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.

LUMBINI

LUMBINI  लुम्बिनी 

LAST GLIMPSE OF FISHTAIL

There have been better journeys and there have been worse.  Pokhara to Bhairawa found us on a bus, having left the former at 6.30.  The road wound and wound through deep valleys with narrow river-beds that would be filled with gushing water in the monsoon, broadening out into flood plains and enriching the earth for the winter crops.  A last glimpse of Machapuchere was the final image I had, pointing proudly to the sky above darker, brooding foothills.

Winding on, we pass Sangye and Palpa, untidy little towns with a variety of weathered dwellings, rickety and sloping under rusting corrugated roofing pinned down against the sudden gales by large stones, tyres, and other discarded paraphernalia that Asians are loathe to discard in order to be cannibalised for whatever use in future time of need.  Then, the inevitable sight of the huddles of women in doorways outside shops and houses, young and old; and in their midst, the toddlers fawning and being preened by the women. 

Then lastly on to Tansen, that hybridised sounding name, not quite Nepalese or Tibetan, standing on a hill and seeming to look unaware and distant at the snaking road and the travellers below.  The hospital dominates the skyline above.  Mabel Maclean, now lumbering behind a Zimmer, remembers her time as a midwife there in the 60s, long ago, long before she moved to Edinburgh.

Suddenly we’re in the plains in Bhairawa, a largish Terai town bustling with people crowding the shops and stalls.  The passengers stand there in a group, looking and feeling a bit dazed and uncentred as if we've stepped off a boat having weathered rough seas.  Slowly, amoeba-like, the group splits and we find ourselves with a tall Australian girl and who I take to be a German couple but I find out the next day when meeting them in the bazaar are actually father and daughter.  We hire a multi-seater micro to take us to Lumbini.  Our bags are hoisted on to the rack at the top and we start our dusty journey along the highway to Lumbini, the birthplace of Gautama Buddha.

BUDDHA'S BIRTH PLACE

We make for the Korean Monastery as they have rooms to let within the vastness that is the home of Buddhism for pilgrims from all over the world.  We are exactly 300-kilometers away from Kathmandu, not that a measurement like that means very much here; 8-hours including stops would be more suggestive of the long, curving Prithvi Narayan  pass up to Kathmandu from the Terai.  But more than distance and time, the two-places are separated by culture and climate.  Here, in the market place, Bhojpuri and Hindi are heard more than Nepali.  There are fewer faces with the Mongol flatness and slanted eyes, more of the Aryan, darker features of a taller race who have lived, not in the forests, but on the plains. 

KOREAN MONASTERY

When we approach the office boy, he tells us, There are no double rooms available, only dormitories with eight to a room.

THE ROOMS AROUND THE COURTYARD

The rooms are grey concrete and quite austere.  The beds are wooden pallets with thin mattresses laid on them.  Dissatisfied, the German pair leaves in a rickshaw for the town, not happy with the accommodation on offer.  The Australian girl decides to stay.  Fulmaya talks to a monk and he instructs the clerk to give us the last double room.  This will cost us NRs600, or around £4 a night – plus three-meals a day.  We could have stayed in a hundred dollar a night hotel, but somewhere on the outskirts of the town miles away from the walled area. 

NO TRANSLATION NEEDED

A HAPPY WAVE FROM A DEVOTEE

 The Korean food in indescribably bland, innovatively bereft of imagination and almost indigestible.  Not the live boiled frog porridge you get in Thailand, but maybe the vegetarian equivalent would be in taste if not in ingredients.

The flocks flock to the central temple, The exact spot where Buddha was born, I’m told by a security guard standing at the door.  Within the building, you get a feeling you’re walking into a large area of meticulous preservation where even the dust must be kept in its place.  There are low walls and enclosed areas, some of it dating back to the fifth century BC.  Barricades surround the vestigial remains and from a distance, the gold leaf on a wall glitters.  This has been placed there by devotees.  The leaf is extremely thin and can be bought in little packets, not unlike sticky notes.  Around the inside of the perimeter wall, a few monks and laypeople sit in meditation. 

FULMAYA IN THE GROUNDS OF MAHA BHODI

I guess this is the point at which questions arise in my mind about the need for religion.  Under a tree, a distinguished looking man in brown kurta and pyjamas is regaling a crowd of westerners with words of wisdom, but I’m sure he’s not saying anything that I don’t know.  Other groups sit about on the grass absorbing (by some kind of osmosis?) the atmosphere of the place.  They will leave feeling holier than when they first came here, though for how long? 

Altogether, it’s a worthwhile place to be and the weather is warm, there is an atmosphere of peace: and finally, if true, then I am at the place where Gautama Buddha was born and lived to become one of the most influential figures in the history of human ideas and thought.

THE ONLY ARMOUR YOU NEED IS SUNCREAM