Returning to Kathmandu

Nepal is fascinating, and has charmed me all over again - it's dirty, chaotic and full of far greater inequities than Australia, but the people for the most part remain friendly and welcoming, and there are few who don't have time for a conversation with you, neighbours, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, restaurateurs, waiters, security officers, people in the ATM queues. I've pretty much adjusted to being here now, though it took awhile because we had so many transitions for a few weeks, and I'd wake up not knowing where I was. Now, I certainly know where I am because of the bell-ringing in the temple area near our house each morning, and in its own way the temple bells have returned a certain rhythm and routine to life.

Flying into the Kathmandu Valley in mid August was a mildly anxious experience. The last few weeks have been the tail end of the central Asian monsoon, and there was thick cloud cover all the way north from Bangladesh almost until our arrival at Tribhuvan International Airport. Then, perhaps two minutes before landing, we descended beneath the cloud canopy, and the beautiful, “immodest” greens (as Indian novelist Arundhati Roy called them) of the rice fields and terraced hillsides south of Kathmandu finally came into view, dotted with the picturesque traditional tiled and thatched Newari roof tops and brick houses of the Valley. I remember thinking: “Of course, this beauty is still here. It won’t be so hard to live here again and rediscover it all, whatever has changed. I’m glad we’re back.”

And changed it is, but learning just how has been most interesting, both for the immediately striking changes and the far more subtle ones.

The first weeks in Nepal have slipped by quickly as we moved into the guest house for three and a half weeks, found our way around the city again, identified safe places to eat, moved out of the guest house, moved into our small but comfortable flat, started teaching (for me) and work (for Mike - he started straight away), met up with a surprising number of former friends, and I began my study. It's also been hot and humid most of the time (end of the hot, rainy season) and that takes more energy for just normal activities like walking. All in all, we are now feeling happily settled.

Kathmandu's notorious bugs came out to meet us in force when we first arrived, and Mike particularly had a few quite rough days. Our stomachs seem to have adjusted now, though, and we have been trouble free for some weeks.

We are toward the end of the ten day Hindu festival of Dashain now, and Mike and I are going out to the edge of the Kathmandu Valley for some of that holiday time - beautiful views of rice terraces and the Himalaya to look forward to....

Our flat in Man Bhawan

South of the Bagmati River which flows through Kathmandu is another famous city of the Kathmandu Valley - the city of Patan or Lalitpur, one of the oldest Buddhist cities in the world. Four Buddhist stupas which marked the original four corners of the city remain, their prayer flags flying constantly. Within this rectangle of stupas is the famous and beautiful Patan Durbar (Palace) Square, perhaps a kilometre away from where we live, one of the seven UNESCO World Heritage sites of this fabled ancient Valley.

Our flat is in a suburb of Patan known as Man Bhawan, well known to taxi drivers as the place where the “British Camp” is found. This is the Kathmandu headquarters of Nepal’s famous Ghurka soldier regiments, long ago recruited by the British into their own army.

Our first few weeks here were spent in a guest house overlooking this pristine British Camp. When I taught English Language and Literature at an international School here during 1995 and 1996, we used to post the Cambridge IGCSE ‘O’ level exams back to the Cambridge examiners via friends in the British Ghurkhas. It didn’t take long to find a connection to the Ghurkhas this time, either – our friendly and efficient landlady downstairs grew up in the Ghurkha regiment in Hong Kong, where her father was a Major. Dillu is from the Limbu people of Nepal, a group more akin to the well-known Sherpas than the Newars of the Valley, and also with a Tibeto-Burman language. She has one of those wonderful Nepali faces which so crinkles when she smiles that her eyes all but disappear. I have really enjoyed some conversations in Nepali with her, and she’s helped us a lot in settling in and understanding the peculiarities of our accommodation.

While we now live a little further away from the British Camp, we are still in Man Bhawan. We reach our first floor flat by some stairs, and there is a small balcony just near our front door. Inside there are 2 bedrooms, a lounge leading off a longish passage, a small dining room and adequate kitchen, and a tiled wet room that houses an Asian toilet, a Toshiba twin tub washing machine, a shower and a washbasin. It seems cramped after our roomier Aussie bathrooms, but works well enough. There is s small toilet with the lowest WC I've ever used in it attached to the main bedroom, but it's so low, I prefer the Asian one. Washing is hung on the flat roof, the fourth storey, and an elderly English lady, Dora, lives on the third floor in a smaller flat than ours. Dora invited us up for a cup of tea the other night; we stayed two hours hearing her very interesting stories of life in Spain, Italy and India - she hasn't lived in the UK much. She teaches English in schools and to private students, mostly Nepali but also to some Japanese and Korean students as well. Stairs are commonplace here, and we get a fair bit of daily exercise from them.

Most days there are motor bikes with multiple passengers going past in our narrow lane, and I find this disturbing because usually only the drivers wear a helmet.

It was made compulsory a few years ago for all riders and passengers to wear helmets, but this got thrown out again and now most passengers ride unprotected. Many lives, especially of women, children and babies, are lost in Nepal due to head injuries each year.

Then there is the occasional Suzuki Maruti taxi, honking to let people in our neighbourhood know he is free to take passengers. Out another window is a lovely garden with tall trees, and a young woman climbed one of these to about five metres the other day to collect persimmons. Our immediate next door neighbour is a Nepali widow who has rented rooms and hosted boarders long enough to be able to send her son to the US to study.

There are signs all over the city advertising opportunities for study and work in other places, including Australia, and the newspapers are quite open about Nepal's citizens "trying to escape the chaos." An article we saw a few days after we arrived cited the Australian ambassador as saying that Nepalis are now the sixth largest national group of international students studying in Australia, and we’ve met a lot more who would like to add to that number.

Normally the people who live in the flat are a paediatrician and his wife from the US. They have returned home to NY State for another break, having served with the United Mission to Nepal (UMN) since 1984, most recently by running a clinic and is also as a part-time researcher at the nearby Patan hospital, handed over to Nepali management by the UMN in the last decade. Via these friends, we’ve been updated on the mortality stats for children here - TB, malaria and water-borne disease remain big killers, but the good news is that childhood immunisation programmes have been increasingly effective, and polio is almost unheard of these days.

Getting around

We get around the city on a moped loaned by the people who usually live in our flat, but only Mike drives that; I'm not game to tackle Kathmandu's chaotic traffic. If it were fast, it would be dangerous, but it's mostly just slow and noisy chaos. I expect we look like ageing hippies getting around Kathmandu on the weekends. It's been great fun revisiting places we knew before, and meeting up with old friends, some of whom, like us, are United Mission to Nepal "alumni" (there are 80 of us in the country at present).

Mike is getting to know his Nepali colleagues in the engineering organisation he is volunteering in quite well (PEEDA -

People, Energy & Environment Development Association). He works 9-5, and shares the lunch break with five or six others, usually in the nearby

eating places.

The Lane to Lagankhel

Yesterday, while returning from the vegetable market to our flat, Mike and I met two Indian men in the medievally narrow lane nearby. They were clad in saffron robes and turbans, and each carried a wooden staff and a can, holding, as it turned out, coils of grey snake with which they wished to persuade “memsahib” to pay for a performance of their snake charming act. I’m not fond of either snake charming or of being addressed in the terms of the old British Raj, and declined. Had Tim been present (our son who is an ecologist in Alice Springs) he would have had the opposite reaction, I thought, but the sight of a few inches of snake at any time is enough for me. There are plenty of other interesting people in the lane, too – older Nepali people in traditional saris and topis (hats worn by Nepali men), greeting us with a friendly “Namaste!” while out for a walk at this Desai festival time, in high contrast with trios of younger jean-clad teens inseparable from their mobile phones, Indian sellers on bicycles spruiking apples, mangoes and bananas, and some collecting bottles, cans and newspapers for a small recycling depot.

Finding jhimbu

The vegetable market we had visited is full of lovely fresh vegetables and fruit and forms the basis of a very healthy diet here. There’s a lot in season at present, even peas and mushrooms , and fruit comes in from both China and India too, though I try to buy local Nepali produce. “Saag” or spinach comes in many more forms than in Australia, and Nepali cooks know just how to spice it up a little to make it a very tasty addition to other dishes. On Thursday I was pleased to find some “jhimbu” in a local grocery shop; this is the dried leaf of a Himalayan herb from, among other places, the slopes of Dhaulagiri, a high peak in the Annapurna range to the west of Kathmandu. I first learnt about it from Dil Kumari, who worked in our home in Butwal so many years ago. She had been born in the shadow of Dhaulagiri and grew up there before she became a teenage bride to a Ghurkha soldier. Dil Kumari even remembered the intrepid village men who climbed the steep slopes to collect the plant for Ayurvedic medicine makers in India. Amongst other uses in Nepal, jhimbu is added to black dahl, and makes it simply delicious.

I intended to go to a well-known grocery mart about a kilometre away recently, but found it unexpectedly shut. Few shops are closed on Tuesdays, so I asked our house-helper about this when I arrived home, and mentioned that there were police clad in grey and blue camouflage guarding the locked-down store. She wasn’t sure what was happening either, but rang me that night to let me know that there had been an attack by "Maoists" on the store just half an hour before I reached it, and there had been television coverage of the incident. She wanted me to know so that I might put off going back there for a day or two. This was the closest I had come at that time, albeit unexpectedly, to seeing any of the “Maoist insurgency” of the last ten years. The presence of the Maoists in the current politics of Nepal is a subject touched upon every day in the media here. Politics remains unstable and governance is very poor, making the people increasingly cynical about this facet of their lives. Water, electricity, waste and sewerage systems are all completely overstretched and each day brings stories or complaints about at least one of these in the newspapers. The “Kathmandu Post,” an English daily, is delivered by a lady on a bicycle to our front porch every morning for a cost of about three rupees per issue, and has been well worth reading; several of its columnists have already become ones we look for when we open its few slim pages.

The Himalaya from the rooftops

This morning was the first time we saw the Himalaya to any extent. On most days, the last of the monsoon mists has kept the view of the peaks to the north of the Kathmandu Valley hidden. I felt my heart soar to see these amazing peaks again – so far into the sky, that it still requires an adjustment for me from my Australian sense of horizon and landscape. We can see best from the fourth-storey flat roof top, on which washing is also hung to dry and sanitise in the sun, and to prevent stealing. Much nearer to our flat, we can also see how densely populated our neighbourhood is - there are literally thousands of people living in every direction around us in multi-storey "Indian concrete box" style housing. It’s so different from Adelaide’s settlement patterns and street layouts, that it seems truly foreign again. There have also been flying kites visible all day, though most people would have wished for more of a breeze - think back to the film “The Kite Runner” if you’ve seen it – a distinctive feature of today’s high point of the Hindu Desai festival.

Electricity

The electricity is erratic already and will worsen as the monsoon rains which feed the hydro power plants cease. We simply adopt the approach of being thankful if there is a connection, rather than being irked if there isn't. This also means that planning one's life is best not taken too seriously, and one needs to be prepared for candlelight anything, not just dinner, in the evenings. We carry torches everywhere at night too, due to poor street lighting, and needing to find a sure footing among the potholes and puddles of many unsealed lanes in the neighbourhood.

We have already become aware that there is much concern about the changing climate here and the steady depletion of snow on the Himalaya, glacial melt rate increasing. In our more immediate environment, it’s plain to see that all the major civic infrastructure systems of energy supply, water, waste collection and road maintenance are badly overstretched. Some people account for the doubling of the Valley population in the last 12-13 years in terms of the huge influx of people from rural Nepal into Kathmandu in the last decade - people wanting to get away from the growing control of the Maoist rebels in their region. For whatever reason, the change to Kathmandu’s landscape was one of the first and most immediate contrasts we noticed when compared with our memories of the city in 1996.

“ Tapaii Nepali bolnuhooncha?”

“Do you speak Nepali?” is a question I often get asked. I’ve been joyfully relieved to find that, back in this context, a lot of vocabulary has returned, almost automatically it seemed. This sure helps with everyday living. At least for running the house, talking to our landlady and the local shop - sellers, our house helper Sharmila, and the locals in general, I can communicate with little enough effort.