House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  It has been a day much like any other, though there are occasional variations. On the 10th day of some of the Nepali months one of a group of five priests called the Pancha Buddha perform a special puja with me called Dasami Puja. These are five priests of the Bajracharya caste representing the “Five Buddhas” that are seen everywhere in the Kathmandu Valley: particularly painted over doorways and on stupas, large and small. Each of them has his own colour and, when on a stupa, each faces one of the cardinal points, except for Vairochana who is usually considered to be at the centre (though on some of the larger stupas, like Suwayambunath, he faces just south of east). One of their human representations comes every morning to Kumari Che for a puja in a special room called the Agan Kota, but the only one that involves me is Dasami Puja. I can never differentiate between them, and think of all of them as “Guruju”.2

  On a Saturday, a holiday for everyone else, I will be busier with worshippers – there might be twenty or more – and there will be no shortage of playmates since there is no school that day. I have little to do during the day, everyone looks up to me, and hardly anyone ever tells me what I can and can’t do. But sometimes I am lonely, and of course I am always looking forward to those 13 occasions during the year when I get to go outside my temple.

  1 Dai is Nepal for elder brother.

  2 Books and articles always say that they are involved in the Kumari selection process, but as far as I know, this is not true.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  Sushma Joshi

  Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. End of the World, her book of short stories, was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2009. Her other published works include The Prediction and Art Matters. Her non-fiction reportage has appeared in Utne Reader, Ms. magazine, Z Net, The Irrawaddy, Himal Southasian, Bertelsmann Future Challenges, The Kathmandu Post, Nation Weekly magazine and other publications. In 2004, she was part of the staff at the Nation Weekly magazine (Kathmandu). Since 1997, Joshi has worked and consulted with international organizations working in social change and human rights, including the Harvard School of Public Health (Harvard University), UNDP, UNICEF, Integrated Center for Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Chemonics/USAID, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

  AFTER THE FLOODS

  Jethi died on one of those monsoon nights when the rains come with such force ordinary people give up any hope for salvation and wait for the end to come. Sometimes the rains just raise the heat and the sting of mosquitoes and bright green shoots of rice. At other times, they raise the wrath of the rivers that lie like somnolent snakes over winter, which are awakened by the monsoon to rage over the voluptuous folds of the Mahabharat hills in a heavenly tantrum of destruction.

  For Jethi, the monsoon brought clouds with black undersides, streaked with innocent silver looks of eventuality. Then the clouds erupted into a storm that went on for three days, sweeping down through the river that swallowed her house, the firewood in her rafters, her children and with it, also herself.

  Kamala was in Kathmandu when she heard the news. A stooped, weary man, wearing a patched waistcoat and carrying a dusty green army bag, arrived at her doorstep one morning. Kamala caught a glimpse of him through the marigold bushes. She had seen his face before, but she couldn’t remember who he was. She ran to unlatch the gate.

  “Are you Kamala from Seto-Khola?” he asked in a gruff voice, peering at her with penetrating eyes set under white bushy eyebrows. “Daughter of Habaldar Saila?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” Kamala brought the palms of her hands together in a namaste. As soon as he spoke, she recognized him. How could she forget! It was the Old Man himself, Damar-Bahadur. Kamala had spent days climbing his trees and stealing his guavas.

  He set down his ancient green Army bag, and extended his hand. Kamala looked down at the envelope he held out. A neat and cursive hand had written “Kamala” with a big flourish in the middle.

  “Your grandson used to walk to school with me. Please come in.” Kamala took the letter from him. The old man smiled, revealing missing teeth.

  “And you and Jethi used to steal guavas from me,” he said, arching his brows and looking at her with shrewd eyes. “Don’t think I didn’t know it was you and your sister. I saw you all the time climbing the trees.”

  “We were bad children,” Kamala said, smiling. To her relief, the old man seemed to harbour no grudges. The old man had had a large number of guava trees on his land. He had, to their young eyes, appeared to be a rich man. “Here, please sit down on this mat. I’ll get some tea.” The old man lowered his body on the small concrete steps, unwrapped his waist-cloth and extracted his beedi. A puff of acrid smoke followed Kamala as she went back into the kitchen to make tea.

  “And how is everybody in the village?” Kamala asked, setting down the hot tin glass. She had lived in Kathmandu since the flood nine years ago. Unlike Jethi, she had never gone back.

  The old man did not reply. Kamala wondered if he had become senile, or if he was losing his hearing. “Everybody’s well,” he replied after a moment. He watched steam rise from the tea. He picked up the glass with caution, blew on the hot liquid, and took a long, leisurely slurp.

  “Did you come to visit Maila Dai?” Kamala asked. Maila was his second son, a soldier in the Royal Nepal Army.

  “I came down to visit Maila. Your brothers, those twins, they asked me to bring this letter to you. Had a tough time finding you too, with all these directions. But after all that walking, here you are.” He spit a stray tea leaf from his mouth.

  “Is there enough sugar?” Kanchi asked. She wanted to take away his tiredness, give him a drink that would make him feel at home.

  “Enough,” the old man replied. Kamala looked at his familiar profile. Life had taken its toll on him. Almost a decade had gone by since she saw him. Ten years later, he had a stoop in his shoulder and a thick nest of lines on his face. Wrinkles radiated in long arcs from the corner of his eyes into his leathery, brown cheeks. There was a look of sorrow in his eyes she could not remember.

  “How were the crops this year?” Kamala had an intuition that he came carrying bad news.

  “There were no rains last year, Bahini. This year, the rains carried away everything,” the old man replied, sighing. He blinked, put down the glass that he was cupping with both hands, noisily blew his nose between two fingers, and flicked snot on the grass. He wiped his hands on the grass. Kamala felt dread gather in a tight knot inside her stomach. She could tell, without opening the letter, what it would say.

  “I remember the floods. I was nine years old then.” Kamala was stalling for time. She did not want the Old Man to tell her anything. She did not want to open the envelope.

  The old man nodded, “I remember. We lost many people in that one. But people never learn. We should have planted the entire hillside with trees after that landslide, we knew those hills were fragile. Instead, there was cutting, and more cutting. Then the lumber people came, and they took half the hillside with them. Last year, there were no trees left.”

  *

  Kamala remembered the day of the flood as if it was yesterday. She had spent the day with Jethi, her sister, stealing guavas from the Old Man.

  “Kamala! Now! The Old Man has gone down the hill to get his hoe. Go now!” her sister’s urgent voice sent her slithering up the trunk with gecko-like speed. Kamala swung on the branches like a monkey, shaking the fruit free for her sister to collect before the Old Man could wind his way up the curve of the hill again. Kamala was nine, thin and wiry. She ran around the hills with skinned knees and tangled brown hair, climbing trees as well as any of her five brothers. Jethi was fourteen, but she might as well still be a child, the way she behaved, leading her little brothers and sister on to childish pranks. The Old Man stood there, shaking his hands in impotent fury as he watched Kamala scamper down the tree, and run down the hill with the stolen treasure. Jethi and Kamala never l
et the guavas ripen. They didn’t know what could happen to the fetal green fruit the next day: an entire season’s worth could be wiped out in a day by the crows, or the hail, or the little boys down the hill.

  The two girls looked at each other as they ate, and ate, all the raw possibilities out of the guavas. The slivers of astringent rind, the slippery, hard seeds, the pungent forbidden taste. The difficulty lay in knowing when to climb the tree to get the raw guavas before they were claimed by others. After that, the hardest thing was to extract the fragments of white seeds that sank like soft pebbles to their hiding places between the teeth.

  Jethi and Kamala, after eating half the loot, hid the rest on their waistcloth, and rejoined the other children in the forest. The clouds gathered above them, thick and black. It had been raining hard for the past week. They sang as they chopped the firewood, thinking more rain meant a better harvest.

  Jethi led the chorus, “pani paryo, asina jharyo.” Because Jethi was Jethi and she couldn’t resist, she made her voice as gruff and solemn as Dambar Bahadur until they were all laughing, even Dambar Bahadur’s sons.

  “You better watch out for Kamala, Didi. She was caught stealing guavas again,” the women warned her mother as they stopped to fill their pots at the spring. Her mother, who was trying to bathe the twins at the small spring, clipped Kamala in the ear. “Aiya!” said Kamala, skipping out of the way. How come the women always saw her, not Jethi, committing these crimes? But unwilling to implicate her sister, she did not say a word.

  The twins slipped in and out of her mother’s hands with the slippery speed of naked seven-year-olds, screaming and beating their hands on their chests, soaking everyone in the process. “Jethi, you bathe these devils,” her mother said, giving up in disgust. She stooped to squeeze the water out of the ends of her dhoti. “I have to help with the planting.” The two sisters winked at each other as they felt the round fruit, wrapped securely in folds of cloth, pressing into their stomachs. That was the last time Kamala ever stole a guava.

  That night, the rain erupted, beating down with a force beyond comprehension. It was the force that Kamala had always known was out there but was not prepared to meet with such suddenness. Who had woken her up that night in the confusion of warm bodies and anguished voices? All she could remember was the sudden panic, chaos, the hands pulling her from her bed towards the door. The sound of thunder and hail was deafening, but above it she could still hear her mother. “Kamli? Kamleeee!” her mother shrieked. “Wake up right now! We are going!”

  “Ama!” Kamala wailed. Blinded by the rain, she stumbled up the muddy, narrow path. But the rain was lashing down and her mother was already far ahead in the distance, holding the twins’ hands. “Walk carefully, Kamli. I know you are careful, Kamli. Be careful,” her mother yelled out to her, her voice lashing in and out of the rain, until it sounded like: Kamli, careful, careful... and then she saw the mother shape disappearing around a bend in the hill.

  Kamala gasped for breath. Her heart thudded like a stone inside her body as she ran to keep up with the shapes in front of her. The path was made treacherously slippery by the rain. A path that lay like a liquid red snake winding upwards towards the invisible sky, and downwards towards the pebbled, stony hardness of the riverbed. One slip of the foot, one loose root, one moment of indecision and her body could hurtle towards the crashing sounds and the white froth of the Seti river.

  The rain was blinding. She felt the plants on either side of her, and she clutched at them, pulling herself up without seeing where she was going. Weeds, stinging nettles, brambles all pulled her up as she frantically clutched at them. She made her way up, the tears falling and blinding her as much as the rain, her breath in ragged gasps, her legs whipped and bloodied by the branches, instinctively following the shadow of her sister before her. She knew at the top of this steep wooded hill was a pine forest where her family was headed. At the moment, she could not imagine if she would get there.

  The moment was so uprooted, blowing in the wind, whipped by the rain, freezing in the cold, that she almost wanted to give up and sit down on the path and let go of her grip. She saw herself washed away, like a leaf, down the hill into the frothing river, where the crest of waves, and the spirits hiding in them, would jump to pull her in. Then she would become a small fish swimming in the white foam. That is when the cry had been torn out of her, a thin wail: “Jethi!”

  “Aija, Kamala. Come on!” Jethi yelled to her from inside the rain. She was scrambling up with all the wiry strength of her fourteen-year-old body. “It’s only a bit farther away. Come on!”

  So she climbed a bit more. Climbed, and climbed, until her legs started trembling with red-hot pain. “Jethi!” she cried again, in the sudden terror of knowing one is nine years old, and only a few feet ahead of death. “Jetttttttthiii!”

  The voice of her older sister came down from the greyness above, with all the urgency of sisters who are caught in the conspiracy to steal raw fruit from the neighbour’s tree. “Come on, come on. I see a guava tree over here. Come on, we can pick a few!!”

  The voice of her sister floated out of the dream-like unreality of the rain. She was singing! “Pani paryo, asina jharyo...” Its raining, the hail is coming down.

  Jethi sounded so solemn, imitating her Dambar Bahadur’s gruff voice, her voice only occasionally fading in the rain, that Kamala gave a tired little giggle in between her sobs. Her sister could always make her laugh with her clowning, but now she just wanted to sit down and rest. As she started to look around for a rock to sit on, she saw the flash of her sister’s head turning back.

  “Gham pani, gham pani, syal ko biha, kookur janti, biralo

  bahun,” Jethi’s voice rang out.

  Sun and rain, sun and rain,

  it’s the fox’s wedding.

  The dogs lead the procession,

  the cat is the priest.

  Jethi’s voice was cheerful, as if she was on an adventure on a sunlit day, as she walked ahead with the sack of rice on her back.

  “Jethi, I can’t go any farther, you go ahead, I’ll come meet you later,” Kamala heard herself say, before she lay down in the blessed coolness of mud, and sighed. Her voice was instantly lost in the deafening sound of the rain. When she felt the hands of her sister on her body, she knew she had almost made it.

  Kamala was told later than Jethi, abandoning the rice that she was carrying in her basket, put her sister inside it, carried her up for the rest of the way up the hill.

  Their old grandmother, eighty years old and brittle as a winter branch, told them: “Go, all of you. I’m going back to take care of the deuta.” She had walked back, slowly, towards the family shrine when Kamala’s father picked her up and put her over his shoulders, carrying her up the hillside. She died, three days later, from the shock of the cold.

  The rest of the family survived. They had been one of the few lucky families who had managed to get up on higher ground on time. Most of the people living below had been swept away before they could walk halfway up the hill.

  It rained for the next five days, as if the rain was hell bent on washing them out from under the pine trees, where they ran for shelter. The rain was ferocious, and the pine trees swayed and creaked oeeeee, ooeee, mournfully, as if all the ghosts of the hillside had come to taunt them in their misery. Her father and uncles knew from the scramblings of their own childhood that there was an overhanging rock in the middle of the forest that would take a hundred years of rain to wash away, and that’s where they stayed for the next fourteen days.

  They ate nothing but mushrooms, scavenged from the ground, for two weeks. Just raw mushrooms, straight from the ground, like animals. She could still recall that humid-grey, earthy taste in her mouth when she thought about it.

  At night, the big gaping scar in the hillside came alive with mournful cries. Sounds multiplied and echoed, and the family, stuck on top of the hill, almost went mad at night trying to sleep. Hundreds of people must have died in the flood, the
y knew. This meant that they were right next to the spirits of the dead who had never been properly cremated. They must be wandering, howling with rage and misery, in the chasm between the hilltop where they rested, and the base of the next hill, where their village used to be. Bir Masan, the keeper of cremation grounds, was out there somewhere, prowling through the dead bodies. Meeting him would bring death and destruction. Even meeting his shadow would make a person deathly sick. So Kamala’s family huddled in a frightened cluster, listening to the echoes and whisperings, the muted screams and the forlorn crying of those who had been swept away.

  The rain abated two weeks later. With the brightness of the blue sky had come the knowledge that half the terraced hillside that they had lived on for centuries had been washed away. There was a big jagged hole, as far as the eye could see, tearing like a scar across the surface where their village once used to be. The only thing that remained out of those hillsides full of corn, twenty-three houses, and the two hundred and sixteen people, was that big hole, mud and emptiness.

  “We’ve lost all our land.” Her eldest uncle had been the first one to say it. The others sat in silence around the fire, which they had finally managed to light out of the wet pine branches, studded with globs of resin. The smoke rose into the light blue of the early morning sky. “What are we going to do?”

  “The women and children can go stay in their maita,” Kamala’s father suggested. The last time Kamala had visited her maternal grandmother, the old woman had fed her delicacy after delicacy, from fried goat liver to rice pudding, from sel doughnuts to fresh persimmons, all of which the old woman had set aside in anticipation of the visit of her daughter and two granddaughters. Kamala felt her mouth watering as she remembered the food. The old lady had been delighted to see her daughter’s youngest girl for the first time. So much so that she had even given Kamala a pair of gold earrings, made of heavy gold, from her old, battered trunk, whispering to her not to show the other children because they might be jealous. The earrings, big ovals of solid gold, had never left her earlobes. “Yes, lets go!” Kamala said delightedly, when she heard her father suggesting another visit to her mamaghar.