House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  6 “Rabindra”, Devi Prasad Dhakal, Ujyalo: Gajuri Byarek Breksammako Atmabrittanta (Light: My Story up to the Gajuri Barrack Break), Kathmandu: Jhilko Prakashan, 2011 (2068 v.s.).

  7 During a visit to Jumla district during 2005, the journalist Sushil Sharma met a group of schoolchildren who had been attracted by Maoist propaganda and joined the party. Unable to bear the hardships, they had soon returned home. But the local Maoists threatened the school authorities with consequences if they allowed the children to re-enroll, and urged them to rejoin the party. Sharma, Napurine Ghauharu, pp. 56–63.

  8 Mohit Shrestha, Jyudo Sapana (Living Dreams), Kathmandu: Akhil Nepal Janasanskritik Mahasangh, Kendriya Samiti, 2009 (2065 v.s.), p. 120.

  9 Lekhnath Neupane, Chitthima Janayuddha (The People’s War in Letters), Kathmandu: Vivek Sirjanshil Prakashan, 2008 (2065 v.s.), p. 55.

  10 Li Xintian, Chamkilo Rato Tara (Bright Red Star) [1974], translated by Sitaram Tamang, Kathmandu: Pragati Pustak Sadan, 2003 (2060 v.s.). In her study on youth participation in the Maoist rebellion, Ina V. Zharkevich notes how the majority of her informants mentioned this novel as their favourite book. She further writes that newcomers to the Maoist military camps in Kathmandu were each given a copy of the novel, which, along with an English–Nepali dictionary and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, was considered essential reading for PLA fighters. Ina Zharkevich, “A New Way of Being Young in Nepal: The Idea of Maoist Youth and Dreams of a New Man,” Studies in Nepali History of Society 14, No. 1 (2009), p. 86.

  11 Mao, ‘On Protracted War’.

  12 Mao, ‘On Protracted War’.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Dhaneshwar Pokhrel, Beni Morchako Smriti: Shabdachitra (Memories of the Beni Front), Kathmandu: Akhil Nepal Lekhak Sangh, 2010 (2067 v.s.), p. 3.

  15 Interview with senior Maoist leader, January 2013.

  16 For details see Dambar Krishna Shrestha ‘Ethnic Autonomy in the East’, in People in the People’s War’, Kathmandu: Himal Books, 2004, p. 17–40.

  17 Bhattarai, ‘Khambu Sangharshako Rooprekhabare Kehi Tippani (Some Comments on the Form of the Khambu Struggle)’, pp. 202–6 in Nepali Krantika Aadharharu, p. 202.

  18 Ibid., p. 205.

  19 Kirati, Sarvahara Netritvako Saval, p. 128.

  20 Ibid., p. 170.

  KATHMANDU

  Thomas Bell

  Thomas Bell is a British journalist and author. He studied at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art before moving to Kathmandu to cover the civil war in Nepal for the Daily Telegraph and The Economist. He was later Southeast Asia correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. He lives in Kathmandu with his family.

  In Asia old objects are not generally considered beautiful for their age, which is a peculiarly Western taste. New things are preferred, so ancient wooden carvings are periodically touched up with colourful enamel paints. The fabric of the temples is layered, as they are renewed with fresh donations. When temples are rebuilt after an earthquake, which occur on average about once a century, old pieces of carved timber might be reused even as the structure is altered and worn out parts replaced. In this way these holy buildings are both old and new. Rather, like other things in nature, such as a whirlpool, a forest, or a coral reef, they are constantly occurring in the same place. It is possible, up to a point, to look at the whole city as just such an eternal system.

  *

  When Sundar Man Shrestha was a teenager in the early 1960s his mother used to wake up screaming because in her sleep she was being strangled by a witch. “Every night she screamed and it was a real problem for us,” he emphasized. He hung one of his brother’s nappies at the door, hoping that might keep the witch away, but it didn’t work.

  Waking one morning he found a large cat in the house, peeping at his sleeping mother through a gap in a door. “It was a big cat, this big, and I said ‘Cat, you are a witch. I am going to kill you’.” The cat was trapped in a room, backed into a corner. “I kicked it and it went back on its legs like this, it put its front paws out in front, and it disappeared. The image faded.”

  After that the bad dreams stopped, but there were other hauntings. During the spirit-infested season that follows the horse festival, in the spring month of Chaitra, it used to be necessary to eat more garlic, just to keep the ghosts away. Old people remember a large one that would block the passage into Nag Bahal, one of Patan’s biggest squares, and refuse to let anyone pass. Around the corner, at the fountain by the Kumbeshwor temple, the slapping sound of a woman washing clothes was sometimes heard after midnight. If she caught you before you fled the square, you would die. And near the bridge between Patan and Kathmandu there was a rankebhoot – a “lamp ghost”, which may only have been the light of phosphorescent gasses escaping from the rice fields. The children who lived down there enjoyed watching travellers running in the evening, to be within the safety of the city before night fell. It wasn’t only the rankebhoot that frightened them. The kitchkandi under the bridge posed an even greater hazard.

  “These things have been disappearing since electricity came,” said Sundar Man. “Before, people used to terrify each other with stories.”

  “They’ve all gone. They were all scared,” agreed his mother-in-law, Dhana Laksmi. She wore a hat and a hearing aid. Her eyes twinkled and she had one tooth left on top at the front. She poked it forward coquettishly to show when she was teasing. I wanted her to be my informant on the traditions of the city and I returned to her for advice frequently. She considered me pitifully ignorant of the realities of nature. Now she looked at me with concern. Did this interest in ghosts mean I was having trouble with them?

  The only ghost Dhana Laksmi ever saw was in the yard outside her house, when she went to sweep before dawn one morning, decades ago. It looked like an old woman but it was smaller than a living person. When she asked it what it wanted it left without speaking to her. After that she never stepped out until first light. “You’d be afraid too, if you saw it,” she pointed out.

  The ghosts hadn’t disappeared altogether. Kitchkandis are spectres that stalk beneath bridges, in the disguise of a beautiful woman. If she seduces a man then he will die, but he has a chance because her identity is betrayed by her feet, which point backwards. To keep kitchkandis at bay some taxi drivers hang a charm of women’s bangles from their rear view mirror. I asked them if they were afraid, and the young men mostly laughed, but one driver offered a subtle view. Since the fields around the city had been covered with housing there were fewer ghosts than there used to be, he said. However, although he wasn’t a Newar himself, he believed that the old spirits still haunt those areas where many Newars live.

  Sometimes when the electricity returns after a power cut, even if the lights, the kettle and the fan don’t immediately come on, something almost imperceptible changes and you realize that the power is back. Everyone lives surrounded by wires, buried in their own walls and in the houses all around them. When a man and a boy came to install cable television they brought the line from a tangle on a pole somewhere, through a low passage and over a rooftop, looped it from the corner of one building to the next and arrived at my bedroom window, adding another strand to the complicated web of the city’s wiring.

  The air is a living vehicle of radio, text messages and wireless internet. The ground is scored and raised by a network of poorly repaired trenches, where extra pipes have been added to the water mains until the pressure is so low that, during the few hours a week when the water flows, people use pumps to get it out of the pipe and into the tanks beneath their houses. The ancient, buried conduits that supply the fountains are little understood. Sometimes a spout that had been dry for decades would flow again after an earthquake, before the depredations upon the aquifers and the deeper foundations of modern developments made half of them permanently derelict. Wells, tanker deliveries, rubber hoses and the copper jars carried on the hips of women complete the city’s water system.

  Another infrastructure, no less recognized and more slowly changing, runs t
hrough the old parts of the city. A grandmother spirit, who can be nasty, inflicting severe stomach cramps or worse if she is not properly invoked, resides at junctions in the chwasa stones. People bring objects that present a magical threat to their household to the chwasa: the clothes of the dead, a baby’s umbilical cord, or the ashes of a torch that has been used in an exorcism.

  Nasahdya, the god of sound, is represented by an empty space; a triangular hole in a wall that opens his passage through the buildings, because he can only travel in straight lines. Every neighbourhood has its guardians; its own full set of those gods (Nasahdya, Ganesh, Durga, Bhairab...) that daily life requires. Apart from the empty space of Nasahdya, these guardians are uncarved, natural stones, which have never been moved from the place where the earth divulged them. They form a network of gods and goddesses, spirits and ancestors that underpins the city, its genii loci.

  Many courtyards have another stone somewhere, which is Lukmahdya, the Hidden Shiva. The old lady Dhana Laksmi told me Lukmahdya’s story on his feast day, wrinkling her nose and poking her tooth at me. The god entered the city after he’d given a demon the power to turn people into ash and, realizing that he needed somewhere to hide, he chose the garbage of the courtyards for his camouflage. “You know that small yard?” she said. “That’s where we used to throw our rubbish. That’s where he is.” Even heaps of reeking trash were holy, if they were in the right place. Even the dogs in the street and the crows on the roof were gods, and had their annual festivals.

  [I saw in Patan] a large number of destroyed houses, as the natives rarely repair a house: rather, anyone who regards himself as a man of distinction constructs himself a new house and lets that of his father decay.1

  –Prince Waldemar of Prussia (visited in 1845)

  Hirakaji’s son Sunil pointed out a house to me while we were walking together, a low brick building with tiny windows filled by wooden grilles, where as a boy he once paid a few rupees to watch a pornographic film. The same house had belonged to Gayahbajye, who was a famous priest and a powerful magician. His powers were so great that he transported gods from different parts of the Valley and placed them in the temples near his home. A room inside has been left empty since he vanished while meditating there hundreds of years ago.

  The low wooden door was opened by a woman who introduced herself as Gayahbajye’s daughter-in-law, by which she meant that she was married to his remote descendent. The lady was an amateur painter and she had decorated the small low rooms with her own watercolours, of birds and local monuments. She showed me the special room, with an electric lamp through a hole in the kitchen wall. It was dark, with a pile of timber in it. Some priests, and officials from the government’s Department of Archaeology, had come to investigate the mystery, she said, but when they started digging the room began to fill with water and they abandoned the attempt. She spoke as if it was yesterday, but this happened fifty years ago, before she was born. Every morning she worshiped the wall outside with poinsettia flowers and rice.

  Gayahbajye’s house stood in a square of fine old buildings, until old houses on two sides were replaced with new ones in the early 1990s. Enclosing the square to the south was the imposing fifteenth-century shrine of a secret god, open only to initiates of Gayahbajye’s lineage, until part of it was demolished in 1996. In 1997 half of Gayahbajye’s house was torn down too.2 Kathmandu people do not find the old houses picturesque. Sometimes a magnificent carved window, centuries old, is cut in half when a brother – inheriting his part of the ancestral property – rebuilds his side in brightly painted concrete. There is no charm in inertia; living in a small dark house in the shadow of your brother’s lofty statement, your wife jealous of your brother’s wife. In this way the city is constantly renewed by the ambition of pious family men.

  The prayer for consecrating a new house begins:

  “Oh well-born son! Any man in Nepal, whether he be a philanthropist or not, should build a house as follows: assemble carpenters and brick makers and other incarnations of Bisvakarma as necessary. Then, choosing an auspicious time, prepare and bake bricks. Have the auspiciously ordained foundation laying ceremony... Then build a magnificent house with the proper auspicious marks and proportions. If a man does this, I call him great.”3

  The family priest will determine whether or not a proposed building site is auspicious or is, for example, already occupied by naga serpents. An astrologer will determine whether the venture is a wise investment, and the best time to start work.

  Dhana Laksmi told me the story of a shopkeeper in Mangal Bazar, called Hem Narayan. He was advised that if he built where he intended then the nagas who lived there would have no outlet, and would bang their heads on his foundation. He took a cavalier attitude.

  “If the nagas bang their heads who will suffer?” he asked.

  “The oldest man in the family.”

  “What about the kids, will they be affected?”

  “No,” he was assured. “The kids will be fine.”

  “I might as well, then,” the old man reasoned. “I’m going to die soon anyway.”

  The foundation was laid but before the first storey was complete he and his brother fell ill. When the fever subsided, twenty-one days later, they found themselves preposterously stooped. Their heads bobbed in front of their shoulders like tortoises’. Their caste was Mahaju and people knew them from then on as the leaning Mahajus.

  For as long as the streets and courtyards have lain where they do now a house has been about eighteen feet from front to back, with a wall in the middle, dictated by the nine-foot span of the floor beams. Wealthy families and kings built four blocks at one time to create a courtyard. For the rest that was achieved more gradually, until a space was enclosed by four houses and an extended family enjoyed their privacy and security within. This courtyard is a chowk, where children play, clothes are washed, grain is dried, men gamble at cards and the family eats feasts. The chowks are the basic unit of the old quarters. The height of the roofs’ ridge beams, where they met each other end to end or at right angles, was roughly the same. The skyline was a hand-knitted pattern of clay-tiled slopes, with the pagoda-roofs of the temples rising above them.

  O client, many lucky signs must be present and many rules of proportion must be observed when a house is built... First the smoke of the brick kiln goes up to heaven and the 330 million gods smell it and ask where it came from; the king of the gods, Indra, tells them that it is the smell of smoke made on earth by an ambitious man who is firing bricks to build a house to stay in; and the gods, hearing him, immediately give their blessing: “Fortunate and upright man! May this house be well favoured; may it be durable; may it be without flaw; may it be a dwelling place of Laksmi; may the builder live long; may his heart’s desire be fulfilled!”4

  To stop the rain from washing away the mud between the bricks Kathmandu’s builders invented a wedge-shaped brick, which covers the joints and gives the most prestigious buildings a smooth burnished lustre. These walls are prone to bulging under their own weight so a wooden frame is made to stiffen them, like the steel inside reinforced concrete but much more expensive. Where the timbers show on the surface they are decorated with carved serpents and the heads of animals.

  The foundations are not deep so, in time, uneven settlement will cause the walls to crack. And, because the stones of the foundation do not rise above ground level, the base of the walls will be exposed to surface water making the ground floor damp. At every stage of the construction, as the door jambs and lintels, window frames, floors, ridge beam and roof tiles are put in place, a puja is done and red and yellow powder is smeared on the unfinished building. In this way the gods run through the house like the wiring. There will be a few small gaps in the brickwork where the bamboo scaffolding was fixed. They will be overlooked when the builders leave and sparrows will nest there. No nails are used anywhere in the structure. If water seeps in and rots the pegs that hold the frame together an empty house can be ruined in a few monsoons. />
  The ground floor is a shop, storeroom or workshop. The sleeping and living quarters are in the middle and the purest and most private places, the kitchen and the puja room, are nearest to heaven.

  O well-born, may the merit of your good deed help you to attain the four goals of life, the seven kinds of well-being, the eight kinds of property, and rid you of the eight terrors... may you have good fortune and happiness in all ten directions and at all three times. Good luck to the whole world!

  In the old parts of the city, when people refer to a house they often mean the site it stands on, and every structure that has ever stood on that site. It is a continuous family institution, of which the fabric (like the people in it) is continually replaced. When someone breaks down the beautiful old brick and timber house his ancestor made, and builds for his family in their ancient place a new concrete home (ugly inside and out, and cold in the winter) the new structure retains the centuries-old shape of the plot and the hierarchy between the storeys above it. Before he starts to build he digs a hole, does a puja in it, and fills it in. Then he digs the foundation.

  Hirakaji and all of his neighbours, who were descended from the same ancestor, had each rebuilt their share of the ancestral site in concrete. The old house, before it was divided by inheritance, must have been large, with a passage through the centre into the chowk behind. One afternoon I was working at my desk, and I suppose I was unable to concentrate, because I wandered onto the roof to look out over the rooftops and the pinnacle of the Mahabuddha temple, and someone bolted the door from the inside. I was stuck up there, until a neighbour appeared on his roof. I stepped over the low wall and followed him down his stairs. The upper floors of his house were dark, the walls were unplastered and the windows were unglazed. We passed through rooms piled with the clay moulds of statues, and down unlit stairs, until we emerged not on the other side of the passage, as I expected, but into the chowk behind. The history of the family had made a labyrinth inside that group of buildings.