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Foreign worries

Published On: October 29, 2016 12:15 AM NPT By: Dinkar Nepal


A Norwegian couple had spotted me in Waling and wanted to adopt me
There is a story in our family. When I was a toddler, I looked like a ‘khaire’ child, a foreigner from Europe or America. My hair was golden and my skin was pale. 

A Norwegian couple, engineers with the Andhikhola Hydropower Project at Galyang in Syangja District, only 15 kilometers from our hometown Waling, had spotted me when I was two and asked for my family’s permission to adopt me. They promised to return me to my family after I grew up and completed my education. They also said they would bring me to visit my real family for at least two weeks every year. 

This, according to my mother’s version of the story, created a rift in the family and she was the one who saved me from being given away. My grandparents were eagerly positive on the offer and my father was almost swayed by it.

But my mother was, she tells me, aggressively against the idea. After the couple pitched their offer in their third or fourth visit to our family, she tells with a sense of pride, and occasionally with anger, she insulted them upfront by throwing the chocolate bar they had given me into a heap of dung next to the cattle-shed. The foreign chocolate added to the organic manure.

I have taken this story differently at different stages in my life. In the family, there are varying versions. Even in the story my mother tells me very evocatively, minor details differ every time. 

For example, I remember our elders not letting us eat anything given by foreigners. Of all the reasons, it was because of the caste system. The foreigners, if not from India, naturally fit in the same ‘varna vyastha’ of four castes, and were placed at the lowest rung.

They became the untouchables automatically. 

It did not matter how better civilized the foreigners thought of themselves or how much more careful they were about hygiene and sanitation. They were the untouchables and anything given by them, obviously, could not be eaten. Even if they hadn’t come with an intention of taking away her child, it strikes me every time my mother tells me this story, she would have probably thrown away the chocolates in any case. 

Thinking about that now, with more situational awareness, I believe the foreigners had no clue why people were behaving that way. ‘They are simply rude’, they must have thought. At worst, ‘uncivilized’. 

This thought reminds me of Chinua Achebe’s fabulous accounts of the turmoil in African Societies when the western influence entered through the religion. The West used all the instruments available at the time, with the ultimate goal of resource capture. This, till today, is the curse of Africa.

A lot has changed in the world in these three decades. From a time when skin tones not like our own seemed too strange to be true to us, today we have a generation growing up singing Justin Beiber. 

It also seems that we are moving away from a world where there is a difference in economic status and standard of living because you were born into a certain country.

There will be poor people in the world in the future as well. And there will definitely be countries doing better than others, but as things point towards today, the difference is shifting more towards individual capacity and effort.

Sometimes it makes me angry to even think of that story in my family. Sometimes I feel ashamed of my country. As a child, let me confess, there were times when I felt proud of it too. And that also makes me guilty nowadays. 

Recently, when I met a European couple in Pokhara who had sold their house in Europe because they could not afford to live there anymore, I had a strange feeling. They had planned to spend the rest of their lives as tourists or travelers in places with lower cost of living. They chose a nomadic life rather than struggle in Europe. 

I am grateful to my mother for almost everything in my life. But I couldn’t help thinking that my foster parents, if my mother had allowed me to be taken, would be their age. 
That was a really strange feeling. 

Twitter: @dn_ktm 


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