Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  Even here, there are signs in English for ESL, for IT training and computer classes. Schoolkids in crisp blue uniforms with neckerchiefs tied smartly under their chin bike or walk to the schools that seem to be on every corner: Little Genius English School, Bright Future High School, National Inventive English School. Some of these kids come out of slums and walk right past starving kids. I wonder how the kids are selected, who decides whose fate is sealed with a pencil case and blue blouse?

  Her hair’s not even dry from her shower, but already Nepal has made Mia’s face unfamiliar to me. Compassion, fascination, revulsion, sadness, delight, surprise—all flash and flit as we drive. She’s never seen life like this, other than in magazines or photo exhibits. I’m as compelled to watch her as what’s outside.

  A mother never tires of her daughter’s face, at any age. One of the most rewarding and entertaining aspects of mothering is being able to witness the very moment your little girl discovers something about herself or the world. We’re always with them when they’re small; we have the opportunity to see subtle changes, the lightbulb moments, the shock at harder truths.

  It’s part of what we, and they, lose when they grow up, the world is no longer new to them in the same miraculous way; and when it is, we’re rarely there to witness it. It was one of the most amazing things about writing Come Back with Mia, witnessing her during the creative process, seeing something emerge from her soul, still shiny and wet as a newborn.

  I know Mia watches me this way, too. Sometimes I would catch my reflection in a window near my desk and see her face off to the side, watching me. Or I’d see her through a kitchen doorway when she was young, watching me cook from a distance. So much of us is unknown, and unknowable, to our daughters. We carry a whole lifetime of before within us. How do you express that to them?

  That before is all the more mysterious and inscrutable for daughters of mothers from other countries and cultures. My mother is from Eastern Europe; she survived the Holocaust in hiding in Budapest. Her family did not. We share almost no social, cultural, emotional, or, save a few cousins, familial experiences or references.

  When I was little, I used to love to watch her when she didn’t know it. I especially loved to study her when she was knitting, sitting on the sofa after a houseful of five kids was quiet. Knitting was the first time I remember seeing my mom as someone other than my mom. It was something she did for herself, as a person, not as a mom.

  Watching her puzzle out something intricate, her blue-gray eyes silently counting stitches as her fingers danced in the air with the yarn and the tick-tick-ticking needles, was like being privy to some secret part of her very essence.

  I learned how to knit and crochet from my mother as a child; it was a bond between us that I loved. We couldn’t disagree, and it was fun and creative—it allowed us to see another side of each other.

  I’m not attached to things. I toss or donate as much and as often as I can. Paul and Mia live in fear that I’ve thrown out something valuable of theirs. But I’ve kept everything my mom ever knitted for Mia or me. The writing sweater she made for me is frayed, stretched out, and tattered, but if my house was on fire, it’s one of the few things I’d run inside to retrieve.

  I didn’t expect my first encounter with death to be a public cremation at a Nepalese temple, but here I am, holding hands with my mother as we watch bodies, now reduced to ash, smolder atop sandalwood logs.

  Pashupatinath is an enormous funerary complex situated on the banks of the sacred Bagmati River. Hindus consider rivers to be holy; they bring salvation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth, and many wish to take their final breaths on the banks of a river.

  The main temple is an enormous pagoda dating back to the fifth century, surrounded by a crowded patchwork of rose-colored altars, white stone statues, and small bronze temples. Wide steps lead from the temple to the river below; bodies are burned on platforms at the top of the stairs.

  The body on the first pyre is a white pile of ash, and the second has snippets of cloth still visible amid burning flames. Pink and orange flowers cover the ground, and small clusters of people stand beside the funeral pyres, white robes waving gently in the wind. I feel like we’re intruding, Westerners snapping photos and soaking up cultural lessons while someone lays coins in the mouth of a loved one. Even among themselves, however, there is no privacy; bodies are burned in the open, funeral processions intersect, unemployed men come to watch and pass the time.

  Though Nepal is now a democracy, the caste system persists; the lower castes are cremated downstream. Beneath industrial metal pylons are six slabs of concrete, and what felt ceremonious before is more perfunctory here. There aren’t colorful shrines, decorative altars, or attending priests. Mainly, the river tells the difference. The water here is very shallow, with banks that are a tangle of garbage, reeds, and a thick black sludge. A layer of ash coats the water, which is rife with burned logs and garbage. Untreated sewage, waste from medical facilities, and animal carcasses are routinely dumped in the Bagmati; the water upstream was hardly pristine but it wasn’t this putrid.

  Two street children are bent over in the water, their hands resting on their knees as they intently scan the river. One looks to be about six, the other ten, though it’s hard to tell, because their skin is tough and weathered. They’re scouring for gold teeth or coins that sink to the river bottom after the ashes from the burned bodies float away.

  A flash of color catches my eye. Not twenty feet from the boys a woman my age is washing her sari. She casts the bright marigold fabric into the river, a rippling square of color floating on the water’s surface, before pulling it in and wringing it out. It’s a beautiful image; a cascade of black hair, brass armbands on honeyed limbs, the sun behind her creating a silhouette of the female figure behind orange fabric.

  My mom’s listening intently to a young guide explaining the various rituals and customs. I’ve stopped listening; I’ve formed a freeze-frame of this image, this beautiful woman in the middle of a filthy and muddy river, a stone’s throw from emaciated boys panning for the teeth of the dead.

  It’s overwhelming, this amalgamation of life and death, of beauty and filth. I’m used to contrasts being compartmentalized. A nice part of town is clean, with quaint cafés and storefronts. Bad areas contain graffiti and concrete, sleeping crowds of the homeless, stores selling cheap clothing and tacky home décor. Our personal lives are similarly divided, friends from family, birth from death, work from play. We visit our dead in cemeteries and wash our clothes in a machine. We have no concept of a single entity being used for everything, and a dangerously contaminated entity at that.

  The Bagmati is the heart and soul of Kathmandu, a living embodiment of the city. It is where you drink, die, cleanse your body and the garments covering it, purify your soul. They say the river is mythological, that it flowed directly from Shiva, the god responsible for rebirth and destruction, but I think it is more than myth that makes this river holy. Its waters contain thousands of whispered prayers, rippling on the surface are the hopes and fears and joys and calamities of a nation. Perhaps part of what makes this river holy is its intimate knowledge of the country’s inhabitants and the unity that it creates among them.

  Swimming Pool of Monkey.”

  Everything at Swayambhunath is of monkey. The oldest Buddhist temple outside of Tibet sits atop a hill in a suburb of Kathmandu, where its stone pool is alive with chattering little fawn-colored rhesus macaques. They trundle and spring all over the three hundred and sixty-five dizzyingly steep stairs, squawking and scratching their hairy little behinds, snatching food from the hands of angry Nepalese and amused tourists; then the little rascals eat it right in front of them.

  Mia’s way up ahead of me. I’m not about to use the shiny handrail to aid my ascent to the temple. Because the other thing the little primates do is polish the rail to a sheen by sliding down it on their butts. Cute, but yech.

  I finally reach a terrace packed with human
-height statues of their gods of air, of fire, water, sky. It feels as if I’m walking on a life-size chessboard with little monkeys eating tidbits off the heads of knights and queens. On the ground between them, Nepalese men and their sons light small devotional fires that we carefully skirt.

  The rest of the platform is dense with temples and guesthouses where pilgrims file in and out. It’s also a hangout for teens. Roving three- and four-year-olds beg, alone and tattered. The biggest group here are mothers and grandmothers, all holding children, moving in a slow, brightly colored mass toward the temple of the Hindu goddess Hariti.

  It’s a two-story gilded pagoda-style shrine lined with butter lamps, where they’ve come to ask for protection for their children from disease. They believe that Hariti was once a mortal who sucked the life out of other people’s children to feed her own (well, she did have a few hundred of them). Upon the pleas of grieving parents, Buddha stole her favorite daughter and hid her in a bowl. When Hariti came sobbing to him for help, he gave her a lesson in compassion and made her a goddess on the promise she’d stop. She saw the error of her ways and became forevermore the protectress of children.

  Mia wanders off to check out the little tourist shops while I observe the women. Mothers and children don’t yet have the pull on Mia they do on me. Mothers focus on the world differently. We’re drawn to each other no matter where we are, even complete strangers. We trade stories, advice, exchange smiles as we admire each other’s children, a silent acknowledgment between members of a tribe.

  There’s not much easy banter here. There’s an almost worried intensity to many of them, even those of some means. Nearly all the children’s eyes are heavily rimmed with black kohl, a custom to ward off evil. Seeing so many of them with orange streaks in their hair makes the kohl all the more heartbreaking. Orange-streaked hair here isn’t a fashion statement; it’s depigmentation from severe malnutrition.

  Why not ring your baby’s eyes black in hope of food and freedom from disease? Nothing else has worked for those on this rung of the ladder in Nepal. Every culture seems to have customs to ward off evil. Italians use the curved horn, and Eastern European Jews used to say insulting things to babies, such as “Oy, such an ugly girl!” to avoid tempting the devil. America’s magic charms are private education, science camp, and SAT tutors to ward off our evil: personal failure.

  Mothers are terrified of that which they can’t control. In a country of wealth and choice like ours, we usually seek God only when agency has failed, when tragedy threatens or takes away our children. Nations of poverty and worship like Nepal are now seeking agency because God, and certainly their more earthly kings, have failed them.

  Mothers seek anything that works. There’s always an undercurrent of fear somewhere in a mother. We hope our children don’t get sick, get hit by a car, go hungry, use drugs, get assaulted on the way to their dorm. It lessens only a little when they get older—Call me when your plane lands. Don’t walk in the parking garage alone at night. Did you get your mammogram?

  It occurs to me that one of the best ways of understanding the values of a nation is finding out what the mothers there are most afraid of. In Nepal it’s easy to see—malnutrition, disease, lack of schooling. It’s less obvious in the United States; homeless children remain largely unseen and beaten wives hide in plain sight. Having spoken to audiences across the country in some of the toniest areas really drove home for me how democratic this kind of hidden suffering is.

  I’ve signed countless books for women in fine wool suits who tell me the only nights they’re able to sleep are when their addicted adult daughters are in jail, where at least they won’t be raped, die of overdose, or be killed in a drug deal gone wrong. Whenever we speak publicly, audience members, producers, makeup artists, cameramen, and security guards approach us to share about their own experience with sexual or substance abuse, or that of someone in their family. Many tell us they’ve never told anyone before.

  No matter where you are or whom you’re with, there’s always another reality beneath what’s visible; each of us carries countless wounds and worries inside of us. Our culture has had no shared practice to acknowledge this, like Hariti’s temple or roadside shrines. We have no place for the public, shared experience of sorrow or fear, or of receiving succor and hope together, just as a matter of course in our everyday lives.

  Till now, and it is women who’ve led the way—through blogs. Women dominate the blogosphere in general, mommy blogs in particular. It’s no wonder they’re so wildly popular. Motherhood is a whole new life, with a new language, new customs and complaints, new skills and sorrows, new pressures and joys. Having a zillion other moms available in real time, or close to it, every minute of the day or night has created a virtual Hariti’s temple for Western mothers.

  It’s late afternoon and Mia and I are walking through the city’s downtown, dense with fourteenth-century dwellings of dark red brick with second floors almost entirely of profusely carved wood window screens, balconies, and balustrades. A crazy quilt of small shops, hovels, shrines, and apartments has grown up around them, squeezed and stacked into whatever space was available over the centuries.

  We’re headed to Durbar Square to find several scavenges and see the historic heart of Kathmandu. We turn down a narrow, dusty street with deep sewage troughs running on each side. There’s an occasional board lying across for those who don’t want to jump.

  The sidewalks are crowded with tables and blankets of salvaged items and limp vegetables for sale. Young men trudge with boxes the size of refrigerators on their backs, held on by nothing but straps on their foreheads. Unrefrigerated meat is sold everywhere; dead chickens dangle upside down. Headless goats hang from hooks, draining blood onto the sidewalk; a few doors down their heads, in varying states of decay, are on sale.

  Many tiny storefronts hold entire families in dim spaces with no electricity and no candles to light as twilight falls. I cannot imagine how exhausting this kind of poverty must be.

  The street continues to swell with Nepalese, mostly men, heading to the square. By the time we cross a bridge to Durbar Square, we’re in a sea of people. There is a nervous energy to Nepal and it’s not just the elections, the potential for violence. It’s hunger. Nepal feels her future at her fingertips. But they’re not waiting for the government to help them advance; most of the work of innovation and improvement in this country is being done by the citizens themselves. This is a nation with no boots pulling itself up by its bootstraps anyway.

  In this regard Nepal feels very much like America to me. There is not the serenity despite circumstances one hears of in India or Southeast Asia, the seemingly peaceful acceptance of one’s fate. The Nepalese are not accepting of a life they don’t want and they’re doing something about it, with great industry, pride, and brashness. It’s the first country I’ve seen signs posted in English and the native tongue: PRESERVE OUR DIGNITY. DO NOT BEG.

  “I just realized why it’s getting so crowded,” Mia says softly. “It beats sitting at home in the dark.”

  “I just realized we only have one phone,” I respond. “Don’t go wandering off; it’ll be pitch-black in about twenty minutes.”

  Durbar Square is actually several connected squares packed with temples, statues, and shrines going back to the twelfth century, along with the king’s former digs, now a museum with an entrance controlled by soldiers with machine guns, another reminder of the wary truce here. A lone white nineteenth-century British colonial-style building stands out. Durbar used to be a hippie hangout in the sixties; there are still head shops doing brisk business.

  The squares are jammed with Nepalese, a few tourists, and, in the only clear spot, a lone cow sitting, pleased as punch. Women sit behind mounds of golden mums and dahlias on sale for offerings. The Nepalese lean against their Buddhas and gods here, groups of teens congregate on the platforms of their holiest shrines. In Nepal there is no separation between the people and their art, religion, and history.

&nb
sp; There’s even a goddess living in the plaza ahead of us: Kumari, a prepubescent girl the Nepalese worship as the living embodiment of the supreme goddess. Once she gets her period, her reign ends and she goes back to her family, usually, and not surprisingly, rather maladjusted and unequipped for life as a commoner. Another is chosen through a selection process that includes having thirty-two qualities, including the chest of a lion, the eyelashes of a cow, small and well-recessed sexual organs, a set of twenty teeth, and thighs like a deer.

  It would be easy to judge or mock this tradition until you look at what we subject our own prepubescent girls to. And we don’t just expect little girls to have “small and well-recessed sexual organs”; thanks to online porn, grown women in the West are often expected to be as hairless and recessed as little girls.

  We’ve come too late to see everything we’d like, so we turn to head back, or try to. The crowd has grown suffocating; we have to shove and elbow to move. I’m at the head of a crowd of people going toward a tunnel at the same time, pressed into me on all sides. This much humanity doesn’t seem to move so much as vibrate. As soon as I reach the vaulted tunnel leading out of the square to our way back, the sun disappears entirely.

  A few feet into the blackness, a giant new shiny black Land Rover starts driving slowly in, filling the tunnel as it heads toward us.

  “Mother, back up!” Mia calls behind me.

  I can’t; we’re all packed in like sardines. The headlights angle into my eyes. I freeze as it advances, pulling a few inches to the left as the crowd, apparently used to this, shifts right. The Nepalese are small. I am not. I actually have to plaster myself against the wall and duck beneath the car’s side-view mirror as it passes.