House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

But, even as the Pīpal trampled the Kavra under it and danced in the breeze

  the progeny of the old Kavra mistook it for a new Kavra

  Listen, now – Once the old Kavra fell, they say –

  the heads of young men and women also fell

  the children became lifeless, like well-stitched dolls

  the Mūndhūm dharma of the wise old fell –

  The hearts fell and the country fell

  Misery alone found birth in the village

  Hunger and thirst alone found new incarnations

  Once the Pīpal trampled the Kavra under it, they say –

  they say that is when the culture of oppression and exploitation began

  When the yellow leaves of the Pīpal spread wide

  they say this round chautari was built under it

  With a grand ritual-fire and human sacrifice

  And with each morning, an offering of blood

  That is when it all started – they say, Grandson –

  the history of envy and grudge...

  when in the Kavra tree started the history of the Pīpal

  hatred was born in the people

  rage was born

  war was born

  .........

  Grandson!

  (After taking a deep breath

  Grandma let her tale rest for a bit!)

  The story is longer that the Tamor river

  It is time to feed the hogs – let’s go home!

  (It was my turn to carry the load.

  Before me, leaning on her cane, Grandma continued her story.)

  Grandson! On that chautari

  so many despots out for conquest

  have stopped to rest

  They tied their horses to Pīpal roots

  and whistled their deathly calls...

  .........

  Grandson! On that round chautari –

  no matter how long we sit to rest

  we remain just as tired!...

  .........

  Grandson! That is the very branch

  from where your great-grandfather was hanged and lanced

  That is the shiny rock where

  – your great-grandmother, then with child –

  was picked and thrashed, picked and thrashed

  until her belly tore open...

  THE DEEPER CATASTROPHE

  Shradha Ghale

  Shradha Ghale is a Nepali writer and editor who lives in Kathmandu. Her writings have appeared in The Kathmandu Post, Record Nepal, Nepali Times, and the Indian online magazine The Wire. Over the past year she has been leading relief and rebuilding efforts targeted toward marginalised communities in the earthquake-affected districts of Nepal.

  I first travelled to Rasuwa district some ten years ago. Just a day’s drive north of Kathmandu, yet it seemed a different world altogether. High, rocky mountains and pine forests instead of gentle foothills and valleys, mani walls, chortens and Buddhist prayer flags instead of Hindu shrines and temples; elderly people who spoke their own language and greeted me with a ‘tashi delek’ instead of a ‘namaste’; Tamang women dressed in angdung and syade and men who spoke Nepali with an accent that would invite ridicule in Kathmandu. Everything I encountered along those trails seemed new and unfamiliar, far removed from what I, with my middle class upbringing and education, had been taught to imagine as ‘Nepal’. And yet this, too, was Nepal.

  In this less familiar Nepal, in the upper regions of Rasuwa district lies Gre, a village that is part of Gatlang village development committee (VDC). All 166 houses in the village were destroyed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on 25 April 2015. Two people were killed. Dozens more would have died had the entire village not been gathered outside to watch an excavator pushing boulders down a ledge, a sight that offers much entertainment to people in Nepal’s hill villages.

  Lakpa Tamang, a 46-year-old muleteer, was not among the lucky survivors. He was with his mule in Langtang when a quake-triggered avalanche buried him along with hundreds of others, including many foreigners trekking in the region. A few weeks after the earthquake, I met Lakpa’s wife Pasang Bhuti when I arrived in Gre as part of a volunteer relief group. Like everyone else, Pasang’s family was living under a sheet of tarpaulin and surviving on meagre rations provided by a monastery. She only spoke Tamang, her mother tongue, and barely understood Nepali. So her young neighbour, a tenth-grade student at a school in Syafru Besi, served as our interpreter. Pasang was as traumatized by her husband’s death as by the prospect of having to rear four children all by herself. The wages Lakpa earned as a muleteer were her family’s main source of income. The crop they grew on their tiny piece of land was not enough to feed them for the full year.

  During our conversation, Pasang asked me at least three times if I could take her youngest child, a three-year-old girl, to Kathmandu. She wanted me to place her under the care of an organization that could provide her a good education. “Kathmandu is far, you won’t get to see your daughter often. Are you sure you want to send her away?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “I am helpless here. I cannot support her in any way.” Next I learned that Pasang’s older daughter, aged 9, had already been taken to Kathmandu by some organization. Neither Pasang nor her sons or neighbours knew its name. I was alarmed. There had been reports of child traffickers entering quake-affected villages in the guise of saviours. How could she risk sending her daughter with an organization about which she knew nothing?

  “Sadly, parents here are willing to take risks,” said Dawa Norching, who had been helping us with our relief work in the village. “The last thing they want is for their children’s lives to resemble their own. They see no future for them in the village.”

  To get to Gre village from Kathmandu, we first drive for nine hours on blacktopped road and stay overnight in Syafru Besi, a starting point of the Langtang trek. Next morning we drive uphill for two hours on rough road, and then walk for about an hour. In terms of physical distance, Gre is far, but not very far, from the capital. Yet you can’t but describe it as a “remote village”, a term that denotes, in my mind at least, not just the physical distance from Kathmandu but also the degree of poverty and deprivation enforced by Kathmandu. It is one of those places where a Kathmandu dweller might travel as a well-meaning tourist, admiring the beauty of rural landscape, lamenting the condition of people who live there, and turning every observation into a lesson to be shared with her kind. (As it happens, there are many “remote villages” even within and right outside the Kathmandu valley, in places like South Lalitpur, Bhaktapur and Kavre.)

  Most people in Gre are subsistence farmers who grow just enough crop to make ends meet. They have to walk for 2–3 hours to reach the nearest health facility. There is one school that provides education up to eighth grade. According to Dawa, the quality of education is dismal, language being one of the main problems. The few teachers employed at the school do not speak Tamang. Teaching takes place in Nepali, a language the local children can barely grasp. As a result they have to repeat the same grade for several years. Students who complete eighth grade usually try to continue school in Syafru Besi, but eventually drop out as they cannot keep up with their peers. This leaves them with little hope and low self-esteem. “If the school was any good,” said Dawa, “maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out after seventh grade to become a driver.” He thought for a moment and added, “But maybe I would have. There was no money at home.”

  Things were more or less the same in the next village, Gatlang, which has the same name as the VDC of which it is a part. All the houses had been flattened by the quake. Seven people had lost their lives. For weeks after the earthquake, no relief could reach the village as landslides had blocked the roads. Now the road was open but people had yet to receive adequate help. Some locals complained that their village had been severely neglected compared to Langtang, which had received much attention in national and international media not only because it suffered terrible devastation, but also because it happened to be a po
pular trekking destination. “Our people have no connections in Kathmandu or abroad,” lamented Ashok Tamang, who grew up in Gatlang. “Everyone is poor and illiterate. We have produced no role models. Can you imagine, not a single student who sat for the SLC board exam passed this year.”

  The villagers chatted with us and fed us potatoes boiled in their makeshift kitchens before lining up to collect the relief supplies. We distributed cooking pots and some water supply pipes, essentials they lacked even in the best of times, and for which they would have queued up even if there had been no earthquake. Their weathered hands and faces spoke of years of unrelenting hardship and deprivation. They had suffered the impact of a catastrophe far deeper than a sudden tremor of the earth: a history of systematic exclusion and exploitation.

  *

  Few other communities suffered as directly at the hands of Nepal’s ruling class as the Tamang people from the villages now ravaged by the earthquake. For centuries after the creation of the modern Nepali state in 1769, the Tamang were virtually enslaved by Kathmandu’s high-caste rulers. In their valuable study of the Tamang of central Nepal, David Holmberg and Kathryn March have shown how the Tamang people in present-day Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading – some of the districts worst affected by the quake – were compelled to work as labourers for the ruling elite during the Rana regime (1846–1950). The Tamang, classified as “enslaveable alcohol drinkers” in the 1854 civil code, had to collect fodder for royal herding operations; walk for several days to carry dairy products to Kathmandu; work at royal fruit plantations around Trishuli; grind charcoal at the gunpowder factory in Nuwakot; produce paper for the administration; and serve as porters for the military and civil administrations as and when needed. Not only were these workers unpaid, they even had to carry their own rations. Meanwhile, they were forbidden from collecting firewood for themselves or grazing their cattle on land controlled by the royal herding operation. If a Tamang family’s cow strayed into the royal pasture, the high-caste authorities would beat the owner, not the ‘sacred’ cow.

  Further, high-caste people who migrated into the Tamang heartland used deceit and unscrupulous lending practices to dispossess the indigenous Tamang of fertile fields. As Holmberg and March write, “Almost all Tamang have direct experience – if not in their own lives in the lives of their kin – of the appropriation of land through the manipulation of writing related to land.”1 The descendants of Ranas continue to own large tracts of land in Rasuwa. Locals still remember the late Sachit Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana, former army chief and advisor to the king, as the wealthy owner of the apple orchards in Gatlang. Another Rana family is said to own vast stretches of land in Dandagaun.

  The end of Rana rule did not mean an end to the oppression of the Tamang. Acts of resistance by the Tamang were met with violent state repression. In 1959, when the Tamang of the aforementioned areas rebelled against exploitative Brahmin moneylenders in their villages, King Mahendra’s troops swept into the area to reassert order. Many were arrested and beaten; others were summarily executed.2 Over the past half century, Nepal has witnessed three major waves of democracy, including an armed communist movement, but the situation of the Tamang has changed little.

  The Tamang community of Yarsa was among those exploited and forced into poverty. Yarsa VDC, which lies on the eastern side of the Trishuli River, was an area in which the Ranas ran their herding operation. Until a few years ago, Yarsa was inaccessible by road. A rough gravel road now connects the VDC to the highway, but due to lack of public transport, locals still have to trek long distances to get to the nearest health facility or market. Throughout the bumpy four-hour ride from Syaubari through Yarsa, we did not come across a single vehicle; only locals bent double under the loads on their backs. The earthquake and aftershocks had left parts of Yarsa extremely vulnerable to landslides. The entire community of Ghormu village had been displaced. Many cracked and unstable hillsides were likely come down in the monsoon rain. Villagers who came to collect relief supplies had to walk, sometimes for up to five hours, past such dangerous hillsides.

  Denied basic rights and opportunities in their country, most young people of Yarsa have no choice but to seek employment abroad. A large number of young women from Yarsa are working as domestic help in Kuwait and Lebanon. Men mostly work as labour migrants in Malaysia.

  “The factory job was tough, but at least I was earning something,” said Gore Ghale, a father of four small children. After years of trying his luck, Gore finally found a job last year in an iron factory in Malaysia. He took a loan at thirty-six percent interest from a neighbour to bear the cost of travel, recruitment agency fees and initial expenses at his destination. But a month after he started working, he sustained a serious head injury on the job and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. After a long recovery process, Gore finally resumed work and was beginning to hope for a better life for his family when he heard about the earthquake. He rushed back home in a state of panic and anxiety. All the houses in the village including his had been destroyed. Nine people had lost their lives, including his wife, who was buried by a quake-triggered landslide when she was collecting firewood in the forest. Dazed and distraught, Gore was now living under a tarpaulin sheet with his children. If he returned to Malaysia, there would be no one to look after his children; his youngest was only three years old. If he stayed back, he would neither be able to support them nor pay off his loans. “If only,” he said, hesitant to make a direct request, “if only someone would help send my kids to a good school.”

  *

  Ashok Tamang, who had been helping us with relief work, was the most educated member of his community in Gatlang. He was, in his own words, “I.A.-failed, meaning, he passed the tenth grade board exam but could not make it through twelfth grade. He was among those who had been working round the clock to bring relief into his home area – coordinating with relief organizations and groups, preparing lists of households, assessing people’s needs, mediating potential conflicts, orienting Kathmandu visitors with local social and political dynamics, and ensuring that relief is distributed in an organized and equitable manner. But he did not have a stable source of income. He had tried his luck at various organizations that ran development projects in Rasuwa, but to no avail. He lived in the village, spoke the local language, knew his people and was deeply committed to improving their lives, but was not “qualified” enough to work in organizations that boasted of their “bottom-up” approach. If he got very lucky, he would be hired as a local “social mobilizer” for a few months. A stable, full-time job perennially remained a distant goal.

  In every affected village I visited, I met young people like Ashok who had played an indispensable role in ensuring their communities’ survival in the aftermath of the earthquake. Youth who had been working in extremely challenging conditions, despite personal losses, amid immense physical risks, without any material reward. They have intimate knowledge of their place and people and tremendous potential to bring change in their villages. But they have little formal education, cannot speak English, and have no access to networks of power in Kathmandu. This leaves them with very few avenues of personal development. Those fortunate enough to get an NGO job are usually at the bottom of the aid system’s hierarchy, a mere “local” with no authority to shape the organization’s programmes and policies.

  One way such youth might hope to expand their network and gain access to power is by becoming a member of a political party. Most of the local volunteers I met on the ground were members of one of the major political parties. We realized only later that the young people who had been helping us reach the most vulnerable populations of Rasuwa were all members of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). They had kept silent about their affiliation for two reasons. First, most of them had thrown themselves into rescue and relief work out of genuine concern for their community, not out of a desire to raise their party’s profile. Second, they knew we belonged to the class of people who consider themselves to be above narro
w political interests, and so they assumed we would be squeamish about associating with the rank-and-file members of a political party.

  The “locals” are understandably wary of displeasing visitors from Kathmandu. Even the most naïve among us are in a position to question, correct, interrogate or repudiate them according to our assumptions. Stressing the importance of localised radicalism, historian David Ludden has observed how every nation has an imperial history and retains “imperial inequalities” between its elites at the centre and people at the periphery.3 Such inequalities become evident even during a casual interaction between, say, a Kathmandu-based development professional and “field staff”. Those from the “centre” will assess, evaluate and decide while the latter will listen, oblige, call them “sir” or “madam”, and earn ten times less. These inequalities, so entrenched in Nepal’s development aid world, were reenacted during relief work in the quake-affected villages. While Kathmandu dwellers saw their relief trips as noble and intrepid missions to disaster zones, for most people in the affected villages, coming to others’ aid was almost like reflex action. In the face of such catastrophe, helping their community was the only thing to do. No photos of them handing out bags of rice and tarpaulin sheets on social media, no fulsome praise for being disaster heroes. An implicit assumption was that youth like Ashok were just doing their duty while youth from Kathmandu, like myself, were venturing out of our comfort zones in a spirit of magnanimity.

  *

  After exploring various ways to support Pasang Bhuti’s daughter, I found a safe and trusted children’s home in Kathmandu with an excellent track record. The home usually took children who had lost both parents, but this time they were willing to make an exception. On learning that Pasang’s daughter might be able to go to school in Kathmandu, several more parents sent me similar requests from the village. I could not help them. In fact, despite all my efforts, I could not even bring Pasang’s daughter to Kathmandu. The local volunteers spent weeks gathering required paperwork from Pasang’s family and the ward administration office. But just when we thought everything was ready, the District Child Welfare Board refused to issue a permit for the child to leave the village, citing cases of rampant child trafficking. Another child we had identified for admission to the orphanage was Asmita Chepang from Dhading district. Her house was completely destroyed by the quake. Her father died many years ago and her mother had left the family and married someone else. Asmita’s sole guardian was her ailing grandmother, who sold cucumber slices to passengers on the highway and was desperate to find a sponsor for her grandchild. But due to travel restrictions imposed by the government, Asmita could not leave the village.