Going Home Again to Nepal
The incisor-like summit of Everest fills my window, tinged blue in the late morning light, partially shrouded by stubby clouds. The pilot makes an announcement and passengers briefly cast aside all airline etiquette – crowding the aisles and hovering over the windows, gaping at the peak.
Slowly, I feel a bubble of nausea beginning to swell in the pit of my stomach as plane begins to lose altitude. The bubble slides into my throat as we make our final descent toward the smog-filled valley below – Kathmandu. It’s not the first time I’ve touched down at Tibhuvan International Airport – I’ve landed here more times than I can even remember – but they all seem like an eternity ago.
I first arrived in Nepal in 1992 – a forlorn eleven-year-old reluctantly relocated from the leafy, green suburbs of Nairobi to dust-choked Kathmandu by my parents, both international health workers. I had a typical Foreign Service childhood – bouncing between posts in Asia and Africa – always an expat, but never more noticeably than when I finally returned to America just in time for high school.
But this arrival in Nepal is different – I’m going it solo. It’s 2007, and I’m returning to the country as 26-year-old, heading to Kathmandu for a few months for an internship. Wanderlust seems to run in the family – and heading to the Indian subcontinent is almost a tired cliché – at my age, my dad was heading to south India as a Peace Corps volunteer, and a few year later, and not long after finishing graduate school, my mom began her international career in Pakistan.
It’s a strange feeling trying to go home again – a decade and a half later. Part of me almost expects things to be exactly as they were. Frozen in time. I imagine when I step off the plane it will still be 1994 and Kathmandu will be just as I left it.
But it’s not. Life has feverishly gone on without me.
On the drive from the airport I can still pick out a handful of familiar landmarks – the tea-colored Bagmati River sluicing through the city, the strands of multi-colored players flags rippling in the breeze above Syambhunath temple, towering, pencil-shaped Bhim’s tower. But, it’s like a whole new city has mushroomed up around these comforting icons.
Oddly enough, in the tourist district, Thamel, a network of alleyways lined with curio shops, bars, and restaurants, one of the most popular t-shirts on display in the various souvenir-selling stalls is emblazoned with the phrase: NEPAL, SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT.
One Saturday, after I have been in Kathmandu for a couple of months, curiosity gets the better of me and I go to look for our old house. I begin at my former school – Lincoln – and try locate the rice paddy-flanked dirt path behind the campus we used to walk to get home. At the time, as a kid, our house was the tallest structure in the neighborhood, shaped like a wedding cake, painted with large burgundy-colored rectangles, capped with a metal crow’s nest accessible only by a narrow ladder.
Behind Lincoln School, I find the old path, beginning next to the familiar marigold adorned, tikka smudged stupa, but almost immediately after that I don’t recognized anything. The brick wall once constantly plastered with pancakes of drying dung has become a towering block of apartment buildings, painted in pastels. The lane splits, splintering off into an entire network of narrow footpaths and everything ahead is unfamiliar. A slender, gray mongoose scurries across the track in front of me. I think about the afternoon walking home from school in sixth grade when my sister and I had to wait for a cobra to finish slithering across this path in almost exactly the same place.
I keep walking, looking for anything I recognize, a landmark. Dusty stray dogs lie in pot holes in the middle of the road, I can hear children crying in the apartments, and nasal pop music throbs from tinny speakers.
Then, suddenly, I see the house our neighbor Myna used to live in – still canary yellow and draped with lines of drying clothes. When I finally notice our old house across from it, the place looks so small, now flanked by lofty apartment buildings on either side, the water bloated rice paddies long gone. The house is a tourism training college now. A student opens the brown metal gate, walking his bicycle through, and I get a glimpse of the avocado tree we planted in the yard – my childhood Golden Retriever is buried under it.
I can’t help but stand there for a couple minutes, staring at the house. I think of my parents. This is the farthest I’ve ever been from them. But I’ve never felt closer.
Thank you for reading and commenting. Please enter the Independence Travel Writing competition and tell your story.
