A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

DEVANAGIRI ALPHABET

The University of the Third Age in Edinburgh has a magazine, The Clarion, and the editor, Bruce Cowan, is calling for articles either on My Hero/Heroin or Languages.  

So this is it, my short essay on the Nepali language.

I remember clearly a programme I was watching on TV in the 70s.  The living goddess Kumari was being paraded through the streets of Kathmandu.  Nepal in those days was still emerging from the cultural heritage of the 18^th century; and to see a young, pre-pubescent girl deified as a virgin goddess and being worshiped was really, for me, beyond the wildest dreams of Kew..the facts of Kathmandu. 

In the late seventies I had the chance to work as a volunteer in Birganj, a busy, bustling town on the border with India, unbearably hot in the summer months and sub-tropical in the winter.  

Outside of the confines of the campus where I taught post-graduate students the art of teaching English, there was very little opportunity to communicate with the locals except in their own language, Nepali.  So I ventured out onto the streets and the bazaar and learned a kind of bastardised version of the language, a mixture really of Hindi, Bhojpuri and Nepali.  

Only when on leave in Kathmandu six months after the beginning of my sojourn did I discover from a local shopkeeper that my language was a mish mash of the local tongues in Birganj:  Thas no Nepali, he told me, thas all mix up mix up.

But the real faux pas happened when I returned to the classroom and decided to show off my skill in the local language with my students.  You must learn English, I instructed them, little realising that the transposition of the first letter of the verb to learn had metamorphosed my meaning to ­You must fornicate  with the English, but in a much less formal context.

While I continued to wonder why the students were laughing at me throughout the lesson , my mistake was discreetly pointed out to me by a sympathetic student at the end of the session.

Altogether, I was there for two and a half years and enjoyed trekking to remote areas and villages.  Slowly, the language barriers fell and the simplified speech of the locals made it easy for me to communicate as little use was made of tenses and gender.

Did I enjoy the experience of learning a foreign language?  Well, I went on to do a post-graduate scholarship course in Nepalese culture with my Guru, Professor Chudamani Bhandu, a lexicographer, from whom I learned there are 122 languages – not dialects – spoken in Nepal as the mother tongue.  Most  of the students I was teaching were at least tri-lingual and I can only say I was relieved to know that Nepali or Gorkhali  as it is also known is the official language of the country. 

But my time in the Department of Culture at Kirtipur Campus in Kathmandu was not wasted as I went on to translate Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s poetry who is considered to be the bard.

I have been back to the country many times and find that I can still communicate with the locals.  I’ve tried my hand at other European languages but for some reason in France they think I’m German and in Germany they think I’m French – oh, and they don’t understand a word I say. 

The main things I’ve found out about learning a foreign language are start young, start with the skills of listening and talking and live in the country.

A Hospital in the Terrai

--> -->Birganj Hospital sits in the centre of the border town. A co-worker fittingly described the place as 'honky': noisy with the sound of car horns, rickshaw and bicycle bells, the dust settles only in the evening around 9 o'clock when the dogs lie down in the road and the people lay their heads wearily on their pillows to dream. 'Folk don't sleep deeply here,' Ed says. It's true. On a full moon night the hyenas howl and the dogs in packs reply in kind. Bats squeal and flap from tree to tree and crickets chirp the night long through till dawn.

At 5 am the town stirs with the sweepers brushing the debris from shop fronts and houses; coolies carrying pails of water and the waking dogs whine and simper. From a tea-house, music softly pierces the air, a holy bhajan repeated every morning on Radio Nepal.

The month is May and by midday the gusts of searing wind are like the blasts from a furnace. Inside the hospital the air is still and oppressive although a fan slowly revolves on the peeling roof of a ward and the sound of a fading groan threads its way along a dark corridor in which an old man lies, staring hopelessly, atop a stained sheet on a rusting trolley. The intermittent buzzing of the flies is the only other sound. From the smothering heat there is no relief. Mosquitoes having emerged from the dark, damp corners to gorge on victims' blood return to their corners, bloated and heavy.

May invited me to the hospital She's an American Peace Corps volunteer working as a microbiologist. The tasks are uncomplicated and involve no research. She only has to recognise different kinds of worm infestation such as the common ascaris. These are prevalent in the overflowing toilets where they wriggle and scurry in excrement on the floor. Hook worm is common, begot through the bare foot where they enter the bloodstream and work their way into the lungs and are coughed up, swallowed and hook on to the stomach lining, absorbing the goodness from pre-digested food. Tape worm is not so common.

I walk warily along the corridor my sandals flip flopping on the brown, concrete floor. The smell of decay, blood and the sharp smell of recently evacuated bowels invades my nostrils. I come across an old woman, dugs hanging loosely on her belly. A child lies supine like a rag doll devoid of stuffing, her face pointed to the fly-spotted fluorescent tube above. The old lady looks expectantly at me, her hands clasped over the bony frame of her legs, sad-eyed pools of hope reflect my passing.

May is saying, "That Dr Jah, he's always trying to kiss me. He's read this book about hippies and he thinks all western girls are ready for it."

As she's telling me this, we enter a "ward" where the light flickers strobe-like above. On the bed sits a boy, ill and wailing. "What's his problem?" I ask.

"He's frightened and begging me to get rid of the corpse lying on the next bed".
Then I notice the cadaver, black with flies. The floor beneath its bed is caked in dried blood. May tells me, "He's been dead for three-days now but nobody wants to move him. Poor child, he sees ghosts."

We turn around and leave the ward with a sense of the hopelessnes of it all.