During those busy times at the stupa when a lot of people
are doing kora, nobody seems to be miffed that walking on the inner pathway
means people are packed together, and people still seem to manage to go their
own pace with the faster folks darting in between others when a small space
comes into existence.
Then one dares to step into a vehicle of sorts. Getting onto
a bus, micro, or tuktuk almost guarantees a physical closeness with others that
is much, much tighter than the crowd doing kora. But even getting into a taxi
or riding a motorcycle means you’re about to become part of a tightly packed
puzzle moving in all directions. Beyond the fact that vehicles are supposed to
travel on the left side of the road and that drivers should pay attention to
the traffic police when they happen to be at an intersection directing traffic,
there aren’t a lot of rules. (Or if there are, they aren’t enforced or
followed.) Part of the craziness that occurs in vehicles has to do with narrow
roadways, in the sense that sometimes two cars coming from opposite directions
are wider than the road. There isn’t really a middle line, so the number of
lanes of traffic going in either direction at a given time is a little blurry.
Even on the big Ring Road where the highway is wide, the space is usually
packed so if one wants to turn into the moving traffic or shift lanes, there
has to be a certain level of assertiveness (or I suppose aggressiveness, but
assertiveness explains it better) on the part of the driver. One time when we
were on a bus coming back from Patan, an assertive tuktuk driver decided he
needed to get around the car in front of him so he eased in between us and the
car and for a minute or so was about 1 ½ inches from our bus. Amazingly, after
awhile this closeness of moving vehicles no longer is alarming. Sure, the first
time our taxi driver pulled a u-turn in wall to wall traffic or the first
couple times we met buses coming around corners on winding mountain roads was
alarming, but soon it ceases to be a novelty or a cause of increased blood
pressure.
So I’ve told you a bit about people, and I’ve told you a bit
about vehicles. What about vehicles and people? The best way to describe
crossing the street is Frogger. Did you ever play that game on the computer
when you were a kid? In Frogger, your arrow keys control a frog that you have
to move through traffic to the other side of the road, sometimes having to pause
in the middle of the road or back track before moving ahead again. Now that
I’ve described Frogger to you, I no longer have to describe crossing the street
here, because it’s just like Frogger. Except that maybe you aren’t a frog.
One of my favorite examples of vehicles and people is when
we were in Patan learning about water systems and resource management. We had
split off from one of the main roads and were walking down a fairly narrow
road. It was easy enough for us to just step to one side for passing
motorcycles, but then along came a truck. It wasn’t even that big of a truck in
comparison to the hulking chunks of metal you see flying down highways in the
U.S., but in comparison to the width of the road…
The photograph accompanying this post is during that
situation. Some Nepali guys who had been walking on the street were squished up
against the wall on the other side, the truck took up the middle, and our group
was lined up against the wall on the other side. Maybe the nice balance to the
close proximity of objects is that they aren’t moving incredibly quickly…
Shifting into a more philosophical mode, the location of things
in the streets makes me see certain processes as being more proximate as well.
Imagine a goat tied up to a light post, and maybe chicken pecking around
nearby. Look up from the goat and the chicken and there’s a butcher, displaying
his or her wares, namely chicken carcasses and chunks of goat. Sometimes a leg
or head is hanging out on the table as well. Now, walk down the street a shop
or two and you might be able to find some fried meat on a stick or be able to
pop into a restaurant for meat-filled momos. Some students seem put-off or
disgusted by seeing life and death and consumption so near to each other. I’m
actually not bothered by it at all (maybe the myriad times I got in the car in
the garage and turned the headlights on, only to find a deer carcass hanging
in front of the car desensitized me?), but this juxtaposition and perhaps other
students’ reactions to it makes me marvel at the way meat seems to be treated
in the U.S. Not only are live animals and saleable meat products not physically
close, but also the products that are sold in stores typically don’t
immediately point to what was once a living animal (i.e. legs and heads). Heck,
most of the meat is deboned already, further disguising it from its previous
life form. Further we have terms that distance the consumable object from the
living animal: instead of pig we eat pork (which is of course further
classified), instead of lamb we eat mutton, instead of baby cows we eat veal,
instead of deer we eat venison. We also don’t tend to look at the kind of
animals we are eating as we eat. A lot of times we we’re served meat here, we
have to be aware of many little bones, because a whole chicken will be used or
a piece of mutton might have skin and hair still on it. Watching people’s
reactions has brought to light an American perception of what edible meat is or
should be like. (Is it weird that bones and hair don’t bother me at all? :-/)
Interestingly, there is one
thing that has stood out to be as being not “incredibly close,” but rather
being entirely separate. Whereas the consumption of meat may occur right next
to the original source—the goat—or the raw product—the carcass on the table,
the production of metalwork for the shops around the stupas—objects that are
seemingly tourist trinkets and/or objects for ritual—isn’t occurring next to
the shops that sell those items. Rather, on my walk from the program house to
my homestay house I pass many one-room operations where 2-5 people will be
sitting marking metal rings and dishes with painstaking patterns or softening
and shaping a piece of metal over a flame. There could certainly be a practical
reason for this separation—primarily that it seems everything into those rooms
of construction is smudged with soot, whereas final products need to be clean.
Or maybe it’s an authenticity thing when it comes to selling things to
tourists. Tourists want old things, things with histories. The items can be
made to look antique-ish, but that façade would disintegrate if tourists saw
the items being made right in front of them. The Authenticity Points of an
object might further fall if tourists discovered it was not Tibetans but
Newaris or some other less-famous ethnic group making them…In any case, I find
it very interesting that while many things that are part of local people’s
everyday production, consumption, and action are incredibly close, the products
made for sale around the stupa are generally not physically close processes of construction.
Maybe the space and people around me wouldn’t feel so
“close” if I had grown up in an urban area in the U.S.? (Ask me about my
Pancake Placement Theory if you are curious about proxemics in the United
States. I maintain that one’s childhood setting can be deduced from way one
cooks pancakes on a large grill. :P) Any New Yorkers out there want to describe
what kind of space bubbles people have in the city? I kind of like having to
rethink space and adopt new habits to operate in that space.
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