Kunda’s view is that the Maoists’ recent change of tactics, targeting civilians in the capital, has lost them support.
‘It’s not that the Maoists are terribly brilliant or strong, just that successive governments have been weak and fractious and corrupt, and they (the Maoists) have tapped into that bedrock of neglect and apathy and frustration in the people. They’ve grown so fast precisely because everything else has been in such disarray.’
With an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 rebels, with looted arms from the police and the army, how does he see the future?
There can, he is sure, be no military solution. There has to be compromise. The institution of monarchy is quite strong and Nepalis identify their country with it, but the King can no longer be an absolute ruler. He must be firm but fair. (Which seems to suggest he’s neither.)
He points to achievements brought about by strong policies resolutely applied.
Forestry conservation has been a big success since local people were given their own areas of forest to administer, the hydroelectric programme, building of roads, water improvement projects. All give him hope.
‘And,’ he concludes, ‘Nepal’s press has never been freer.’
We’re turning into the bus park below the walls of Bhaktapur.
‘The Prime Minister has been sacked, parliament is in limbo, but the press is free.’
The day that started promisingly is growing grey and gloomy as, having paid our $10 fee to enter the city, we climb up the steps and in through a narrow, rose-brick gateway.
For Basil it’s a nostalgic return. Much of Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, on which he worked as both actor and stills photographer, was shot in Bhaktapur. Though smaller than Kathmandu or Patan, Bhaktapur, whose name means ‘city of devotees’, once boasted 99 separate chowks. A powerful earthquake in 1934 did serious damage and now only five of these grand courtyards are left. That they are here at all is largely due to a German-sponsored reconstruction programme. The connection with Nepal seems a curious one, but it goes back a long way. A German Jesuit sent one of the Malla kings of Nepal a telescope as early as 1655. Hitler sent a later king a Mercedes.
As in Patan and, indeed, old Kathmandu itself, there is some glorious work in Bhaktapur. The Sun Dhoka (Golden Gateway) is an arched entrance surrounded by richly ornamented deities covered in gilded, embossed copper. The figures of the gods are still worshipped and I see young Nepalis touching them and then their foreheads as they pass. All over the temple area there are statues and carvings worn shiny by touch. We clamber up into a small, octagonal, carved timber gem called Chyasin Mandap, the Pavilion of the Eight Corners, an 18th-century original, meticulously restored around an earthquake-proof, steel shell. A much grander building stands nearby: Nyatapola, the tallest pagoda in Nepal. Five-tiered and standing 100 feet high, it somehow survived the 1934 earthquake quite unscathed. One might imagine this would increase its attraction for devotees, but when I climb up the long, steep staircase past sculpted ranks of temple guardians - wrestlers, elephants, lions, griffins - I find only dust and a group of street children. Apparently, this magnificent building is dedicated to an obscure Tantric goddess, Siddhi Lakshmi, who very few people have heard of, let alone worship. As the temples rely on rich patrons for their upkeep, Nyatapola remains neglected.
There is hope. Kunda is generally optimistic about the way the old city centres are looked after (all three are UNESCO sites). He’s much less happy about the way modern development is going. The urban sprawl around Kathmandu is, he feels, destroying the identities of the three cities. They are becoming part of a Kathmandu conurbation, which is bad for Nepal. It increases the centralization of wealth and government in the valley, further alienating the country areas, and puts great pressure on limited resources. Water supply is becoming a major problem. The latest proposal is to bring water in direct from a glacier, 15 miles away. It will be the biggest engineering project in Nepal’s history, and if it works it will only bring more people and more money to the central valley, further dividing the country. And it would not go unopposed. Only yesterday, Kunda reminds me, the Maoists destroyed a hydroelectric plant.
On our way back, the insalubrious suburbs, and the congested roads that take us through them, seem to bear out Kunda’s darker prophecies, but life is not all gloom.
He tells the story of sitting next to Prince Charles (of whom he has a very high opinion) at a Nepali banquet. Halfway through the meal Charles upended a full portion of rice wine into his lap.
‘Great embarrassment all round?’
‘No, everything was fine.’ Kunda smiles at the recollection. ‘I told him that was the way we do our dry cleaning here.’
Day Fifty Seven : Kathmandu
To a high-walled, heavily gated, but otherwise reassuringly normal home near the Gurkha headquarters for a reunion with Adrian Griffith, the British Gurkha officer sent to look after us who ended up being abducted himself.
A relief to find him in good health and good spirits. We drink tea in his garden with his admirably phlegmatic wife, who claims never to have worried that he wouldn’t come back. Adrian, whilst refusing to answer what he calls ‘operational questions’, gives us a little more background to what happened that evening when the Maoists called him away from his whisky.
They were taken to an empty house an hour from Lekhani and about five hours later, about midnight, were led deeper into the forest. His escort were not angry but they were insistent, and they had weapons concealed in their shoulder bags.
‘Pistols?’
‘Yes, pistols.’
‘I went to sleep in a very filthy bed from which I received a lot of flea bites.’ (His only injuries, fortunately.)
All the next day was spent talking, or rather, being talked at, by his abductors. On the second day of their captivity, by which time the story was all across the world’s newspapers, word came down from the Maoist high command that Adrian and the others should be released. He feels pretty sure that the local commanders had been reprimanded by their superiors for taking him in the first place.
I asked if he ever felt in real danger. He said his two worries were of the danger of being caught in crossfire if the security forces mounted an operation to free him and the knowledge that a Nepali member of the Gurkha staff, abducted a year before, had been held for seven weeks.
‘I think we were an opportunity target. They came down in order to disrupt the recruiting, realized there was someone more senior from the British Gurkhas there and saw it as a chance to publicize their cause.’
What of the recruits who’d sweated and strained their way through a day of tests?
Well, they would be given the chance to try again. This was the only time Adrian sounded less than convincing.
Before we leave Kathmandu, I meet up once again with the redoubtable Pratima Pande, who insists that I should see one of the great sights of Kathmandu, the temple complex at Pashupatinath, the holiest Hindu site outside India. Pashupati is one of the many names (around a thousand in all) of Shiva, the most revered god in the Hindu pantheon. So sacred is this site that non-Hindus are not allowed inside the temple at the heart of it. If they were, they would be able to see one of its great attractions, a ten-foot-high male member, or linga, which, and I rely on my Rough Guide for this, refers to a myth whereby ‘Shiva transformed his phallus into an infinite pillar of light and challenged Brahma and Vishnu - the other members of the Hindu trinity - to find the ends of it. Both were forced to abandon the search.’
Below the temple and flanked by the burning ghats runs the River Bagmati, which, despite carrying the effluent of 1.5 million people, is a holy river, and eventually joins the Ganges. Monkeys scuttle along the parapet ahead of us as we pause on one of two stone and brick bridges and look down on a sight I’ve heard about but never witnessed. A number of platforms, sort of jetties for the soul, are built on the riverbank and on these the dead are cremated on wood pyres. One or two have bodies burning on them already, others are bei
ng cleared after a cremation. Attendants, brisk and businesslike in white aprons and cotton vests, are brushing the platforms clean, sending burning embers flying into the river, where they hit the water with a hiss and bob off down the Bagmati, trailing plumes of smoke like so many miniature steamships.
As we watch, a corpse is carried down past the temple and onto the bridge. Six members of the family are in attendance. They turn off and lay the body down beside a pyre already decorated with garlands of marigold.
Pratima explains that in Hindu culture it is very important that people do not die in their house, or that on death they are removed as soon as possible, so that the spirits captured there can be released. Indeed, there are those who, thinking their time is up, ask to be brought down to this holy place to die, only to recover and get up and go home at the end of the day.
The family we were watching have taken up their litter and moved across to the other side of the bridge, having strayed inadvertently onto the ghats reserved for upper-class Brahmins. This, Pratima tells me, is where the various members of the Nepali royal family were brought after the massacre two and a half years ago. Five of them, including the King and Queen, their younger son, and two princesses were cremated the same day they were murdered.
The family have now found the pyre reserved for them. To aid combustion, an attendant inserts slices of ghee (clarified butter) between the split logs. The mourners, all men (no women mourners are allowed to attend a cremation), are preparing themselves. The eldest son is sitting on the steps of the ghat having his head shaved by a priest, a pandit, with a cut-throat razor. He wears a plain white robe, white being the Hindu colour of mourning. There is something quite affecting about seeing the way he submits to this very simple, very public act of obsequy, in full view of any who happen to be passing.
The priest then talks to the family, presumably instructing them as to how it’s all done, and they then lift the body from its bamboo stretcher, carry it, a little awkwardly, three times round the pyre, before laying it down, the head exposed. It’s the body of a woman, younger than I expected, maybe not his mother or grandmother but his wife.
Basil leaves and water are placed in the dead woman’s mouth as prasad, food consecrated and blessed by the gods.
Ghee is then placed on her body, with sandalwood to add a sweet-smelling incense, and the oldest male heir then walks around the pyre three times more. Then it is he who applies a lighted taper to the body, always near the mouth.
Shaking with emotion, he then bows, walks to the end of the pyre and buries his head on her feet. I feel I should look away, but I can’t. I know nothing about these people yet, in this brief ceremony, I feel a wave of empathy, not just for them, but for loss, for the end of a life. I come from somewhere where death is kept private, almost as if it’s an embarrassment. We send our loved ones away hidden in a box, into a hidden fire. We don’t even press the button that sends the coffin sliding into that fire. It’s all at arm’s length. Here in Pashupatinath it’s very much hands on. The reality of death, the fact of death, is confronted, not avoided.
We walk on across the bridge, to the east bank of the river. Everything here is odd and unfamiliar. There are animals everywhere: dogs, cows and some of the 400 monkeys who scamper over roofs and walls, eyes and little pink hands out for any offering left unattended. Along the side of the hill is a series of small, stone shrines, each one containing a stone phallus, dedicated to Shiva. They were built to commemorate those women who came here to commit sati, to be burned alive beside their husbands, as was the custom before the British made it illegal. Among the temples and terraces higher up we come upon an enclosure where sadhus, flamboyant ascetics as I suppose you might describe them, gather. The holy men, who call themselves babas, are not at all averse to posing for the tourists. I rather like the idea of exhibitionist hermits and particularly enjoy the milk baba, who lives solely on milk, and an 87-year-old with six-foot-long tresses, who obligingly puts his leg behind his head for me.
Bearing in mind that I shall be in Tibet tomorrow night, it seems suitable that we end the day at the biggest Buddhist temple in Kathmandu, built for those who for thousands of years have come through here on the road to and from the lands to the north.
Boudhanath stupa is immense, some 130 feet (38 m) high, and it squats like some great white spaceship, surrounded by shops, hotels and houses, off one of the busiest streets of the city. A pair of painted eyes looks down from the wall, serenely surveying the flock of birds, spread across the dome like stubble on a huge bald head, the shopkeepers and the crowd of pilgrims walking round and round in a clockwise direction, gaining more merit for each circuit they make. A web of colourful flags flaps from the highest point of the stupa, sending their prayers out to the gods. To my classically conditioned mind, all this display seems excessive and garish, like wrapping St Paul’s Cathedral in Christmas paper.
Pratima invites us to a very smart party this evening. Lots of important foreign diplomats being introduced. I’m tired and just want to go to bed, but I do treasure one bit of polite conversation.
I’m introduced to an immaculately dressed man who takes a slightly pained glance at my appearance. I don’t catch his name and grabbing a passing glass of wine, I hear myself asking, ‘I’m sorry, ambassador of where?’
‘France.’
It’s time to move on.
Day Fifty Eight : Kathmandu to the Chinese Border
The road that winds its way northeast from Kathmandu is called the Arniko Highway. It’s appropriately named, for Arniko was the Nepali architect credited with introducing the pagoda to China and the road that bears his name leads to the only crossing point between the two countries.
It is quite likely that there was more contact between Nepal and China 600 years ago than there is today. The road route from Kathmandu to Lhasa has only been open since the 1980s.
The landscape at first is unsensational, the highway rising and falling over undulating, terraced foothills. A string of tourist hotels with names like Snow View Resort and Himalaya Lookout carry the promise of great things to come, but sadly fail to deliver. The mountains ahead of us remain undetectable behind a layer of sluggish low cloud.
This concentrates the eye on more intimate views: villages of brick and thatch houses and tiny plots of land, ploughed by hand, with nothing much to suggest anything has changed in the last few hundred years. Verdant, fertile country, but rural life is still on an intimate scale. At the bend of a river a mixed team of cows and donkeys is being turned in tight circles to thresh the freshly cut wheat. Milk churns are carried on bent backs.
The only significant modern intrusions are regular police checkpoints (not a purely Nepali phenomenon, we’ve learnt to expect men with guns everywhere in the Himalaya) and the bizarrely large number of whisky adverts on the side of the houses. Names like Matador, Pied Paper and Bond are so ubiquitous they give the impression that much of rural Nepal must be on the bottle.
The only other product that is so obviously trumpeted is education. They’re proud of their schools here and it’s common to see crocodiles of young children, in matching uniforms, ties and backpacks, emerging from establishments like The Golden Future High School or The Wisdom Academy.
After lunch at Barabhise in the valley of the fast-flowing Bhote Koshi (Tibet River), the countryside narrows into a deep, forested gorge. A bridge with a bungee jump incongruously attached rises high above us and a little further on we pass a heavily guarded hydroelectric power station. Just as everything seems to be getting steep and claustrophobic, the walls of the gorge widen, quite abruptly, to reveal, high above us across the end of the valley, the white-stacked rectangles of a mountain city. My first glimpse of Tibet.
Nepali immigration is in a large bare room decorated with three framed pictures of King Gyanendra, his queen and Ganesh, the elephant god. Having had our names laboriously entered on a Departure Record, we walk up a dirty muddy road towards the border crossing on Friendship Bridge.
As we have all our gear to transfer, we cautiously back our vehicles into the middle of the 200-foot bridge to the exact point where Nepal ends and China begins. I don’t think anyone’s ever done this before, and there is much shouting from both ends. In the mayhem we say our farewells to Wongchu and Nawang and Mingmar, the trio of Sherpas who have looked after us so magnificently, while at the same time keeping an eye out for our Chinese escort.
He turns out to be a slim, young man in a sky-blue fleece, holding some papers and looking extremely anxious. So preoccupied is he with this unorthodox crossing that he doesn’t introduce himself for another two hours. Only then do I learn he’s a Tibetan, by the name of Migmar.
Anything in the Himalaya with the word ‘friendship’ attached is bound to be Chinese, and, sure enough, they built Friendship Bridge across this gorge in 1985. It’s a grim and deeply confusing place to be and we are pretty soon ordered to stop filming. As Wongchu and Nawang wave one last time before disappearing into the crowd behind a ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of Nepal’ sign, I experience an emotion not dissimilar to that of seeing my mother wave goodbye to me on my first day at school.
We’re now in the hands of unsmiling Chinese border guards in uniforms that seem to have been specifically designed to be too big. With the SARS epidemic so recently over, I first have to fill in a Quarantine Form. I then take it to a booth where a man in a white coat checks it, produces a gun, points it right between my eyes and pulls the trigger. He then peers at the gun, notes down my temperature and motions me into China.
The disorientation continues. Not only does the traffic drive halfway across the bridge on the left (Nepal) and the other half on the right (China) but, because of time changes, one end of Friendship Bridge (China) is two hours and fifteen minutes ahead of the other (Nepal). Propelled suddenly from mid-afternoon to early evening, we load up and drive as fast as we can, which means extremely slowly, up the six miles of slippery, winding track between the bridge and the Chinese immigration and customs post. Across the valley I can see Kodari, the last town in Nepal, receding below us. The gorge is steep and very beautiful but scarred with piles of rubbish, regurgitated from the backs of the buildings and spilling down to form scummy, foaming pools at the water’s edge. In every country we’ve been so far private cleanliness and public squalor seem to quite happily co-exist and I’ve never really been able to work out why.
Himalaya (2004) Page 16