mother lives a day away on the family farm. “Ama,” Arjun moans, and Hari is worried. “The gods made him sick. They’ll make him well.” “Does he have a fever?” I ask. “Is he hot?” Hari stokes up the fire to make jellabies. “He is hot.” “He should drink lots of water, Hari.” Hari squints in the smoke. “He drinks. But there is a demon in him. What can I do?” Four days later Hari carries Arjun, limp, dehydrated, eyes gummed shut, out of the teashop and down to the health post. “He got an injection,” Hari tells me later, and I wonder how Hari handles the conflict of old beliefs, old ways of life, and foreign technology. Amidst the dust and the donkey farts, the smoke from his fire, Hari watches the travellers who pass by his shop, puffing up the mountain, their transistor radios blaring Hindi film music and soap advertisements, cricket results and family planning encouragement. There is talk in the village of a motor road up the mountain. “I’ve seen it,” a traveller claims as he slurps tea in Hari’s shop. “It’s nine kilometers long.” And I have seen highway restoration work, from the bus window as I roll into Kathmandu, the painstaking repair of continual erosion. Women sit on the side of the road, chipping rocks into gravel with little mallets. By hand. I have watched concrete bridges being built in the southern Terai, where development has arrived more easily because the terrain is flat. Women carry baskets of mud Keshab Shanna, the Vocational Arts teacher, shows his tenth graders how to castrate a goat in the volleyball court, a small plot of packed-down earth, where we celebrate the King's birthday and the arrival of local officials. on their heads. Basket by basket, building this motor road. At school the children learn science from Panday, who teaches everything from molecular theory to gravity to evolution. And they learn cultural history and religion from Shastri. He teaches the story of Rama. Rama lived as an ascetic in the woods with his wife Sita. Rama saved his wife Sita from a demon with the help of Hanuman, the monkey god. I have walked with a tubercular sage up a steep hill. He stops to wheeze and spit blood. He is carrying my pack, the fat American who can’t hack the trail, up the hill for a small price. At the top of the hill, a teashop. I suggest we stop for tea, feeling guilty for the relentless cough deep in the man’s throat. The teashop is run by a young mother. Her baby is feverish, a small bright bundle on a mat in the corner. I drink tea as the old sage ministers to the sick child, chanting, blowing his rattling life spirit on the child’s face. He marks the face with ashes, chants, blows the healing powers of a tubercular sage. And what cures Hari’s son Arjun, surrendered to the darkness of a small back room, limp in dehydration, watching the demon dance behind gummed-shut eyes? His cry Ama? Hari’s midnight concern? The injection? Maybe the demon left.... ■JE rjun again rolls his hoop around J U the pond, past the teashop, past A his mother, who has walked from the farm into town. She is gentle and frail. She has delivered four children, another is coming. She is happy that Arjun is well. She stays a few days, the three of them sleeping in that tiny room behind the teashop. Do they make love quietly when Arjun is asleep? He does not play hooky while his mother is here. I do not come and sit, each evening, in Hari’s shop. He will not see his wife again for several months. He will walk the quiet miles home to see the new child. Comforting, the thought of reincarnation, knowing you’ll come back, knowing you’ll meet a friend on down the road. Be sure to recognize him. Be sure to remember. In America we reincarnate our souls into our cars, our houses, our children if we’re lucky, though it does them little good. For our children we are foolish, laying on what is already there . Small comfort, in a Himalayan land where goats are sacrificed to the gods and chicken blood consecrates the new mud stove in Hari’s teashop. What small comfort found Hari, coaxing his moaning boy to drink water, just a sip. Small comfort beneath the worry and the guilt, misty terror that congealed at a cry and parted when the boy was sleeping. A Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 41
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