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We Nepalese generally drink a lot of tea from Ilam (Eastern Nepal), which is just as good as the Darjeeling one, if not better, because it grows on the Nepalese side of the same mountains just across the border. We make tea by boiling the water first, then putting the tea leaves and letting them boil till a good, strong colour appears, after which we put sugar and milk. Another method of making tea in Kathmandu is to boil the milk first, then put the tea-leaves along with cardamom and then the sugar. It's called: dudh-chiya (milk tea) and is served with ayurvedic spices. The preparation is similar to the Milchkaffee in Germany.
Dr. Novel Kishore Rai, the former Nepalese Ambassador to Germany and a good friend of mine, for instance prefers to drink smoked-tea made by the hands of his dear mother in Ilam. She has a few bushes of Thea sinensis which she calls ‘my plantation’ and is proud of her hand-made tea. In the Victorian days the tea leaves were plucked, weighed, rolled by hand and set out to wither in the sun. After the advent of industrialisation, the tea-leaves were rolled by machine and the withering was also done in factories.
Since he was a man of Rai origin, I had asked him to say something about his ethnicity and he said, ‘As you know, ‘Rai’ is only a cover term of more than 60 to 70 sub-clans and they do speak more than 50 different languages and not dialects. For example Chamling, Khaling, Thulang, Bantawa, Kulung and so on. Culturally they are not so different, but linguistically one cannot expect so much of variation among the so-called ‘Rais’. Nepali is the only Lingua franca among them in their original settlement and now the younger generation is drifting towards Nepali because of so many socio-economical reasons. I am a Bantawa speaker, belonging to the Chamling sub-clan, but my children and my wife don’t speak Bantawa at all.’ They spoke German, English, Nepali and sometimes Hindi, when we visited them at the Embassy in Bonn.
His two teenage daughters spoke excellent German and were preparing for their German Abitur (‘A’ level exams). They have both received their masters degrees from the University of Poona.
Since I’d grown up with shamanism in the form of traditional healers like: jhankris, bijuwas, amchis, and yebas, I had given him a shaman text in Thulung shaman vocabulary written by the anthropologist N. J. Allen, and he went on to say, ‘ As you know, shamanism is an old tradition in Nepal and the shamans are well-accepted faith-healers. They do many kinds of shaman rituals and use the language, even though they don’t understand the exact meaning of the words in many instances. Some of the words and phrases they do repeat out of memory, and practice without knowing the exact meaning. Moreover, they are controlled by the spirits they beckon during their rituals. They agree, that whatever said or done, is by the spirit but not by themselves. Science has not yet been able to prove what is behind it and how it operates.
Dr. Allen collected and viewed some of these shaman healing practices among the Thulungs of the Rai-group and he has written ‘Illness in Nepal’, which may attract the interest of medical students. I would say that this paper is more related to anthropology than western medical practice. As a Bantawa native speaker, I cannot understand the Thulung words he describes and some Nepali loan words we do understand, though they are phonetically somehow different.’
I recalled that a lot of Tibetans, who had fled from their homeland Tibet after it was annexed by Mao’s Red Army, would pass through our small town and I was fascinated by their style of living because they’d spread out their ornamental ethnic tents outside the town and make a central fire and their mules, donkeys and yaks would graze in the green grass along the slopes and their dogs would bark and scurry around. The men had braided hair with moustaches and Mongolian beards unlike the Sikhs with their thick mossy beards.
The Tibetans had a fire-place romantic about them. It was difficult to communicate with them because they spoke only Tibetan and we spoke only Nepali, English and a smattering of Hindi. Oh, how she wished she could have talked with the friendly Tibetan ladies who were all smiles, despite their tragic past. The post-fifties generation of Tibetan children who came as refugees to Nepal, Dharamsala (India) and Rikon (Switzerland) speak excellent Nepali, Hindi and Schwyzer Deutsch, and also English and have integrated themselves in these respective countries.
The milky rice-beer is a very popular drink among the matwali-jat (the-caste-that-drinks) in Eastern Nepal, in the vicinity of Kathmandu and among the different ethnic folks. Every tribe has its own brewing secret. The Sherpas, Thakalis and Tamang-hillfolk prefer the chaang, which is made of millet. During the cold months, the Sherpas and Tibetans drink tongba which is a hot, milky alcoholic drink sipped with the help of a bamboo pipe. Momos, thukpa and sukuti (dried meat) go well with tongba after a long trek in the Himalayas. The highland Nepalese also prefer the tongba during marriage feasts. During my days as a journalist in Kathmandu, we used to go after a hard day’s work to relax at Pala’s Place, where his wife and lovely daughter used to serve us with momos, gyathuk and the warm tongba drinks. We’d sit around in a circle with the Pala, a burly Tibetan guy, who has the head of the family and the restaurant owner. Most of the Nepalese who came upstairs to eat momos and drink Pala’s excellent tongba were His Majesty’s civil servants and from the corporations. As time went by, the people would get garrulous and start telling stories.
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