Last Days

On my last day of school the classes are all games.  I’m coasting and I don’t much care if it’s pandemonium as long as the kids are having fun.  I still stop everything and yell at them when they try to add “are” or “is” to the simple present tense but I don’t wack them on the heads when they don’t listen.   We hold a farewell assembly where every student and every teacher piles garlands on my shoulders and head and covers me with tika powder.  I make a speech in Nepali, a variation on what I had memorized, and everyone goes wild.  We have a special lunch of fried fish, puffed rice and free flowing raksi.  Several of the teachers and I get slightly lit up.  Afterwards it’s a love fest in the “teachers lounge” while Mem goes through the tedious process of paying the salaries in cash.  We all stand around with arms thrown over shoulders telling each other what great friends we are now and that we will never forget the times we shared.  The Assistant Headmaster, a man named Kashi who speaks twenty or thirty words of English and who I always thought sort of hated me, holds my hand and tells me.  “I like drink.  I like teach.”  I tell him in Nepali that we are the same and he gives me a hug. 

After the love fest breaks up I eat a quick meal of daal bhaat, drink a little more raksi, and head down to my front yard for an evening of “cultural dance”.   After first watching others, I am forced, as expected, to perform; dancing and jumping in a heavy wooden mask and full costume while the drums keep beating longer than I would like.  The mask comes off and I’m still catching my breath, but now it’s time for The Stick Dance, a choreographed swordfight that I manage better than I’d feared but worse than I’d hoped.  Freestyle dancing follows and I demand in good natured English, understood by few, that this time will not be another White Guy Show.  I’m flying high on good will and raksi and as I goof around in the center of the circle of revelers, I focus my authority and point to one friend after another, “You!  Get out here!”   I manage to draw Mem to the dance floor, along with many others.   I am trying my best to hold onto this moment, to stay conscious of how strange and good it is to be here, laughing and dancing with these people.

 

The next morning the entire village, accompanied by the music of a four-piece band, parades me, once again covered in tika and flowers, down the hillside to the bus stop.  The buss rattles for an hour over rocks and through mud before we find a gravel road then, finally, pavement.  I’m not feeling sad or nostalgic exactly, but I am feeling acutely aware of time passing uncontrollably, of all of the things that I have done and said that are finished.   I am lost in the realization that even if these moments are recorded in a photograph or a memory, they have still disappeared.  They are untouchable. They are ghosts.  And it has always been that way and it always will be.  Today, for reasons I’m not quite sure of, this feels profoundly mysterious.