House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  On our way back, the insalubrious suburbs, and the congested roads that take us through them, seem to bear out Kunda’s darker prophecies, but life is not all gloom.

  He tells the story of sitting next to Prince Charles (of whom he has a very high opinion) at a Nepali banquet. Halfway through the meal Charles upended a full portion of rice wine into his lap.

  “Great embarrassment all round?”

  “No, everything was fine.” Kunda smiles at the recollection. “I told him that was the way we do our dry cleaning here.”

  FORGET KATHMANDU

  Manjushree Thapa

  Manjushree Thapa is a Nepali author, translator and editor. She grew up in Nepal, Canada and the United States and began writing after completing a BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. She later graduated with a Masters in English from the University of Washington. Manjushree’s essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, London Review of Books, Newsweek and other publications in the US, UK, Canada, India and Nepal. She has written several non-fiction titles including Forget Kathmandu, which was a finalist in the Lettre Ulysses award in 2006, The Lives We Have Lost and A boy from Siklis. Her novels include The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight and All of Us in Our Own Lives. She lives in Toronto.

  THE DIARY OF A BAFFLED BOURGEOIS

  There came a time, at last, when it was no longer tenable for the Kathmandu bourgeois to deny the reality that democracy was failing. For me this came about eight months before the June 2001 massacre at the royal palace. It occurred to me that I did not like my ignorance about what was happening outside Kathmandu. I, a writer, a bourgeois with aspirations to being an intellectual, was perpetually lost, living in a mist of anxiety that would not clear. I was unhappy, and I was unhappy about being unhappy, for I knew that in the scheme of things I was immensely fortunate, and so should be happy.

  Yet I found that every public disaster had the power to hollow me out. I was like a bad-politics junkie, and it felt as though bad politics were ruining my life. I kept up with what was happening in the country as much as any person, but watching the television news or reading the papers or listening to the radio left me feeling defeated – personally, intimately, as though tragedy had struck me or someone I loved.

  There was no objective reason for this despair, because my own personal and professional life was quiet. I kept my contract with society. Like any proper bourgeois citizen I worked, I paid taxes, I contributed to causes that I believed in, I fulfilled my family duties, I communed with friends. I roughly functioned as I was supposed to. But for reasons I could not understand, my days were getting arduous. I kept seeing signs of calamity. Something bad would happen. I was not prepared for it.

  My dread manifested itself as emotional malaise, a lagging in the heart. I would wake up, and before starting my work I would read the newspapers and feel fatigued before my day. I would scan some headline – the government-owned Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation had decided to lease a B-767 jet from Lauda Air. The mind is relentless – it fixates on details, it charts out scenarios, it mulls over implications. In leasing the Lauda Air jet, the RNAC was ignoring a directive by the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. To lease the jet, the RNAC would have to offer a bank guarantee worth over a million US dollars, and an advance of one month’s rent. Could the country afford this?

  Why should that matter so much to me?

  You’re using everything as an excuse to be miserable, I would chide myself. But then I would pick up the papers and read something else, and my reason would dissipate. I began to believe, irrationally, that if something good happened in government all my troubles would go. If I could be sure that the country would not fall apart, I could get on with my life. I even thought: Maybe if G.P. Koirala resigns as prime minister I can be happy again. I knew this was ridiculous. But since 1990 G.P. Koirala had been prime minister four times, and the country had spent his leadership years in despair.

  Didn’t he know that the royalists were counting on democracy to fail? Conservatives said, “You call the Congress a party of democrats? It’s the private den of the Koirala clan!” I was never an ardent supporter of the Congress, but like most Nepalis, I had expected much from the party. But it, like the UML, had proved wanting. Not only that, the future of the political parties also looked bleak. Not having studied at the local college campuses, I had no feeling for the Congress or UML student unions, and thought the politicization of students a bad thing: Young people should study. Yet it was true that the students had forced the referendum of 1980. Without student activism in 1990, there would have been no democracy. But today’s student activists seemed to act robotically on their party leaders’ orders, flooding the streets for every last power struggle, but never pressuring them to take seriously the scores of honest issues that meanwhile lay ignored.

  *

  Amid the pell-mell of the days, I sometimes found it so hard to keep my mood up that I wondered if I should get a pill that would make me cheerful. Sometimes on my errands I passed the house of a psychiatrist. I did not know him well, but exchanged greetings with his wife and children when we met on the street. The doctor was successful – he drove a car – and appeared amiable and informal. He met patients at a clinic in his house. I wondered if I should go there. His patients, coming out of his gates, were skeletal teenage girls with their families or husbands, or elderly men and women being led by the hand, or couples glancing nervously around as they got on their motorcycles. They looked like people with genuine problems. What was my business among them?

  I decided instead to take up meditation, and was lucky to find a teacher who moved through Tibetan Buddhist rituals lightly, instructing students on techniques to control the mind. I read doggedly cheerful self-help books that had become available of late in Kathmandu’s bookshops. I also joined a gym where all the machines functioned, and hot water was available even in winter (when Kathmandu’s houses were all dry) and I began to feel that maybe I would be all right.

  *

  The problem was, my happiness tended to last only as long as I was meditating or on the treadmill. When I went back to my room and began to write a story, the anxiety would return. Perhaps this was the problem – writing was so interior; I was stuck inside myself, being of no use to society. I spent too many hours alone, uselessly, before a computer in a room that got no sun.

  When I did go out on work or errands, I would see the middle-class youth of Kathmandu all looking strangely ebullient, as though they did not know that their country was in crisis. Young women were baring belly buttons and enhancing their height with platform shoes; young men styled their hair and wore body-hugging T-shirts. I was glad that they were not despairing, and wondered if I could be like them – not indifferent to the problems around me, but able to be blithe, nevertheless, on a day-to-day basis.

  It was, I knew, pathetic to be disabled the way I was. I was not, myself, politically engaged. I had watched the People’s Movement from the side, and to be honest would not die if democracy were to fail. People do live in dictatorships of all kinds – perhaps they do not live fully, but they do live. And if, say, the king were to effect a royal coup, would I go to jail to bring back democracy, spend five, seven, ten, even eighteen years for this cause? Probably not. I felt passionately that the past decade had fostered many important, positive changes, but I couldn’t always say what these were.

  And sometimes positive things felt negative. For instance, groups were forming everywhere to organize their interests. Strikes had become increasingly common. In December 2000, hotel employees started demanding a mandatory 10 per cent service charge. Hotel owners refused them, and the government was slow in helping to negotiate a deal, and so all of Kathmandu’s hotels closed on 11 December, forcing tourists to move into tents, private houses and makeshift accommodations. Cancellations poured in as a result, and many trekking companies went under.

  My work slowed down as the rest of Kathmandu slowed down. I wrote for hours every day,
yet I always felt that I was falling behind or forgetting something important. It took a lot just to start writing after reading the morning papers. Maybe reading newspapers was the problem. They disturbed me. On 22 December, the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee summoned G.P. Koirala as part of its investigation into possible corruption in the Lauda Air jet lease, and I was wearied just to read the prime minister taking a high moral tone in response.

  It felt like trouble was coming from every direction. On the day after Christmas, in the year 2000, violence erupted in Kathmandu. Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan had apparently said something derogatory about Nepal. Students affiliated with the left parties were marching to the Indian embassy with a letter of protest when, inexplicably, riots broke out, at the end of which four people were killed and 180 injured. It was bizarre. Who cared what an Indian actor thought of us? Not anyone I knew. Yet, when I went out that afternoon, the streets were littered with stones and rubber tyres burned at the junctions, befouling the air. Similar riots took place around the country. By day’s end, the government had blocked transmission of Indian TV channels. The Nepal Motion Picture Association and the Film Artists Association of Nepal had condemned Hrithik Roshan. The Gopi Krishna cinema hall declared that it would never screen his movies. Scores of irate press releases flooded the newspaper offices.

  When the situation calmed, reports eventually emerged that the monarchist coterie of the king’s youngest brother, Dhirendra Shah, had incited much of the rioting, alongside the Maoists.

  So it wasn’t just negative thinking. Malevolent forces were indeed coalescing against democracy, and the people – caught up in their small lives – would be left watching as their rights vanished one by one. After the Hrithik Roshan riots, I no longer wanted to live in Nepal. There were more riots the next day, and people of Indian origin were attacked. Walking on the streets, I became very conscious of looking like a hill Nepali; I suddenly loathed my mainstream features. Five hundred demonstrators and 80 police were injured by day’s end. A Nepali actor, who had once offered to shoot the prime minister if he got orders from Dhirendra Shah, was one of the rioters arrested. The government announced a ban on all Hrithik Roshan movies. Hrithik Roshan, for his part, denied that he had said anything bad about Nepal – and protested that in fact he loved his Nepali servants. Scores of press releases were issued against him that day as well.

  The riots stopped after it was verified, the next day, that Hrithik Roshan really hadn’t said anything against Nepalis. So what had these riots been about? Nobody knew.

  It was like that. We never knew where to look for trouble, and once we sighted signs, we never knew how to interpret them. We wanted to see all the bright, good things that democracy had brought us, but in Kathmandu the party leaders were forever bickering. Was this just a part of democratic culture, and was it right? On 28 December, 56 of the Congress party’s 113 members of Parliament started an inter-party no-confidence motion against G.P. Koirala. The motion was led by the Congress’s “rebel” faction head, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai. G.P. Koirala survived the motion, but only by making party members vote in an open ballot, without secrecy. Was this right?

  The opposition parties were no better. Nine leftist parties, not including the UML, called for a two-day nationwide general strike. Was this democratic culture? General strikes, or bandhs, had become common by now. This one took place on 1 and 2 January 2001 – that was how we in Kathmandu started the new year, with no traffic on the streets and most shops and businesses closed. The tourism industry was hit hard by cancellations. Businesses were all beginning to flounder.

  *

  One day I thought: It is not fair to say that I blame bad politics for my unhappiness; my happiness actually is derailed by bad politics. I was keeping up with my meditation and exercise. I had even decided to take seriously to gardening, to tend to flowers. I also longed to visit my teacher at his monastery atop a hill on the outskirts of Kathmandu where the winds carried the fragrance of wild grasses and sunshine. Then suddenly it would all seem pointless: Any effort to make a life here would prove futile; the country was heading for all-out war.

  In mid January, G.P. Koirala won the informal approval of the king to create an Armed Police Force to fight the Maoists. He said the Nepal Police had not been armed adequately, nor trained enough, to lead the counter-insurgency. Even so, their brutality during the Romeo and Kilo Sierra 2 operations had turned vast swathes of rhe countryside against “bourgeois” parliamentary democracy. Wouldn’t a more lethal police body just spawn more antagonism? G.P. Koirala thought not. He also hoped that by creating an Armed Police Force he could avoid deploying the Royal Nepal Army, whose first loyalties – many felt – were to the king and only then to the country. If the army got involved, democracy would be lost.

  It wasn’t just I who was controlled by public events; many of my friends, too, were in the same state. We were always looking for signs. Signs that our own lives – our nice, orderly lives – might eventually be compromised by all this trouble.

  Around mid January, the Maoists issued the “Prachanda Path” – their guiding principles. Prachanda – who many still believed did not even exist – was now said to be heading the CPN (Maoist). Surely this couldn’t bode well. Some friends called, their voices thin with panic. I knew we shouldn’t be so fraught, but the world was going badly, and I felt we had to keep watch.

  On 5 February, opposition parties demanded G.P. Koirala’s resignation over the Lauda Air lease scandal, and over the government’s inability to curb Maoist violence. Undeterred, G.P. Koirala formed a 37-member cabinet two days later. Five people had just died in a Maoist attack in Surkhet, west Nepal, in an ambush on the Chief Justice’s convoy. The Chief Justice had survived only by chance. Immediately upon the formation of G.P. Koirala’s cabinet, three people were reported killed in a clash between the police and the Maoists. Barely a week later, the Maoists exploded a bomb in Achham, west Nepal, killing two children and injuring 11 adults.

  Life in Kathmandu was also growing chaotic. The Federation of Nepalese Transport Entrepreneurs organized a two-day strike of public buses and microbuses in response to student demands for a 50 per cent discount on fares, and a recent ban on vehicles more than 20 years old. The streets swarmed with people walking to work.

  The day after the strike, 12 February, was the first day of the 19th session of Parliament, the winter “working” session in which bills got passed. There was always a buzz at the start of these sessions. They were what the 1990 People’s Movement had been for, after all. Thirteen bills were pending from previous parliamentary sessions, and two new bills were to be introduced. One was a bill granting women limited rights to inheritance and abortion, and the other a bill to govern political parties. The women’s rights bill, in particular, was immensely urgent. It had finally been tabled after years of delay, and though it granted only limited rights to women (women could inherit parental property but had to return it to their families upon marriage; only married women could obtain abortions, that too with the consent of their husbands), these limited rights were great improvements on the current laws.

  But the session was to end without a single full day of work. On the first day, as the Speaker of the House Taranath Ranabhat struck the gavel, opening the session, a UML member of Parliament took the floor and launched on a tirade against G.P. Koirala. Another UML MP called for a boycott of Parliament. After two and a half hours of debate, all of the UML MPs marched out of the House, followed by those of all the other opposition parties, almost half the total strength of Parliament.

  On the winter session’s second day, as soon as the Speaker opened the meeting, MPs from every opposition party except for the Nepal Sadbhavana Party circled the rostrum, chanting slogans against Prime Minister G.P. Koirala. The chanting lasted six minutes, after which the Speaker adjourned the meeting.

  The following day the same thing happened. Members of Parliament even exchanged fisticuffs.

  The boycott of Parliam
ent continued for days. Wasn’t the UML discrediting democracy? Weren’t all the parties doing so? On 16 February, G.P. Koirala met with the opposition parties in an effort to negotiate a way past the stalemate, but they continued to demand that he resign, and this he would not do. Three days later, a brawl erupted in Parliament as the minister for culture, tourism and civil aviation tried to present a government defence of the Lauda Air jet lease. As he headed to the rostrum, a UML member of Parliament pulled him back. The two exchanged blows, then others joined in the fracas and the meeting was adjourned.

  The dysfunction of Parliament was making the Maoists look justified in criticizing “bourgeois” parliamentary democracy. The political parties were behaving irresponsibly. And the bourgeoisie was beginning to want to be saved by the king... An old pattern was repeating itself.

  King-watching became an obsession all over again. On 26 February, King Birendra went on a state visit to China, and while members of Parliament wrangled, the media focused, with much adulation, on this visit. Would the king please step in to save the country? That was the undertone of the press coverage.

  There were also reports at this time that the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation had suffered a loss of 80 million rupees during the month and a half of Lauda Air service.