Future of my community

Visiting the old neighbour this evening reminded me of the time when my children were little and my husband and I were young.

It has been nearly three and a half decades since we moved to this town. Our family was the very first immigrants from Nepal settling to this province! However, this town has hardly changed.

We left this province for a short period of time and noticed the place hasn't changed much in three and a half decades, which we hadn't noticed just a year and a half ago. This tells  me how easy it is to just get lost within ourselves and not think about our surroundings.

However, the one change we clearly see is the fabric of this town. It was a “white” town with a few thousands East and South-east Asians, a few African-origins, few Middle-eastern, very few Hispanics and even fewer Far-eastern immigrants. That has changed! Now I see a lot more Middle-eastern, Far-eastern and African-origins.

In term of infrastructure of this town, it has hardly buzzed, although there a few new high-rise buildings and town-houses that were not in earlier days.

People say this is a “picture” province, and it is in many ways. There are some "hidden secrets" here that are not so obvious to outsiders. This can mean environmentally-friendly. But people need job opportunities to make a good living, which is very scarce in this province.

So, if the few fortunate people are happy with their hidden secrets and not create opportunities for others,  I wonder what kind of future this province will have for our future generation? 

Fall and the pumpkins: My fondest memory

I'm lucky to have lived in a country/territory where I can experience more than couple of seasons each year. All seasons are beautiful, with their own beauty and charm, but my favorite season is the fall. Fall is especially pretty in the Atlantic Canada!

Among many others, my fond memories of the fall are intertwined with the red maple trees and bright orange pumpkins. 

We sold our first family house with two pure red maple trees in our backyard many years ago, but the deep scarlet red maples, whose branches overarched our deck, are still in my memory! Along with these, fall also brings me one of my fondest memories of the pumpkins in my parents' field in Kathmandu, Nepal.  

My parents harvested lots of pumpkins in the fall and saved some of them for the winter months, when fresh vegetables were short supply when I was growing up. I can still see those bright yellow, large and heavy pumpkin in my mind's eyes! I needed help to carry just one of those pumpkins off from our parents' field to the veranda where the fleshy pumpkins sat, facing the bright afternoon sun, most of the year ( while lasted).

During the winter months, my mother made all kinds of dishes out of those pumpkins: We eat them boiled with ghee, salt and pepper some days and other days my mother curried them with goat legs or horse radishes. We also had the pumpkin salad -- one my mother's unique recipes that I'm going to included in my book, Cuisines of Nepal. 

While my mother used her pumpkin flesh to prepare her side- dishes, one of her tenants used the seeds to make the most delectable candies. She took hours to make them, but  they were the best sort of candies one could ever make!

She heated her flat iron cookie-sheet over a charcoal fire in a small earthen pot, we called a "makkal" in Nepal. First she rubbed a bit of ghee over her sheet and then she laid her seeds on single layer. The seeds were stirred often while pouring a bit of sugar with ghee syrup over them. She occasionally fanned the makkal to keep the coal burning. It probably took 20 to 30 minutes for her seeds to roast, but they were the most appealing cream coloured spiky candies you could ever imagine. Slowly roasted in ghee and sugar syrup, the pumpkin-candy tasted great.

The memorable rayo sag: A fond memory of my mother's' cooking

The memorable rayo sag in my parents’ garden carried an intriguing fact that I remembered after all these years. In fact, the tiny little rayo plants I grew in pots in my deck this summer reminded me of the story. Compared to those dark green glossy rayo sag in my parents field, which looked more like banana plants, my humble rayo green looked more like dwarfy spinach plants. Just a dozen of my mother's rayo leaves made enough stir- fry tarkari for my parents’ family of nine people, while my tiny leaves made barely enough salad for my family of two: my husband I!

I was born in Paknajhol, but grew up in Baneswor. Baneswor was more like a village than a city when I was growing up. My parents owned quite a few pieces of land and they had a caretaker to look after their property. Rayo sag was one of the crops the farmer was good at growing and my parents loved the sag.

After all those years, I still picture my parents’ back yard with the patch of rayo garden. The taste of my mother’s rayo sag ko ghol (soup) when my siblings and I returned from our schools is still on my tongue! However, the secret of how the sag got that way was something I had forgotten until now.

After living in a society where almost everything is fabricated, it feels weird  to think that I grew up eating the vegetables fertilized by the “night soil.” Apparently, that was one of the secrets of some farmers in Kathmandu that I was so accustomed to and never thought about it any other way until now.

Governments' role for woman

From the time immemorial, boys and girls are raised very differently. In that, girls are raised to be  caring, giving, gentle and submissive persons, whereas, boys are raised to be leader, provider, assertive and strong. Girls are encouraged to be caring and abiding. Occasional emotional retrospectives are accepted from them, but not from boys. They are praised for their physical strength and encouraged to hide their emotional vulnerability. Boys are encouraged to be dominant and defensive. 

Boys are raised to become frontrunner, while most girls are encouraged to stay behind  and support their men. These "leader" and "subservient" roles are established by the cleaver men, construed by the clergymen, and accepted by families. Governments' 'rule of law's are made based on these systematic discriminations.  

Canadian's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau’s support for "Muslim women’s choice of attire" is one of the prime example of this. If Justin Trudeau himself insists that face-coverings are “rooted in a culture that is anti-women,” why did he defend Rania El-Alloul and justified wearing niqab was part of Canadian liberty?

The ISIS ideologies do not represent Islam and only the people of radical Islamic faith are violent. Wearing niqab doesn’t make a women true Muslim or violent. In fact most credited Internet sites I visited clearly stated that Islam doesn’t require the Muslim women to wear niqab.

Covering body parts seems to have been started as a symbol of wealth somewhere is Arab and in the Middle Eastern countries. Protecting women’s delicate bodies from the desert heat seem to have been the main purpose for burqa’s discovery.  

I don’t know what the future Muslim women will think about Canadian Government's  laws. But I know that women themselves can’t break the men-made-rules without being ostracized, or even lose their lives from the very hands that they and suppose to be protected.   

Witches are women

Have you ever wondered why "Witches are female and witch doctors are male?"

Here are two links that explain how it started in the Western world:

http://www.salemtarot.com/archive/seminar.html
https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/ehrenreich-barbara/witches.htm

God have a mercy for the people of Nepal

I’ve not had time to write blogs lately; too busy with my book and others. But the news of another earthquake in Nepal almost paralyzed me this morning. I’ve no mood to carry on my regular chores. My hands are shaky and I’m very upset with the God!

I've been talking with my God regularly since I was a child. This morning my communication with God was more like a rebuke than prayers. I asked Him bluntly his purpose of this catastrophe in Nepal? "Haven’t the people of Nepal suffered enough from the brutality of the Maoist?", I asked.

In a time like this, I feel fortunate to have lived in Canada with my husband and children. But I know Canada is not immune to earthquake, either. However, being close to the "plates" Nepal gets earthquake more frequently than it deserves!  

My family left Nepal a long time ago. We came of our own, without the support of the Nepal government. So, we didn't 'betray' our birth country. Instead, we've been helping a few people financially when they are in real trouble. Still, Nepal is our birthplace and the one with lots of childhood memories. So, our feelings for the country remains intact. 

Nepal is just like any other poor nations with good and bad people. Being poor is not the worst thing for the country, but being illiterate and corrupt  government have been! Deceitful bourgeoisie are better off now than ever before, but the poor and vulnerable people are suffering more than they can handle!

When I got another news of another earthquake in Nepal this morning, my first response was to give calls to our immediate families from both sides. When I found out they're okay physically, my mind rushed to million others who may not have been so lucky with their situation.

God is too powerful to mess up with, so instead of fighting with Him, I left home to purchase a few yellow rosebushes and two carts of pink petunias from the nearest nursery. I planted them in my front lawn for the peace of my people back home. Then, I  was called for interviews by the CBC radio and television.  

It was a long day today and my bedtime prayers was: God have mercy for the people of Nepal!

Being negative

I suppose you can call me negative for I do notice more cheating than helping attitudes of the people around me. I also hear more cry for help then people extending their hands to help others. My eyes catch more crimes than the good deeds in the society, and I hear more sad stories from around the globe the first thing in the morning. Melodious peace-songs are not for the morning-news, I guess.

 Have you ever noticed the negative words outnumbering the positive ones in your dictionaries? It's true! As I write this piece, I searched for a few appositives to challenge my thoughts and found only a few positives of them. Strange, you might think, and it is!

You may find it wired to believe that our world is made of more negative materials, more negative people, and more negative vibes. This is why we see more bad dreams than the good ones. Instead of taking us to the sunny beaches and green meadows, our dreams often take us to the dark and scary places. I wanted to find out why. Then, I read this:

  “…First Glimpse of the shadow universe around us…” in January 2015 National Geographic. In it I read that our old galaxy was made up with more of the “dark matter” and “dark energy” than the ‘normal’ matters and ‘normal’ energy we see nowadays. “Some of that dark energy are still floating around the universe”, I read. All my bad dreams suddenly make sense to me!

 However, to give my negativity a chance I read a few biographies of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ people and found that the negative people are closer to reality than the positive ones. I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but it does to me. For example, I’m one of those negative persons whose future predicaments have come to materialize 95 percent of the time out of 100.

I’ve observed the lives of my positive and negative friends. As I watch these two categories of people growing old visibly side-by-side, I noticed the negative persons living their lives placidly than the positive ones. For example, my positive friends thought everything was happening to them because of the choices they made. But when they got into the situations that they hadn’t think about, they were doomed. They didn’t know how to come out of them. On the other hand, my negative friends, who had been reeling about their misfortunes for years, knew adversities are part of their lives and found their way out in real difficult situations.

It seems to me that there is some merit for being a negative person after all!