I used to hoard chips and chocolates when I was in Nepal, to eat when I was feeling specially low. But I never truly understood the meaning of the word until I came to Macomb, Illinois and found that there was no Nepali or Indian store for miles. And then me and my roommates truly began hoarding any Nepali food that came our way.

After our first semester, one of our friends went to Nepal. We asked her to get some spices, like Jeera and Dhaniya. After two years, I still have some of that powder left. If anyone got us sweets like Jalebi or peda, we would make it last for weeks. And a packet of kurkure, of course, lasted for months. I preferred to make a salad of it by adding tomatoes, onions and corn so that its volume increased and I could save the rest.

I once stretched a carton of wai wai for six months (yes, it was stretched pretty thin.) And besa, without which there could be no pakodas, I treasured until maggots started breeding in the last few grams, at which point I had to throw it away. The bottle of heeng that my friend gave me a year ago has very little left now, but I will still keep the bottle and smell it occasionally, and thus literally make the expression "heeng nabhaye pani heeng rakheko bottle chha" come true.

I guess, at the end of the day, we all like to eat what we grew up with it. Though I can subsist on burgers and fries, I feel like I have truly eaten only when I eat something delicious from Nepal. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leads to hoarding what little I can get my hands on. It's a good thing I can get my hands on little, because if I had any more of Nepali food to hoard, I would probably end up on the tv show "hoarders."

Sketch by Sewa

Sewa recently won the "nerdiest" competition by claiming that her favorite Saturday night hobby is reading, and she would like to know what pure math is all about. Though she is working at becoming the jack of all nerdiness, she mainly likes to write about the issues of Nepali students abroad, the issues of Nepali women everywhere, and frequently goes off on tangents of myths and fables.

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2012/04/04/on-hoarding