House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  *

  At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques. The same is also true of the city as a whole.

  In the sacred diagrams called mandala the principal god or goddess is worshipped in the centre, surrounded by a retinue of related deities, representing the different aspects of the governing spirit’s nature, and their relationship to the power at the centre.5 A mandala is something like an icon, which channels the power of the god it depicts, and therefore something like a prayer or a spell. I also read that each ancient city is a giant mandala, a diagram of the order of the universe, with the king’s palace at the centre, surrounded at the margins by the temples of the Eight Mother Goddesses, by the twelve sacred bathing places and the eight cremation grounds.6

  So I went to see a Buddhist priest of the Vajracharya caste – a gubaju – because they are the ones with the power and the responsibility to master and mediate this side of life to the laity. I had a whole sheet of typed questions: What does the city’s mandala mean? Does it belong to a particular god? What’s the meaning of the festival of Mataya? (I thought the tortuous route of that day-long procession might hold some secret.) Can one also think of a single house as a mandala? Would it be possible to draw a map of the city, which wasn’t a map of chowks or streets but a map of gods? I was fascinated by the idea that the city had a secret design, but I couldn’t understand what the nature or meaning of such a scheme could be, so I didn’t know what to ask him.

  The gubaju lived in an upstairs room by the bus park at Lagankhel. The passage to his narrow stair was stacked with boxes of the same crockery and thermos flasks as were for sale on the pavement outside. The walls of his room were almost entirely covered by pictures of gods, and tableaux of traditional life, which seemed to have been cut from magazines or calendars. Especially prominent were several large pictures of himself in his robes, adopting special postures, with a bright sunburst inserted behind his head by the photo studio. On the windowsill there were two white doves in an iron cage. It was a bright fresh autumn day and the gubaju had his windows open. On my recording of the interview there is a constant hubbub of the bus conductors and market traders outside.

  The gubaju was in his eighties, sitting cross-legged on the floor. He rifled through heaps of paper and handed me photocopied scraps: a mandala of the goddess Durga with a Sanskrit text beneath; a Newari text he’d composed himself on the faults of modern society, and the rituals that would correct them; a list of forty-nine holy places of the Valley that he had visited and their holy days; and a history of his most illustrious ancestor, a tantric who performed magic acts. He chuckled and pulled his legs tighter around himself as he talked. I asked him about the city’s mandala.

  “In ancient times,” the gubaju said, “the Kathmandu Valley was a lake and at that time it was a golden age. In the Age of Treta, the bodhisatva Manjushree cut the mountain and let the water flow out. Only then people started settling here.”

  That much I knew. I asked him about the mandala again and he said, “It is like a mandala. The centre is Gujeshwori. In whichever direction you go from there, east, west or whichever, is 7 kos [14 miles]. People celebrate the day Manjushree cut the mountain on the tenth day of the waning moon of Mangshir.” He took out his charts and showed me.

  I pressed him again. “Actually, we don’t talk in detail about the mandala,” he admitted. “It includes everything, birds, animals, human beings, everything, but we’re not allowed to explain it. The first god that was created was Gujeshwori, who is both male and female and began creating the other creatures. All the other creatures came out of Gujeshwori.” I was following him more or less. I knew that at Gujeshwori there is a hole in the ground, fringed with stone petals, which is related to female power somehow. It does stand somewhere near the centre of the Valley. And I wasn’t surprised by his secretiveness, because I had read that gubajus reveal the real truth of their religion only to the initiated, and there would be no question of my ever receiving it.

  We were interrupted by a woman who had come with her two children to consult him as a healer or magician. The children, she complained, were not doing well at school. He prescribed some rituals. She touched her head to his feet, and she paid him with a small plastic bag of what seemed to be flour. After they’d gone I tried another tack and asked him about the Eight Mother Goddesses, whose temples are in a ring around the city.

  “The Eight Mothers are outside the city, not inside,” he said. “We can explain it up to the Eight Mothers, but the mandala inside the circle of the Eight Mothers we cannot explain. Eight is a very significant number. They are for protecting people against disease, fire, water and so on. These goddesses are located in the eight directions.”

  He talked about many things. I tried to hold him to what I saw as the point, and to work through my list of questions, but I may as well have been asking “How many hamburgers make a Wednesday?” for all the sense my questions seemed to make to the gubaju. I drew a diagram of concentric circles like I’d seen in a book, representing the location of the most important buildings in the centre of the city and the lowest on the outskirts, and I asked him about it.7

  “In the past,” he said, “when you are in high rank you go nearer to the centre and if you are poor and of low rank you have to move out of the city. The king, the palace, is in the centre and near the palace are the higher-ranked people.”

  “Maybe it was to do with land prices?” I said.

  He ignored it. “In the centre are located the gods and goddesses. In the next yoni come... how to explain it?... they are just like spirits. Then comes the human yoni. Then comes the demon yoni, then the animal yoni. The furthest place is Narka. Narka is hell. Altogether there are six yonis,” he said, noticing that I had sketched only five. The gubaju spread out a different mandala on the floor between us. “This is simplified,” he assured me. “A small number of gods are depicted – there are sixty-four gods here. The deeper you go the more gods there are.

  “I don’t know about Kathmandu but I know in detail about the Patan area,” he said. “I have a dispute with the priests of Kathmandu. They say I don’t know about the things of Kathmandu, but when we have debates about religion I have defeated them many times, because I have done research on this mandala which they have not done.”

  I left when the old man had talked for as long as he wanted to, and at the time I was disappointed I hadn’t received a clearer explanation, perhaps resembling some kind of map. Now it seems he gave as clear an account as I could have hoped for. And for what it was worth I already had a book with a translation of the liturgy that gubajus use, describing the Valley’s mandala. So if he wouldn’t discuss it with me, or if I couldn’t understand his explanations, I could get some impression. When a gubaju begins a ritual he recites in Sanskrit:

  OM, now in the period of the Attained One, Lion of the Sakyas [i.e. the Buddha]... in the Kali world era... in the Himalayas... in the land of Nepal... flowing with the four great rivers... adorned with the twelve holy bathing places... surrounded by the mountains... the Eight Mothers, the Eight Bhairavas... on the south bank of the Bagmati... in the city of Lalitapattana [i.e. Patan], in the kingdom of Aryavalokitesvara [i.e. the red god Bungadya, who came down my street in his giant cart]...8

  Working from the inside out, it would go something like this: in the centre is the Buddhist god Cakrasamvara, surrounded by four goddesses and the four Kings of the Directions. Then there are three circles of lotuses, thunderbolts and flames. In life, the king’s palace sits in the centre. He is not exactly a god, but anyone can incarnate aspects of the divine and in the king’s case he incarnates aspects of the loftier lords in heaven. His palace is surrounded by the temples of the greatest Hindu gods. They receive pure, vegetarian, non-alcoholic offerings from Brahmin priests. Courtier families and priests live near the palace and the various other ca
stes live among one another throughout the city. Each caste has its own affinities to different gods, according to its nature and occupation. In the middle ranks of the caste system, for example, Jyapu men (of the farming caste) have an affinity with Bhairab, Shiva in his wrathful aspect, who is also associated with beer. Jyapu women have an affinity with Hariti, the Buddhist goddess of smallpox, who has power over young children, so they act as midwives.

  On the city’s outskirts, the low castes, by performing unclean tasks such as butchery or drum making, or conducting death rituals, absorb pollution on behalf of the community, allowing the high castes to stay pure. The edges of the mandala, or the areas beyond the ordered life of the city, are the land of the dead. Butchers are permitted to live just inside the gates but the lowest, most impure people, the Pode sweepers’ caste, who shovel shit, must live outside, where the demons and the witches also live, and where the ghosts are most numerous among the rice fields. They are the receptacles of all the bad omens, of all the pollution, degradation and filth of the city, and their affinities are with the lower and more dreadful spirits. The cremation grounds are near their homes, each associated with a Mother Goddess to whom the Pode act as priests. The goddesses receive blood sacrifices and offerings of alcohol. Just as the Brahmin priests of the high gods are themselves high and pure, so the untouchables can have great and frightening powers, like the blood-drinking divinities to whom they minister.

  In the wilds around the edge of the mandala there is a ring of skulls.The mandala is more than a map of the city. It is a social and political ideology, a description of the order of the universe, which is repeated in a well-ordered city here on earth.

  1 Kaevrne, Pat (transl). 1979. ‘The Visit of Prince Waldemar of Prussia to Nepal in February and March 1845’. Kailash 7(1). p. 39.

  2 Niels Gutschow. ‘Urban Patterns in Patan’, in The Sulima Pagoda pp. 81−86.

  3 ‘Prayers Read at the Consecration of a House’, published in Slusser, Nepal Mandala, pp. 420−21.

  4 Prayer for consecrating a house, reproduced in Slusser, Nepal Mandala, pp. 420–421.

  5 ‘A mandala is an arrangement of deities conceived of in sets (of four, eight, sixty-four or more) laid out along the axes of the cardinal points around a centre.’ David Gellner, Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest. p. 190.

  6 ‘A mandala is a circle, a mystic diagram of varied form, and in ancient Indian usage signified an administrative unit or country. From at least the sixth century ad., in conjunction with the word ‘Nepal’ it signified to the Nepalese the Kathmandu Valley and surrounding territory.’ Mary Shepherd Slusser, Nepal Mandala. p. vii.

  7 Gellner. Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest, p. 48. 406 notes.

  8 ‘Adya mahadana’ (‘And now the great gift’) cited by David Gellner, Monk, Householder and Tantric Priest. p. 191.

  POEMS

  Itisha Giri

  Itisha Giri is a Nepali writer based in Kathmandu. Her poems have been published in La.Lit and she works freelance as an editor.

  I HAVE CREATED

  I have created –

  a country for you where your fractured self

  lives by multiple names –

  and no pen can pin you down to be the one that

  belongs to someone else.

  I have created –

  a land for you that is yours

  to dig deep for roots

  that give life to the blood

  running through the many layers of you.

  I have created –

  a town for you where you can walk

  hand in hand, coupled together

  in your fits of desire.

  I have created –

  a womb where your tiny apparitions

  float on their backs until you flip them over–

  into your salty embrace and

  you both come up for air.

  BUILDING HOUSES

  Drive a stake through the heart of the city,

  squeeze a square outwards –

  thrusts a spike upwards

  and own what lies beneath.

  Bury the land’s history, its muffled screams,

  with layers of concrete,

  uproot the trees that line your claim

  and replace them with steel grilles

  tied together with plastic tendrils.

  Lays the bricks –

  one on top of the other

  one floor at a time, upwards

  and then stare down at me.

  Hammer those nails of lead,

  first into the door hinges,

  and then into my head,

  every thud, thud, thud,

  a cerebral point you make

  of desires that have turned into needs –

  as I feel my insides rattle,

  on your cement conveyor belts.

  WHEN I HAVE A DAUGHTER

  When I have a daughter,

  I will pinch her every day so her skin turns to rhino hide –

  so she feels no pain when cornered by a stranger’s hand at play.

  When I have a daughter,

  I will lash her with my tongue –

  so she is ready for it when someone else calls her names.

  When I have a daughter,

  I will cover her room with a thousand, wide-open cutout eyes –

  so she is used to someone else’s stare.

  When I have a daughter,

  I will teach her to disappear into thin air, like a ninja –

  so she is never in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

  When I have a daughter,

  I will teach her of lust and of pleasure –

  so she never feels any shame.

  When I have a daughter,

  I will bathe her in milk tinged with acid every day,

  so when someone decides to attack her,

  like a snake charmer, she is immune to the venom and its decay.

  ZEBRA CROSSING

  I don’t care for zebra crossings,

  nobody does, in a poor country.

  Everybody just wants to cross,

  whenever and wherever.

  Everybody wants to get to the other side,

  of all that needs to be left behind.

  Things were different when I was small,

  I cared for the Scouts and their badges,

  I cared so much that one day, the whole day,

  in my pleated skirt and my feathered hat,

  I asked people,

  to use the zebra crossing.

  HOME

  On the streets of Brick Lane

  with a sting in my eyes

  and a spring in my step

  I smelled fevered hay

  smoked under the sun of Bastipur.

  In the shop on Drummond Street,

  my grandma’s kitchen unravelled itself.

  The tiny corner in Muzaffarpur,

  where eggplants the size of my thumb

  played touch and go with mustard seeds.

  The officer’s quarter in Begusarai

  next to the canal, turned to Camden in my mind

  as in front of me

  the red water snakes glided along,

  keeping time like the N29.

  In a courtyard in Spain,

  under the shadow of the Caracoles

  a lemon tree interrupted

  the spread of concrete under my feet,

  and I was once again in Bastipur where

  a blood-splattered goat

  flapped around headless as I squinted away its pain.

  These places from my past,

  are now difficult to tell apart.

  When I’m asked to pick one as my own,

  or choose one to be the truth I know,

  I hide inside the hardened shell on my back,

  made from a wet paste of my crushed bones,

  and like a snail,

  I feel

  at last, at home.

  CRACKED EARTH

  Niranjan Kunwar<
br />
  Niranjan Kunwar is a Nepali author, educator and assistant editor at La.it. He returned to Nepal in 2013 after living in the United States, mainly in New York City where he completed a Masters in Childhood Education. Niranjan worked as a teacher in two different private schools in Manhattan. He now works as an independent Education Consultant in Kathmandu and enjoys participating in meaningful projects that involve collaboration with other educators, teachers and students, as well as writing. After the April 25 Nepal earthquake, Niranjan joined hands with a few friends and coordinated relief missions for six weeks from a bed and breakfast in Sanepa called The Yellow House. Cracked Earth was written during this time and first published by lalitmag.com on May 10, two days before the second quake. Apart from La.Lit, his writing has appeared in Himal Southasian, The Kathmandu Post, The Huffington Post, Record Nepal and ECS Media.

  The Saturday evening a week after the earthquake was stunning. I happened to walk out of the Yellow House in Sanepa right after sunset, during that short period when the sky was still glowing with various hues of copper-red while clusters of houses beyond the Ring Road were starting to shimmer, getting ready for night. Standing by the roadside, I gazed at the distance for a few moments. An orange halo surrounded Kirtipur; its outer edges seamlessly faded and dissolved into the rapidly darkening sky. A bit later, while eating bara with friends at a restaurant’s front yard, I noticed the moon – almost full, radiating lucid, white light – a strange juxtaposition to the calamity that had befallen us.

  The calm, quiet beauty was unsettling.

  After dinner, I took a taxi to the flat I was renting near Patan Dhoka. I had not slept there since the quake, living instead out of a backpack, stuffed with an assortment of things – laptop, chargers, pajamas, T-shirts, granola bars, toothpaste, three sets of underwear and socks, a notebook, a water bottle and an umbrella. The times I sneaked in to change clothes and shower, I was scared. The crows in the garden squawked, perhaps warning us of another catastrophe. The tremors and the jolts have been continuous.