The Ends of Kinship. Sienna R. Craig
was neat and clean,” Dolma uses one of her English phrases. “But home is more comfortable.”
“I would be scared to give birth at home,” admits Nyima.
“How has it been with nursing?” I ask. I have just seen Nyima feed her child, but I also notice formula under the coffee table.
“She nursed for the first month,” Dolma answers for her daughter.
“But the doctors said I did not have enough milk coming,” continues Nyima. “So I started feeding her lactose too.”
“What would you have done back in Mustang if this had happened?” I ask Dolma.
“We would feed tsampa mixed with butter early, like this,” she mimes the motion of putting a little bit of dough in her mouth and then feeding it to a baby. “We do this not only if there is not enough milk but to make babies strong. It is food from our place. But here, the doctors told us not to feed anything but breast milk or this powder for six months,” says Dolma. “We are in a new place now. The wind and water are different here. The customs are different. So, we have to change what we do.”
As we talk, I learn that the family performed a simple purification ritual in their apartment after the birth but that more elaborate rituals for the baby girl took place back in Nepal. She was given her name by a lama in Kathmandu. The khora of migration is also the circling of ceremony across place, through social networks, at a distance.
I ask Dolma if the lama made a kyekar, a natal horoscope, for the child. Dolma nods.
“What is a kyekar?” Nyima asks. The newborn has fallen asleep again, and Nyima lowers her gently into a bassinet.
“The astrology you need for your life,” Dolma answers. It is, to me, a perfect translation.
“Do I have one?” daughter asks mother.
“Yes. You and your sisters all have them.”
“But where is it? Do I need it?” Nyima crosses and uncrosses her thin legs, pulls her baggy sweatshirt close. She looks worried. New motherhood can be like flint, igniting a sense of the miraculous, kindling fear.
“They are all at home, in the shrine room in Monthang,” Dolma answers. “I have not looked at them in many years, since you grew up. But they are important.”
“Why?” Nyima asks.
“It helps to know what to do, if anything happens.” Dolma pauses. I wonder what she feels in that moment, how she has reckoned her own loss, the child who died. I also wonder why, if they are so important, these documents have been left behind in Nepal. Do these recorded calculations that help to frame cause and consequence, particularly at the beginnings and ends of life, have less relevance through the long stretch of adult years?
My friend surprises me with what she says next. “It is sort of like the papers that come with a new TV. A paper to explain things.” She laughs. “Not really. It doesn’t guarantee. It is written by a lama, not a company. But we should follow the advice of what is written there. We remember these things in our minds.”
I sit with this simile as I watch mother and daughter communicate across language, generation, and culture.
The baby whimpers, and in an instant, the whimpers crack into a bawl. Dolma scoops up the child from the bassinet. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, little one. Grandmother is here.”
HALLMARK HOLIDAYS
A Facebook notification appears on my computer screen as I sit writing in the library in early June 2018. It is Choesang’s first birthday. He is Yangjin’s son.
What is remarkable about this event is neither the substance of the pop-up notification nor the time-space compression that brings me heart-to-heart with his mother in Kathmandu nor is it the ability to virtually peer into a private family celebration. No. What is remarkable is the marking of the birthday itself.
Yangjin and her husband are not the only young couple from Mustang who have adopted this cultural ritual. Birthday parties have become a thing. From Nepal to New York, people are sending out invitations, renting halls, or reserving banquet rooms in fancy restaurants. At times, they are connecting a first birthday with the official consecration of a marriage. They are celebrating with sparklers, streamers, and elaborate meals. Birthday parties have become a site of conspicuous consumption and also a new form of ritualized reciprocity—a moment to give money, always an odd number for good luck, placed in an envelope marked with your name. As with weddings and funerals, people keep records of the giving.
A generation ago, a first birthday would not have been marked at all. In fact, to call attention to such a moment could have been viewed as inauspicious. It would be considered dangerous to shine a spotlight on a new human being, one who might still be vulnerable to nöpa and other forms of harm, who might not survive to age two or age five, let alone into adulthood.
This is to say nothing of dates and calendars. Among people in their forties or older from Mustang, knowing the precise day of your birth is unusual. In contrast, the day of the week you were born often lives as part of your name. Lhakpa, for instance, means “Wednesday.” This can be useful for astrological calculations. Likewise, the time of birth, the season, the animal year in which your birth occurred, and the relationship between your birth moment and the coming of Losar, the lunar new year, are all important. But assigning a birthdate in the Gregorian or Nepali Vikram Samvat calendar systems has been, for many generations from Mustang, an ex post facto act. It wasn’t that important.
So, too, with birth certificates. To be born at home, especially in the village, meant that you did not receive a birth certificate. This form of “making paper”—getting the government to recognize your existence in official terms—took effort and was not always successful. A turn toward clinic or hospital births has been coupled not only with the creation of a paper trail but also with a demographic transition away from larger families and a public health turn toward infant and child survival. As I stare at the Facebook pictures of birthday hats and candles, of a cake bedecked in sugar roses beside platters filled with more traditional offerings of nuts and fruits, I think about the radical nature of this cultural turn toward celebrating the very young, away from the elderly.
Tharchang celebrations are markers of liberation from householder responsibilities for people who have made it into their seventh decade of life. Just as first birthday parties are on the rise, tharchang rituals are becoming rarer in Mustang. In great part, this is because the aging generation cannot really afford to “retire.” Even with remittances, there is work to be done: farms to manage, animals to husband, hotels to run, village meetings to attend, grandchildren to care for.
Although Mother’s Day has not taken on the social import of birthday parties, it is a holiday moment that people from Mustang, particularly those in New York, are beginning to celebrate.
In May 2017, I attend a Mother’s Day party at the Elmhurst Community Center. It is organized by several young women—themselves unmarried and not yet mothers—who have gone to college in the U.S. and whose fiery adoption of feminism, along with a sense of devotion to their community, moves me. When I arrive at the community hall, kathag in hand, the African American security guard at the entrance asks, “You lost?” I assure him that I am not.
Spring coats are strewn about the foyer. The hall has been decorated with banners and balloons. Long folding tables line the sides of the room. One table has been set up at the entrance. There, I buy a $15 ticket. I am told that, after recovering expenses for food, a Nepali DJ, and decorations, any remaining funds will go toward the language and culture classes held for Loba children each Sunday in the basement of an apartment building in Queens.
The room is filled with women of different ages. I recognize some only vaguely; others, I know well. I see Tenzin, the wife of an old friend. She brings me a flimsy aluminum plate piled with fried beef jerky, pounded rice, spicy