In September 1980, about two months before my ninth birthday, my mother left Kathmandu, Nepal, for the United States to pursue a PhD in Anthropology. In the days that followed, my father resolved that he and my brother and I would join her overseas for however long her studies took to complete. In the weeks before our departure, we visited the towns of Biratnager and Lahan in Nepal’s Terai region, in the southern part of the country, to bid farewell to relatives on both sides of the family. Feeling buoyed by the upcoming airplane ride, I reveled in the anticipation of visiting America and shared these thoughts with my relatives. At nine, I did not fear losing ties with anyone, certainly not because of a plane trip over Eurasia and the Atlantic Ocean. And my father talked of returning to Nepal in just a few years, so I also looked forward to my own return and reciting my travels to my friends and family.
One of the last visits we made was to my maternal grandparents in Biratnager. They’d raised me until I was five; my grandmother had insisted on raising me, her first grandchild. After my birth, she had argued that my parents had to work and doing so took them away from me, depriving me of a good quality of life. So my parents spent their days in Kathmandu, a town in the Himalayan valley, and I spent my formative years in a part of Nepal that is two hundred sixty-two feet above sea level, where mangos, guavas, and jackfruits grow in abundance. The air is warm and humid, and it is wet during the monsoon season. Fields of green rice paddies decorate the outskirts of town. Relatives of mine live throughout Biratnager and have for generations.
My grandparents lived in a very large house on Rangeli Road, near a cinema hall that is no longer open. The road was also home to a dozen or so stores. Much could be purchased within a short walk, such as tea, many hues of fabric, watches, soda, and sweets. I never lacked for attention or food or fun. One of my fondest memories is hanging out with my young cousins, plucking ripened mangos from the tree in our yard and incising into their skins to suck the juices out. We would giggle as the sweet liquid ran down our chins.
My grandparents embodied the stuff of old world purity — she, a near five-feet woman who knitted, nurtured her family and her rose garden, and periodically embarked on soul-fulfilling Hindu pilgrimages; he, a Sanskrit scholar and fluent English speaker who only ever wore white tunics and lungis, an unstructured cotton cloth wrapped around his hips and legs. During that visit, my grandmother lavished her attention on me and fed me every dish that I wanted to eat, especially desserts like black sesame laddus (balls) and rice puff laddus, each held together by melted jaggery. My grandfather opened a map of the world and helped me trace the distance I’d be traveling and the city I would soon see: Philadelphia.
When it was time to leave, my grandmother put me on the bus to Kathmandu, the valley from where I would fly westward. I remember her standing just outside the door of the bus. She wore a pale-colored sari. Her black but graying hair fell down her back in a long braid. She looked at me as if she would never see me again, and she reached for me for an embrace. As she did, I resisted and stepped up into the bus’s interior and waved. Maybe this is what many nine year olds do or maybe this is only what ungrateful, selfish ones do. She looked hurt, but I worried about preserving my own sense of coolness, about being too grown up for a hug. Maybe I needed to feel as if I’d see her again and a farewell hug would jinx that possibility.
I am in my forties now, and this youthful error in judgment still hurts my heart. My own moment of desperation for human touch came in my late twenties. With that imposed life lesson, I could finally empathize with my grandmother and why she needed to hug me. She wanted to touch me, her only granddaughter; she feared not seeing me again for a long time. She craved what an encouraging human touch offers: safety, contentedness, and calming of the heart in a world that is ever changing.
My hug would have placed a gentle pressure wherever my body touched my grandmother’s skin, and the nerve receptors that are just below the skin, called “Pacinian corpuscles,” would have accepted my touch as a warm nudge. Then, these corpuscles would have conveyed to the vagus nerve in the brain that they received a comforting touch. Acting on this message, the brain, through its hypothalamus, would have released the chemical oxytocin to reassure her mind. And while this was happening, the vagus nerve would have communicated with its family of nerve cells throughout the body, including in the heart, to lower my grandmother’s heart rate, thereby calming her and lowering her blood pressure.
So important is the warm, human touch that clinicians encourage new mothers (and fathers, too) to practice skin-to-skin care where the mother holds her baby directly against the skin of her chest to foster the infant’s health. Like the warm, positive touches that nurture babies, women who touch their romantic partners often have higher levels of oxytocin in their bodies. Dr. Kathleen C. Light and colleagues observed women under 50 years of age who engaged with their partners for ten minutes of warm physical, verbal, and emotional contact. And in these mere ten minutes, Light and colleagues recorded a decrease in the women’s blood pressure values and an increase in their oxytocin levels.
Sadly, many people are deprived of this nourishing contact for even ten minutes in a day. “I think a significant number of Americans are touch deprived — probably every person who lives alone,” opines Dr. Tiffany Field; she is the founder of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami in Florida.
My grandmother likely felt very lonely when I did not embrace her because this is what touch deprivation can do. I felt this very thing in 2001. I was living in St. Paul, Minnesota, having separated from a boyfriend who could be extremely affectionate and drunkenly violent. In the year that followed, I was conflicted about touch. I craved and feared affectionate contact, so I kept to myself. I tried to embrace my melancholy solitude with jogs in the spring, summer, and fall and walks in the snow in the Minnesota winter when my eyelashes would freeze from the sweat dripping down from my forehead. During those months of loneliness, anger, depression, and low self-esteem, I yearned for a comforting hug. My family and friends lived in the East Coast; like many others wounded because of abuse, I was ashamed of what I’d lived through and hesitant to fully share my grief and predicament. So I hugged my cats and cradled bottles of beer and glasses of iced Bailey’s. Though it took months, my heart started to heal, one furry touch at a time.
I often think of my grandmother, standing in front of that bus, hoping I’d change my mind about the hug. When I learned of her passing a mere six months after I’d left Nepal, my arms ached to give her that hug. It was in that moment of realization, which occurred a day or two after her death, when I cried inconsolably for her.
She visits my dreams, and, even there, I can’t reach her to give her the hug that I really now want to give. But she taught me an invaluable lesson that day: ego be damned because a warm, positive touch from a loved one is an essence of life. If I’d just told my grandmother that I thought I was too grown up for a hug, what would she have done? I’d like to think she’d say, “I’m not too old for one.” And she’d be right.
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Vipra Ghimire was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, and grew up outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her AB in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College and MPH in Health Education from Emory University. She is the nonfiction editor of the Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, a literary journal; a few of her essays appear in this journal. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Photo: Annie Spratt
Sources:
Dr. Tiffany Field. February 22, 2016. Email communication.
Koole SL1, Tjew A Sin M, Schneider IK. 2014. Embodied terror management: interpersonal touch alleviates existential concerns among individuals with low self-esteem. Psychol Sci. 25(1):30–7. doi: 10.1177/0956797613483478.
Light KC, Grewen KM, Amico JA. 2005. More frequent partner hugs and higher oxytocin levels are linked to lower blood pressure and heart rate in premenopausal women. Biol Psychol. 69(1):5–21.
Stanley-Hermanns M, Milller J. 2002. Animal-assisted therapy. Am J Nurs. 102(10):69–76.
Trudeau M. 2010. Human connections start with a friendly touch. National Public Radio website. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128795325. Accessed February 21, 2016.
