Writers Room | The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive
by Mikaela Brewer for The 44 North, Senior Editor
Please note: this short story discusses cancer, climate catastrophe, mass death, and sexual assault. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.
"Where did all the horses go? In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root. In Tamang Tongue—there is no way to say this / in English."
—Samyak Shertok, “Mother Tongue: A Haunting”
***
Not many can say they’ve survived three flash floods, let alone in the same day.
At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road. Here in Canada, around 6:30 p.m. local time, a second flash flood rushed, unwanted, between my legs, in a dark supply closet at the end of my residency shift in the pediatric ward. The third poured as blood, minutes later, from a mouth a few floors down where my best friend was dying from cancer.
That amount of water pressure should have powdered my bones.
I limped out of the closet into the washroom across the hall, fell to the floor in the stall, and wept so there would be room for oxygen in my body. I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes, my friend was sitting across from me, bare ass on the floor under her hospital gown, wiping crystallized tears off my face with her thin thumbs. The ceiling fan swished the stale air; the sound of waves coming again and again. My mouth tasted like salt.
“I’m going to bloody kill him,” Gelly said, her Irish accent thicker, it seemed, to compensate for her body’s withering.
“I can’t take any more death today, Gelly.” Dr. Williams, the lead physician on the floor, had been making comments to me for months. This time, after the news broke from Nepal, he told me he wanted to comfort me—that he wanted to make me feel better. Still in shock, I vaguely remember giving in to him touching me. Soon, his want took over, and he was too strong to stop. I hadn’t told Gelly this yet.
“I know, love, I’m sorry.” She paused and, maintaining a serious face, said, “We should’ve shaved my hair tomorrow instead.”
I couldn’t help but smile, yet it felt wrong. And I still didn’t know what to do—I was waiting for more news, more information. My mother was dead. My childhood home was erased.
“How did you get up here?” Gelly snuck out often to see me, as long as she was physically able. More and more often, she wasn’t.
Gelly looked at me long and hard. “I told the receptionist the truth.”
I nodded, but didn’t say much in reply. The homesickness washed nausea over me, and I quickly spun around to throw up in the toilet. I could feel Gelly’s hands on my back as a brace. When I’d finished, she said: “Well, maybe you have room for my plan now?”
“Your plan?”
“Aye, my plan. I made a new friend downstairs. She’s a cook.”
I looked at my watch: 2:13 a.m. “Gelly, I need to go home and sleep.”
“No, no, no. Well, yes. But not quite yet. Right now, you need yam curry.”
“Yam curry? How do you figure on making yam curry?”
Gelly pulled me to my feet, tidied my thick black hair, took my hand, and led me down the hall. The hospital lights were still on, but many were sporadically dimmed. It was an eerie place to be on a quiet night, especially after such a violent day. Everything was still functioning, but not quite fully, as if run by ghosts. It seemed there was less colour in the already drab labyrinth of hallways, diluting and draining away like my tethers to Nepal. The burn of disinfectant from whoever had mopped the floors made my eyes water as we rounded the corner to the staff kitchen.
A nurse, maybe a few years older than me with long black braids and warm brown skin, stood with her back to us. She was organizing ingredients on the table with a tender touch: Purple yam, ginger and garlic paste, asafoetida, ground turmeric, salt, cumin, and coriander, Kashmiri chilli powder, chopped tomatoes, bhat, Greek yogurt, Tama Ko Achar, and Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar. How she found these ingredients, I had no idea, let alone how she snuck them into the hospital. There was a Nepalese grocer in the city, but I’d always figured I was the only one in the building who knew where it was.
The woman turned around and smiled kindly, just enough to see her dimples propping up a spray of freckles.
“Seti, this is Niimi, my nurse downstairs.”
Niimi placed her hands on her hips. “Seti, would you help me?”
Exhausted, delirious, and still gripping Gelly’s hand, I nodded. Gelly let go, stepping shakily off to the side to sit in one of the kitchen’s chairs. I made eye contact, aware of her exertion, but she nodded toward the table and smiled. She was so thin that her entire face wrinkled, though she was only 23. It was her wisdom, laughter, and kindness made visible; I wanted to believe.
I walked slowly toward the table, guided by my hands as if they were a puppet’s. I started peeling the yams, cut them into one-inch chunks, and covered them with water to preserve the colour and texture. I heated the oil, slowly folding in the ginger and garlic pastes until they softened. Into the pan I dusted the turmeric, yam, and salt until shimmering golden brown. My fingers slid in the chilli powder, cumin, and ground coriander to cook for a few minutes, then the tomatoes to cook for a few more under the lid. As I removed it and sprinkled in the fresh coriander, I became aware of my mouth. It watered not only because I was hungry, but because I’d been speaking of my mother the whole time.
Gelly and Niimi had been asking me questions about Nepal—about my parents, about their horses, and about my mom’s recipes and flower garden. How she loved the chef Santosh Shah, but thought he didn’t quite make yam curry right. Niimi handed me ingredients as Gelly asked their names and origins in Tamang. I scooped the steaming curry onto 3 paper plates, complete with bhat, Tama Ko Achar, Hariyo Khursani Ko Achar, and Greek yogurt.
When I finally sat down, deeply sore in body, mind, and spirit, I looked into Gelly and Niimi’s faces. Gelly was dying far from a home scarred with war and oft-forgotten colonial violence. Niimi’s tribe’s lands were being sold for military and economic development. We had known such loss, and yet, we each remembered something that very early morning: Curiosity about life in the face of death; offering an able body as Earth, the largest we know, cries for help; and making from ancestral memories while devastation and violation threaten to unmake them. My hands had become my mother’s in this small kitchen across the world.
There’s a poem I adore from Nepalese poet Samyak Shertok, called “Mother Tongue: A Haunting.” One line has settled uncomfortably in my heart for a long time: “If to speak one’s mother tongue is to keep one’s mother alive, / I kill my mother daily.” Earlier in the poem, he also writes: “In Tamang mouth, ghost, and blossom come from the same root.”
There is formal support, I know, for sexual violence, grief, and palliative care. The way Gelly and Niimi are looking at me now, eating our makeshift yam curry, I know I won’t have to find or approach help alone.
I can’t speak Tamang fluently, but the best nourishment that evening was the grief and love cooked into the meal—ingredients as containers. Right now is all we have sometimes. Right now, maybe, is all we need to keep each other, and by extension my family, alive in the way we know how.
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