I was a huge reader back when I was young, going through books like they were nothing. Of course, my young mind couldn’t really grasp the implications of most of them, so they’d just slid off my brain. You can’t really give The Brothers Karamazov to an eight-year-old and expect the little bastard to get anything.
That’s not the case for everything, though, and some stories get burned into your mind so clearly that you still remember it fifteen years later. Sometimes those are pretty unassuming too. Not well-known classics or bestsellers, just some random story that grabs hold of an impressionable mind.
The story that did this for me is Bhitta ko Namaste by Khagendra Sangraula. Sangraula is a famous enough author, with quite a few books under his belt, but this is just what comes to my mind when I think of his writing.
The story is simple, a boy is tired of being asked to greet the guests in his house with a namaste. And as a solution, he simply makes a large drawing of himself making the gesture and pastes it onto the wall. When his dad is predictably confused, the boy just points out that the drawing can do all the namastes the guests want.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. No plot twists or turns there. Nobody is anyone’s secret child, no last-minute tragic deaths, and no redemption arcs. Still, it was one of the most relatable things I’d read until that point. Yeah, the Tale of Two Cities was deep and whatnot, but I hadn’t been involved in any revolutions until that point. On the other hand, my dad often asked me to do a namaste whenever the guests were over, and I absolutely hated it.
The boy in the story is asked to do a superficial show of respect, and he basically does it in the most disrespectful way possible. In the boy’s mind, he wasn’t asked to show respect to the guests. He was asked to show a namaste, and he does just that. That solves the problem, right?
After reading it, I took a step back and examined this whole transaction we Nepali often do. You can be ready to lay your life down for a relative, but you’ll still get some raised eyebrows if you refuse to namaste them. On the other hand, you might be planning to get your inheritance early with copious use of rat poison, but if you invite your relative in with a namaste, there’ll be smiles all around.
I’m going to set a scene. It’s Dashain, the weather is great, children procrastinate on their holiday homework, kites fly, illegally smuggled fireworks occasionally go off. There’s a knock on the door, and you open it. On the other side is your grandfather, traveling all this way from your village. He smells like ghee, and your stomach rumbles. You smile and invite him in.
Any Nepali can tell you that it’s not a great first impression. Let’s rewind then. Before you invite him in, you clap your hands together in front of your face. He does the same. Continue as usual. Much better already, but let’s do one better. Before inviting him in, you lean down and pretend to want to touch his feet while he pretends to not want you to do that. Perfect! Full marks! Mucho dacchina is in the cards for you.
With all three scenarios in mind, what the fuck is the point?
Let’s take a step back even further. There is absolutely no more inherent value in a namaste than in any other hand movement and posture. Thousands of years of cultural development had ping-ponged the gesture down through history until it landed in my kitchen with my father staring at me with disapproval when I couldn’t be bothered to do something that small.
Let’s take a step back even further into existentialism with The Stranger by Camus (yes, I really will be this way about a children’s story that nobody else remembers). One of the memorable parts of the story was the idea of the narrator killing a man, but its gestures like smoking at his mother’s funeral that gets him convicted. Our society is just filled with this meaningless stuff that we do because that’s how it’s done. Refusing to follow in leads to a negative impression of you as a person, even though you objectively didn’t do any harm to anyone.
There is no inherent value in not smoking at a funeral, but people will think badly of you if you do. Same for Namaste, touching the feet or pretending to like a YouTube video that a friend is excitedly showing you. Respect for someone is an intangible, vague thing that resides within your skull. You can’t exactly show that, but small inconveniences are visible and tangible, almost like a lighter version of self-flagellation. That’s as close to an answer that I ever got, and it’s as unsatisfying as you’d expect.
Namaste is arbitrary and meaningless, so why do it? Well, why not do it then? You’ll get a better dacchina that way. Buy some laddu in Tihar, my guy.
