Rabi Thapa's Blog

I’ve been back barely a fortnight and my system is rejecting the very air I breathe. My throat feels raw, my eyes water and itch, and I’ve been sneezing like the Dickens. Finally, I give in and pop a pill or two, but I still haven’t had the sense to invest in a mask, and I insist on walking far more than is necessary or sanitary. You see more on the hoof, I tell my mother, how can you live in a city if you don’t know the texture of its living?

Living here is something else for my parents, though. It’s not important for them to live at street level, to be pedestrians. They’re too old to be wandering these broken roads. But they were never really interested in reading the moods of the pi-dogs, and have long cocooned themselves into high-walled compounds wherefrom they only venture in air-conditioned cars. When I try to explain to my mother just how bad things have become since the time we used to circle the ring road on our faux-BMXs and run from Bansbari to Nayabajaar for kicks, she doesn’t seem to understand, because the only sane response is to withdraw from the streets for a life less pedestrian – yet wholly so.

Walking out from Balkumari into the labyrinth of gallis east of Mangal Bajaar, I osmose the sights and sounds of a week-morn and store them somewhere in the anterooms of an open mind. The dogs that by night raise hell to defend territory no human has any use for at that time now lie supine on the pavements or pant in front of butchers’ shops with the patience of scrap-seekers. A girl smiles as she exits her front door into the path of a motorcyclist she recognises. Bloody hunks of buffalo decompose next to bright plastic piles of telecommunications. A rat spills its guts outside the community market. Clumsily modelled Shakyamunis the size of SUVs take pride of place as millennial shrines to obscure gods crumble by the roadside, shiny khatas wrapped around the one, caked vermillion smeared on the other. Two men laugh at a big black mongrel shuffling about in a pink T-shirt.

As I approach the decline of Pulchowk, a dozen observations are drowned out in the roar of traffic to the city, in which this place begins to resemble just another poor, unplanned clusterfuck of roads, overhead bridges, shopfronts, high-rises and people in a hurry. The dysfunction exists in its entirety on the smaller scale, too, but its humanity saves it. The variety of interactions in the old city is smoothed over into the monotony of a population headed to a destination of chopped-up office blocks. The variegated interest of Patan would hardly be the same if it were perfectly preserved, either, because such an artifice could only survive today as a purely touristic economy, as is the case in the “medieval” cores of Europe.

I’m not the only one wandering these streets. I take the overhead bridge and find myself in Bikalpa Art Center, where Founder/Director Saroj Mahato and artist Prabod Shrestha are preparing an exhibition of silk screen prints drawn from the latter’s peregrinations within the Valley and over the years: particularly following the earthquake and the loss of the gallery he ran in Sanepa with the support of the artist and Freak Street icon Jimmy Thapa. The fragments of prose that accompany the exhibition “Kathmandu My Fascination” are searchingly naïve, but are of less interest than the prints themselves. They force you to look at them. As pure photos, perhaps, they wouldn’t command quite the same interest. But flatten the dimensions of reality out, and the superimpositions of the new and the old that characterise Kathmandu are scrambled into a monotone of affect. Most striking are those works that you can’t quite make out at first glance, such as the drapery of laundry over the work executed by Kolor Kathmandu on a low wall in Kupondole. A panoramic street view of Makhan Tol, taking in Taleju Bhawani, cyclists, walkers and a solitary hen front and centre is rendered almost indecipherable by the scrawl of superimposed signatures and crude graffiti, yet seems to echo the voices of the people who live and breathe in this city. More accessible works, too, generate echoes and ripples. Rendered in red the paintings of deities and demons on the underside of the massive beams for the Rato Macchendranath chariot are almost too vivid, staring out accusingly at the observer who would fain pass them by in the dust of the quotidian. And then there is another wholly ordinary photo of a man on a ladder, which through Shrestha’s manipulations becomes almost transcendental; he fades out as he ascends to heaven while his compatriots scuttle along on their motorbikes to the daily grind.

Most old cities, being impressive agglomerations of peoples and their structures and cultures, have the capacity to generate this kind of art, which is a sort of reflective, running commentary on the layers we create and are, ultimately, both bewitched and trapped by. For wanderers like Prabod Shrestha and myself, that city happens to be Kathmandu.

“Kathmandu My Fascination” is on at the Bikalpa Art Center in Pulchowk from December 8-24, from 11-6 everyday. For more information contact Saroj Mahato at 9851147776.

Day 11

Roads approach Bagalthok from every angle, and I remarked to Achyut as we tramped down to the river that there won’t be any village left if the roads are to continue over fields and through chautaras, not even sparing bar-pipals. Who are these roads for, I wondered. They use them to take fertilizer to the fields, he replied. And excavate sand and gravel from the river, I added disapprovingly, as we walked past wheat that had been trampled by tractors.

Achyut indulged my bird-watching fancies; the binoculars slung around my neck, then his, lent us some purpose. Spotting kingfishers, bright greens in the water that turned out to be plastic, a bunch of barbets, some bright reds that I couldn’t identify, and a massive raptor that took off from a Simal tree as we approached, possibly a Golden or Imperial Eagle. Achyut wasn’t impressed; it could have been a common kite as far as he was concerned. But he was happy enough to identify trees for me – Kauro, a big-leaved, twist-rooted tree by the Andhi, planted in rows; Sissau, tall and straight; Katus and Chilaune; Bayar, not in season!

I fear even the most basic surmises I am making as to the Nepali and Western common names of these trees are completely off. Without a base knowledge of tree types and how they vary geographically how on earth can I get a grip on anything beyond what Richard Mabey terms the ‘blur of green’? How, then, to write green?

Mabey is a stylist through and through. His prose stays you: you are not tempted to scan for information as you might, say, sections of Ramachandra Guha, who writes in a clear, accessible but journeyman fashion. For all his skill in drawing you a picture of, say, the global environmental movement, the text is strung together with research, citations and an overarching structural rather than natural impulse.

Day 12

A shorter walk up to the water source with K’s dry, spry father. With leading questions, I pursued once more the viability of roads reaching every which way – since I’ve been here I’ve not only seen K bring the dozer right up to the back of the house, a raking scar has Z-ed its way up a hillock across the highway, scratching into my view of the Himalaya. Uncle suggested that the roads are a good thing (subida bhayo) but also that there may not be much of the village left as a result. We city-dwellers are tempted to dichotomize; the reality is jumbled.

On the way back from the modest, pretty waterfall in a moist, leaf-fringed gulch, I asked Uncle about what they grew up eating. They had a decent variety of strictly seasonal vegetables to go with their rice – bhatmas, karkalo, pidalu, cauli, bodi, sag, even tomatoes – but everything grown in their karesa bari was for themselves. There was no question of selling or buying. So now, I clarified, you sell many things and you buy many things, the medium has become money. We grow more things as well, he said, adding that this was not enough because pahila thorai bhaera tyati le pugnu parthyo, ahile dherai bhae pachi dherai chahincha.

The idea of eating a thing when it comes into season and eating a lot of it – say oranges, as here, is newly novel to me. Kathmandu is still governed by the seasons to a large degree, but the availability of fruit and veg and grains from around the year from around the region has altered eating habits more than it has in the country. Everything is consumed in moderation, with the exception of meat (which is more! More! MORE!). There are still seasons for Bhogate (strictly uncommercial in my experience), and other festive foods such as Til ko Laddu (for yesterday’s Maghi) and cross-cultural gifts of Yomari. But living in different places has scrambled my radar. It’s a question of unlearning, then relearning the rhythms of the place that you are in, before overlaying the interruptions of the rest of the world.

Being here has also thrown my eating habits into contrast with ye olde gaule traditions. Thankfully meat-eating is no great pastime here. But the twice-daily offering of piping hot buffalo milk has set off a battle between its associations with a rural homeliness and a desire to keep my cholesterol on a leash and my belly at peace. Tea-time, particularly abroad, has devolved into a pallid imitation: leaves replaced by bags, milk by nut substitutes, sugar by a drop of honey. But where’s the pleasure in tea without a bit of a burp?

Day 13

I’m pleased to identify for the third time a Great Barbet in the Chilaune by the side of the house, with its somewhat regular one-note screech, and now – wait for what Birds of Nepalsays – a rather more silent Blue Whistling Thrush. So satisfying, the naming of things. White-rumped Munia, leave them orange trees alone, I’ve picked them green.

After a few days of cloistering myself come dusk, I warmed my body with yoga, and stepped out to view the sunset. A lovely warm shading, the shadows falling softly over and under the summits, the snow as easy on the eye as it would chill to the bone anyone up there in miles of icy, falling darkness. Reading an expedition account from 1960 by Jim Roberts (with a young Chris Bonington) I trace their route up and down the jagged line on the horizon: the first ascent of the 7,937m Annapurna II, which Roberts would have liked to have named Marsyangdi Himal.

Day 14

The gauley way of shouting up and down the hills, their shrieks (it’s invariably women) bouncing off the terraces, is challenged by mobile phone numbers. Anthanabbey jero chattis! Anthanabbey jero tis? Chattis! Chattis? Unh! Ani pansaye chapanna! Saatsaye chapanna re! Saatsaye chapanna…? Pansaye chhapanna! Yeh saatsaye chapanna re! 

On the way down from my longest walk yet – a goodly 4 hours – I broke off a piece of Chilaune bark and rubbed it vigorously on the back of my hand, just to see if it does what it says on the tin. It does, with a delay, reddening the skin and rendering it tender and itchy.

Udaya Bahadur Gurung, age 74-75, was weaving dokos in the sun. He called me over on my way down from the tower, above the last houses on the ridge. Up there, the path was guarded by a brace of playful strawhaired dogs, who let me pass to stumble around in the fallow terraces being overtaken by banmara and saplings, a few errant cardamom plants still flush. I couldn’t find a way up through the forest, so arranged myself on a slab of rock for a view and an orange, then strode down. The old man peered up from his work, cracked a grin at my Namaste, and began chatting. Soon, he offered me a tiny orange and we peeled them as we talked, mine devoured almost before he began popping the danas into his shrunken mouth, his wizened features and frail build an exemplar of ‘poor Gurung’, several iterations behind the lahurey sons I befriended at school.

Four green, fresh-looking dokos stood upright beyond him. It took him 4-5 hours to weave one, but his son can’t do it, and there’s no one to work the fields anymore, there’s only 25-30 houses left here. ‘I’m only staying for the maya of this place,’ he continues, ‘I’ll head down to Pokhara soon, where my son lives.’ Pahila ban phadera khet banayo, ahile khet sabai bajho chhan, he laughs. We cleared the forest to make fields, now the fields are all fallow. ‘Back when I returned from India, I was a hawaldar in the army, I bought bits and pieces of land everywhere. I have 4 bighas of land near Bhairahawa, the same Tharu has been farming it for 38 years, we just get the rice. I have about 25-30 ropanis of land around here. But there’s no one to farm it. Buy? No one will buy it either, never mind that there’s a road here.’

What will happen to his homestead once he leaves with his wife? It is already in decline; the forest is reclaiming what always belonged to it. What the roads carve out, I’m happy to see, the forest takes back.

Day 15

Yesterday, when I saw the morning mist hovering over the hillocks around the river, I imagined a giant sitting on one of them, leaning down for a great spoonful of foggy soup. But other beasts were afoot. A troupe of chittering monkeys raided the homestead a dozen terraces above us, overturning pots, grabbing corn husks and whatever else they could get their paws on. K’s mother heaved herself up the terraces with a big stick to chase them away even as I stood stock-still in my pajamas, grinning at the sight, only belatedly joining in to chuck feeble stones at our cousins.

Day 17

A Common Green Cuckoo lured me out almost as soon as I roused myself with its loud kui-koo/kui-koo in the orange grove. If mountain birds for the most part are not as ablaze with colour and as thick in the trees as those in the Tarai, they are still impressive, and quite easily spotted. They compensate very well for the relative lack of larger animals to spot from the trails. I’ve identified some three dozen birds in my time here, most not far from the cottage. Not bad for a rookie twitcher.

Day 18

I went further than I had the first day up the mountain, past K’s old school in Pahelkachok. It’s rather modern and bland now, though the smaller settlements nesting along the ridges ribbing out from this plateau are more intriguing. I passed neatly kept but quiet, almost abandoned clusters of houses, some still thatched, left to ruin or demoted to stables while stone or concrete structures signalled the arrival of road and remittance, oft painted the same combination of green and brown. But once I left the last village behind and began to climb up a cattle trail, Dhaulagiri and the long ridge of Annapurna I now visible, the beat of a dhami’s drum began below.

Within a few minutes I’d reached a clearing obscured by vegetation where one might hope to look out to the north, leading into deep forest. A scratching in the undergrowth froze me in my tracks, and as I crept forward I heard a step down the slope, and another, then the bark of a deer, followed by that of a dog from the village. There wasn’t much more, certainly nothing I could track. In a couple of minutes more the odd refracted voices I hadn’t been able to place on my way up materialized from the forest; it sounded like a few women were on their way back from chopping fodder. Not more than fifty yards away, and approaching the clearing, or were they? They were loud enough, but not speaking Nepali. I didn’t want to surprise them. It’s one thing to explain to a passerby in a village, ‘Ghumeko’. What on earth would I be doing above habitation, in a clearing leading nowhere? A fanciful thought occurred to me – perhaps they were spirits, luring me in. Fanciful logic replied: then wouldn’t it have been a murmuring rather than a mundane conversation? The first thought snorted, no, of course it wouldn’t have sounded like you think a spirit should sound.

There are no spirits.

Day 19

The sun’s out! One more time.

The buffalo was in luck today. Two old carrots and a perfectly white slab of cauliflower made its way to its wet maw, its purpled tongue curling irresistibly.

The animal has no issues urinating while it is eating, though I’ve known humans to do the same. I’ve consumed a couple of litres of buffalo milk in my 3-week sojourn here, and the source appears to be perfectly happy (as does her calf). But I am discomfited by the idea that she will be confined to this space for the duration of her productive life, inseminated as soon as she gives birth so as to keep the stream of goodness flowing. How different is this from industrial production, where a cow may be kept in a stall and impregnated year after year? The crucial difference is that the calf is not separated from the mother. A male calf is destined for the slaughterhouse, of course, but perhaps at an age that does not trouble the mother overly. The feed, too, is markedly better – a mix of forest leaves, hay, and kholey free of chemicals. And surely it benefits from the human touch.

An examination of the conscience, peeling away layer after layer, points inevitably towards veganism, if one is not to follow Han Kang’s titular vegetarian to her final, absurdist solution.

*

Tomorrow these hills, these orange trees in this chunky red soil and the white butterflies that track across them, will begin their transition to memory. I have no way of knowing if I will ever return, though I know that Pokhara and the terrain north of it is always open.

The process of memorializing these 20 days in Syangjha, one January of cold nights and warm days, has already begun. It will never quite fade, and the interplay of text and photos and a scattering of pencil-sketches will continue, as it does here, half a year later in a foreign land. But it probably doesn’t matter how good the translation of experience into memory, it’s enough for it to be there. To paraphrase Wordsworth: what once was, ever is.

Day 8

The morning walker K promised me hasn’t arrived, though it’s 8.00 AM this Friday.

chi-bi-bi-bi! bi-bi-bi! Lampucchre aka Magpie is a very noisy bugger.

Finally had a proper chat with Uncle – he is short, gaunt, worn, with teeth poking out of receding gums and a heavily creased, gentle face and gentler demeanour, wrapped in track pants, waistcoat, and funky woolen hat with braided earflaps. I find it comforting to speak in clichés about the city and the country; he tells me he is so habituated to cooking over a fire that a gas cylinder lasts them four months, only to be used when they have guests.

Back in the day they walked down to Butwal, a journey of eight to nine days, to get their salt (bhot noon was deemed too weak), clothes, and just about everything else. The currency from here was mainly ghee. It was a simpler life, a harder life, and I cringe inwardly recalling that I was going to offer to bandage his hand yesterday – he cut himself hacking bamboo out of the way of the bulldozer carving a line to his home – when he explained that if he fell out a tree and broke an arm they’d simply fashion a splint out of half a dozen bamboo cuts and paste it together with a whisk of eggs.

I finally got around to cooking a dalbhat dinner, and with K’s personable nephew in attendance, was relieved it turned out quite well – brown rice, dāl, sāg, chanā. Kids these days … may be different in the village. Achyut goes out of his way to be helpful, he’s smart, does well at school, and likes his football. He doesn’t read, though. I packed him off with one of the only English-language books on K’s shelves – Animal Farm.

Day 9

My morning walker was a no-show again and fair enough, people have better things to do than squire around city slickers with odd notions about the country. These are busy folk – forever cutting, chopping, gathering, more comfortable with work to get on with than not. K’s parents sold their buffalo last year but bought another soon after, I’m told, at least as much for the milk as for the blessed work involved. With a calf by her side and another on the way, it seems a good decision.

So rather than mope around on my low-level belly ache (the buffalo milk and last night’s jirey khursāni churning in my guts), I set off finally on a walk up the mountain. I instantly regretted not having gone sooner. Heading straight up the hill through a gāu of bahuns, I overtook a party on the way to a ‘mareko ghar’ just past Kafle Niwas. (They looked festive enough, as did the house of the dead.) It was a bit late for birds, though I paused to scrutinize some late callers along the way, skirting the relatively traffic-free dust track to Tehelchaur. It was a fresh morning to sweat my way up through. But I struggled to identify even the most basic of mid-hill trees – Chilaune, or Schima wallichi. I plucked a few leaves for later id-ing, well knowing the futility of doing so twice a year. One has to be in place.

The track has changed things – women walk up it, for starters, and the houses are mostly pakki, in bright-painted concrete, but the settlements remain villages. A single-storey structure further up summed up the state of play in these parts. Padlocked, its chief feature was three white marble plaques into which the names of donors were engraved. It tells us where all the men are – Korea, Qatar, Saudi, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Dubai, Macau, Malaysia, Bharat and You-Kay. All proud members of Tamuwan, with the odd Aryal thrown in for variety. But where is their homeland if they cannot be here?

Day 10

Hijo up, āja down. An earlier start saw me cross the highway and head down to the Andhi Khola, but not before being cross-questioned by an older gentleman – rather rudely, I thought, but that is the way of ye olde Syangjalis perhaps. Once I explained myself, of course, I was let into the slipstream of one of K’s relatives, who was pleased to learn I was also a Lamichhane and therefore shared his ancestral rishi, Garga. Referring to the Thapas, he noted we left the chaubise rājya of Satahun dherai agādi (250-odd years ago), but not dherai dherai agādi.

And thence to the river, in the early morning mist, with the sun just peeking over the hills and creating a weird and wonderful interplay of light and dark and condensation steaming off the surface of the greenish waters. The bāluwā-gitti tractors were never far away though, and their tracks to and fro (visible even under water as pale white traces) and over to a large sandbar pockmarked with excavations pained me. I was tempted to chuck into the waters a shovel left in one of the ditches, but to what end but a penalty for a wage labourer? The criminals are those who manipulate the law and exploit our apathy to extract as much as they can while they can, and those they supply for grand houses in the city. The shovel, when I shoved it back into the sand, pointed an accusatory finger at me. I hope K can get the message through to the Mayor he is setting up to meet the next time he is over, while presenting his project for a model homestay village (he reckons she is a good sort, and easier to influence).

Still, the river was beautiful. I tiptoed over a precarious bamboo bridge to the sandbar, disturbing a large stork at the far end, where the waters were shallow and calm. Where this canal curled around to join the main flow it was limpid, deeper, and I imagined a lovely spot for a summer dip. In the dissipating chill of a January morning, I was content to take photos.

Up and over a suspension bridge, past a tarp slipping off a bamboo frame littered with the aftermath of a bāluwā-gitti party – Himalayan Dragon Beer empties, half-devoured meals, a sodden fire, bike helmet, damp blankets. Two hungover shabbies came to wrap up the tarp, and stood sentinel over the bridge with music blaring out of a mobile phone as I passed. What else is there to do in a village like this if you don’t care to farm or attend school, on the way to moving out to the Gulf?

Soon I arrived at the ramshackle, painted tail of Lampata, less a village than a town now that it is connected to the road that winds up to the highway. I took the shorter, stiffer route up behind a couple and caught up with them at the top; they looked winded. I met the highway and strode home, wending my way past a hitch of motorcyclists who’d just scraped a jeep and were circling each other in imitation of some ancient ritual of masculinity, spears at the ready, ready to prove themselves worthy of the terrain.

Day 0

Of a sudden I find myself transported to a cottage of my own, an hour from Pokhara, a dusty, longish bus from Kathmandu. Not taking the plane and consciously armed with the stump of a pencil I jagged my impressions of the highway towns, popping out of the frozen misty valley to a panorama then down to Khanikhola, Naubise, Galchi, Malekhu, Manakamana, Mugling, Abukhaireni, Dumre and Pokhara, stopping at lean-tos for tea, sel, dāl, bhāt.

Along the Siddhartha Highway south of the lake city, I strove to see how Syangja differs from districts around it. But it’s just more mountains, differently named and similarly abled, with the bare Bhaludanda leering over an Andhi Khola attenuated by the winter as much as the gravel diggers. And a five-minute burst up steep stone from Jadkhola here I am, in K’s perfectly appointed one-bed cottage 100 feet from his parents’ house, garlic and rāyo sāg on three tiers, just-denuded orange trees framing a view of Annapurnas IV, II and Lamjung Himal. It’s gorgeous. Other cottages can be espied through the trees above, and the road is audible, but tolerable. The chunter of village voices, the constant call of birds in the hills and valleys, a throaty cough, dogs barking, the glorious sun. I turned in just past 10, thinking of the stars sparkling outside, a reminder that you don’t have to go on a trek to see them, you just need to get the hell out of the city.

Day 1

I kept waking, and finally roused myself just after 6, while it was well dark outside. After working diligently for almost 2 hours, K and I went for a walk up the new road that adjoins his farm, the main course to the homestead here. We talked oranges and apples. Did he know England has six thousand varieties of apples, and that the fruit originated in the wild forests of the Tien Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan? Did I know orange trees could live for a hundred years, and that grafts are quicker to fruit but less hardy than those grown from pips? What book knowledge I could offer K on the effect of the moon on sap, and thus pruning seasons (from Roger Deakin’s Wildwood) he corroborated as traditional knowledge in Nepal as much as in England. As K busied himself with pruning the orange trees and removing the dried-up twigs of a failed experiment with kiwi fruit, a bold kingfisher that had set up shop on an stretch of wiring demonstrated how easily he could snap up a dozy dragonfly.

Day 2

This morning a birdy racket in one of the larger orange trees spurred me to grab my binoculars and sidle past K’s father and the stable, from whence the large, ashen buffalo rolled her eyes at me. ‘She doesn’t recognize me,’ I said rather sheepishly to Uncle, and was embarrassed to discover mere mynahs as the authors of the alternately crackling and melodious tweets in the brances; it seemed to me that they never sound this wonderful in their urban avatars.

Much of today passed eating oranges, drinking milk tea, and shooting the shit. Or rather, listening to Syangjalis spinning yarns. J and B were visiting from Kathmandu, the latter, like me, a city slicker looking to sketch out pastoral dreams. The couple were scoping out a possible location next to J’s parents’ large, whitewashed semi-traditional home in a fold below the highway. ‘There’s hi-tension wires here, and there,’ K pointed out disapprovingly. ‘You can’t build below them, they’ll drive you crazy. When I lived by some wires like that in Lainchaur years back I kept getting into fights with my sisters for no reason.’ Later, we helped them transport sacks of oranges to J’s blue Honda ‘Amaze’, which looked startled to be left on the muddy road in the middle of the jungle. Roads are everywhere, and the villagers plot to have them wind slipping and sliding right up to their front yards. You can’t blame ‘em. Who likes walking? I took the steep stride back up to K’s and boasted about it to his 70-year-old father, who a couple of days later shrugged off a full cylinder of gas he’d carted up the same way, a pound for every year he’s lived.

Day 4

I mixed some paints, executed some cursory line drawings of the garden, and identified a warbler and a spectacled whatnot. Meaning to say I found the page in the book where these tiny twitterers belong, indistinguishable to me from a dozen other cousins. Still, if I want to find birds I will have to look for them beyond the homestead. The mynahs dominate this particular patch with their extraordinary array of clucks, screeches and whistles. I will go for a walk to the top of the hill, past K’s farm and up, where he says there is a yojanā to build a paragliding site. Syangjalis are enterprising, if the stereotype is anything to go by (‘All the Syangjalis have moved to Dhapasi, and you are going from Dhapasi to Syangja,’ my mother laughed), and yojanā are the order of the day. The latest I hear is a plan to bore a tunnel from Pokhara to the highway, cutting the 35 kilometre-trip to a mere 8. Pokhara in half an hour! We could milk the buffalo and go down to Phewa for a beer, K laughs.

Day 5

I tried to break free of the too-early dalbhats by declaring I would cook my own aglio e olio, but K’s folks countered with millet roti with bitter home honey, ghee and mahi, topped with an orphaned orange I plucked off a tree. Bliss, and that’s not even looking at the Annapurnas.

K has commissioned a bulldozer to extend the road to his back yard. He doesn’t shy away from work, be it writing plays and novels or getting his hands dirty. He returned today with an ax slung over his shoulder, having dispatched of two trees to make way for the extension.

Day 6

After a coffee at the Roadside Cafe, down by the highway, with K and his young sidekicks, we trudged up to view the dozer at play. A cluster of rather excited villagers were watching the monster eat into Maila Dai’s terraces. A beautiful young simal will also have to go (though it’s illegal to fell them), and I fantasized about transplanting its ramrod straight 40-foot trunk and high, spreading crown directly to Dhapasi, like some kind of rural, sculpted skyscraper, to tower over my father’s twee garden with its ornamental trees and bushes and pots of bougainvillea. Then again, I’ve been refused permission to even plant a pot-bound banyan at home.

The onlookers admired the ‘perfect-for-oranges’ soil pouring out of the dozer’s jaws with every ravenous bite, commented on the disappearance of ban pidālu, and wondered at the power of the machine, clawing out out entire tree roots and dispatching them down the hill (‘That would make a great wood sculpture’, K noted, as the wreck tumbled away out of sight). And when I turned to make my way back over the crumbling trail everyone else has been using the women shrieked, don’t go that way, you won’t be able to!

Day 7

K leaves today, and my stay will turn introverted. Less talking, more walking, more reading, writing. A last meal with my host, and a spot of shiitake picking. Wonderful things, sprouting out of a wigwam of dark katus along the shady eaves of the house. It boggles the mind that everyone doesn’t get around to some such husbandry. At Rs 300 wholesale, and Rs 1000 retail, these are well worth the trouble, and that’s without a taste of their juicy, earthy caps fried in mustard oil.

Oranges, green garlic, bougainvillea, mint, basil, guavas, bananas, spinach, chilaune, katus, millet straw, shiitake, aloe vera, chrysanthemum, bamboo, is what I can see from my perch in front of the cottage. The forests cloaking the hills, the river at my feet, the mountains on my horizon, Syangja awaits.

The monsoon broods at the edges of our consciousness. We grumble about the erratic weather that has beset the Valley in recent times. Once its steady rhythm of storms and showers commences, traces of dusty disgruntlement will fade, roads to greener pastures will crumble and we will once more rest easy in the certainty of the elements. But if the onset of the rainy season hasn’t much altered, it seems stormclouds are stretched thin across the subcontinent. Going by the records of the last couple of decades, we can no longer expect the monsoon to withdraw by end September, leaving us with breezy kite-flecked skies cooling the home stretch to the festive season. We can blame climate change for the scattering of our seasons, and the cultures they enable. This is no less than a remoulding of our imaginations. How do we face up to our rebellion against Mother Nature, and her wrathful response?

Writing about it is an obvious way to go. But Amitav Ghosh, author of many fictions set in his watery homeland of Bengal, declares fiction has failed us. Lamenting the low profile of “cli-fi”, or climate fiction, and accepting blame for his own failure to contribute to the genre (despite dealing in elemental themes), he attempts to explain why – through a work of non-fiction.

The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable, is not just about how crazy we (the military-industrial complex) are to be boiling our planet alive. It’s about a failure to recognize not just that we are in a pickle, but that we have to do something about it, and that means the way we live has to change if we (or our children and co-species) want to live at all. It’s about a failure of imagination. The arts, with their power to recalibrate the way we think, have a critical role to play here, Ghosh insists, but the discourse of climate change is limited to the domain of real life, or non-fiction – academic papers, news reports, documentaries. When it does make its way into fiction, we get overblown Hollywood blockbusters and fantastical tales set in a range of dystopias that are promptly relegated to the category of science fiction, which like all genre fiction, tends to be undervalued. Why can’t writers get a grip on the most existential question humanity has ever faced?

Intriguingly, Ghosh points to the very form of the novel as a barrier. Born out of a very bourgeois sensibility desirous of stability in the face of the tremendous changes wrought by the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, the novel was itself a fantasy of domesticity. As such, Ghosh observes, the Western novel is not equipped to deal with climate change.

This is not to say other variants of the novel that incorporate surrealism and magic realism, as well as poetry, have not succeeded in capturing some of the emotional freight of what we are doing to our planet. But Ghosh concludes, “climate change is too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous, and too accusatory to be written about in a lyrical or elegaic or romantic vein”.

Photo: Luna sin estrellas

Of course, cli-fi does exist, and not all of it is speculative. Not long after after Ghosh, I chanced upon Flight Path, by Barbara Kingsolver. Here, for reasons unknown, an entire colony of nesting Monarch butterflies has been displaced from its native Mexico, and lands up in a nook of the Appalachian Mountains, throwing the close-minded and fractious community downstream into considerable confusion. None more so than Dellarobia Turnbow, the headstrong heroine who discovers the butterflies. Locals see the Monarchs as a sign from the Almighty; scientists as a signifier of climate disaster; journalists as a heart-warming story. For Dellarobia, trapped in an unhappy marriage and hurtling from one hollow crush to another, it offers redemption, but of what sort? Flight Path uses climate change as a metaphor for many things, and makes a decent fist of portraying how a complex scientific problem is refracted into many inadequate understandings, but on a very basic level it is about the nature of change itself, rather than a change in nature. Unlike early exemplars of cli-fi such as JG Ballard’s The Drought and The Drowned World, wherein the protagonists find their personalities dissolving into the dystopias they live in, environmental change crystallizes Dellarobia, galvanizing her into action. Ultimately, the novel is about the humans that populate it – would this satisfy Ghosh? In the Anthropocene, is it possible to write a “successful” novel that does not accord human subjects the respect they are accustomed to?

Day 173, Veggie Raj

The transatlantic flight came in due course. I took partial responsibility for 1,120 kilograms of CO2 steamed into the atmosphere as a result of my London-Lisbon-New York and Boston-London flights, by offsetting 100%, 28% and 45% of three legs with a payment of 27 Euros to support a biogas project in Nepal run by German climate protection company Atmosfair. To the uninitiated – individuals can offset the carbon footprint of their air travel through a voluntary tax used by third parties to fund clean energy projects in the developing world. To the initiated – I understand that the the moral and environmental reasoning behind this gesture is complex.

Was I merely paying out to salve my conscience, as George Monbiot suggested a decade ago in comparing carbon offsets to medieval indulgences bought from the Catholic Church to absolve the worst of crimes? The last time I indulged thus was before Monbiot weighed in (when the schemes were limited to tree plantation). I read him then, but my ten-year lapse had more to do with a lack of financial resources as much as a lingering doubt as to the efficacy of such projects. This time, though I can’t afford it much more than before, I’m reinvesting my faith in a project focused on Nepal. I admit it, I feel a little better now. Do I imagine myself visiting a gobargas project in the sticks to see if my environmental sins are being alchemized into virtue?

Wryly, I noted the irony of almost missing the trip to the US – which combined a family visit with a talk on the environment of the Kathmandu Valley – because of an outbreak of shingles, quite possibly due to my immunity being compromised by the greening of my diet. The talk itself, to Professor Charles Zerner’s small, engaged class of undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence University in upstate New York, was titled ‘Purity and pollution in contemporary Kathmandu: reflections on Nepali environmental management’. More a study of mismanagement in the Kathmandu Valley, my presentation toyed with the notion that an excessive focus on ritual purity and pollution (courtesy of ye olde caste system) has blinded residents to the immediacy and reality of material-environmental/purity-pollution. The case study was the Bagmati and its tributaries, drawing on the work of Anne Rademacher and others, but it could have been anywhere in the subcontinent. Wherever a holy river is choked in its tracks by an urban conurbation, we find that the holiness it exudes counterpoints the filth its devotees excrete into it – dirty, sacred rivers, as Cheryl Colopy terms them in her eponymous book, newly available in Kathmandu. The fervour of local faith determines whether the symbolic can transcend the material, and in Kathmandu, this is a moot point. To what extent do we still regard the Bagmati a holy river, and how does this influence how we feel about it? Do we have to feel pious to feel at all?

Downtown in The New School, I met Ashok Gurung and several members of the Kailash Cartographies group that visited Kathmandu last year. Radhika Subramaniam and Rit Srestha Premnath, along with Charles Zerner, contributed to La.Lit’s Green Issue, and The New School itself (via the India-China Institute, which Ashok heads) helped fund its printing. But it was another walk with Nitin Sawnhey (mirroring the one I took the Kailash group on, from Thamel to Asan) that really gave me a sense of how some megapolises are renegotiating their paths through the urban landscape. While Kathmandu has unidirectionally obliterated its green spaces in the last half century, some parts of New York at least have resisted the monomaniacal drive of developers. The momentum often comes from the communities, as in the urban gardens of the East Village in Manhattan. How these idiosyncratic green spaces took shape against the odds is a story in itself; I was astonished to learn from Nitin that there are 39 of them scattered across this compact neighbourhood. On this island of Manhattan, then, where space is at such a premium that everything points skywards and where the expanse of Central Park is the moral and geographical equivalent of a national park, people still fight for their scraps of green, land they can communally farm and tend, reaching beyond the potted plant in the corner of a studio flat for 1500 dollars a month. There are 600 community gardens in New York City. Who tends who?

Meanwhile, I’ve arrived in Dustmandu.

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Eyes right: Roger Scruton, who does not like lefties

It’s not easy being green, as Kermit the Frog says. In a world of long-distance travel and consumption, the pursuit of consistently green living may seem downright quixotic. What is the point of cutting down on plastic and cycling to work if, in one transatlantic flight, you can cough out the equivalent of a year’s worth of car emissions?

The point is not to subside helplessly into our god-granted role of eco-predator, nor is it to advocate a hard puritanism that is neither practicable nor desirable. There are other advantages to not using plastic or getting a slice of cardiovascular exercise every now and again, even if the spectre of climate change looms over us all. But it helps to understand the costs of how we live our lives, in every possible way. I’ve struggled with this for half of my life, and now I’m making a concerted (and public) effort to reconcile my contradictions the best I can.

Thinking about how we do what we do in everyday life is a good place to start. Some of our ideas are well-formed, others are half-baked, and we may also be plain misinformed. We are the sum of this motley crew of thoughts, and we act on their contradictions, rationalizing after the fact. Our personalized chains of thought and action, too, are consequences of our education and experience. Just as your fingers chime out familiar patterns every time you seek news and opinion online, your perception of local and global problems comes glancing through the lens you are accustomed to. In that worldview you share across shifting Venn circles, it may well be that you will come to think Left good, Right bad, or merely the other way around: ne’er the twain shall meet.

In the aftermath of the Trumpocalypse, I set myself to wondering – how significant was it that I cold-shouldered conservative news outlets? Could it be that the liberal havens of The Guardian, The New York Times, Slate and Salon were completely misguided as to broader public opinion? Or simply that they accepted their elitism as the cost of their (and their readers’) moral superiority? True, liberal outlets all agonized about how they might have got it so wrong, with The Guardian linking to alternate news sites it considered acceptably different. But their coverage has not changed; nor have I appreciably shifted away from my own news staples since.

Considering how to go about consolidating my environmental thinking, I wanted to get an overall sense of the philosophy underpinning an environmentally responsible lifestyle. Philosophies, that is – there is no unified field theory in place. And in beginning to work through the tantalizing trail mix of nature writing, mountaineering accounts and dystopian fiction that stacks my bookracks, I spent some time poring over Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the planet. 

Its conservative slant surprised and intrigued me, but it provided plenty of talking points that infiltrated conversations I had over the course of 2016. What did Brexit mean for the environment, for instance? Could we really presume that the European Union, through its penchant for regulation, had the environment’s best interests at heart? If the EU was seen to be overtly pushing for reduced emissions through the Paris Agreement, in turning “climate ambition into climate action”, what of its Common Fisheries Policy (which, Scruton claims, has eroded sovereign rights over coastal waters, leading to a tragedy of the commons) and the Common Agricultural Policy (which favours large landowners and absentee agribusiness in its subsidy regime, and destroys small-scale farming)? Could it be that its bent towards the Precautionary Principle, in forbidding everything with an element of risk, ends up permitting everything, and stifling innovation?

Equally provocative is Scruton’s dislike of left-leaning, undemocratic, internationalist non-governmental organizations whose actions, he feels, advocate a “geography of nowhere” and do not properly consider localized contexts. Ground realities, he feels, are best understood by those living there, which is why locals need to form “little platoons” (after Edmund Burke) and act to ensure the sustainability of the landscapes and townscapes they love.

An abiding affection for one’s home, then, which Scruton terms “oikophilia”, lies at the heart of his conservative conservationist ethic. Green Philosophy forced me to reconsider my vaguely lefty leanings, and ponder what approaches might best suit my own beleaguered home, the eco-bog that is Kathmandu. It’s not difficult, of course, to recognize that Soviet-style internationalist socialism has been disastrous for the environment; it’s slightly more uncomfortable to bring it on home and admit that armchair leftism sits at odds with the elite networks I have access to in the Nepali capital, at the nexus of the developmental state. In short, should an effective, equitable Nepali environmentalism derive from the people living in threatened environments or would it rely on top-down, donor-friendly strategies, and what hybrid forms might fit the bill?

Day 25, Veggie Raj

August 4, 2014

Blink and you’ll miss it – KU Art+Design’s week-long exhibition at the Nepal Art Council in Babar Mahal is the creative explosion of a generation of graduates from Kathmandu University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts, and unless you’re one of those hapless fools tasked to “draft” our constitution down the road, I’d recommend getting there by Wednesday, when the show closes. BFA Exhibition Project 2014 signifies unfettered creativity as much as the discipline required to complete a four-year degree and six months of intensive studio work – the installations, even the most straightforward of which deviate from what Nepali audiences might traditionally define as “Art”, are a collective revelation.

Living as they do in a country struggling to reconcile past and present, it is no surprise that much of the work on display grapples with themes of environmental degradation and socio-political boundaries. Many of the artists draw on the familiar to refresh our understanding of a culture besieged by modernity. Kiran Rai’s startling mechanical prostheses for mythical creatures, such as a pair of shiny metal wings for a garud that flaps about with unwieldy grace at the flick of a switch, shatter our perceptions of myth as something frozen in time. The notion of beauty itself is challenged by Prajwal Bhattarai, whose “re-cycles” reveal a deep understanding of how (discarded) objects can be repurposed to recall wholly different arenas of aesthetic endeavour.

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In a related sense, Anish Bajracharya and Tsewang Lama play with reinterpretations of that which is familiar to Nepalis.  Bajracharya’s refashioning of the iconic Goldstar, the “shoe of the masses”, is simply inspired. Or as he puts it in the tagline for his imaginary brand (albeit fronted with real shoes that I was tempted to try on), “inspired by the land”. If Goldstar dares to come out with a shoe that incorporates within its design Nepal’s plains, hills, water bodies and mountains, it would be, if you’ll excuse the pun, “revolutionary”. Lama’s critique of urbanization, meanwhile, could be viewed as one more in a long line of anguished responses to Kathmandu’s apparently inexorable decline. But his representations of the chaos of the capital churn inside of the viewer’s mind. The style recalls the clichéd touristic vistas of Nepal’s mountains, temples and alleys; the content, conflagrations of cars and concrete, quite literally demolishes that becalming notion.

I remember the excitement I felt when I encountered US-based artist Binod Shrestha’s installation, Rhythm of Solitude, at the Yala Maya Kendra in Patan. Back in 2009, it seemed to me that installation art was a relatively new chapter for Nepali contemporary art. BFA Exhibition Project 2014 proves that explorations in this genre are far advanced. The young Nepali artists on show at the Nepal Art Council until 6 August are poised, like the aforementioned mechanical Garuda, to launch into their self-defined, disparate orbits before too long – this is a rare opportunity to catch them all in the flesh and ask them about the worlds they envision, before they have quite created them.

January 8, 2015

To occupy, among other things, is to fill or take up (a space or time), be situated in (a position in a system or hierarchy), hold (a position or job), take control of (a country).

Occupation, thus, ranges from mere passivity to outright aggression. But the Oxford Dictionary of English also defines occupation as the act of entering and staying in (a building) without authority and often forcibly, especially as a form of protest. In the context of the Occupy protests around the world, mirrored in the feminist Occupy Baluwatar movement of 2012/13 in Kathmandu, to occupy is to push back against occupation perceived as unjust, whether it is passive or aggressive.

January 6, City Museum Kathmandu: An interaction with Cheryl Colopy, the author of Dirty, Sacred Rivers. As we discuss our passive, laissez faire occupation of the Kathmandu Valley, which has reduced the Bagmati River to a sewer even as we continue to dispose of our loved ones in its sluggish embrace, the #Occupy exhibition, consisting of original artwork and captioned posters from around the world, serves to distract. Two pieces by Sadhu-X draw the eye – a canary yellow depiction of a policeman dragging away a panda (standing in for the Hong Kong protestors), and a naked, monstrously inked Kumari, proclaiming “Rape Me”. The latter is a clear condemnation of the hypocrisy of our society – we worship more goddesses than one could shake a phallus at while allowing our mothers, sisters, daughters and friends to be harassed, oppressed, diminished – and I couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction might have been had “Rape Me” been displayed at Occupy Baluwatar.

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The protests, focused on several cases of abducted, raped, or otherwise abused women, petered out after months of determined placarding on the pavement opposite Nepal Rastra Bank (being as close to the Prime Minister’s residence, that other Baluwatar of Occupation, that the protestors were allowed to approach). Promises were made, committees formed, and eventually the police began arresting more than just protestors. But the root causes remained unaddressed – the protests fading into so many others – and the protestors themselves appeared divided on the direction of the movement.

That Occupy Baluwatar failed to reap a lasting dividend for Nepali women is confirmed in “Harvest of Illusion”, a poem by Pranika Koyu, whose opinion piece on the defrauding and rape of Sita Rai by airport officials and police prefigured the movement. As part of the passionate, alternately belligerent and despairing anthology Bhav, Koyu’s “Harvest” suggests that her trust was betrayed somewhere down the line – whether by fellow protestors or the authorities is not quite clear. But Koyu herself admits to self-doubt that clouds her “glass of trust”. Perhaps she expected too much from a street-based protest?

Meanwhile, attendees at the City Museum event are bogged down in enumerations of compost kits and garbage cans. Less practically oriented, I want to know how it is that we tolerate the accelerating degradation of our land, water and air. Why, in fact, do we occupy this space? Hutta Ram Baidya, the “Bagmati Man”, passed away in 2013 without realising his dream of a meaningful occupation, frustrated by the cultural amnesia of the Valley’s inhabitants as much as the government’s abdication of its responsibilities. I ask Cheryl why she feels that it is not too late for Kathmandu (as she implies it may be for Delhi), but remain unsatisfied by the argument that this place is small enough to change. What’s left unsaid is how, in working for a better world, we are compelled to peddle tempered optimism if we want anyone to listen. But is the frog in the pan unmoved, unmoving? That’s for you and me to answer.

#Occupy runs till January 12 at the City Museum Kathmandu.

Cheryl Colopy’s book Dirty, Sacred Rivers is available at Vajra Books, Thamel.

Pranika Koyu’s Bhav is available at Educational Book House, Kantipath.

January 14, 2015

“The state of Nepal is a strange and usually little known country”, declared the Archduke of Austria-Este Franz Ferdinand in a diary entry from 8 March, 1893. This strangeness, of course, was due largely to the fact that the Nepal leg of his world tour was restricted to the far western Tarai (crossing the Mahakali River by elephant); the prince’s interest in Nepal lay chiefly in slaughtering its wildlife. For this purpose the Prime Minister Bir Shumsher made available 1223 men and 415 animals, including 203 elephants, and by his own detailed account, Ferdinand made full use of these resources. He and his entourage, including the British Resident, shot almost anything that moved (including 18 tigers), and a typical entry reads thus:

At this moment I see a second tiger emerge from a tunnel of reeds, shouted “rok” and fired. To my joy, this tiger lay dying in front of me too.

Royal pursuits both bloody and refined were documented by amateur and professional photographers as Ferdinand inched across the globe. His time in Nepal and India, the focus of last Sunday’s photo.circle showcase, was presented by German art historian Regina Höfer. While the material on Nepal (limited to a few hunting shots) probably disappointed the audience, Höfer did make some interesting observations regarding the nature of photography, then and now. The Archduke’s touring party engaged local studios and photographers as it travelled. Telegrams from the time, carefully preserved, indicate that payment for services rendered was not always prompt. Things have not changed very much a century on!

These services were crucial to representing the prince as a valorous hunter. Thus a picture of the Archduke standing over a dead tiger in Rajasthan is photomontaged (or “photoshopped” in modern parlance) to remove all trace of his (very numerous) native assistants. Ferdinand was however keen to credit the native shikaris of Nepal, whose skill he praises at every juncture. He also makes the following judgment:

The Nepalese distinguished themselves very positively from their Indian brethren for whom indecisiveness and noise seem to be indispensable ingredients of every hunt.

Make of this what you will with regards to our constitutional mess, but one might at least hope the following retains some truth:

The elevated rank of the minster in Nepal is said to be a dangerous and mostly short one as ministers die a violent death after they have been in office for some time. There are numerous small parties in Nepal and if the minister of one party has been inconvenient or his influence has become too strong according to some at the court, he is simply killed.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself never got to properly “remember in old age what I cherished as a young man”, as he puts it in the preface to the published volumes of his diary. Some might even suggest he got his just desserts for living by the gun, as it were – his diaries recount an estimated 300,000 game kills. The piles of dead animals the prince so proudly posed in front of were eventually to be mirrored in the millions of lives lost to the Great War: on June 28, 1914, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip stepped up in front of the Archduke and shot him in the neck.

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