Word: townes
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...with Turmeric is a well-captured docudrama, and Jhuma's acquiescence makes sense in a novella that chronicles life in an isolated 1950s Nepalese village. Dhané's misfortune, though heartbreaking, is also true to life. Readers may pity him as he and his family are run out of town, and yet, as rural tragedies go, theirs is distressingly mundane - and timeless...
...remember the day president Sukarno died. It was June 21, 1970, and I was in a taxi going from Jakarta's airport into town after completing a tour of the U.S. as a student leader - a trip made possible through a program initiated by Suharto, Sukarno's successor. The streets were quiet and I asked the driver why. He replied in a neutral voice that Sukarno had just passed away. After the chaos and isolationism of the Sukarno years, my student movement had supported Suharto's vision of stability and economic growth. Nevertheless, I felt a sad sense of passage...
...That encounter, to Sandhya's relief, never came to pass. In 1996, as a 14-year-old student from a town north of the capital Kathmandu, she joined Nepal's Maoist cadres at the moment when their armed insurgency had just begun to take hold of this rugged Himalayan nation, long a magnet for foreign backpackers and adventurers. Her father's military income meant Sandhya did not grow up among the country's many poor, but she chafed under the rigid caste laws and gender norms that blunted her parents' ambitions and stripped her of the same opportunities...
...made it to Cairo; the family had friends who led them along Bedouin trails across the Sinai desert, past the roadblocks of Egyptian police, whose orders were to turn back any Palestinians fleeing Gaza. Others weren't so lucky. Egyptian authorities stopped dozens of ailing Palestinians at the town of el-Arish because they lacked the proper visas. The patients remain there, camped in mosques and in the doorways of el-Arish, tended by relatives who are pleading with Egyptian riot police to let them pass...
...most Gazans, though, shopping was the key. I saw a poor woman haggle over a single bulb of garlic as though it were a Manhattan town house. Goats and camels, prized for their meat, were on many shopping lists. So were commercial goods. On the Gaza side, an unemployed mason with nine kids was hoisting bags of cement off an Egyptian flatbed truck. The Israelis had banned the import of cement, so all construction had stopped. But with the opening, the price of a sack of cement fell from $60 to $12, he told me, so he was happily back...