...After Three Months in Dhanusha

It is around 4 in the afternoon but the sun is as strong as a mid day sun.  I have just come out of  the  bus  which had stopped in front of Himanshu dai's and Saroja 's placement school.  I'm sweating.  I'm trying to handle the heat.  I'm telling myself this is what I signed up for.  But deep within I'm regretting my choice. (Day one of the fellowship) 

 A few days  later,  in the evening I'm standing on the rooftop of Himandhu dai and Saroja's home for the next two years.  I look around but can't recognize this strange place.  I don't see Nepal here.  It feels like a village from a Hindi movie.What I see is a place straight out of a Raj Kumar Rao film. I ask, "why is this place so different from Nepal?". I tell myself this is Nepal as well.  But the "Nepali" in me feels something else.

 Everyday when I go to school and come back,  I see women in faded saris which was once too brightly coloured.  I also see the new bright orange and pink and green.  The saris are all that's visible.  Their faces hidden hidden by the ghumto pratha. The faces bowed down and voiceless. A few weeks later,  I'm in the city of Janakpur.  Everyone look the same.  The same sari and kurtha and dhoti.  The faceless women and a totally dark skinned population.  I  tell myself probably this lack of diversity is a reason why the city is so conservative.  It is a weird feeling to not see jeans and shorts and t-shirts.  Only the boys have that freedom.  

However,  two months later the sun and the sweating is an everyday thing, both literally and figuratively.  Nothing new there.  When I am in kathmandu, I need a jacket. The place now feels more like home.  I hitchhike so often,  that's  how people know me there. Help is just a raised-hand away.  I now see the Nepali texts that had been hiding in plain sight. We talk back and forth in Nepali and Hindi and Maithili(I try to). Language no longer is a divide. 

I see T-shirts and jeans and shorts and skirts not just on the dummies and men.  As for the ghumto,  I now have adopted gamcha, a cotton towel, as my multi purpose tool. I wipe the sweat off my face and neck, and more to the point,  I cover my face very similar to how the women do with their saris. So there's some utility to that too. As for how I see the city, there are dusty, potholed roads, stinking dhals and private schools at every next corner. Kathmanduites  probably are familiar with that. If that's not Nepal then what is? 

 It's not all gold and rosy in Dhanusha, that's a fact.  But as an outsider looking in, my prejudice, that has been built up by decades of political propaganda, media biases and misrepresentations that has led to quite a lot of misunderstandings and racism,  played a huge part in how I perceived the place and terai as a whole.