Eat My Love: Dal Baht
DAL BAHT POWER 24 HOUR
“When you prepare a meal with artful awareness, it’s delicious and healthy. You have put your mindfulness, love, and care into the meal, then people will be eating your love.”
Boudhanath, the largest Tibetan stupa near my monastery
In a bare room of a nondescript building in downtown Kathmandu, my Nepalese coordinator was in the middle of his “cultural” orientation of Nepal. He stood next to a small white board and finished drawing a middle-school grade pyramid of the caste system. I slowly began to tune him out, feeling that the relationship between religion and ethnicity in Nepal is clearly very complex, so I didn’t put much stock into these simplifications. “Ok, now before we break for lunch, let’s talk about Nepalese food,” he transitioned. My ears perked up. Surely, cuisine was something more simple, a landscape much more easily understood than ethnic studies. Everyone has a relationship with food. “Dal baht is the main meal here,” he said flicking his dry erase marker. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I meet a Nepali person who ate dal baht every meal, every day of his life.” Intrigued, I asked him: What was dal baht? How do you cook it? But perhaps the better question I should have asked was:
how do you eat it?
The first time I ate dal baht was at lunch with Akanksha’s uncle. She told me I could just refer to him as Mama, the Nepalese word for Uncle. It was by very tenuous connections that I came to meet Mama; he was the Nepalese brother of my father’s colleague, Dr. Fisher. Dr. Fisher and Mama are not actually blood brothers, but rather joined together by a ceremony that binds two men like real brothers. In tribal times, it was used as a diplomatic tool, but Dr. Fisher and Mama’s brotherhood is based on deep friendship. Dr. Fisher elaborated on the binding ceremony when I meet him later in Paris. He recounted their travel to Mama’s home village and how all the villagers came to Mama’s door with copious gifts of food and wares. Mama’s parents welcomed Dr. Fisher like their own son. And Mama welcomes Dr. Fisher’s son like his own.
Klaudia and Kati, two friends I met at my hostel.
I was just beginning to understand the depth of Nepalese relationships when I sat with Mama on floor cushions in the living room. It was already an extreme kindness for him to host me, a stranger, into his home. He didn’t bat an eye when I arrived at his door with Klaudia, a roommate I met the day before at the hostel (with Akanksha’s prior approval). In fact everyone there – Mama, Akanksha and her mother, Klaudia - were all people I had never met the day before. We shared a cup of tea and talked about how Mama had met Arnold Schwarzenegger and founded his own engineering school.
Thus, conversation flowed easily and we made our way to the dining room. In traditional Nepali culture, women don’t usually eat until the male in the house is done eating, or else eat out of sight. So, after Akanksha’s mother placed a circular metal plate with raised edges in front of me, she left to the kitchen. I took a moment to eat in the sight of the glorious plate in front of me. The lentil soup (dal) was a cloudy pool in a separate bowl on the side. A mountain of rice was perched in the middle (baht). Small peaks dotted the sides of homemade chili sauces and assorted pickled vegetables. A mound of marinated chicken leaked a small bridge of sauce into the rice.
The plate was beautiful.
Mama smiled, then started to dig in with his hands. Engrossed, I watched his form to mimic. He expertly plucked some chicken and a bit of sauces with his right hand. I remembered a tip from my preparation book to only eat with your right hand. In Nepali culture, the left hand is used instead of toilet paper, so it is considered very dirty (jhuto) and disrespectful to give objects or eat with your left hand. He kneaded the sides into the rice with the tips of his fingers. After rolling it into a small ball, he tucked the morsel into his mouth. Having never eaten with my hands, I was quietly amazed.
Endless knot symbol of Tibetan Buddhism on a Nepali store front.
When it came my time to try, I was surprised at my thick aversion to touching food with my hands. I cautiously dipped my fingers into the rice first, and slowly poured some lentil soup into my rice. I mixed in the spicy chili sauce and reveled in feeling my food. Throughout the meal, I clumsily dripped soup and spilled rice, but I relished each bite with more awareness of the food I placed in my mouth.
I did get a few more chances to eat with my hands, but only with my Nepali friends. When I went to Reecha and Roshani’s apartment for dinner, we sat on the ground with our plates. Roshani had cooked the chicken and dal baht herself and beamed when we complimented her cooking. We sat for a long time eating until we were filled to the brim with rice and overflowing with laughter and the happiness of deepening friendship.
I relished each bite with more awareness of the food I placed in my mouth.
My first day in the monastery, the other volunteers warned me that we eat dhal baht every day for lunch and dinner (though everyone uses spoons). I arrived just before lunchtime, catching the last 15 minutes of classes, palms sweating from nervousness.
All the monks are male aged 5 to 25 and divided into classes by age. There were about 8 other volunteers in the monastery from all over the world, all traveling alone. Since volunteer teachers come and go at different times, the group dynamic is constantly shifting with the movement of people. To me, I was stepping into a new world of monastery life. To them, it was just a new shipment of volunteers. I became quiet among so many new people, choosing to study the monks and the relationships of the volunteers rather than engage.
Monks playing in front of the monastery at tea break, a secret prayer room on the rooftop reserved for the abbott.
So much was new to me. When we all sat down for lunch, Maxi, a sweet 19-year-old German volunteer helped procure a small mug (“Get the biggest one for tea break at 3:00 PM”), a spoon, and a plate from the kitchen. “These are yours now. You clean it all yourself in the sink,” she said as she sat down next to me. Across from me was another volunteer my age, Lina. She was ill and had her hood over her head. She was turned to her side making playful comments to the other volunteers between coughs. On my other side was my roommate Amanda, a graceful Singaporean. We were in the same program, so we arrived at the monastery together.
Huge steaming baskets of rice were passed around, followed by huge pots of lentil soup with chilies floating at the top.
Next came a heavy bowl of curried potatoes and green beans. I jumped as the monks started to chant loudly. The small hall filled with the monotone of their Tibetan prayer that marked the beginning of the meal. I ate silently and quickly. The monks chanted again to end the meal and we all left to clean our plates.
After lunch, an older monk helps adjust the robes of a younger one.
That night, Maxi and Lina came into our room to meet us. Amanda and I began tentative small talk with them, simply chatting about monastery life and our lives back home. As the night wore on, this slowly transmuted into topics of our relationship with Buddhism, how we should interpret our dreams, and the correct way to label how cold the showers are to other volunteers (cold, very cold, freezing cold, ice cold, scream-while-you-shower-and-then-die cold). By the end of the night, we were rolling in bed in a raucous, crying-with-laughter filled conversation. It was like dipping my finger in that steaming rice for the first time, when my eyes inadvertently widened, when my senses flooded with a new texture and a new warmth I had never felt before. That first night was like my first bite of dal baht, a nourishment that went right to the soul.
My co-volunteers would become cherished life-long friends. On the balcony of the monastery during an afternoon off.
