Echoes of a Yolmo Buddhist's Life, in Death

Abstract

Shi mandi mareko hoina. Sareko ho. I hear these words as I drive south along Interstate 84, gliding past Worcester and Hartford and a world of unknown places as magnetic trace of a voice recorded months before sounds through an unreliable tape deck set on seat beside me. Time and again during these weekly commutes from Boston to New York and back again, I listen to voice and try to soak up sounds and grammars of sentences heard. I wonder about welfare of speaker, hoping that old man is alive and well and talking still while asking myself why there isn't more of an anthropology of voice, of histories of voicings in their many particulars as they are heard and echoed by others who speak or write in turn. Shi mandi mareko hoina .... Dying does not mean dying.' The voice belongs, if a voice can ever belong to its speaker, especially once it is recorded and resounded electronically, to an elderly man often called Lama or Grandfather Priest by other members of his community, many of whom identify themselves as wa or people, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people who for two centuries or so have lived in hamlets and villages along upper ridges of Yolmo or Helambu Valley of north-central Nepal. Meme (pronounced mhem-e) lived in a village on southwestern ridge of this valley until some twenty years ago, when, in seeking a more comfortable life in city, he moved with his second wife and daughter to Chabahil, an ethnically mixed neighborhood on eastern outskirts of Kathmandu, about one mile west of Tibetanesque neighborhood of Boudhanath. Born in 1916, second son of a respected priest from a prestigious Nyingma lama lineage, Meme raised a daughter and three sons with his first wife, who died in 1964. He remarried two years later, and his second wife soon gave birth to a daughter, as yet unmarried and living still with her parents. Much of his life had been spent either farming or practicing the lama work, with former taking priority in his youth and latter gaining importance as he grew older, in part because his weakening body prevented him from working as he once did and in part because