Dad’s deception

The dark interior of the Om Restaurant on Freak Street was my favourite hangout when I first arrived in Nepal. Run by three groovy long-haired brothers, refugees from eastern Tibet, it was one of the few eateries in the Kathmandu of the 1970s.

Tenzin, the eldest, was destined a decade later to become my husband, but I hardly remember him from those days. Busy establishing the family carpet factory he made only occasional appearances, but I do recall a dark floppy moustache and his reputation for a bevy of foreign girlfriends. I liked his air of mysterious purpose.

The fried rice, noodle soup, momos and cheerful welcome at the original Om were a staple of the world traveller community, along with Yin Yang’s apple pie, and our favourite sizzling chicken on the Crystal Hotel rooftop with the historic city spread beneath us.

It was from that lofty terrace one monsoon afternoon in July 1973 that I imagined watching the smoke rise and the fire engulf most of the seven courtyards and 1,700 rooms of the Singha Darbar palace, conveniently consuming all government records.

The Om restaurant was not destined to last forever either, and became a casualty of Nepal’s shifting allegiances in the Tibetan resistance movement and China’s ping-pong diplomacy. By 1978 it had closed.

When I came to marry Tenzin -- in the Winchester registry office in the summer of 1986 -- the Om brothers decided it was too hard for their aging mother to face the dreadful reality that her favoured eldest son was wed to an Englishwoman. She still regarded him as a monk in Lhasa’s Sera monastery, where he had studied as a teenager.

Tenzin had recently brought her out of Tibet to re-join her two husbands in Nepal, following three harrowing decades during the Cultural Revolution – being the wife of Khampa leaders, her treatment was particularly harsh and she could never properly use her right arm without wincing in pain.

Due to her perceived fragility, Tenzin and my relationship had to be concealed.

My emotions ranged the full gamut from hurt to anger to irritation to sadness to denial, and finally to resignation with this strange family impasse. First one baby, then a second son were born to us, squeezing into the diminutive Alpine Cottage in a quiet corner of Bansbari beneath a spreading fig tree. But my boys could not be enjoyed by their Tibetan grandmother, even though she lived just down the road in Bodnath, finding exiled solace in her daily devotions and spinning prayer wheels. I suspected she must have been aware (Kathmandu Valley is a small place) but that she chose not to know, which in some ways was even more distressing.

Tenzin Choegyal, the eldest of the 'Om Restaurant brothers', in 1987 soon after we married.

Things came to a head when my English father and stepmother travelled to Nepal in 1987. Dad had hosted our wedding reception on an expansive green lawn in Hampshire, and was much relieved that his troublesome eldest daughter had found such a polite, good and gentle man to marry. Arriving from Edinburgh, enthusiastic to meet Tenzin’s family and bearing gifts of Scottish shortbread and tartan rugs for the in-laws, I did not have the heart to explain the reality of our situation.

Read also: Personal anthropology, Sonia Awale

So early one December evening our breath condensed in the air as we skirted the stupa at dusk, wrapped in scarves and padded jackets against an unusual chill. Baby Sangjay had been left at home. The Bodnath kora was crowded with mountain pilgrims escaping the worst of the winter cold in their highland homes. Flush with fervour, an elderly woman in a pink headband prostrated towards the white dome and pervasive painted eyes – a wave of robed boy monks disconnected from their prayer-wheeling to flow around her like a gentle river through the last of the light. Our footsteps echoed on the stone flags amidst murmured prayers and the clunk of prayer wheels, but we were more focussed on our mission to introduce the in-laws.

With Sangjay around the time that my father visited his Tibetan in-laws in 1987.

I was apprehensive trooping up the concrete steps behind my father and stepmother to the modest apartment behind the stupa, my only consolation being that we safely had no language in common. Tenzin’s parents were courteous but cautious as katas were offered and we settled onto carpeted and cushioned seats.

“Tashi delek!” his father nodded benignly. Neither had learned Nepali. A heater glowed bleakly in the dim room, sweet tea was served, and there were wooden bowls of cupse, nuts and dried fruit on the painted tables. A web of wrinkles was etched deep into my mother-in-law’s bronzed face, betraying a lifetime of gritty wind and harsh realities on the Tibetan plateau. Her wooden prayer beads were never far away.

But I needn’t have worried. Tenzin, his brothers and their smiling complicit wives carefully stage-managed the deception, translating every word between their Tibetan dialect and English. My uptight British father pontificated about the joys of cross-cultural marriage and far-flung families, a suitable reply was translated back to us, and the gifts were ceremoniously exchanged.

Tenzin’s parents were gracious and patrician in their sombre Khampa clothes and straitened circumstances -- it was only afterwards that I learned they had been told we were some random acquaintances from Tenzin’s time in the United States.

It was several years later, without any words being spoken, that our marriage and young family were tacitly admitted to be acceptable after all. Just like that, without any fuss, it was over, and the boys and I could all be together at Kathmandu Khampa gatherings. Dad never returned to Nepal and went to his grave unsuspecting, always professing delight with the hospitality of his extended Tibetan family.