We Can See Tibet From Our House

It’s Thanksgiving today. The students are off in their homestays now, so life at Sonapani is relatively quiet. We're going to try to throw together some sort of Thanksgiving meal for the students when they return on Saturday. I was threatening to go out and hunt a pheasant if someone would only give me a gun. No one believed me, so we're just going to have chicken. I think we'll be able to make mashed potatoes and stuffing, and also a pumpkin pie of sorts. I've been asking around to see if there are any sour fruits with which I could approximate cranberry relish. The closest answer I've gotten is tamarind. hmmm. I think not.

As the fall turns to winter here, the crisp, cold air reveals the distant peaks of the Himalayas in all their glory. Every morning we can see the details of new snowfall, and make out new mountains on the horizon. Yesterday we spent some time naming the summits within our view and realized that a few of them are actually in Tibet.

The seasons are funny here. Even though it’s getting quite chilly, and the leaves are falling from many of the trees, all of the animals are giving birth as though it were spring. There are baby goats and cows everywhere. And one particular tree (a variety of wild cherry) is actually in bloom- pink petals coating the ground all over.

It’s also wedding season. Every time I go out walking in the villages, Bollywood dance songs are echoing through the valleys. Yesterday, some of the students called Keith in a tizzy. They had gone out to do some work at the NGO field office, and the staff there were not letting them walk back to their homestay because there was a wedding celebration going on in the village center. The staff were worried for the students' safety. They were worried for their own safety too. They were all women, and there were no men on hand to escort them- all the men were getting drunk and rowdy at the wedding celebration. Keith told them to have some chai and wait for the men of their homestay families to come get them. It’s only safe for me to go out walking alone because everyone assumes I’m a man- dressed as I am in pants, a hat, and a heavy wool vest I bought from the men’s shelf of the locally made clothing shop. This is a constant refrain of life in the rural villages here- the women are often left to do all the work as many of the men spend their days drunk and gambling.

Yesterday I was talking with Deepa (Deepa and Ashish own and operate Sonapani) about books (naturally). We ended up discussing Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. We both had sort of hated the author for putting us through all that misery when we first read the book. Every character is so blighted, there’s no ray of hope in their lives at all. Mistry is an incredible writer, but that book is a miserable experience to read. Deepa told me, though, that she’s come to appreciate the book more and more in the time that she’s lived here in the foothills. She and Ashish have started a sewing cooperative for some of the local women. They come for a few hours each day to an open building in the back of Sonapani with several sewing machines to make laundry bags which are sold to hotels in Delhi. With this money they’re able to buy propane for their stoves, so they don’t have to spend time foraging for wood and cutting down the oak trees in the surrounding forest. Deepa said that as they work, they talk about their lives. And every one of their stories has something of A Fine Balance in it. She says she’s come to appreciate that Mistry was telling us something important: the unvarnished truth.