Rishi Ram Paudyal

Many a time we say little but mean more. Let’s say a Nepali husband comes home in the evening and soon his Nepali wife says, “Now I’m dishing out, OK?” meaning, “I’m serving food, so please come to eat”, to which the husband replies, “Just a little, OK?” meaning, “Please serve me just a bit as I am not hungry”.

The wife asks, “Why?” There is so much left out with ‘why’. There is more language which is not spoken. She could mean, “Why did you ask me to serve you just a little? Have you already eaten something? Haven’t I often told you that dinner would be ready here and that I would be waiting for you so that we could enjoy it together? If you come home after you eat somewhere else, what’s the use of my cooking? What’s the point I wait for you? When will you hear me and do as I tell you?

This means the food will be wasted now. It also means we will again have to eat the stale food the next day. You don’t seem to be a family man. You are like a hermit. You’d better live in an isolate jungle in a cave. You don’t know the value of money. You enjoy out while the family suffer at home. You like the food cooked by others but not by me. Your stomach is always queasy at home. You could have phoned me and told me before I started cooking that you would come home after eating somewhere else. You are not like the husbands of so and so, they always come home looking forward to dinner.” The list could go longer.

Let’s take another example: A daughter who has had Jenssen COVID-19 vaccine one day after her father was vaccinated with the same vaccine calls her father and says, “Daddy, how did the vaccine do?” “It was OK,” the father replies. Inside the question of the daughter, there could be lot of information hidden. She could be saying, “It didn’t do that good to me. I had diarrhea and fever. I felt very weak. I couldn’t sleep until two o’clock at night and so I had some paracetamol. I am still uncertain of its effects.”

In the same way, in the answer of the father “It was OK”, there could be a lot of information hidden. “Well, of course, I felt a pain when I was injected. When I was sitting at a canteen waiting for somebody to come to take order, my body felt kind of different, kind of cold thing running in my nerves. Then later, I felt, my hands were warmer than before. Just to see if I had fever, I felt my forehead but it appeared to be normal. I had heard that some people had fever after the vaccination, so I was kind of skeptical if that would be the case for me as well. But fortunately, that didn’t happen. I slept quite well that night.”

The hidden information can remain hidden or be revealed depending on the questions asked or the relationship levels the speakers and listeners have.
They say ‘money makes the world go round, but sometimes, it appears, it is words that make the world go round.