Through the Looking-Glass #8

Published November 28, 2006 in the Telluride Watch

Time remains at a standstill in Gerkhutar village, a three-hour bus ride and 40-minute walk west of Kathmandu. I think of the film Pathar Panchaali, the first of Bengali filmmaker Satayjit Ray’s renowned Apu Trilogy. Ray takes the viewer to a Bengali village and focuses on a leaf rustling ever softly in the breeze, while a stream gurgles softly in the background. A Apu’s older sister Durga sits in soft focus on a swing in the background, singing a song to herself. Ray holds this scene for what seems like a good three or four minutes, expertly conveying the slowness of life in an Indian village.

In Gerkhutar I am living that slowness. The afternoon I arrive in this village I spend some time talking with the brothers of the house, sharing news of friends I first visited Gerkhutar with five years ago. After 20 minutes of catching up, I look at my watch to see that it is still only early afternoon. Ram Chandra Pandey suggests taking a walk around the village, and we head down the path that runs between the Pandey’s buffalo stables and their neighbors’. The path continues through fields of millet to the village’s school where Ram Chandra is a teacher and around a Kali temple that appears to be growing out of the side of a pipal tree. Behind the school and temple is a local shop where the men of the village congregate to drink tea and discuss politics. I notice Maoist slogans on every wall. “Maobadiko mukti morcha jindabad!” Long live the Maoist movement! Ram Chandra is not a Maoist; he is of Brahmin lineage and his family owns plenty of land, a mill, a cow, three bulls and two water buffalo. But in Nuwakot District, where Gerkhutar lies, and to the north, the Maoists are active, in virtual control of more remote villages.

We pause to have a cup of tea with a few of Ram Chandra’s friends before we continue on to the Gerkhu Khola, a stream that runs through the small valley, and where families are cutting and threshing their rice harvest. We watch some teenage boys and their grandfathers bundling the rice stalks to prepare for threshing. They have laid down a few large tarps sewn together and placed a flat rock in the center. In turns, they pick up bundles of rice, lift them over their heads and bring them crashing down on the rock to let the kernels of rice loose. Four people stand in a circle around the rock, lifting their arms up and bringing them banging down in a round sequence. After three or four times, a bundle is tossed to the side, and another one picked up. I fight the long shadows of the afternoon sun and take photographs of them at work, hoping to press the action of rice kernels bouncing off the stone into the black and white emulsion inside my camera. I’ll know later if I am successful.

Our group of Ram Chandra, the German Tom, my Telluride friend Kate and our trekking guide Shiva continues walking up the valley, and 15 minutes later we meet the same group that was threshing rice before at another patch of their land. This time, I am told, I must do the work myself and not just watch and take pictures. In good humor, I tie a bandanna around my head, leave my camera with Kate and pick up a bundle of rice. They do not know that I have done this before, with friends near Kathmandu, and are surprised when I expertly twist the bundle of rice each time before bringing it down on the rock again. Soon Tom the German and Kate have joined me, and this time it is the Nepalis who are resting, watching us at work. We carry on for 20 minutes or so, working the muscles in our arms, backs and legs. “In your country it is all done by machine, isn’t it?” they ask. I honestly don’t know how rice is threshed in America, but I presume it must be done by machine, for who could afford that labor? “Yes, it is all done by machine in America.”

By now the afternoon sun has sunk behind the western ridge and we begin walking back to Ram Chandra’s house. On the way, we pass by another stream with a water-powered mill perched atop it. A fine dust flutters out through the cracks of the roughshod wooden walls, and a tall, thin man walks out, also covered in this dust. This is a pani gatna, a mill to grind corn that is powered by the rush of the stream. A large, flat round stone is turned by a turbine below, while a small piece of wood bounces off the vessel holding dried corn kernels, causing three or four pieces to slide out at a time.

This simple technology is ingenious. No polluting source of energy, no electricity to worry about being turned on or off, no firewood from the forests cut down, and no manpower needed, aside from the owner who watches the mill himself. Families bring their sacks of corn, millet, rice, and barley and place them in a queue, returning when their grain has been converted to flour. Tom the German tells Ram Chandra that when he sees this simple technology, he becomes angry at the patronizing view of undeveloped countries like Nepal that is prevalent in the west. “This is simply genius,” Tom the German keeps insisting, even as we reach Ram Chandra’s house.

Back at the house, the youngest sister-in-law is preparing dinner, this cooked over a wood stove. She grinds the achar by hand on a large flat stone, adding a green herb related to cilantro to ginger, garlic, salt, red pepper and fire-roasted tomatoes. This is a small condiment to the main meal of rice, vegetables and lentil soup that we eat off of brass plates. As is customary, Bhauju insists on serving us seconds, although it seems impossible to consume that much rice on one occasion. After dinner and a heated discussion on the corruption of development agencies in Nepal (the money stays in Kathmandu, we all agree, never reaching the villages where it is needed most), we go to bed. By nine o’clock, the village is quiet again, and the house soon sleeps, too.