin from a relatively well to do family, perhaps living in a city, or a landlord in a village with a dominant social status. He was very likely sent to a private school with much more rigorous didactics and resources than dilapidated public schools that majority of others went to. That very likely gave him an edge to compete in exams to secure position at a reputed high school. And that, in turn, prepared him well to ace the medical school entrance exam and secure full scholarship. He likely had relatives or acquaintances who were living in America or had traveled or studied in America to guide him through the process of immigration. 

Someone securing medical school spot by working at a zipper factory that very likely pays sub-substinence pay even by Indian living standards? Fantastical, in my mind. But, I surmise, these are precisely the types of stories that motivate many kind-hearted individuals to be open about welcoming strangers to their country. And the distinct contrast in material prosperity that exists between these countries makes it easier for someone in America to assume that everyday life is a struggle for the whole masses of lives populating these resource-poor countries. Ordinary affairs of daily living can be interpreted as unendurable struggle. The narrative needs, therefore, can be easily fed and satiated with a variety of these fantastic and often embellished examples. 

Dev's pride about this country and gratitude for existence in this segment of the world is a more complicated matter for me to discern. American children of immigrants are in many ways equally foreign entities for immigrants. But we also likely have a very distinct set of relationship with this segment of American population. Being an immigrant father of two children born in this country, there is almost a reflex trepidation for matters that may adversely affect this group. But very little understanding of their internal lives. And many questions. When Dev bloviates about "amazing lives," I dearly hope that it is what he feels in quietude. Not a learned response to justifying his existence at this place. While as an immigrant I do not have much qualms in identifying myself as foreign, and no real issue with others treating me as a foreign individual, as long as it is not borne of malice, I see no moral justification for any form of identification as a foreign entity for children born in this country, whatever the circumstances. Gratitude should not be a contingency for their citizenship. One's relationship to their nation of birth, I suspect, is not neat, rather complicated. And one should be entitled to a full assortment of emotions. Gratitude is the best among those, and if indeed that is what Dev feels, this immigrant father of two America born children is truly hopeful!

Hajurama

My family believes, that my paternal grandmother, hajurama,  was over 100 when she passed away. I will underscore, it is merely a belief. There is no concrete record of her birth date. Just approximations tied to the year of a major earthquake. She certainly had a prolonged longevity. Mother of 4 daughters and 4 sons, she lived to see numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. My grandfather passed away at a much younger age, we approximate that to be in his 60s. As was the tradition, youngest son and his family shouldered the responsibilities of her care. My father being the youngest of the sons, she was our family's charge. But most of her life she was independent. Cooked for herself, did all house chores, took care of cattle, climbed trees with sickle in hand to chop branches for cattle fodder, bunched them in a neat heap, wrapped with a strap, namlo, and hauled it a distance with namlo wrapping forehead, bent forward a little to center the gravity. While my father pursued vocations away from the home village, she lived in the main house in Gorkha. One of my aunts lived next door and she was the main support. Only at a much later age, her 80s per our estimations, she needed more support and my parents and our family were more consistently engaged in her day-to-day care. As the village started emptying out with urban migration and later with a violent civil conflict, we moved her to Kathmandu to live with us. After a few years of living in Kathmandu, she passed away. I was not there when she departed. 

As I think of hajurama's last days, the most striking memory I have of her later years is her constant rambling about the misery of her prolonged life. She was physically still quite robust. But her desire to live had simply withered. "When will the god take me away?" she would implore. She would list the relatives that had perished and ask, "why only me?" This intensified further as she started losing one adult child after another, thulo buwa, sainlo buwa, thuli ama, mailo buwa. Towards the end of her life, I remember of hajurama as a disoriented person. Not the disorientation we see in delirium from medical maladies, but a disorientation from the life events such that there was a degree of randomness to her speech and behavior. Deep inside you still knew that she had intact senses but restraints to hold them in order were set asunder. It was as if she was intentionally releasing the authority of her faculties, hoping that attendant entropy would summon the death closer. 

As I have pondered of her predicament, then, and now, celerity of change of the world surrounding her has been the culprit I have narrowed down to. She was a woman married to a man in her childhood and perhaps started bearing children soon after puberty. She lived in a village. The extent of your world was defined by what you saw and the places you were able to walk to. Certain social order was defined by a few entirely familiar people around her. And she belonged to a rather privileged position in that social order. In the recluse life of a village with sparse people, where prosperity was defined by the size of your cattle herd, tillable land, number of children, ideas were likely sparse and disruptions sparser. Much later into her adulthood did the wider world started pouring in. I surmise, to her, with absent context and no fathomable mechanics for the changes. Vehicles, telephones, schools, ideas of egalitarianism, ideas of rights and grievances, televisions, strange people from other parts of the world, children and grandchildren carrying out incomprehensible conversations- often in different languages, and with incomprehensible meanings. I specifically recall her asking me one day while we were watching a black and white television in Gorkha, "Babu, explain to me, how are all these people able to get into that box and do things?" It was a genuine, deadly serious wonder. But it generated a hysterical laughter from her grandson (likely a teenager at the time). I am certain I used her question to amuse others a countless time and consistently generated laughters. But I have been convinced later, this profound existential wonder typified her struggle to reconcile with the ambient world that was central to her disorientation, and a catalyst for the void she created to get away from life. 

While hajurama's disorienting exposure happened later during life, I feel that analogous disorienting exposure afflicts my generation of youth from Nepal as well. Particularly those of us who grew up in a village and immigrated to Western countries. Stretch of time spanning a vastly different life is rather short. It was not too long ago that I lived the life under a kerosene lamp with food being cooked in wooden stoves. Notion of essentials beyond stored grains from harvest season and what was available from backyard being clothing, salt and sugar. It is an utterly different life, living as an active clinician and educator at a major academic institution in America. Would the relative youth for these experiences shield us from hajurama's disorientation? Or is it lurking behind, awaiting manifestation when the time is opportune? 

The Phantom of the Opera

 In a remote existence, before our lives were graced by precious children, and life's vocation entirely shepherded by their needs, my wife and I were privileged a trip to New York. To take a break from work. For fun. Indulge in touristy things. While I would have been entirely content sampling restaurants, savoring all manners of Asian foods alien to a Maine resident, riding trains to probe this majestic city, my wife insisted that we go to a Broadway show. "What's the point of coming to New York if we don't even go to a Broadway show?" must have been the exhortation. I conceded and we purchased tickets for "The Phantom of the Opera." It's a classic, my wife assured me. 

What I experienced at the show was thoroughly new. A sensory experience my body system, and conscience, had never before undertaken. A stage at the center accentuated by palpable awe and adoration of utterly silent spectators. Every sound amplified in import. Even a flicker of light simmering in  significance. Any movement, human or non-human, pitching a ripple in the air. Myriad of artists concocting splendid things, realtime. With instruments- flutes, oboes, keyboards, clarinets, trombones, tubas, string instruments, and who knows what! With mere speech- all kinds of pitches of sounds, flows and modulations. With body movements- precise, speedy, slow, smooth, unexpected, and entirely predicted. Stage lights dancing and shifting with the artists. Stage setup changing at marvelous speeds, almost magically. 

The result was a performance that reaches somewhere deeper in your body. The emotion at the stage penetrates your heart. Sends chills down your spine. Raises your hair in goosebumps. It is as if the body has vaporized and the particles have  amalgamated with the aura emanating from the stage. The stage has a grip on you. You willingly surrender to the sublime, entranced. 

"Humans are capable of doing this!" was the more tangible exclamation I could ascribe to my extraordinary experience. And I recall another distinct experience from that time. The wall of individual identities, of you and me,  was non-existent. The artists were not "American," "White or Black," "English-speaking or non-speaking." I was not a Nepali or a man or a short person. Any ascribing hindered the relationship. So we bared our identities. I was nothing. They were excellence. 

I have wondered, here and then, this relationship with excellence. When I have admired Einstein during my formative days, I have not thought of him as a German Jew, American citizen. While weeping, reading a book detailing Gandhi voluntarily taking a beating in South Africa, I have not seen him as a primarily Indian brahmin from Gujarat. Marveling at the magnanimity of characters in Coetzee's writings, thoughts of Coetzee as a white man from South Africa do not really situate in any immediate strata of conscience. They are just "my" people. There is no need for any other identity to intrude this relationship. 

When I think of myself immigrating to a different country, I have wondered how much of this experience with excellence has been a factor in lending courage to move. Immigrating is an uprooting experience, however voluntary it may be. We create myths to summon courage, I am certain, at some unconscious levels.  I suspect this blinding awe of excellence may be one of the factors that pumps our hearts as we set sail for the foreign lands.  

Why Do We Immigrate?

 A ghastly photograph embodies the socio-political milieu of my early youth. Lone tree looms in the backdrop of a blue sky, interrupted, by distant hills sparse of trees, not completely bald but patchy, typical Nepali hills. This solitary tree appears to be on the edge of a terraced land. Ground is strewn with dried up plants. Strapped to this tree is a man. A lean man with modest beard, mostly dark, with strands of white. His eyes are closed. If you just saw the face, you could be tricked into thinking he might be meditating. A scarf (we call it "muffler" in Nepal), tied up higher, holds his head upright. Arms are wrapped around the tree and likely tied behind. One leg is bent at the knee, leg twisted at an odd angle, hugging the ground. Another leg hangs down from the edge of the land, only the upper half is visible. His dhaka topi lies on the ground next to his foot. His brown sweater is stretched partially, exposing his untucked shirt and still tucked white undershirt. A patch of blood streaks the white undershirt. It is a lifeless body that greets with you deep agony. Its almost peaceful face taunting, "You! Behold the barbarism you are capable of!"

Muktinath Adhikari was his name. He was a school teacher at a time the country was possessed by political violence. "Maoists" had staged a violent uprising exploiting deep resentments borne of historical wrongs. Death was ubiquitous. Newspapers and TVs served raw visuals of death abundantly. Dead young men contorted in myriad shapes dotting the open ground after a raid in an army barrack, corpses of "Maoist guerrillas" ambushed at a hillside by the army. In a span of ten years this would end up claiming nearly 18,000 lives. Mr. Adhikari's fatal aggression, according to the Maoists, was that he did not dole out his "required" monetary contribution to fund their violent uprising. And, of course, he was an "informant." They dragged him from the classroom. Took him to a farther location. Tied him to a tree and shot him. A visual left to serve as a warning to others who may defy their edicts.  

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We are born to those environments, it is not a choice, it is not our doing, at least at an individual level as a child. What is the appropriate relationship we have to the places we are born to, particularly when suffering is the experience? Do we have obligation to improve the situation at those places? Are we capable of improving situations at those places? Do we bear the burden of the past, of the ancestors unknown, of the relatives and neighbors known? 

These are not the questions I was asking when I committed to pursuing professional training in the US. I was probably more inspired by feats of science, human capabilities achieved at a different corner of the world than by any anguish of the prevailing social ills of my surroundings. I was not necessarily, at least consciously, trying to escape the horrors around. It is very likely that a subconscious anguish was a major factor but not the overt and decisive factor. 

Over 1.5 decades since that initial decision to pursue professional progress, I now live as an immigrant in this country. "Why did you immigrate to this country?" is a question that gets asked often. Many a times by myself. Sometimes by others; I suspect not out of some deep-seated curiosity but often to confirm and assert their prejudices. But the majority, with well-meaning sensitivity in these political times, abstain from this question altogether. If conversations on media are any guide, I suspect the majority of these kind-hearted folks ascribe to a certain notion about immigrants, of victimhood. Victims of violence, poverty, seeking "better" lives for themselves and their family. And I surmise they expect me to expound experiences like above, were they to ask the question. The times I have been asked that question I have blurted out meaningless, half-baked answers. But the real question of, "why do we immigrate?" remains a complex personal question to me.