House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  The boy from Banauti looked up. His chin quivered and the large, dirty-brown eyes turned wet and trembled. I sat by him. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Nests,” he said, “swallows’ nests.” He dug into the wet sand until water seeped from all sides into the rut. He dipped his palm, let the wetness run down to the fingertips and drip: solid, wet beads of sand. He arranged the beads, every drop placed with deliberation. Streets. Spires. Hedges. A temple with a dome that rose in two concentric spirals, like the domes in the books which Singapore Lahure kids brought to school. He stopped and pointed at my hands.

  I scooped water and sand, but my beads fell in uneven sizes. The boy from Banauti laughed at first. I drew outlines on the sand for the layout of my village, patted down sand for the foundations, then started over. Now the boy from Banauti watched intently, added his own drops to augment, once using a crooked finger to scoop and transplant a bead to perfect effect, changing a hut to a sentry-box by piling up a pyramid of cannonballs on the roof. Then he started laughing. I laughed with him.

  “Who works here?” He pointed to the newly finished sentry-box.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “it is a sentry-box.”

  “I know what it is,” he said. He was annoyed. “I said, Who works here?”

  It is a stupid lump of stupid wet sand, I wanted to say. Everybody else was busy shouting or jumping. Pushpa and Sujan appeared by Hari-Hara. Sujan tried to blow smoke rings. Sujan could do anything a grown-up could. “I said, Who works here?” The boy from Banauti brought a finger too close to my sentry-box with the cannonballs on the roof.

  You have to know. That is the whole point. Knowing. Exactly. Who, where, what, when. That is the point. Why. That is the point also. Otherwise you are just a stupid kid playing with wet sand. Just a stupid kid.

  The boy from Banauti was raving now. I tried to imagine his blind father’s rage. The last time we climbed to Manakamana, Mother had taken me to their home and had made me eat yogurt prepared by his father. The old man had insisted upon reading my fortune. His coarse fingers attentively hovered over the thin lines of my palms. He said good things. Then he cried. He said, “I wish my son had half the good fortune you have.” He took my face in his hands, gingerly rubbed his hand over my forehead, said I had a wide forehead, one for fortune and fame.

  The boy from Banauti knew – exactly who, where, what, when. Even the why. He was becoming more and more agitated. He had a name for each intersection of each neighbourhood, each face of the temple, the person sitting or absent from each window, everything being sold by each vendor in each derelict corner behind large warehouses. His was not a village, but a city, with a park where the king’s younger son played with his vast army of retainers while the king did what? Hold jousts and chases to find an eligible prince for his daughter. Anybody speaking calmly would need a year to finish inventing and detailing everything the boy from Banauti knew and jabbered on and on about, but it took him less time than it took for me to work up a temper.

  I kicked sand into his face. The stupid wet sand he had been playing with. I trampled down his vast city. I killed the sentry in my own sentry-box with the cannonballs on the roof. The sentry poked his head out of the tiny window, dull bayonet leading, trying to prop my foot up with a pin-prick. Then I kicked the double-spiralled temple to the face of the boy from Banauti. Although he sat there dumbstruck, his chin quivering, one hand on his throat to either stifle a scream or to bottle his breath, I knew he knew the where, when, who, how. I was the marauding why. I spread my arms wide, faced the sky and laughed maniacally.

  I quickly picked one of Pushpa’s shrivelled crayfish and chewed on it. Another. The boy from Banauti walked away. “I’ll tell your mother,” he said before disappearing behind a rock.

  *

  I left my clothes behind Pushpa’s rock and admired my toes peeking out of the water. I slipped underwater and blew bubbles, holding each pearl of air at the cusp of my mouth, watching it pull its shape from within me, leave me to rush to burst against the sky. None of the boys had returned into the pool when I sat up to breathe. Back underwater, to the place where everything was indistinct and therefore looked like bright coins. Blue and black and beige and white pebbles like coins. There is a country somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, a place which Yuva Manch Monthly writes “Did you know?” facts about, where these pebbles are riches, precious as diamonds and malachite. Malachite. The World Cup is made of gold and malachite. Did you know?

  Somebody grabbed my hair and lifted me out of the water. It was Binod, Shankar’s twin.

  “What did I do?” I screamed at him. He looked at me, puzzled, but didn’t let go of my hair. I had to use my knees to stand. Pebbles and coarse sand scraped my kneecaps.

  “Don’t sit like that in the water, you ass,” he said, “I thought you were drowning. That you’d drowned.”

  “I can hold my breath,” I said. He grabbed me by the nape and threw me to the bank.

  “Don’t go back into the water,” he said. Nobody else was around. He climbed Pushpa’s rock. I climbed after him. One roasted crayfish fell into the river when my wet toes nudged it loose. A line of pale naked buttocks jumped from rock to rock, running downriver to where Daraundi met Marshyangdi. Babaji screamed from the temple, running from one corner to another, his atrophied hand still pointing to the gods.

  “What happened?” I asked. Binod put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed the nape he had roughed but a moment ago.

  Sujan and Shankar bobbed over Daraundi’s water, racing fast towards Marshyangdi. Daraundi brought clear water, fed by glaciers, or mountain springs filtered through thousands of paddies, while Marshyangdi descended furiously, intent upon grinding together the rocks in her belly. Where Daraundi met Marshyangdi, Daraundi recoiled. Sujan was thrown back by that recoil. Shankar dived into the seam, came up for air thirty paces downstream. Everybody else ran along the river, shouting, screaming. A line of people stood on the suspension bridge and pointed this way and that, made noises that didn’t carry to where we stood. My toe slipped an inch and I lurched slightly; Binod caught me by my arm and steadied me on the rock without taking his eyes off Sujan and Shankar.

  “What is his name?” Binod asked. Whose? “The boy. You were making swallows’ nests with him. The boy from Banauti.”

  “He is my relative,” I said. I didn’t know his name.

  “He fell,” Binod said.

  Sujan and Shankar could be seen, diving, coming to the surface, riding the white water of the rivers to propel them to whirlpools that swallowed bodies. Amrit and Omkaji shouted to Sujan and Shankar. Sujan dived once more, but Shankar came to the bank. He floated on his back in a corner, one hand grabbing the rock behind him. Sujan finally climbed out of the water, but stranded himself between two granite ledges with water on either side. He crawled to a narrow bar of sand and hid his face in his hands.

  Pushpa climbed his rock, teetered with one hand on my shoulder. He brushed off the remaining crayfish into the river.

  “What was his name?” Binod asked Pushpa, who shook his head.

  “We should have asked,” Binod said sombrely. He put his hand on my shoulder and rubbed my neck. “Go home,” he said. “Go home, but don’t talk about this. Don’t mention you were here.”

  Pushpa and I buttoned our shirts in silence. I hadn’t yet learned how to tie shoelaces quickly. It took me a while. Up the hill, in the temple, Babaji was locking his arm into a wooden box suspended from the roof. “Go home,” he said perfunctorily. Pushpa threw away what remained of the cigarette, still wrapped in the syaula leaf. I wanted to stand on the edge of the bluff and read the rivers in both directions, as far as my eyes could see. Who knows when the boy from Banauti will call for help, I thought. But it felt like it had been a very long day. The most recent minutes were interminable, like the yarn on my mute uncle Madhav’s dhaka loom, looping around something not very far, anchored to the weight inside, and each thread returning, over and over, to the same pl
ace, just a slightly different spot.

  Pilgrims on the suspension bridge continued to peer into the current long after it made any sense for them to. What a day! Not even noon yet, the sun still mild and pale, and a boy disappeared even as dozens of people watched. Six generations ago, there had been a man who worked in the jungles along these very rivers, tended to his cows, gathered fodder and firewood, read fortune for a small fee. From him came hundreds, including Grandfather who sunned his yellowed pages of scriptures while his distant cousin groped blindly at the air in Banauti for his son’s return; from the first astrologer came the sister who jumped into the river, and from him came I: truant, delinquent, ignorant. I knew nothing of those who had passed before me. There was one who could have known, who could have conjured their faces and voices through an act of will and invention, but the river took him before I could ask his name, before I could ask him how his mother had died, or if he remembered her at all. And it made me melancholy to understand that I didn’t know enough about the boy from Banauti, or about myself.

  CANDY

  Nayan Raj Pandey

  Nayan Raj Pandey is the author of a short story collection, Chocolate, and three novels: Ghamkiri, Loo and Ullar.

  After leaving the Pajero at the district headquarters, the personal assistant and I headed out on foot. A village road. Dirt and dust. A horrid stench. Shit and dung. Why had the villages become so filthy?

  I was walking to my village. People always complain that we leaders forget our villages after winning the elections. I was returning to silence that complaint. This was the first time I was returning to the village after winning the elections and leaving for the capital. I felt as though I were in an entirely new place. I had some candy in my pockets. I was going to hand it out to children.

  “Minister-jyu, it looks like we’ve lost our way.”

  “Oh, you’re right.” I was unnerved when the personal assistant pointed this out to me. “The main road branches off at Sallaghari. But we’re at Dharmapur,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

  “Minister-jyu, let’s do this: let’s follow that trail over there to Sallaghari. That looks like a shortcut.”

  The personal assistant seemed to have a feel for the village. I followed his advice and took the other trail. I had no desire to go to Dharmapur anyway. That was where I got the fewest votes. A total of three hundred.

  “Those traitors gobbled up sixty thousand rupees!” I silently cursed the residents of Dharmapur and made a pledge: “I won’t pass a budget for this village.”

  I had made this pledge to myself, and yet, as though overhearing my thoughts, the personal assistant said, ‘“Yes, hajur, we shouldn’t pass a budget for this village.”

  *

  I grew vexed again. Once again, we had gone past Sallaghari. We had reached Chitrapur now.

  “You fool, we can’t go into this village. They’ll beat us up.”

  As soon as I said this, the personal assistant began to tremble. “We might get ambushed. Let’s go back to Sallaghari, Sir.” He looked as though he might wet his pants.

  We took the road to Sallaghari. Spotting strangers on the road, a few children began to follow us. I took some candy from my pocket and gave it to them.

  *

  It turned out that the main road branched off at Bansghari, not Sallaghari. I had gotten them mixed up.

  The Chairman of the Sallaghari Village Development Committee rubbed his hands together when he saw me and said, “Minister-jyu, now that you’re here, have some tea before heading off.” It was the first time since leaving the capital that I’d seen anyone rub their hands. It lightened my heart.

  “What are the problems in this village?” I asked the Chairman.

  “There’s a huge problem with drinking water,” came the reply.

  “Be patient, Chairman-jyu, don’t worry. In five years I’ll wash this whole village in water,” I assured the man, but to myself said, “You’ll get nothing,” and handed out some candy there as well.

  *

  Afterward, I scolded the personal assistant, “Is this any way to conduct yourself? Leading us in the wrong direction?”

  “Sir, it’s my first time here. I don’t know the way. I thought you’d know the way. You were born and raised here. You won the election from here.”

  This was embarrassing. “All right, never mind. Now let’s take that road over there. We’ll get to my village that way.” When we reached Bansghari, I said proudly to the personal assistant, “See? This is Bansghari.”

  But upon entering the village I realised it was Dandagaun.

  I now understood the problem with being a minister. A minister can’t ask directions to his own village. I decided that the next time I’d bring a map to my village. I told the personal assistant about this plan. He was delighted by it. We walked on, but we couldn’t find the way. If I had a map I wouldn’t get lost. My plan about the map now struck me as highly prescient and relevant.

  *

  “You launched the democratic revolution of the 1990s from this very village,” an elderly man recalled when we arrived at a different village. I found this information tantalizing. I almost said, ‘“Oh, really?” I had forgotten all about this but couldn’t really say so. My problem was even more acute now. This hadn’t turned out to be my village either. There was only one consolation: all of these villages fell in my constituency.

  “Take out your pen,” I ordered the personal assistant. I made him list the names of all the villages we had visited.

  The personal assistant was ecstatic: “Minister-jyu, you’ve visited all these villages on foot. This will make for incredible news, Sir.”

  Such was my foresight.

  The road widened as we walked on. I believed we were finally nearing my birthplace. But once again we arrived at another village.

  *

  The relentless sun made me longingly recall air conditioning. I remembered the Pajero. I recalled my room in the Ministry. I began to worry that the assistant minister would hire all of his own people in my absence. I was also gripped by the fear that he would rake in all the commissions himself.

  I asked the personal assistant: “Which is greater? The village or the nation?”

  With great emotion, he replied, “The nation.”

  “In that case let’s return to the capital.”

  “Yes, hajur. It’s better to return to the nation than to waste all this time looking for a village.”

  I turned around.

  On the way we met another group of children. I handed them the rest of the candy.

  The candy was finished and the road to the village had come to an end.

  THREE SPRINGS

  Jemima Diki Sherpa

  Jemima Diki Sherpa is a freelance writer, interpreter, and community organiser from Thame Valley in Solukhumbu, Nepal.

  When there are gatherings in our valley, the women sit with the women and the men sit with the men, and the children tear about evading adult arms that reach out to obstruct their fun. The men form a long line on low benches along the front wall of the house, patriarchs sitting at the end closest to the fireplace with the wide-legged weariness of ageing masculinity; down through the established householders with their roars of laughter, past the young fathers bouncing sticky toddlers on their laps, through the self-conscious new and prospective grooms, to the awkward youths who cram together and snicker and mutter and jostle each other.

  Everyone wears down jackets.

  In such a line as this, a gambler would have good odds that any man, picked at random, has stood atop of Everest; chances better still that he has been partway up the mountain a dozen times only to return to Base Camp, collect another load, and head off to cross the treacherous icefall again. What elsewhere is extraordinary – the raw material that can be spun into charitable foundations, movie rights, pub boasts and motivational speaking tours – is quotidian in the villages of Thame Valley. Even our monks shed their deep red robes in spring and come back sn
ow-burnt, the marks of sun goggles etched pale across their cheekbones and their lips chapped flaking white with bleeding crimson cracks.

  When I finished high school and left Kathmandu for university in New Zealand, I was conditioned for the reactions my last name would elicit. “They ask how many kilos you can carry,” says every Sherpa who has ever travelled abroad. But I was caught by a more common response: “Shuuurpa,” in the muted antipodean accent, “Seriously? That’s AWESOME!”

  It is something to behold, the open-hearted enthusiasm that the Sherpa name elicits in the western mind. It is (as every random company that has capitalized on it well knows) the branding motherlode – stimulating a vague positive association founded on six-odd decades of mountaineering mythbuilding. I wondered what deep, subconscious connections, what snippets of information, what flashes of imagery were being evoked.

  “Awesome” how? I came to ask myself. More importantly, “awesome” for whom? Uncharitably, I imagined them imagining themselves as conquering heroes, assisted by a legion of Sherpa faithful ready – and cheerful – to lay down sweat and lives in service for arduous, but ultimately noble and glorious, personal successes. Still, it is undeniable that, in “post”-colonial democracies where ethnic minorities carry the burden of insidious and vicious prejudices at every turn, Sherpas are fortunate. Everyone loves us, everyone trusts us, and everyone wants their own collectable one of us. Internet listsicles call us “badass” and we have a very large, very coveted piece of real estate in our back yard. It is a stereotype, sure, but a positive one.

  Any vague hopes my new acquaintances may have had of me selflessly and singlehandedly lugging their furniture up stairs on moving days were swiftly dashed. I lived life some, and then meandered my way home more than half a decade later. Village-born though I was, and potato farmers and yak herders though my grandparents may have been, despite the yearly trips to the Khumbu homeland I am a Kathmandu city girl. Like post-arts degree twenty somethings the world over, I was adrift. With equal parts defeat, hope, terror, self-congratulation and wildly under-informed plans and good intentions, I arrived “home” to live in Thamo, elevation: 3550 metres, population: maybe fifty people on a good day.