Mountains Painted with Turmeric

1. For instance, when they enumerate something, the characters of this novel use the old formula of goda (an old form of the numeral classifier -vata that follows the numeral in modern Nepali but precedes it in this style of language) + the number + the numeral ek, “one.” Thus godaduek = 2, godatisek = 30, and so forth.

7. Nepali prose narratives such as this switch between present and past tenses more frequently than an English translation can reflect. The present tense is often used to depict physical settings or to analyze psychological or emotional conditions, producing a period of reflective stillness in the text, while the events of the story are usually recounted in the past tense. In this text, the present tense is also sometimes used to recount the unfolding of events, and this is reflected in the translation as far as possible. There are a few instances, however, where a paragraph begins to describe events in one tense and then switches to another for no apparent reason: the translation departs from the original in such instances so that this switching between tenses (which can be confusing in English prose) does not occur within the body of a single paragraph.

9. Kahila means “Fourth Eldest Son.” Very few characters in this novel are addressed by their given names, and this reflects colloquial speech, in which kinship terms and birth-order names are used much more commonly. The birth-order names that occur in this novel are Kancha (m), Kanchi (f): “Youngest”; Kahila (m): “Fourth Eldest”; Sahinla (m): “Third Eldest”; and Jetha (m), Jethi (f): “Eldest.” A dhami is a shaman or diviner.

10. Bankalé: a malevolent forest spirit.

11. The Damai are an artisanal caste who traditionally work as tailors. They occupy a low position in the caste hierarchy.

12. “Jadau” is a deferential greeting used by lower castes when addressing a member of a higher caste (Turner 1930:207). Leute’s use of this form of greeting would appear to contradict the author’s claim that he “did not need to defer to anyone”: the inference is perhaps that the status acquired by birth remains a more powerful factor than any status acquired though wealth. Alternatively, in view of the ensuing tirade, it could also be construed as sarcasm.

13. Bulls are not generally confined but permitted to wander at will and are often held up as symbols of lustfulness and irresponsibility.

14. A mohar is half of one rupee.

15. Chait: mid-March to mid-April.

16. Bhadau: mid-August to mid-September.

17. Nani: “Child”; Bahini: “Younger Sister.”

18. Limbugaon: literally, “Limbu Village.”

19. A kos is a notoriously vague measure of distance that is usually defined as two miles but sometimes as “the distance that can be covered on foot in half an hour.”

20. Nepali has a complex pronominal system. The informal second-person pronoun, similar to the French tu, is timi, while the politer version, similar to the French vous, is tapai. The soldier uses the latter on this occasion.

21. Strictly, the term dai means “elder brother,” but it is used more generally to address or refer to men who are older than the speaker, and here it clearly refers to the soldier’s cousin.

22. Dhané’s family name, Basnet, proclaims his Chetri (kshatriya) caste. He either knows that the soldier belongs to the same caste (nowhere in the story is his caste or ethnicity made explicit) or assumes that he does because of the soldier’s occupation (in the classical varna hierarchy, the kshatriya are kings and warriors).

23. Bhaujyu: “Elder Brother’s Sister.”

24. The literal meaning of sangini is “female friend.” Sangini songs are sung as dialogues between women, particularly among the Chetri caste (according to Weisethaunet 1997) and especially in eastern Nepal. The singers exchange their joys and sorrows in song.

25. Mugalan: an archaic and, it seems, exclusively Nepali name for India as the land of the Mughals.

26. The festival of Teej (tij) falls during late summer, on the third day of the bright half of the month of Bhadau (mid-August to mid-September). It is a women’s festival celebrated almost exclusively by Bahuns and Chetris, during which a woman must undergo purificatory fasting to ensure the long life of her husband. Traditionally, women indulge in a feast on the eve of the festival, and on the day itself they dress in their red wedding saris and dance before temples dedicated to Shiva—activity that represents “a complete reversal of the Hindu ideal of womanly behaviour” (Bennett 1983:225). Teej is followed by the festival of Rishi Panchami, on the fifth day of the bright half of Bhadau, during which Bahun and Chetri women purify themselves by taking ritual baths in a river. For further detail, see Bennett 1983:218–34.

Dasain is the major social and religious event of the year, especially for Bahuns and Chetris. The warrior goddess Durga is worshipped during the Nine Nights (navaratri) leading up to the tenth day of the bright half of the month of Asoj (mid-September to mid-October), when the festival reaches its climax. Family members renew their kinship ties by daubing one another’s foreheads with a mixture of yogurt, red powder, and rice in an action known as “giving tika.” Animals (principally goats) are sacrificed and eaten during the festival, and the head of each household must provide each family member with a new set of clothes.

27. “Victory to the goddess Bhairavi!”

28. A song sung during the Dasain festival in honor of the great goddesses of Hinduism.

29. In his study of Chetri households, John Gray records that maize was generally considered to be the least desirable staple, far inferior to rice. His informants often described poorer or lower-caste households in terms of the fact that they had to eat dhiro, a maize flour paste, for their main meals, instead of rice or wheat (1995:133).

30. Budho is an adjective meaning “old”; “Budhe” is used as a nick name here, meaning “oldie.” The Kami are an artisanal caste who traditionally work as blacksmiths. Like the other artisanal castes, they occupy a lowly position in the caste hierarchy.

31. A woman’s peva is usually simply her dowry (more commonly called daijo). In some instances, it can denote possessions that a woman brings to her husband’s home when she marries him but that remain her own personal property.

32. Kubera, the king of the Yaksha and Kinnara demigods, is proverbially wealthy.

33. The hat bazar, a temporary open-air market that is set up regularly at a particular location on a particular day of the week or month, is an important feature of social and economic life in the hills of eastern Nepal (see Sagant 1996:213).

34. Kanchi Didi: literally, “Last-Born Elder Sister.”

35. Moro (m) and mori (f), derived from the word for “corpse,” are used as terms of either abuse or endearment, depending on the intentions of the speaker and the tone in which the word is uttered.

36. The traditional measures of weight or capacity are gradually being displaced by the metric system in Nepal today, but they retain their currency in many rural areas. A pathi is equal to 8 manas, a mana being equivalent to 0.7 liters or about 20 ounces of grain.

37. Khasi goats are castrated goats, reared especially to be eaten.

38. Khet is fertile irrigated or irrigable land, usually located at some distance from a farmer’s house, while bari is nonirrigated land. The general pattern is that during the wet season, rice is grown on khet land and maize on bari land; in the dry season, wheat may be grown on khet land and either wheat or mustard seed on bari land. Khet land is valued more highly, both because it is more fertile and because it yields rice. A vegetable plot located close to a farmer’s house is also known as bari.

39. Kanchi: literally, “Last-Born Girl” or “Youngest Sister.”

40. “The most typical and sometimes the biggest markets emerge at a neutral, uninhabited place, a mid point in the jungle between those living at the bottom of the valley and those at the summits” (Sagant 1996:214).

41. The soldier uses the Hindi-Urdu words lekin, “but,” and kuch, “something,” in this sentence.

42. The English word “recruit” appears in the original.

43. Married women wear vermillion powder (sindur) in the parting of their hair. The episode is probably intended to demonstrate that the soldier has forgotten an aspect of his own culture, thus emphasizing his status as an outsider. This is amplified in the exchanges that follow.

44. Naraz means “angry” and is commonly used in Hindi and Urdu. References to anger in Nepali most commonly make use of the verb risaunu, and the word naraz is known only by those who have had some exposure to Indian plains languages.

45. Accha: a Hindi-Urdu word meaning “good” or “okay.”

46. Ferris wheels or rotary swings (roteping) are erected on the edge of many rural villages for the Dasain festival.

47. In Nepali, maula-nishana. A maula is a rock or a stone on which an animal is sacrificed. Before the ritual takes place the maula is worshipped and sanctified. A nishana is a religious flag or banner.

48. On “bitter leaves,” see note 3 of the foreword.

49. Marriage is often defined as kanyadan, that is, a father’s gift (dan) of his virgin daughter (kanya) to the groom’s family, symbolized here by his tying her to her husband with a shawl, as in the marriage ceremony. The idea of courtship is antithetical to the ideals of kanyadan. See Bennett 1983:71–73.

50. Dobaté means “situated at the junction of two (do) roads (bato)” but can also mean “a shopkeeper at a corner; a pedlar who swindles passers-by” (Turner 1930:320). Sahinla is a birth-order name meaning “Third Son.” It might be that the name Dobaté (literally, “two ways” or “two-wayed”) is intended also to imply that this character is two-faced or hypocritical.

51. Magh: mid-January to mid-February; one of the coldest months.

52. It is usual for a man to refer to and address a friend’s wife as “Elder Brother’s Sister” (Bhaujyu) if he is in the habit of addressing that friend as “Elder Brother” (Dai), and in fact it is deemed quite inappropriate for a man to refer to or address a friend’s wife by her given name. This is perhaps a logical corollary to the custom by which men between whom there is no family relationship very frequently address each other using kinship terms, especially Bhai, “Younger Brother,” and Dai or Daju, “Elder Brother.”

53. The term “Sahu” is applied to anyone to whom a substantial debt is owed, whether he be the owner of the fields a farmer rents or a moneylender who has extended credit to him.

54. Baisakh: mid-April to mid-May; the first month of the year.

55. “Bhorla creepers”: “The creeper, Bauhinia Vahilii, the leaves of which are used for making ghum, or leaf-umbrellas” (Turner 1930:484). “Chilaune trees” could be translated as “itching trees.”

56. Mangsir: mid-November to mid-December.

57. Jeth: mid-May to mid-June.

58. Sagant describes a farmer’s routine at the time of year when the rice is first sown:

In the evening, when everyone has gone home and the mud has settled in the paddy fields, the owner takes his basket and, standing at the edge of the fields, broadcasts the rice. For the next five days he floods the field. At dawn he rushes down the hill and lets in the water, allowing it to flow until evening. The first day he oversees the two casual labourers he has hired to repair the levees along the fields that are to receive the rice seed. The next day he is alone. But he must stay to be sure someone else does not divert the water into his own paddy field. These are the first in a series of water disputes that will go on for two months. (Sagant 1996:256–57)

59. Gharti is the name of a class of people descended from slaves who were freed from bondage by the Rana prime minister, Chandra Shamsher (r. 1901–29) or otherwise emancipated. Until the abolition of slavery in Nepal in 1924, people became enslaved through sale, as the punishment for a crime, or through debt bondage. Höfer warns that the name Gharti is “not solely applied to ex-slaves and their offspring. Gharti seems to be, at the same time, a reservoir for people of ‘notorious’ origin” (1979:130). Sané means “small one” or “minor”; the author clearly means to assign a lowly status to this character.

60. Surya: the sun deity, who rides his chariot across the sky.

61. Thuli calls Maina Bhaujyu, “Elder Brother’s Sister,” while Maina addresses her as Nani, defined by Turner as “baby, small child; girl; term of affection for a young woman” (1930:340). Maina refers to Jhuma as Kanchi, “Last-Born Girl,” while Thuli refers to her as Kanchi Didi, “Last-Born Elder Sister.”

62. The exchange labor system is known as parma:

In the parma system each household sends several members (usually women) to whomever is planting (weeding, harvesting) on a given day. In return, that household gets an equal number of free laborers when its planting day comes. Members of poorer families with less land to cultivate often work for wages instead of labor exchange. The wage for a male laborer in 1975 was six rupees and two measures of flattened rice plus midday snacks and a few cigarettes each day. Women earned only three rupees and one and a half measures of flattened rice for a day’s work. The amount one must work in the fields is a clear measure of one’s status. (Bennett 1983:23–24; see also Gray 1995:174–79)

63. Turner defines abi or abai as an “exclamation of surprise or fear (used esp. by women)” (1930:36). Aabui is one of several variants of this.

64. Ficus nemoralis, a small tree whose branches contain a milky white juice (Shrestha 1979:38; Turner 1930:314), hence the Nepali name, which means “milky.”

65. Asar: mid-June to mid-July, i.e., in four or five months.

66. Arati: a ceremony in which the deity in a temple is worshipped each evening by moving a tray of burning lamps in a circle around its image; the ceremony is usually performed to the accompaniment of various hymns in praise of the deity.

67. The word translated here as “friend” is mitini. Females become one another’s mitini and males one another’s mit in a ceremony that includes an exchange of gifts and creates a lifelong bond of fictive kinship that extends even to mourning obligations.

68. Among traditional upper-caste Nepali Hindus, a widow must wear white clothing for a year after the death of her husband, as must the chief male mourner of a family in which a death has taken place. Widows must never again wear red, “even as a tika mark or hair braid” (Bennett 1983:107). Thus white is a color that is closely associated with mourning and death, and this explains Jhuma’s choice of attire at this juncture in the story.

69. The Legal Code (Muluki Ain), which was first promulgated in 1854, is greatly concerned with rules of commensality and with distinctions between castes and groups whose members are either “water acceptable” (pani calnya) or “water unacceptable” (pani nacalnya) and either “rice acceptable” (bhat calnya) or “rice unacceptable” (bhat nacalnya). Of course the question of who a person might safely accept food and water from is also determined by that person’s caste and ethnic identity. A person who breaks the rules of commensality by sharing food or water with someone who is for them “rice unacceptable” or “water unacceptable” may be punished in various ways, including caste degradation and exclusion from commensal relations with fellow caste members. The 1955 edition of the Legal Code still recognized the caste hierarchy, but the version promulgated in 1963 contained no regulations concerning caste interrelations (Höfer 1979:203). This novel was first published in 1957–58, so it may be assumed that the villager’s reference to the Legal Code is to the 1955 version. Here, it is suspected that Dhané’s family may have been polluted, and his fellow villagers are arguing about what should be done about it. Höfer notes, “certain decisions are left to the relatives and fellow caste-members as, for instance, the question of whether somebody who has violated the rules of commensality is to be excluded from commensality or not” (197).

70. Jhuma assumes that Karki is planning to flee the country and fears that he will be regarded as an abductor.

71. The rite of putting on the vermillion powder (sindur halne) marks the climax of the part of the traditional Bahun-Chetri wedding ceremony that takes place in the bride’s enclosure. The groom sprinkles a line of vermillion powder onto the bride’s forehead and then makes a red line with it in the parting of her hair. “The red powder in the part of the bride’s hair symbolizes the groom’s sexual possession of her. It is said that only after the groom has placed the vermilion mark can the bride call him husband” (Bennett 1983:87).