As our neighbors sang rock songs with electric guitars and raspy death metal voices, my mother shook her head, “They don’t sing the songs that I did when I was a kid.” So, instead of the blare coming from the houses surrounding ours, she starts telling us of her version of deusi-bhailo.
“All of my dais used to say that I was lucky,” she begins and tells of how her older brother and friends would carry her on their shoulders just so she could dance when they sang. “Didi used to put ghiu on a spoon and hold it under a candle and she would smear the black on my eyes,” my Ama explains her childhood version of eyeliner. She laughs at the ingenuinity of my aunt who used the red off of cheap streamers to color her lips and cheeks.
“Somehow, didi found a jhili mili top and sewed it on top of this black shirt I had so I would sparkle when I danced,” my mom continues and even though I know she’s sitting there in front of me at our dining room table in our house in Kathmandu, what her eyes see is the glow of diyos, and her ears are perked listening to the songs her brother and father used to sing.
My mother is transported back to her life in the village, of when hunger was more familiar to her than being fed and when 10 annas were worth to her what a thousand rupees is for me today.
My sister and I let her talk, and we listen. She talks about how they weren’t starving, but how they were poor. She tells us some stories we’ve heard before about how her best friend and her used to beat up boys that liked them. And I find myself thinking, “Man, my mom is so freaking bad ass.”
Perhaps in light of Tihar and the special feel of once a year celebrations, she starts talking about another event that she used to look forward. And as she explains the situation, the relevance of two rupees, I find myself trying to imagine her life. Her stories shift to the mischief she used to take part of, and somehow she ends up talking about the suicide of a dai that she used to think highly of. “Bichara,” she says, “he was so nice.”
There is no doubt, the pain and poverty that is the background to all of her stories. The beatings, the starving, the stealing that I never indulged in but she did – part for the fun, part for the necessity. She talks and talks and I find it hard to believe that her stories are from one lifetime.
I’m happy to have been raised with the fortunes my mother wasn’t, but listening to her life that I’ll never experience, there was a charm and happiness to the way she lived that the kids of Kathmandu today will never know.
Saani has no real goals and aspirations but she sees opportunity in everything and goes with the flow. This is probably because she loves exploring and discovering. She writes for fun but for the same reason she also cooks, reads, and spends a lot of time on random websites that offer a chance to learn all sorts of tid-bits on life.
http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/10/28/a-nepali-mom-like-no-other/
