Children In The Field

7. Our Ulleri Child

PATRICIA HITCHCOCK 7 Our Ulleri Child The night was clear, and I could see the shining surface of the water as it poured from the leaf spout into the spring pool. I cupped my hand in front of my chin and bent over to catch some of it. The climb was worth a drink that did not have to be boiled first. "Sweet water," the Musuri villagers called it. I dabbed my mouth with the end of my cotton sari and turned to sit on a large, flat stone the women used for washing clothes. The brilliance of the stars gave depth to the darkness. The high ghostly Himalayas framed the nearer, more familiar hills. All I could hear in the distance was the barking ofvillage dogs and the steady, far-off drumbeat of Mudoo, the local medicine man. Tiny fires dotted the black bowl of the valley. One of those fires was close and comforting. Mudoo's wife would be sitting by the hearth with her children, perhaps smoking, waiting for her husband to return from his strenuous efforts to cure the sick buffalo. My eyes were drawn to a reassuring, starry presence. 173 174 Patricia Hitchcock "Orion Sahib," I called aloud. "Ifour two little girls are watching you from their dormitory window, tell them it is time to go to bed. Their mother says so." This was my most precious hour. I could leave the hut full of villagers visiting my husband and disappear into the night, knowing no one would dare to follow me. In Nepal the spirits that roam about after sundown are thought to be unfriendly, and no one wishes to cross their paths. My mind wandered, as it often did, to little Ben. I remembered seeing him squat on his short husky legs, watching a pair of beetles struggle to push their round nest of dung across a trail to safety. I felt at once a sad kinship with dung beetles that reached the trail's edge, only to see their cradle kicked by a careless traveler and all their eggs trampled underfoot. My tears returned. In the darkness I did not have to hold them back. Suddenly the stars and the fire in Mudoo's hearth blurred and ran together, and I allowed the memories of another village to return. It was almost two years before that we had left our home in the United States for Nepal. We had come with such confidence. My husband, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, and I accepted the demands of his career with equal enthusiasm. We both liked mountains, jungles, exotic places; we preferred campfires to cocktail parties. So we were enthusiastic when we learned that he had been awarded funds to do research in Nepal. We knew living there would be a challenge, but we were Our Ulleri Child 175 not without experience. Our last two-year field trip had been spent with our daughters, Marion and Emily, in a village in north India, so we all were prepared for the rigors of field work. Only little Ben had been added to our family since then, and to leave him behind for this trip seemed unthinkable. As always, relatives tried to dissuade us. They would look at year-old Ben and remind us of how fast dysentery can dehydrate a baby. But I would see a headline in a local newspaper, Child Drowns in Family Pool, and hope that-in some ways-we would be taking him to safety. We all had very real needs that could be met only if we stayed together. The children needed a father. Two years apart would bring John home a stranger; none of us would be able to understand what he had been through or what he was thinking or writing about. To me, this would not be a marnage. There was another need that only those who have lived through long stretches oflife in the field can understand-the need to have, among strangers, loved ones ofyour own. It was important toJohn that someone else cared whether a village headman would talk or not, that someone got as excited as he did when progress was made-or listened with understanding when the week seemed lost in unfulfilled hopes. And so our decision was made. The journey from Los Angeles to Nepal, the long, narrow kingdom sandwiched between India and Tibet, took less than two days by jet. A slower trip would have...