like shares on a stock exchange;
where the men who presume to lead our youth on
have faces wrinkled like roofing steel;
where the “wash and wear” creases of honor
are never spoiled by any malpractice,
and even the prostitute’s terylene skin
cannot crease, whatever her crime;
where seeds which double production
are displayed at farmers’ fairs
which fill with news of drought and famine;
where beer and whisky flow instead of sacred rivers2
and people come to our holiest shrines
less to receive the food of the gods,
more to consume the forbidden fruits
of Adam and Eve in the gardens behind;
where the sugar factory makes booze, not sugar,
and mothers of freedom give birth to soldiers instead of sons;
where the great poet must die an early death to pay his debts
and a poet, driven mad by the pain of his land,
must take refuge in a foreign hospice;
where Saraswati’s lonely daughter
must live her whole life shriveled
by a sickness untreated in her youth3
where a guide describes to a tourist
Nepal’s contributions to other lands
then departs, demanding his camera,
where young men sing the songs
of forts and foreign conquests,
marching in parades...
In this land I am forced to say,
clipping a kukuri to my tie and lapel,4
tearing open my heart:
compatriots, nation-poets of this land
who sing the songs of my country’s awakening,
respected leader of my people:
if you wish, you may call me a slanderer, a traitor,
but this land is mine as well as yours,
my hut will stand on a piece of this land,
my pyre will burn beside one of our rivers;
I am forced to say, made bold by this feeling,
this is a land of uproar and rumour.
dig deep, and you find hearsay
heaped up beneath every home,
so this is a land of tumult and gossip,
a country supported by rumours.
a country standing on uproar:
this is a land of uproar and rumour.
I THINK MY COUNTRY’S HISTORY IS A LIE (GALAT LAGCHA MALAI MERO DESHKO ITHAS)
When I pause for a few days
to look at these squares steeped in hunger,
these streets like withered flowers,
I think my country’s history is a lie.
These gods, dug in all down the street,
these knowing men who are deaf and dumb,
these temples ravaged by earthquakes,
these leaning pinnacles,
these statues of great men at the crossroads:
when I see all these ever present,
never changing, all alike,
then I think it is a lie,
the history of these men who share my table.
When I constantly see young Sītās5
in the streets, the alleys, the markets,
in my country and in foreign lands,
stripped bare like eucalyptus trees,
when I see countless Bhīmsen Thāpās,6
standing still and silent,
shedding the songs of their souls,
like kalkī trees7 with their hands hanging down,
I really feel like mocking my blood.
I hear that Amarsingh8 extended the kingdom to Kangra,
l hear that Tenzing climbed Sagarmāthā,9
I hear that the Buddha10 sowed the seeds of peace,
I hear that Arniko’s11 art astounded the world;
I hear, but I do not believe it.
For when I pause for a few days
to look at these squares steeped in hunger,
these streets like withered flowers,
l know that this is the truth of my past,
and I think our history is a lie.
1 The English words “ear phone” are used in the Nepali original.
2 The original Nepali poem refers to the Bishnumati and the Bagmati, the two sacred rivers of the Kathmandu Valley. Similarly, the following line names the temples of Swyambhu and Pashupati.
3 The “great poet” referred to here is Lakshmiprasad Devkot, the poet who is driven mad is Gopalprasad Rimal, and “Saraswati’s lonely daughter” is Parijat.
4 The khukuri is the ubiquitous Nepali knife that has become a military emblem and almost a national symbol. Sherchan perhaps intends to show that he does not lack patriotic feeling.
5 Sītā is a consort of Lord Rāina, the princely incarnation of Vishnu, and the epitome of female chastity and fidelity.
6 Bhīmsen Thāpā dominated Nepalese politics from about 1804 until 1837 and is given especial credit for building up the military strength and prestige of Nepal. See M. S. Jain (1972, 4–13).
7 A kulkī is a flower or the plume on the Rāinas ceremonial helmet. The ambiguity is almost certainly intentional.
8 Amarsingh Thāpā was the commander in chief of the Nepalese army who pushed the borders of the kingdom westward as far as Kangra, in modern Himachal Pradesh, during the early nineteenth century.
9 Sagarmāthā is the Nepali name for Mount Everest.
10 Because Lumbinī, the birthplace of Shākyamuṇi, is now within the borders of modern Nepal, the Buddha is sometimes claimed to have been a Nepali.
11 Arniko (1244–1306), a Newār craftsman, was taken to the court of Kubilai Khan by a powerful Tibetan lama in 1265. The khan was overwhelmed by Arniko’s skills and assigned him a number of major projects, including the building of several famous temples.
THE WAITING LAND
Dervla Murphy
Dervla Murphy is an Irish touring cyclist and author of adventure travel books. She is best known for her 1965 book Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle, about an overland cycling trip through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. She followed this with volunteer work helping Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal and trekking with a mule through Ethiopia. Murphy took a break from travel writing following the birth of her daughter, and then wrote about their travels in India, Pakistan, South America, Madagascar and Cameroon. She later wrote about her solo trips through Romania, Africa, Laos, and the states of the former Yugoslavia and Siberia.
On Foot to Langtang
9 NOVEMBER – KATHMANDU
I have spent the past few days trying to forget the Pokhara Tibetans and organising a fortnight’s exploratory trek to the Langtang area due north of Kathmandu – though perhaps ‘organising’ is too strong a word for my sort of pre-trek arrangements.
Trekking parties here vary enormously according to the status, pernicketiness and physical fitness (or unfitness) of their members. The most elaborate are the comical Royal Progress of Ambassadors, who travel accompanied by scores of porters, a team manager to control them, a cook, a kitchen-boy, a guide, an interpreter, personal servants, quantities of imported food, cases of alcohol and every conceivable piece of equipment from a mobile lavatory to a folding wardrobe. The next and largest group are the lesser Embassy officials and Foreign Aid men, who travel in moderately luxurious parties numbering their porters by the dozen and forgoing lavatories and wardrobes – but bringing tents, tables, chairs, beds, larders and cellars; and then there are the hoi-polloi, who are too poor – or too sensible – to do anything but rough it.
I had planned to go alone on my own short trek, but Rudi Weissmuller, a Swiss friend who is familiar with the area, told me that this would be unfair on the locals because during winter they have no surplus food to sell to travellers; he also pointed out that I would be permanently lost without a guide, and advised me to go to the notorious Globe Restaurant to look for a Sherpa who would be willing to ac
t as both porter and guide.
Had I not by now been semi-integrated in the Nepal province of Tibland it would have been difficult to find such a combination; the Sherpas are being a little spoiled by the Big Time Expeditions and are no longer very enthusiastic about ambling in the foothills with ordinary mortals. However, through Tibetan friends I contacted Mingmar, a twenty-four-year-old native of Namche Bazaar who agreed to come with me for eight shillings a day – by Sherpa standards a sensationally low wage.
A month ago I applied to the Singha Durbar for a trekking permit, but inevitably I have spent most of my time during the past few days prising it out of the relevant Government Department. In addition to losing my application form these caricatures of bureaucrats had also lost my passport, so I just hung around the office waiting... and waiting... and waiting... until at last I became a Public Nuisance. Then someone bestirred himself to excavate a mound of documents (doubtless losing several other passports in the process), and a battered green booklet inscribed EIRE eventually appeared. This was at once seized on by me – to the great distress of the clerk, who insisted that it belonged to a Czech stocking-manufacturer – and in due course the permit was grudgingly issued by a more senior clerk, who reprimanded me for not having made my application until the last moment.
This morning I again met Mingmar and gave him money to buy rice, salt, tea and a saucepan. He seemed considerably agitated by the scantiness of these provisions – not on his own behalf, but on mine – nor was he much consoled to hear that I myself was bringing twelve tins of sardines, twelve packets of dried soup, a tin of coffee, two mugs, two spoons and a knife. This was still not the sort of provisioning and equipment he expected of even the humblest Western trekker, and despite my assurance that I perversely enjoy hardship he remained convinced that I would fold up en route for lack of comfort.
Yesterday I spent an unforgettable afternoon wandering around Patan – beyond a doubt my favourite part of the valley. To me there is by now something very special about this disintegrating yet still lovely city; familiarity with the most obscure of its filthy little alleys and a positive sense of friendship towards its time-worn, grotesquely carved animal-gods has changed my original excited admiration to a warm affection.
The rice harvesting is at its height week and as I strolled around the narrow street, feeling the local magic rising like a tide to engulf me, the air was hazily golden with threshing dust. Now Patan is to be seen in the role of a big farming-village and even in the Durbar Square, where a prim group of guided tourists was pretending not to notice the temple-god’s penis, I had to pick my way carefully between mounds of glowing grain and stacks of straw. Most people quit all other work at harvest-time and return home to help – a delightfully sane arrangement of priorities which does nothing to speed the modernisation of Nepal. While the men cut the crop in the field the women attend to the threshing, and outside every house along every street the family’s rice supply for the next year was being heaped. Normally the surplus is sold to bazaar merchants, but unhappily there will be little surplus this year, for Kathmandu has also had vile weather during the last fortnight.
Perhaps there won’t be time for me to visit Patan again, but I could have no lovelier a final memory than yesterday’s, when the streets were one vast sun-burnished granary, with crimson skirts swirling above golden grain, and sheaves of shining straw being balanced on raven heads, and the untidy music of swinging jewellery sounding faintly as lithe bodies displayed a timeless art.
10 NOVEMBER – TRISULI
A typical Nepalese day, with lots more waiting. Mingmar and I had arranged to meet at 6 a.m., on a certain bridge; but we each went to a wrong one – unfortunately not the same wrong one – and by the time we had got ourselves sorted out it was 9 a.m.
Trisuli is a valley north-west of Kathmandu where the Indian Aid Mission is now working on a colossal hydro-electric project. A rough forty-mile track has been hacked out across the mountain and every day an incredible number of heavy, battered trucks carry machinery, piping and cement to the work-site. To my annoyance Mingmar decided that we would do the first stage of our trek – in what he most misleadingly described as ‘comfort’ – by taking a truck to Trisuli. I argued that my conception of a Himalayan trek did not include rides in motor vehicles; but it is against modern Sherpa principles to walk one yard further than is absolutely necessary, so I soon gave in and we set out for Balaju, the suburb of Kathmandu from which the Trisuli track begins.
This is the industrial area of the valley, where foreign aid has already done its worst and produced incongruous little factories, schools and blocks of ‘workers’ flats – not to mention a deep-freeze plant with a notice advising foreigners to book space for storing their PERCIABLE goods; even in the context it took me a few moments to decipher that one.
We waited here by the roadside for over an hour, during which I became more and more restive. It is easy to wait patiently when a situation is beyond one’s control, but to sit around pointlessly when one could be happily walking into the hills is very galling indeed. Yet Sherpas are as obstinate as Tibetans, and it would have been impossible to convince Mingmar that some people do enjoy walking.
When a cement truck finally appeared we joined the twenty other passengers after a prolonged haggle about fares; obviously, though his own purse was not affected, it was a point of honour with Mingmar to secure the lowest possible rate from the Sikh driver. We then drove a few hundred yards up the village street, which is being newly paved, but soon our way was blocked by an ancient steamroller that looked as though it had been abducted from some Museum of Early Machinery. This fascinating object, having expired on the narrowest section of the embryonic road, was now resisting all attempts to push, tow or otherwise move it out of the way. Occasionally a scowling young Indian with set jaw appeared from somewhere, shinned up to the driver’s seat and struggled violently with whatever it is that makes ancient steam-rollers roll; but nothing ever happened.
Meanwhile our driver was having trouble with the police, who could not make up their minds whether we should proceed to Trisuli (steamrollers permitting) immediately or at 5 o’clock this afternoon. (It was not clear to me why the police were in control of our apparently innocent movements: but I have long since ceased to be surprised by the quirks of Nepalese officialdom.) No less than three times all twenty-two passengers and their luggage were moved out of the truck, and back into the truck, as the police vacillated. One feels that Lewis Carroll must have secretly visited Nepal; a strong ‘Alice’ atmosphere now enveloped the whole scene, and to Mingmar’s alarm I succumbed to an uncontrollable giggling fit when, for the third time, we were ordered back into the truck.
At this point an Indian Senior Engineer arrived at the scene of the breakdown and did something so drastic that the steamroller gave a scream of terror, emitted unbelievable clouds of steam and moved at terrifying speed down the steep hill, grazing the side of our truck as it passed. Fortunately this development coincided with a police mood favouring our immediate departure, so off we went at full speed – 10 m.p.h. – up the hill over the half-made road.
One suspects Sikh drivers of fiddling their loads so that they can make a good profit on carrying passengers and our covered truck was only one quarter full of cement sacks; but, as these constitute a most unpleasant cargo with which to travel, I soon climbed out on to the roof of the cab and hung on there, obtaining splendid though terrifying views for most of the forty-six mile, six-hour journey.
This track makes the Rajpath look like the M1 and, as we crawled along, I reflected yet again on the unlikelihood of Nepal ever having a conventional network of roads, or of China ever wanting to annex a country that could be of no possible use, either agriculturally or industrially, to anyone. There is only one Himalayan range in the world, much of which happens to be right here in Nepal, and even the ingenuity of mid-twentieth-century technologists can do very little about it. The Chinese have just spent four million pounds on building their
sixty-five-mile dirt track ‘strategic highway’ from Kathmandu to Kodari – on the Tibetan frontier – and no doubt they regard this final link in the Lhasa–India road as being worth every penny of these four millions; but the building, and even more the maintaining of commercial roads throughout landsliding Nepal is never likely to be considered economic by any government.
As we left Balaju I was brooding morbidly on yesterday’s American jet crash, in relation to our flight home; but before we had travelled far on this track I could only think how very slim my chances were of ever again boarding an aeroplane. The snag is that when sitting in a corner of the box on a cab-roof one’s seat is projecting beyond the wheels – which are only a matter of inches from the often crumbling verge – so at hairpin bends one imagines repeatedly that the lumbering vehicle is about to go over the edge. Recently I have been congratulating myself on having an improved head for heights but, though it is true that I no longer even notice 1,000-foot drops, and am only mildly impressed by 2,000-foot drops, I do still take fright on finding myself poised over 4,000-foot abysses while being driven by a slightly inebriated Sikh. Yet when I had adjusted to the singularity of this road – which is not to be compared with anything I have ever seen elsewhere – it became paradoxically soothing to go swinging around mountain after mountain, hour after hour; but the jolting was hellish, and tonight my whole body feels as though it had been put through a mangle. Such journeys are not the best sort of preparation for strenuous treks.
The soil in this area appears to be much poorer than around Pokhara. The main crops are millet and maize, but three-quarters of the land is an uncultivable – though gloriously beautiful – mixture of rock and forest.
During the day several trucks and two jeepfuls of Indian engineers came towards us en route for Kathmandu, and during the complicated manoeuvrings that have to be executed before vehicles can pass each other here our lorry went axle-deep into soft mud at the cliff-side of the track. Obviously there was going to be a long delay, while the more able-bodied passengers freed the vehicle with spades borrowed from local peasants, so I suggested to Mingmar that we should walk the remaining ten miles to Trisuli Bazaar: but the idea was spurned. I then briefly considered going on alone; however, Nepal being Nepal, the truck could suddenly take a fancy to return to Kathmandu with Mingmar and most of my kit on board – or some other inconceivable catastrophe might occur to prevent us from ever meeting again in this life.
House of Snow Page 9