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Badribas or Bardibas?
The name Bardibas apparently stems from the inverted form of Badri (the family name of the original inhabitants) and bas, or the root of the verb basnu in Nepali, which means to sit or live—the place where the Badris live. No one is quite sure how this became Bardibas; perhaps it just rolls off the tongue a bit easier.
The original village of Bardibas was built around a small pond, a Shiva temple with a Nandi bull statue in front (Nandi is Shiva’s vehicle, as the mouse is Ganesh’s) and a smattering of mostly ramshackle adobe homes. The more “modern” Bardibas lies along the Mahendra Highway (think country road, not highway) about 400 meters from the original settlement. The original Bard (this is the only place where you will spot a couple of rusty old signs announcing in both English and Nepali where you are) is now mostly where the poorer folks live: it still plays host to the twice weekly haat bazaar or flea market where everything from kitchen utensils, to cloth and clothing to vegetables to the services of makeshift barbers can be had (sadly, the selection of vegetables is no different than the regular vendors near the new Bard), and it is seemingly a place of residence for the lower caste households. Only children and water buffaloes are bold or innocent enough to brave the murky waters of the pond—water buffaloes immersed up to their eyeballs and naked children passing the time on very hot summer afternoons. There is the obligatory and shady pepal tree with stone platform around its base, which serves as mostly an informal place for men to gather and discuss the day’s events. Some laborers and field workers catch a few hours of sleep. There are a few tea and snack stalls made of scrap wood with long wooden benches in front made smooth and shiny by hours of sitting. The old Bard is mainly a place where I ride my bike through the many foot and cart paths through the fields and enclaves of farmhouses. I prefer the paths to the roads with fewer animals to watch out for and more opportunities to just be alone and reflect without the good-natured yet screaming children or the gaping stares of adults.
But the newer Bard is where I do most of my business and I am known to many of the shopkeepers. The one thing there is always plenty of here are chairs in front of the sundry goods shops that seem to be selling just about the same thing, or everything that you don’t need. It is there that shopkeepers hold court—it is a rarity to find them on their own without the normal loyal subjects passing the time.
My favorite of these is the shop of one Ram Krishna—he’s a chubby, good-natured guy with a dark complexion and thin moustache a la India or this part of the Terai. He is also, purportedly, the richest man in town, a board member of my organization’s cooperative and has a penchant for paan—not the wimpy single, plastic package stuff, but the big green leaf in the shape of a triangle. He has a cheeky, cat like grin that exposes said years of paan chewing. I always get a seat at Ram Krishna’s and on particular days there are even cups of tea which follow. In our first few weeks here, he let me step behind the counter—there are no shops here where you can step behind the counter or inside—so I could have a look at the goods, which all too often resemble numerous packs of biscuits. It may take half an hour to buy a kilo of sugar, but it is my social event par excellence. As the proprietor, Ram Krishna is merely the money handler of the operation; his sons sometimes assume this responsibility, but there are 3 or 4 other “attendants” that measure out all of the bulk goods and handle the merchandise. Ram Krishna sits in his high back wooden chair, is passed the money from one of the attendants and informed of the total price; he pulls open a wooden desk drawer stashed with tattered and torn rupee notes and produces the change. Everything is calculated by hand first on a small slip of paper and then rechecked on the ubiquitous calculator that all shopkeeper’s have—like the scepter of their court and status—before a total price is produced. By this time, Migyoung has calculated everything in her head and pointed out the mistakes…
There is also the town “supermarket,” which is really just another sundry goods shop just a little cleaner and crisper in appearance, but it is merely that and nothing else. Commodities such as rice, sugar, flour and other grains are sold by weight and stored in sacks. Invariably these goods are full of rocks, bugs and sometimes the shit of what I hope is geckos and not rats or mice… It used to take us almost an hour to clean the rice of bugs and rocks before cooking it, but we have since found prepackaged 5-kilo bags. Flour, sugar and everything else not sealed, has to sifted and giving a good going over. There’s the pots and pans shop run by an ex-policeman where the prices magically rise and fall depending on if I am on my own or with a local Nepali; the bicycle repair shop where I stop in every two weeks to have my tires re-inflated and which is run by an Indian man who always wears a blue doti wrapped around his waist—pumping up tires usually draws big crowds for some reason; the samosa and sweets shop where children aged 10-14 do all of the work—the ubiquitous child labor of Nepal; the liquor, soft drinks and water shop where I sometimes purchase bottles of mineral water and an occasional bottle of beer, which I take home and put in the freezer for several hours (being no middle ground between drunkard and teetotaler, the word is out that I am the former…); and the meat and egg shop where I used to purchase my eggs until the youngish proprietor with a bowl haircut became incredibly rude with me because I once refused change in Indian and not Nepali rupees. I now buy my eggs from one of the vendor carts set up along the streets and run by a lower caste couple.
The wild grass growing out of the town’s median chowk has gotten long enough to hide the debris (it’s hard to get close now since there are perpetual puddles around it) and our six street donkeys have mysteriously and sadly disappeared. The pink, balding dog that hangs around the ciyah pasal near the chowk clings to life. The surrounding rice paddies are a painter’s palette of greens in every shade that one could imagine.
The heat continues unabated—every day we pass the century mark, usually well past, and only the night brings a little bit of relief, but not much. To be inside is to sweat unless you perch yourself directly under the swirling ceiling fan. We shower during the early morning and late night hours when the rooftop water tank has moderately cooled down. Fortunately, the power supply has returned to normal levels of only a few hours of outage per day after suffering through 16 hour a day outages for many weeks. We have moved our bed into the living room of our place since the bedroom—with its walls facing south and west—was like an inferno and virtually impossible to sleep in. We are now beginning to catch a few more hours of sleep per night. Every day it threatens rain but little has fallen since the floods. Although that was certainly a rather miserable time, we find ourselves looking to the skies for a bit of afternoon relief more frequently… We await autumn with great anticipation.
At work, I am putting together the particulars of a dalit rights and inclusion project—a program aimed at reducing incidents of caste discrimination in 21 VDCs (counties) through inter-caste training and awareness programs in addition to educational, economic and public access opportunities for lower caste individuals, particularly women. At the same time, I am utilizing this process as a means of training my colleagues in how to plan, design and write proposals using such tools as logframes and project logic matrixes. So for me, I am hopeful that this process will be twofold: a learning/organizational development tool for my colleagues and an opportunity to contribute something positive to the development of dalit women and families.
Posted by david at August 9, 2004 01:49 PM