The largest town is Marpha, just south of Jomsom, along the banks of the Gandaki—with 1,600 residents it’s practically a metropolis. Easily accessible by road and protected from the meddling wind by the flank of a mountain, its flagstoned streets buzz with life: teahouses and shops, signboards and posters, locals and foreigners. Here the spirited and welcoming attitude of the Thakali people, Mustang’s largest ethnolinguistic group, is evident, especially when I meet Kamala Lalchan, the voluble proprietor of the Apple Paradise teahouse. Bustling around her open kitchen, she serves me a traditional Thakali meal of rice, dal, curried chicken, stir-fried cabbage, and puréed pumpkin. (Second and third helpings are mandatory.) Colorful condiments decorate my large plate: tomato chutney spiked with the local pepper called timur, strips of carrot and radish doused with chili, tart pickled apricot. While attending to apple jam slowly cooking on a stove, Kamala makes small talk with me and Mimi, her assertive Pomeranian.
“We are Thakalis, but just as importantly we are Marpha Thakalis,” she says, describing a hyperlocal social order endemic to the villages in Mustang. “In Marpha, we Thakalis have four clans. They are the Hirachans, the Lalchans, the Pannachans, and the Jwarchans. The Pannachans and Jwarchans are small in number. So they are not encouraged to intermarry. Hirachans and Lalchans, yes, no problem.” She laughs, proud and delighted. “But recently things have started to change. The young people of the village have started asking to marry outside Marpha: in Thini village, in Jomsom, in Tukuche….”
In a community this small and tight-knit, Kamala unsurprisingly serves multiple roles: head of a local women’s cooperative, farm owner, and now a local politician of note. Not that any of this keeps her from opening Apple Paradise every day at six in the morning—or doing her duty by friends old and new. On the morning of my departure from Mustang, I drop by her tea shop, without notice this time, and find her all dressed up. She’s setting out on an auspicious ritual: to greet the newlyweds during their village wedding. “The first wedding in more than a year,” Kamala tells me. Yet she stops to make tea for us and does not leave until we do.
