Forehead in the sky

by MAIA PANDEY

My mother told me a joke once about dignitaries in a fancy room far away: important people from every country around the world gathered for a meeting, she said, even big and powerful countries like the United States and India and China.

“Also, this joke,” she said, pausing, “well, just don’t tell this one to your friends because they probably don’t understand it, and you don’t want them to think of Nepal like that.”

And because I heeded her disclaimer so carefully, never retelling the joke to anyone, I don’t remember anything except the punchline, which involved some crude bathroom humor and the imagined Nepali dignitary storming out of the room.

Before I realized people in Boston asked me where I was from because I didn’t look like them, I didn’t mind declaring that my parents were born in Nepal, and I was born in the hospital a suburb over—except that pigtailed girls on swing sets and sticky-handed boys in art class had often never heard of the tiny landlocked country flanked by two much more powerful neighbors. So I learned quickly how to make an elevator pitch.

“I’m from Nepal,” I would say. “It’s right between India and China, and it has Mount Everest, and that’s the tallest mountain in the world.”

It was the perfect fun fact: “tallest” is a clean, simple adjective. It’s indisputably relevant and easy to grasp for six-year-olds with cocked heads, mouthing “Nepal” back to me. I relished getting to say it. Sure, the air pollution made the capital city almost unwalkable to foreigners like me and my sister, and the streets were lined with more unhoused people every subsequent summer, and we reliably came down with food poisoning once a trip. But when the plane circled the tiny, one-runway airport, I could make out the frosted Himalayan peaks watching over Kathmandu, blue lines etched around the brown dust of the crowded capital.

Mountain ranges blanket about 75 percent of Nepal, and you only need to brave an hour-long drive outside Kathmandu on narrow cliffside roads to glimpse them looming over the horizon on day-length hikes. My father would scoop me up to sit on his hip and point almost arbitrarily to the distance and say, “Look, that’s Sagarmatha. Do you know what that is?”

He called it Sagarmatha, not Mount Everest, the name chosen in the nineteenth century after George Everest, a British surveyor general of India. Sagarmatha means “head of the ocean” or “forehead in the sky” in Sanskrit, depending on which corner of the Internet or which current interpretation of my father’s you believe.

“Saa-ghar-maa-tha,” I would repeat back, much like the playground kids said to me.

If you spoke to a Sherpa, you might hear them call it Chomolungma, or “goddess of the sky.” Many in the mountain ethnic group worship the peak as home to Miyolangsangma, the Tibetan Buddhist goddess of inexhaustible giving. But Tibetan or Sanskrit, it all felt far more grandiose than the cramped, dimly lit city apartments where we visited distant family members. I’d lean against the shoulder of my father’s Patagonia quarter-zip and gaze up at the supposed top of the sky, and it was so much bigger than the blockades imposed by India and China over the years that easily plunged the country into even deeper poverty.

Still, “Everest” was the cleaner, simpler word for American tongues, just like tallest, highest, biggest.

Tallest, highest, biggest ever mountain in the whole world, I’d say every first day of school when we went around the circle sharing summer highlights. The fresh faces huddled on yet another fraying classroom carpet would murmur with some awe, and I would hug my knees happily to my chest, forgetting all the awkwardness of hugging relatives I barely knew or guiltily walking past children on the street in my GapKids clothes.

When I was fourteen, my parents decided we would squeeze a ten-day trek to Everest Base Camp into our two-week spring break. The trek clocks in at 5,364 meters in altitude, a far more feasible and tourist-friendly endeavor than the 8,848-meter peak. My father had done it once before, but the rest of us had only the fitness regimen of junior varsity cross country or a biweekly hour on the elliptical to rely on.

When you go about booking a trip to Everest Base Camp, lodge rates, trekking permit costs, and sometimes even the price of chai at tea shops along the way vary whether you’re a foreigner or Nepali. Though both my parents had long since swapped their faded green passports for sleek, navy American ones, they held Non-Resident Nepali status that allowed them to pay lower rates as non-foreigners. My sister and I, however, were visibly American: pale from New England winter, clothes unstained by city dust, sneakers gleaming white from the suburbs.

A few weeks before our trip, my mother positioned me in front of a blank wall in our living room.

“I need a photo for this ID,” she said. “It’ll be quick—wait, let me just—tuck your hair behind your ears there.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, dodging her hands on my sweaty, after-school hair. “I have a passport.”

“We need to make a school ID for you and your sister, so you both can pay the same rate as us,” she said, holding up her new iPhone camera.

“Ok, but I still don’t get it. Which school?”

“Oh, just a school where one of our friends works. They can do it very quickly, don’t worry about it,” she said, breezy as always, trying to explain the ins and outs of Nepali culture to me and my American sensibility. I never quite grasped the “Oh, you have to know a guy” and “Don’t worry, that’s just how things get done” moral grayness of Nepali bureaucracy, but my parents navigated it expertly even several decades after their immigration to the US.

So, with newly minted school IDs, my sister and I laced up our L.L. Bean boots to hike the Himalayas at the same rate as our foreign-born parents. My family joked that the ruse would fall apart in seconds if I exchanged more than a couple words with our porters, my Nepali far more marred by an American accent than my sister’s.

It didn’t prove an issue, though, because our porters only flashed us quick smiles and nods when we met them by the bustling Lukla airport. Often deemed the most dangerous airport in the world, Lukla’s single and short runway features a steep drop-off immediately at its end. My sister and I clung to our duct-taped seatbelts most of the half-hour flight, and only minutes before landing, did I feel bold enough to glance out the window. The lone strip of concrete runway looked alien among the mountainous green terrain, all the lushest forestry plunging into valley below us.

After relaying a few notes about the day’s hike, our two porters deftly tossed our duffels over their shoulders and led the way. We had ten days to hit seven checkpoints, stopping at two of them for an extra day to acclimatize to the thinning air. We would trek about seven hours a day, aiming to reach base camp on the eighth day, before venturing back down a couple villages and catching a helicopter back to the Lukla airport.

Maintaining my new fake identity was also a nonissue because most lodges were milling with almost entirely Western trekking exhibitions. We met a weathered European setting out to summit the peak for the fourth or fifth time and a chattering flock of American college kids on a school trip. We met a couple on their honeymoon and a group of friends reuniting for the most adventurous vacation they could book. But the native Sherpas who had tended the lodges for generations smiled more warmly when my father dropped the sentence or two he knew of the native language. At tea shops, the locals insisted on frying up some extra snacks when they heard my parents’ quickfire Nepali. Even in my New England paleness and Patagonia windbreaker, I received kinder eyes along the way than I imagine many of the well-meaning, enthusiastic tourists did.

“You’re from Kathmandu?” one shopkeeper asked, setting down turmeric-stained potatoes and four mugs of steaming milk tea. We had day two off to acclimatize and were wandering Namche Bazaar, famous for its bustling markets and homemade yak cheese.

“Oh, from here and there,” my father replied, already scooping potatoes into his mouth.

“Now, what does that mean?” The shopkeeper dragged a chair over to our rickety table.

“I was born in Dhading Besi,” my father said, naming the village he left as a teenager to attend school in the city.

“And I’m Kathmandu, born and raised,” my mother chimed.

“But these two—just look, they’re Americans,” he added, laughing. My sister quipped back with her few words of sharp Nepali slang, and everyone chuckled again and sipped their tea and squinted up at the mid-afternoon sun.

After the fourth day, altitude sickness began creeping into our foreign bodies, mine and my sister’s especially. We woke up with splitting headaches and bile in the back of our throats, even with the daily altitude acclimation pills my mother had started us on before the trip. The nausea would dissipate over the day as I popped Advil with tiny sips of warm water—only to settle back in as we reached the next lodge and stared down a bowl of Sherpa noodle soup that looked more foreboding each time. Any reasonable person who read a hiking guide or even the landing page of a tourist website would have reverted course after the three or four days of persisting altitude sickness. But my new school ID insisted I was born and raised Nepali, and my mom had planned the tightest of itineraries, so we were reaching this summit at her insistence and eventually all of ours, too.

The day we reached base camp was the longest of the trek.

Forgoing the original schedule, we hiked from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. that eighth day to skip over the traditional second-to-last stop: already up late nursing headaches, my sister and I likely would not have slept through the night at any higher altitude.

Like most other days, we trudged in near silence for the first hour or two. My bones shivered in the blackest predawn hour, and I clutched the REI hand warmers in my pockets until my fingers numbed. We blinked sluggishly when the first shards of sunlight pierced the horizon.

By midday, though, we began finding our voices again: my sister and I to crack grim jokes about our exhaustion, my mother to urge us to huddle for another photo, my father to scold us to drink more water. We fell into rhythm so easily that only when the surroundings began to blur together did I realize the trek was ending.

The sun, first orange then blinding white, began to illuminate snow caps in the distance. All the unbridled green forestry of the first few days had dissipated almost entirely into the icy blues and whites of the Himalayas. From the crunching terrain under our feet to the mountains encircling us, everything was a jagged expanse of white and gray. As the sun climbed over us, I saw the thin line between the white peaks and unclouded sky sharpen by the second. The last hour, I started pointing at every little cluster of people or wooden post in the ground and asked, “Is that it? Is that the camp?”

But the actual camp was unmissable when we finally came into its view—not because of the dozens of trekkers lined up for the picture or the marred sign that read “Everest Base Camp.” Not even because of the firm clap on my shoulder from my father when he spotted it, too.

No, I knew we had reached it when, squinting across the distance, I saw blue, red, green, yellow, and white specks dotting the white and gray. Rows upon rows of tattered prayer flags, some newly draped and others reduced to single fluttering threads, festooned the base in reverence of the goddess of the sky.

We stood wordlessly when we reached the base, gazing at the same flags that fluttered in Kathmandu streets I had trailed my parents in for years. Only the occasional excited yelp from a tourist disturbed the roaring wind. The whitest snow, the bluest sky, the blinding sun; I forced my squinting eyes open against all of it because the largest things I would ever see faced me down then. Pulling off a glove, I brushed my unfeeling fingers against the gravel under our feet. I held my hand up against the blue of the whole sky. I looked at the otherworldly, extraterrestrial and simple fact of home for so many, and I felt suddenly embarrassed for boasting about the tallest, biggest, highest.

So I just closed my eyes and let the coldest, thinnest mountain air settle on my aching forehead a final time.

None of this made it into my elevator pitch.

In fact, the pitch itself became obsolete over the years when the people who asked me where I was from morphed into middle schoolers with smartphones, well-meaning discussion partners in college seminars, the occasional teacher or professor.

“Oh, there’s a Nepali restaurant near us! I love their food.”

“Nepal, wow! I used to work with a guy who was from there.”

“Wait, there was an earthquake a while ago, right? Wow, yeah, is everything OK there now?”

Most of all, they would beat me to my own punchline: “Nepal, yeah, of course! You know, Mount Everest.”

By that point, I had far more to respond with than just tallest, highest, biggest. I had watched my breaths cloud with blue mountain air. I had sipped milk tea in generations-old mountain lodges. I had stockpiled hundreds of pictures in my camera roll of icy ranges, sunrises in the deepest orange, my father strolling through mountain villages in the widest smile.

But I clipped my responses to just a smile and a nod because some things, like my mother’s darkly funny jokes, are just grander when they’re your own.