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The Gentle Art of Home Invasion

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about local visiting protocols, starting with an early morning visit by five nuns and a goat. I think this bit needs a bit more explaining.

Indian and Tibetan social boundaries are very different from the Western style. One result is bizarre social situations where one walks into someone’s house to see if they might be home to receive visitors. Another has to do with the Indian art of watching other people. There’s no social restriction on staring. A Black indji lady with a lip ring and dreads is fully stare-worthy, by Indian standards, but only for about five minutes or so. After that, when it’s obvious that I’m not suddenly going to turn into a dragon or a god or an animal or whatever, folks usually give up. I can tell now which folks are from out of town; they’re the ones doing double-takes as I pass them on the street. Too, there seems to be a firm belief that work is not occurring unless there is a spectator or two on hand to watch. Sometimes, it’s a “if a mystery fells a tree in the forest, do you pay him for the work if nobody saw it” style of thing. Other times, it’s just something watchable, like TV, only a bit more interactive.

So the spectating also applies to visits. Often times I’ve visited someone’s home, only to find they were out, and had their ama, bhi or houseboy or whoever serve me a cup of tea and park me in a corner. This also meant being treated to whatever other bits of domestic life were happening, whether it was a bit of television, or explaining to chilluns home from school that they absolutely cannot have one more toffee today, and that they should go outside and play or something to burn off the sugar they’ve already consumed.

In this part of the world visitors are always welcome, and there’s usually a cup of chai and a biscuit or two offered, even if the cupboards are otherwise bare. When visiting Tibetans, the tradition gets and extra twist: you’re supposed to bring a nice treat like fresh fruit, biscuits, juice or some such. This helps your host restock their goodies for visitors, and at the same time politely ensures that they have something to serve if they haven’t made it out to the bazaar yet to stock up.

During Losar the whole business gets “kicked up a notch” with the inclusion of the holiday pastries known as kapsas. Kapsas, for those of you not familiar with them, are the special social-festival-weapon foodstuff of the Tibetan New Year’s holiday. They are a fried pastry treat made with little sugar, and enough flour to turn them almost adamantine after a while. You’re supposed to enjoy them with a cup of tea, but after encountering a few super sized kapsas at their hardest, the military applications of this treat are a little obvious. However, they also play a part in a bit of social ju-jitsu peculiar to the Tibetan culture.

Traditionally, on Losar, every household makes a bushel and a peck of these things. The next step, in a strange Tibetan version of “Tag”, is to pack up the kapsas in your house, wrap them in a fine white katak, and go visiting to leave them at other people’s houses while making a special Losar visit. The day is filled with people dressed in their holiday best–silk tchubas, fine silk shirts, and their very best silver-and-turquoise jewelry–racing from house to house in an effort to unload the kapsas menacingly piling up in the kitchen. Unfortunately for us, Lena is something of a celebrity here, and so a number of people, especially the cave nuns, competed with each other in making sure Lena got a batch of their kapsas which were so much better than so-and-so’s kapsas. So despite Lena’s best efforts to give away as many as she could, even going so far as to drag bag after bag of the things down the hill to town in a series of Losar visits, this was the result:

Scary, ain’t it? Even as of this writing, we’re still handing out the kapsas like there’s no tomorrow…in case you ever come to visit, You Have Been Warned.

Editrix’ Note: Just after I completed this entry and was about to post it, we had visitors, including a Khampa kenpo from Ziggar Monastery. Mind you, a full week after Losar. During the visit a boy politely entered the room, and deposited this:

These, of course are the gonzo Khampa kapsas, the ones that can double as cricket bats if you’re not ready to eat them yet. Now to figure out who’s left among our friends to visit…

February 25th, 2007 Posted by admin | Travel, India, Tibetan Buddhism | 5 comments