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?
