by Adam Popescu
“My name is Valerie,” she tells me, in Nepali. “Call me Val.”
Val.
Sherpa, a dialect of Tibetan, is my mother tongue, but I speak Nepali almost as well. Yet to hear it from this woman’s lips…
“Where did you learn to speak Nepali?” I blurt.
Val smiles, her teeth even whiter than her skin—she’s pretty, almost pretty enough to be in a Bollywood film, and yet there’s a fragility to her. Is that what it is to be a Western woman? And me…in my state, my hair gone, I don’t feel feminine at all right now. At the other table, Val’s companions don’t seem to notice my transformation, both of their heads lowered to their mobiles. The Sherpa girl at the counter, though, the way she stares, she’s surely noticed. But if she disapproves of me or my new friend, she doesn’t say. Val doesn’t seem to care, she just keeps rattling on.
“I’ve been in Nepal for three years,” she says. “I’m an American journalist for the BBC. You know BBC?”
I lie, nodding.
“That’s why I came to the Khumbu. Where are you from?”
She asks question after question—nobody has ever taken this much interest in me. I’m more honest with Val than I was with Mashi. I tell her my real name. I tell her that my family came to Nepal after China invaded Tibet. I’m not sure why I say so much. Her manner is otherworldly; I should be frightened, and yet that initial fear passes and I’m suddenly comfortable. Maybe it’s just because of that—she has no connection to my world, so there’s no threat of her telling anyone.
“Why were you cutting your hair in the bathroom?”
Don’t look back.
“I want to work on the mountain, make enough to start a new life. I’m a Sherpa, but I’m a woman, and women aren’t usually allowed. Do you understand?”
She nods. “Does your family know you’re here?” Pause. I wipe sweat from my face, shake my head. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen.” Almost eighteen, really. Old to still be unmarried.
“And that?” She points to the bruises on my neck. “Is that what you’re running from?”
I look down. “It’s not bad,” I mumble. There’s a silence I can’t fill. Mercifully, Val does.
“When I came to Kathmandu, my boss, my editor, wasn’t used to women like me. Women who want and can do everything a man can.”
I don’t understand. “Why come to Nepal? Why leave your home?”
She smiles. “My boyfriend was in Doctors Without Borders. He came to Nepal, and I followed.” Now she looks like she’s wondering if she said too much. I think back to how casual she seemed when she pressed lips yesterday. What is love to a woman like her? “I had always wanted to be a photojournalist. But we broke up not long after I arrived.”
“Why?”
“He…he was seeing someone else. A Belgian doctor. I didn’t have anything waiting for me back home. No money, my mom had just passed away, and every time I logged on to Facebook, I would see another one of my friends getting married. So I stayed here and started over. I didn’t want to return with nothing, so I built a new life.”
Can this really be me, speaking Nepali with a mikaru, chatting about her love life?
There’s so much of what she’s telling me that doesn’t translate, even in Nepali, but I don’t stop her. I have the same feeling as I did next to the mother leopard, being so close to something so different.
Val reaches in a pocket, pulls out her mobile. “Hold on, I want to show you something.”
Her fingers flit and flick against the screen. I look over at the two other mikarus: they’re doing the same. I turn, check behind me, the Sherpa girl at the counter is still staring, leaning against the counter, head propped up by both hands.
“Look,” Val says, shoving the mobile in my face. There’s a map on the screen, places I don’t recognize with names I’m not sure how to say. “This is where I’m from.” She places a perfect finger—the nail filed, polished and shiny and painted the color of a mountain sunset—onto the screen. “The other side of the world. That’s my home, that’s where I’m from, Nima.”
I know this much: the world is much bigger than just this mountain. Nurse Lanja showed me in her atlas. “A world beyond our mountains,” she would say. Flipping page after tattered page in that old atlas, it was hard to believe as a girl, hard to believe there could be anything on the other side. But sitting here, looking at this woman with her perfect hair and teeth, it’s proof. She could never be born in this world. The other side, indeed.
“Very different,” Val says, looking straight at me. “Very different for women here.”
I nod. Is it that obvious to her? Of course. I curse myself for being so slow, so dense. I want to explain myself, what I want, what my plans are, how I would conquer the mountain in order to get down the mountain and start fresh in the capital, but I can’t find the words. They’re trapped inside me. I don’t have a quick wit like she does. I’m graceless, dull.
“How…old are you, Val?” I finally manage before a lump builds in my throat again—in any country it’s bad form to ask such a question. I should have asked her about herself, her plans in Nepal, her goals, anything—but my mind doesn’t work that way. I have no manners. I don’t know how to make friends. Luckily for me, Val laughs. She doesn’t seem to mind my question.
“Thirty-one. I’m thirty-one with no husband.” My eyes grew wide. “I know, I know, I’m an old maid in this country. Young for the BBC, though.”
“What is BBC?” I finally ask. I’m embarrassed, but I have to know.
“British Broadcasting Corporation. It’s a news organization—radio, television, online—it’s one of the biggest in the world. The BBC. I’m a journalist. You’ve never heard of it?”
I shake my head. “Journalist?”
“I write about people’s lives. I tell stories for a living.”
“You write to earn a living?”
I have so many questions. How much food must her country have, how rich is her homeland, to be able to spend her days studying and writing and not have to grow crops? She must buy all her food in the market. How much paper does she use? How many pens? It’s expensive here, paper is hard to get. Sometimes we reuse labels from bottles, or write on the back of cardboard or plastics. But it’s hard and the ink always comes off plastics.
“I’ve written many stories about Nepal. Stories about the war with the Maoists, the earthquake, the monsoons—about India and China, too.”
“And Sherpas?”
She shakes her head. “Not yet.”
“But you will now,” I smile encouragingly. “On this trip. We have so much to teach you.”
She nods seriously. “I want to write about how tourism is affecting the mountain—plants, animals, people. I mean, we’re in a restaurant that’s a yak version of a McDonald’s. There’s a fake Starbucks next door. McDonald’s, you know—never mind. The point is, there’ve been major changes here. So much. Yes, some people are getting richer, but I think all this change makes life for most Sherpas harder. Maybe people like you? The ones who own these places are making money, but average Sherpas don’t get rich from tourism.”
“You must be quite rich?”
I regret the question as soon as the words leave my tongue. Val laughs, those white teeth returning. “Rich? No. Journalists aren’t paid well. But a lot of people know about the BBC, even in Nepal. And it feels good to publish, to write about people without a voice and then see your words make change…” She trails off, holds her cup of tea, swirling the remaining liquid as she continues. “Doesn’t always work that way, though. A lot of journalism these days is just listicles and puppy pictures.”
I nod, not sure what else to say. I’d finished my tea.
“Thank you,” I say, rising, ready for what faces me back up the mountain. And just as I’m ready to leave this new world for my old one, Val looks at me in a way that reminds me of my sisters—a way that makes me stop—and then she clasps my hand.
“Whe
re are you going?” she asks.
“To the airport. To look for work as a porter,” I blurt out, touching my hair, speaking quicker now. “I told you, I’m no longer a woman—they’ll hire me now. I’ll wear men’s clothes, I—”
I stop, like something’s come over me. They have no guide, no sirdar. I feel a cloud lift, the sun filling me. There’s a roof overhead, but I still feel its warmth shining right on me.
“I’ve been up and down these mountains since I could walk,” I start, without thinking my words fully through. “You’re going to Base Camp, right?”
One of Val’s companions yells in English—he must be wondering what we’re talking about. Val answers in English, and in Nepali again, to me, “Don’t worry, they don’t speak Nepali. What are you trying to say, Nima? We’re headed to Base Camp, me and these two mikarus.” I blush at the mikaru who calls her own people that. “That’s right, I know the word for us.”
“I will take you,” I say. “Let me lead you and the mikarus to Base Camp.”
Over her shoulder, the girl at the counter still watches us. She looks away when our eyes meet, goes back to cleaning the counter with a rag. How strange we must look to her: a mikaru and a Sherpa, speaking in Nepali like friends. And a mikaru who is speaking to me, no less, a Sherpa who walked in as a girl.
“I already have a sirdar,” Val tells me, eyes narrowing, considering me. “Could you work together? I’ve heard two guides can be beneficial, right, more bodies to carry the bags, one to scout ahead and another to walk with us?” And then, as if she were weighing the pluses and minuses out loud, she speaks to me while looking down. “Locals will trust you more than they will me. You were born here. You’ll make a decent wage, maybe enough to start over like you said. But I’m not promising it’ll be easy. Maybe it’ll be harder, because you’re a woman. Will that be okay?”
She looks up, meeting my gaze. Nima would cry, but I’m no longer Nima. I answer yes, to everything.
12
IT TAKES TWELVE DAYS TO GET TO BASE CAMP AND BACK. I’VE NEVER been that high before—I’ve never been much higher than my old village, but I don’t say a word because I know the trail, all Sherpas do: straight up. I’ll be making fifty thousand rupees. Fifty thousand. That’s more than four thousand a day, and Val says I’m getting a quarter to start, the rest when we finish. My wages include food, lodging at tea houses, and a park fee to climb.
Val introduces me to her boyfriend, Ethan—I assume that by boyfriend she means someone she’s going to marry. Everything about Ethan is large. His head, hands—it must have cost his parents a fortune to feed him. That giant yeti hand swallows mine, jerking it forcefully up and down. He grins wide, a mikaru with crooked, yellowed teeth. I didn’t know they could be like that. Ethan has a full beard of black curly hair, a wide jaw. When he releases my hand, it’s throbbing.
“He’s an EMT,” Val says. “Emergency medical technician.”
“EMT,” I repeat, understanding individual words in English but not what they mean all put together. The English I’ve heard, the English I’ve learned, it’s like a completely different language, different sounds.
“It’s like a nurse,” their companion chimes. He puts down a camera, bows his head, and says, “Namaste.” His brown eyes look soft, and he takes my hand much more gently than the other one.
“And this is Daniel. He’s the team photographer,” Val says.
Val shoots me a look: See? No one’s noticing.
Ethan talks and Val translates to me. “He says he thought our Sherpa was old. You look like you barely hit puberty.”
Ethan speaks again, pointing at my face, how did I get those bruises? He raises his arms, fists clenched, do I like to fight? Then he pokes me with one of those thick fingers.
“You speak English?”
“Little.”
“Back off, Ethan. We have a lot of gear to haul.” Val points to a stack of packs by the door. “We need two Sherpas, remember?” She holds up two fingers at me, so I catch her meaning. She keeps talking, and once in a while, a word lights up my comprehension like a torch in the darkness. “Sirdar,” she keeps saying, an experienced Sherpa guide, someone who knows the mountains and how to navigate them (at least better than me).
Val counts out a stack of rupees, turns back to me and hands me my advance. Twelve thousand, five hundred rupees. I’ve never held this much money, and I stick it into my pocket, fast, as if it might burn my fingers. Now I’ll be able to pay back my family for what I took and have enough to go down the mountain—maybe even by airplane, like the mikarus.
“You’ll be carrying nearly thirty kilos,” Val says to me in Nepali.
I nod, trying to keep my face neutral. I’ve carried thirty kilos before, but only for short distances. I’ve heard that experienced Base Camp porters carry even more than that. And the ones who haul gear to the summit, they carry twice that. But they get paid more, too. I can only imagine how much, but I know some are quite rich. If I was good, really a good porter, even a woman porter, no hiding, and everyone knew it, would I get the same pay as a man?
I realize Val is staring at my chest.
“Go to the bathroom,” she tells me. “I have an idea.”
I bow and excuse myself. The Sherpa girl behind the counter looks up from her mobile phone, her eyes narrowing. Back to the bathroom. I close the door behind me and look at myself in the mirror and shake at my own reflection. Val comes in a moment later, to the same spot where she discovered me with a knife in hand, barely an hour ago. “They’re packing up right now. We have just enough time.”
“Time for what?”
She holds a roll of duct tape and smiles. “We’re finishing the look. Now take off your sweater.”
Val wraps black tape over my undershirt, flattening my chest. I wipe the sweat from my forehead.
“Now take a breath. Deep. All the way in. Hold it.”
Around my chest, again and again, Val passes the roll of tape until it gets low.
“How’s that? Too tight?”
I stretch my arms, move from side to side, try to breathe normally. It is tight, but I can handle it. And when I put on my sweater, my breasts have vanished.
“Hold on, one more thing.”
Val takes out a pencil, uses it to shade in my upper lip. I smile to myself, wondering if this writer has ever penned something like this.
“Keep still,” she says. “Just a few strokes, yes, there.”
I think of Norbu, Father, my sisters, and Mother and what they would say now. Today—or was it yesterday?—I was supposed to be a bride. But in the bathroom’s tiny mirror, with my hair gone, my now boyish chest and freshly applied mustache, Nima the Eldest, betrothed to Norbu, is gone.
“Good,” Val says, looking me up and down. “Very good. And what are we going to call you?”
Without thinking, I blurt out, “Ang.”
Val repeats it. “Ang. Very well, Ang.”
Forgive me, brother.
13
MY UPPER LIP ITCHES FROM VAL’S PENCIL. IT TINGLES AS SWEAT BUILDS, and I want to scratch it with my nails, but I don’t. I’m afraid to touch it. And I want to pull off this stupid knit cap, run my fingers through my short hair. But I don’t touch that either.
I must look a fool, but no one says anything. Not the children we pass playing in Lukla’s lone street. Not the mikarus I walk side by side with—Nima would never have been able to do that. I finally gather the courage to touch the back of my head, right under my cap, feeling for my long hair and finding none. That’s not Nima, I whisper in my mind, willing my change while afraid and ashamed to speak my new name, even to myself.
We pass the same group of misfits that unloaded the bags at the airport. They play billiards inside a tiny open-air stall—loudly, pushing and shoving and yelling, just like yesterday, passing a single pole between them. One boy places a coin on the table, hits a white ball with the pole, then curses as another boy scoops the coin up like an eagle snatching prey. Clear
ly, they are putting their hard-earned money to good use. A boy with a cleft lip laughs as though hearing my thoughts. Another swigs an orange Fanta, finishes it, throws it in a pile of empty bottles. The clank of the glass wakes a sleeping mutt who howls in displeasure, its dream world ended. The dog trots towards me and barks a warning as we pass and the one who threw the bottle scrunches his face at me. He looks a lot like the little boy who pushed me yesterday, the angry one. Another bark, and the boy keeps staring. The mutt takes a step closer, then stops and turns to scratch. The angry boy spits at the dog and returns to the game, laying another coin on the table. We keep walking.
At the edge of town, we meet the sirdar at the domed stupa, just steps from Mashi’s home. Lasha looks older than my father, with a craggy, tanned face and graying mustache. His arms and legs are thick and strong, built like a cliff-running goat. He scratches that mustache, and it wiggles, a caterpillar glued to his lip. Val announces me as the second porter and his gnarled old hands press together as he bows slightly, whispering, “Namaste.”
If Lasha senses something, thinks that it’s odd that I’m a Sherpa without a tokma, with a penciled-on mustache, he doesn’t let on. He wiggles that caterpillar, huddles with the mikarus by the side of the road, as they bend, drop, and unfurl their massive duffel bags. The gear is divided—containers of food, water, medical equipment, clothes, shoes, cameras—the mikarus keeping what they need for the day’s hike and leaving the rest for us Sherpas to split in two loads.