-Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

In a temple the man who has the job of burning incense to the deities is known as a ‘dhupauray‘ i.e. the man who carries a censer. But outside the temple a ‘dhupauray‘ would be a sycophant, a flatterer living off the hand-outs of the more endowed. He would be a combination of a ‘dui-mukhay‘ and a ‘dui-jibray‘ or a liar and a hypocrite and his sponsor generally a ‘dhan phukuwā‘ or a spendthrift. Ah! You must have noticed the parallel with the English, ‘a person who blows up his money’ (dhan = wealth, phuk = blow, uwa = a suffix denoting a person). A shade better than a ‘dhupauray‘ would be a ‘taparay‘, a person who lives on the charity of others, and he gets the label from ‘tapari‘ which is a small plate made of leaves. So in a circuitous way a ‘taparay‘ is a person so indigent that he cannot even afford a regular plate and therefore has to live on handouts.

I particularly find the words ‘joi‘ and ‘poi‘, meaning wife and husband pleasant for they are short, sweet and pleasing to the ears but somehow they have gone to total disuse save in the expression ‘joi tingray‘ meaning a henpecked husband (joi = wife, tingray = fetters or shackles which gives us ‘a husband in female’s fetters’). A ‘joi‘ would have little joy under a ‘bajhantay‘ (’bājnu‘: quarrel, bajhantay = quarrelsome person) for he is a quarrelsome person but she need not worry too much since that word has been obsolete for quite sometime and has been totally replaced by ‘jhagaray‘ and ‘jhagariya‘. Another word that has taken the obliteration route is ‘bahatuwa‘ meaning wanderer or loafer and it took roots from another obsolete word ‘bahatinu‘ which is represented today by ‘batinu‘ or to go astray. Understandably, it is the people who go astray that are most likely to give us a ‘batāsay‘ or an illegitimate child. ‘Batāsay‘ normally means a windy place but in this case it is importing a sense of seeds thrown to the winds or what the Englishman would term ‘wild oats’. We of course must not confuse ‘bahatuwa‘ with ‘bhatuwa‘ who is a beggar, an idler or a sponger. It is difficult to etymologize this word but it could possibly have come from ‘bhatta‘ (c/f ‘bhatta-bhunga‘ or in ruins).

It seems that I have concentrated mainly on people with negative attributes and it would be sad to end it that way. So to get the ball rolling let us take up the old word for a buyer i.e., ‘kretā‘ and to this if we add the prefix ‘be‘ denoting separation or ‘the lack of’, we obtain ‘bekretā‘ or ‘not a buyer’ which took on a small amendment to mean a seller. In the series ‘Their Words, Hamro Vocabulary’ it was mentioned that the suffix ‘dār‘ meant an owner and keeping that in mind when the almost obsolete word ‘bahi‘ is tagged with ‘dār‘ we are left with ‘bahidār‘ meaning an accountant. ‘Bahi‘ aptly translates as a ledger or an accounting book and so the literal meaning would be an owner or keeper of a ledger i.e., an accountant.

Bahidār and bekretā have come to stay but some others have left or are leaving. In Nepal the postman is a ‘hulāki‘ and to us he is a ‘dākwala‘. ‘Hulāki‘ is an extension of ‘hulāk‘ and ‘dākwālā‘ of ‘dāk‘ and surprisingly both of them have a same meaning, a relay. In the days of yore letters were carried by relay runners (hulāk/dāk) and the houses where they exchanged mail was the ‘hulāk ghar‘ or ‘dāk ghar‘ which we nowadays prefer to call a post office. The system or method has changed but not the word. Similarly, and I am not too sure whether you are aware that, the Indian soldiers under the British were once called ‘tilingay‘ or ‘tilingo‘ and that was so because the first Indian soldiers were trained in Telengana. A loose parallel could possibly be drawn with ‘lāhuray‘. Following the defeat in the Anglo-Nepal war many of the Gorkhas refused to face shame of returning home with the stigma of defeat on their shoulders. They therefore joined the troops of Maharaja Ranjit Singh who had his head quarters in Lahore and ever since we designated our soldiers as ‘Lāhuray‘. Our recruits no more go to Lahore but the word ‘lāhuray‘ has stayed on.