Rachana Shakya, 30, smiles as she fries bara, fat black-lentil pancakes, the kind that Newari street vendors sell in the Kathmandu Valley, where she grew up. Ginger, garlic, cumin: Her small apartment kitchen in northwest Houston smells like home.
At the last minute, she cracks an egg atop the bara, then flips the whole thing, so the egg fries into one side of the pancake. This, she says proudly, is different from anything you’d eat in India and China, the big countries that little Nepal is wedged between.
Even inside wildly diverse Nepal, Newari culture is special and increasingly rare. UNESCO classifies 62 — 62! — of Nepal’s languages as endangered. Newari, which Shakya and her husband use at home, is classified as “severely threatened,” meaning that children no longer speak it.
The Newari people have inhabited the Kathmandu Valley for thousands of years — plenty of time to develop a rich culture. Japan is known for pagoda roofs, but really, architectural historians agree, the Japanese took the idea from Kathmandu. UNESCO has designated seven World Heritage sites in a valley of only 220 square miles.
But cultural preservation wasn’t what Shakya’s husband, Ram Chakradhar, 34, had in mind four years ago when he posted their first video on YouTube. He works as a civil engineer, but at the time, Shakya was home in the apartment, bored and lonely in a strange new country, sick of watching TV.
“My plan,” Chakradhar says, “was to do it so that she wouldn’t say, ‘Let’s go back home.’”
365 days, 366 festivals
When the egg on the bara is firm, Shakya slices the pancake into wedges — “like pizza,” says Chakradhar — and serves them topped with a tomato-y chutney, and with fiery red-pepper potatoes on the side.
In 2011, the Nepal census showed roughly 880,000 Newari speakers in that country. Ethnologue, a language-reference website run by SIL International, estimates that another 15,000 live outside the country. Most are Hindu or Buddhist.
Shakya explains that at home in Nepal, she learned cooking alongside her mother and aunt, in a big kitchen with big pots, preparing food for 15 to 20 people every night. Lots of times, they were cooking for festivals, where their extended family would gather to eat special dishes, each with its own meaning.
“They say that out of 365 days, the Newari people have 366 festivals,” Chakradhar laughs. “It’s like Christmas every day.”
Shakya and Chakradhar grew up in towns roughly 50 miles apart, and met, Shakya says, “on the Facebook,” through mutual friends.
“We started with a fight,” he laughs. Shakya had posted something — neither remembers what — and after he commented sharply on it, he says, “She would never talk to me.”
He persisted. After getting his civil-engineering master’s degree in Miami, he went back to Nepal to find a wife. Shakya’s family, he says, wasn’t thrilled by him: Though she and he are both Newari, the 50-mile difference in their hometowns means that they’re considered to be from different regions, with different accents.
But it was a love match. The pair got married quickly — he only had a week off work — then he returned to the U.S. to wait for the months that it took her to get a visa based on their marriage.
A little American kitchen
Love match or not, Houston wasn’t easy for Shakya. In Houston, Chakradhar had an engineering job and two relatives. But Shakya only had two relatives in the entire United States: one in Dallas, and one in Kansas.
Houston’s strong economy has long attracted immigrants from many countries, and in recent years, according to Rice’s Kinder Institute, the city’s Asian population has grown faster than that of any other ethnic group. But for some reason Dallas, Shakya says, has attracted more people from Nepal, including more Newaris. Dallas has a handful of Newari restaurants, Shakya says. But in Houston, you’re lucky to see a Newari dish on an Indian or Pakistani menu.
To keep her spirits up, Chakradhar did what he could. He researched Houston places they could go for weekend outings. They found her a volunteer job where she could practice English. And together they’d go hunting ingredients for Newari dishes, shopping at Chinese or Indian grocery stores. Once, to Shakya’s astonishment, an elusive dried pepper showed up at a Kroger.
Used to big pots, big kitchens and big families, at first Shakya cooked way too much for just the two of them. She urged skinny Chakradhar to eat more.
But over time, she adapted. She learned to make rice wine in her apartment kitchen, using a small rice cooker instead of a vat. She couldn’t buy Nepali rice, and Basmati didn’t work at all. But short-grained sticky rice, she says, resulted in a “really good” wine, intensely sweet-and-sour. “Not like Nepal,” she says. “But close.”
In 2015, Chakradhar used his phone to make a video of her cooking bara, and posted the result to YouTube, on a channel they named Newari KhajaGhar ("Newari Food"). Shakya’s homesickness, and the foreignness of this new place, shows in that first video’s mournful generic title: “Newari Dish in US Kitchen.”
It was what foodies call a “hands” video, one that doesn’t show Shakya’s face, just her hands preparing a recipe. Since then, Chakradhar has gotten better at the technical stuff — peppier music, tighter editing, better spelling, more Google-friendly titles. And they’ve made a Facebook page to promote the videos.
But the basic “hands” format remains the same. Shakya is fluent in English now, but she still doesn’t speak in the videos. When words are needed, they show up as English text. That text doesn’t always give measurements, and sometimes it doesn’t even specify ingredients. That is, after all, the way Shakya learned to cook: by watching an expert who knows what she’s doing, who doesn’t stop to explain.
The couple doesn’t post videos every week anymore. Recently, Shakya started work as an accountant, and she’s not nearly as bored as she used to be. But she’s still thrilled when someone discovers her food.
Their hits — like that rice wine video, or the one called “Nepali/Newari choilla,” showing grilled goat meat — rack up more than 100,000 views.
“When somebody comments, it makes her really happy,” says Chakradhar. “She’ll text me at work: ‘Have you checked the comments?’
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/food/article/Cooking-like-Kathmandu-Preserving-endangered-13553207.php
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