This week marks fifty years since my first visit to South Asia and the beginning of my lifelong learning from Hindu traditions. On July 4, 1973, I flew from Kennedy Airport, New York, to Nepal. The flight was terribly delayed leaving New York, but my ever-patient parents and sisters waited with me all those extra hours until finally my plane took off. It was Pan Am 1, a West-East flight around the world, lengthened and blessed by a series of refueling stops: New York – London – Paris – Rome – Beirut – Karachi – Delhi. I finally landed in Delhi on July 6, 1973. Due to the delay, I missed my connection, and so I spent the night in a hotel near the airport. The next day, July 7, 1973, I flew from Delhi to Kathmandu by a small domestic airline, and began my two years in the Valley.
From that day until August 1975, I lived and taught at St. Xavier’s School, a boarding school inclusive of classes 6-12 (to which a primary school too was attached, non-boarding). It had been set up twenty-five years earlier at the request of King Tribhuvan, a modernizing king who wanted a school of great excellence in the country, to educate the middle class (including by fluency in English) and to stop a brain-drain to India and Europe. It was modest by American standards, but then (and now too) among the very best schools in the country. The school, and its sister school out in the village of Godavari closer to the edge of the Valley, had been created, built, and lovingly nurtured by two dozen or so Jesuits from the Midwest. They were good, hardworking men, doing very good work in service to the people of Nepal.
The school is still located in the Jawalakhel suburb of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, in the middle of a valley a little less than a mile’s elevation up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a valley surrounded by hills reaching up to 10,000 feet. To the north lies the glistening white panorama of the highest mountains in the world. If you stood in the right place on the roof of the old school building — no longer there — you could see Mount Everest peeking up above closer peaks. When I arrived in 1973 the Valley was lush, green, cooled with rice paddy everywhere, and with the ancient towns of Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur marking central points and crossroads. The crowding, a tenfold increase in population, would come later.
I had suddenly stepped outside the small world which I had inhabited growing up in New York and as a young Jesuit. New places, climate, foods, sounds and smells, music and religious feasts. I was now on edge, more truly alive than ever before. Ancient forms of Hinduism and Buddhism were well established in the Valley, and it would be hard, and even pointless to sort them out neatly as two separate religions. The temples seem old enough that you might take them as museums, except that even today they are still visited daily. In a word, Kathmandu was a place of spectacular beauty, a long history and ancient cultures not ruined by colonialism: not a bad setting in which to reimagine what it meant to be a Jesuit.
I was the youngest Jesuit during my time there; the oldest was around 70. After some initial adjustments, things quickly became ordinary. For the most part I was immersed in the everyday life of a boarding school, learning how to teach Nepali boys to pronounce English words properly (that is to say, like a New Yorker), how to read Julius Caesar and A Tale of Two Cities (without pushing too far the theme of the assassination of monarchs, in the kingdom of Nepal), how to referee football, how to run a film projector, how to sleep under a properly tucked in mosquito net in the corner of a large dormitory. I was with the boys from 6 AM, when I rang the bell to wake them up, to 9:30 PM, when I hoped they would go to sleep. I learned to speak a bit of Nepali and more easily to read it in its nagari script. I imbibed the basics of local etiquette regarding greetings, courtesies, and ways of eating, and I began to mark the festivals of the Hindu and Buddhist calendar. Slowly, I was growing, changing, settling into a new home far from home. But it all began on July 4, 1973.
(The first of two posts marking 50 years.)
