It is now only 1.45 a.m. and the daily train for Rexaul, on the Nepalese frontier, does not leave until 6 a.m.; but I’m afraid to sleep lest I should fail to wake in time.
30 APRIL – REXAUL RAILWAY STATION RETIRING-ROOM – 9 P.M.
This pedantically-named apartment – no doubt a verbal relic of the era when trains were introduced into India – is equipped with two charpoys, a lukewarm shower and a defunct electric fan; but despite this wealth of refinements I now feel irremediably allergic to everything even remotely associated with railways.
Today’s hundred-mile journey on a narrow-gauge track took eight blistering hours. The elderly engine was falling asunder and at each village it stopped, lengthily, to pull itself together before moving at walking speed to the next village. Also it killed a young man; but no one took much notice of this grim sight and we were only delayed ten or fifteen minutes longer than usual. The police did not appear (perhaps there are none in these remote villages) and one gathered that the event was unimportant. My Nepalese neighbour told me that it was probably a case of suicide, as people with family or financial troubles frequently throw themselves under trains; and this seemed a likely explanation, since our snail-paced engine could hardly take anyone unawares.
This morning, on the platform at Muzaffarpur, I met an Irish boy named Niall who was travelling to Kathmandu with a Swiss youth named Jean and an American girl rather disconcertingly known as Loo. Loo had recently arrived in India on a round-the-world air trip, and had been persuaded by the boys, against her own better judgment, to sample life in the raw by going overland to Nepal. She spent most of today pointing out just how much better her own judgment was, and though recriminations seemed futile at that stage one could see her point of view.
Certainly life cannot be much rawer anywhere than it is in these villages of Bihar. Throughout the Punjab one rarely encounters that extremity of poverty traditionally associated with India – but here one does. And, as the hot, squalid hours passed slowly, I began to take a more lenient view of our affluent society. The people all around us seemed inwardly dead, mere mechanically-moving puppets, their expressions dulled by permanent suffering. To look at their bodies – so malformed, starved and diseased – and to sense the stuntedness of their minds and spirits made me feel quite guilty about helping Tibetans when so many Indians are in such need. Yet one doubts if Indians ever can be helped in the sense that Tibetans can. Apart from the vastness of their current material problem the very nature of the people themselves seems stubbornly to defy most outside attempts at alleviation.
Rexaul is a smelly, straggling little border-town, overpopulated by both humans and cattle. It has an incongruous air of importance, since all the Kathmandu truck-traffic passes through its streets, yet its cosmopolitanism is limited. When I went to the Post Office – a dark wooden shack – to airmail the first instalment of this diary to Ireland my request caused unprecedented chaos. To begin with, registration was not permissible after 4 p.m. and it was now 5.30; however, when I had flatteringly explained that I wanted to post from India rather than Nepal the senior clerk consented to make an exception to this rule. But then came the knotty problem of deciding where Ireland was – and the even knottier problem of determining the airmail registration fee for such an outlandish destination. In the end no fewer than seven men spent twenty minutes working it all out, consulting thick, flyblown volumes, weighing and re-weighing the package on ancient scales of doubtful accuracy, checking and re-checking interminable sums on filthy scraps of paper and finally laboriously copying the address, in triplicate, on to the receipt docket – with hilarious results, since even intelligent Europeans often find my handwriting illegible. I suppose it is possible that the package will eventually arrive on the Aran Islands, but one can’t help having horrible doubts.
1 MAY – KATHMANDU
The ninety-mile Tribhuvan Rajpath, named after King Mahendra’s father, was built by Indian engineers during the 1950s. At present it is Nepal’s only completed motor-road – though the Chinese are working hard on an uncomfortably symbolic continuation of it from Kathmandu to Lhasa – and it must be one of the most remarkable engineering feats in the world. Yet the Rajpath’s inexplicable narrowness (or is this defect perhaps explicable in strategic terms?) means that trucks are often rammed against cliffsides by other trucks, or go skidding over precipices in successful but unrewarding attempts to avoid head-on collisions. However, the art of truck-driving is only nine years old in Nepal, so perhaps it is not surprising that most drivers apparently long for a rapid reincarnation; doubtless the next generation will have learnt that too much rakshi does not aid the safe negotiation of six hairpin bends per mile.
In view of the Rajpath’s reputation it is understandable that trucks are forbidden to carry foreigners. A high mortality rate among visitors might be bad for the tourist trade, so in theory all foreigners use the senile bus that leaves Rexaul daily at 6 a.m. But the bus fare is Rs. 16/- while the truck fare is only Rs. 8/-, and therefore many travellers blithely ignore the illegality of trucks. Fortunately the border police also ignore it, or perhaps are unaware of the law’s existence – an anomaly that would be typical of this deliciously topsy-turvy land.
This morning we left the railway station at six o’clock and walked the two miles to the border. The next three hours were spent wandering in and out of tumbledown customs, police and passport offices, where courteous but clueless officials entertained us to innumerable glasses of tea while trying to make up their minds exactly why they wanted to interview us. One felt that this profusion of bureaucratic formality was a game, since none of these men seemed to comprehend the nature of his job clearly enough to take it seriously. The whole performance appeared to be part of Nepal’s sudden attempt to get ‘with it’, after centuries of deliberate isolation, and over all those glasses of tea the stiff, alien formalities spontaneously blossomed into flexible, indigenous informalities.
The Nepalese expertly elude the tyranny of Time simply by refusing to allow it to affect any of their actions. We waited endlessly for everything: for glasses of tea to be carried on trays from the bazaar, for a policeman’s bunch of keys to be fetched from his home down the road, for an adjustable rubber stamp which would not adjust to be dissected (and finally abandoned in favour of a pen), for a Passport Officer to track down Ireland (whose existence he seriously questioned) in a dog-eared atlas from which the relevant pages had long since been torn, and for the Chief Customs Officer, who was afflicted by a virulent form of dysentery, to withdraw to a nearby field between inspecting each piece of luggage.
To me all this was enjoyably relaxing and precisely what one expects at a Nepalese border-post – though I suspect that these dilatory methods will twang on my nerves when I am encountering them daily. But unfortunately my companions reacted adversely to this subjugation of Time, and the Nepalese were bewildered to find that neither their conversation nor their tea could begin to compensate for so many ‘wasted’ hours. In the end I felt thoroughly ashamed of Loo’s querulous impatience, Jean’s contemptuous sneers and Niall’s ill-tempered commands – none of which had the slightest speeding-up effect on the Nepalese. Yet no doubt I myself will behave equally badly on occasion during the next few months.
When at last we were freed we walked another mile or so to the little town of Birganj and there, after much playing-off of drivers one against another, we secured seats in the back of an almost empty truck.
By now the sun’s rays were fierce and we had no protection against them as we covered the next twenty miles. This section of the Terai has been spoiled by the railhead and road, and as nothing of interest lay on either side I was all the time eagerly looking north; but the heat haze restricted visibility, and only on approaching the village of Bhainse could one see that gigantic mountain barrier which here rises so suddenly and splendidly from Northern India’s eternity of flatness.
At Bhainse we stopped outside an eating-house, and without bothering to replace my boots I
hopped out of the truck into the welcome shadow. Loo declined any refreshment, after one shuddering glance around the mud-floored, fly-infested interior, but the rest of us enjoyed piles of rice moistened by dahl and curds – with a very hot curry for the driver. Here the devastating poverty of Bihar was no longer apparent, though otherwise there was little to distinguish these people from their Indian neighbours; only the style of domestic architecture (already some Newari influence was evident) indicated that we had entered Nepal.
When the driver had demolished his Everest of rice he told us to wait in the eating-house, and twenty minutes later I had to walk half a mile, barefooted, to rejoin the truck beyond a tollgate. By now the sun was directly overhead and melting tar on the road forced me to cover this distance by running about ten paces, sitting down to get my agonised feet off the tar, jumping up when my behind became equally agonised – and so on … and on … and on. The locals were vastly amused at this spectacle; but oddly enough the humour of the situation escaped me.
From Bhainse – which is almost at sea level – the road climbed steadily over the Churia and Chandragiri mountains, crossing a pass of more than 8,000 feet. On every side the slopes and crests were heavily wooded and freshly green and this abrupt ascent seemed most dramatic in contrast to the dead plains which stretch from Dehra Dun to Bhainse. At one point we could see below us the twelve hairpin bends which we had rounded on our way up that particular mountain, and often the famous cable on which some goods are still brought from India to Kathmandu was visible overhead, its wires spanning the deep valleys from mountain-top to mountain-top. Until we crossed the pass no villages were visible, but at Bhainse the truck had filled up with cheerful, unkempt families who were returning home from marketing trips. These people, bred to walk everywhere, have been very quick to take advantage of the luxury of motor transport.
Even motoring up the Rajpath gives one a sense of achievement, felt on behalf of those Indian engineers and Nepalese coolies – many coolies were killed on the job – who had the brains and the guts to construct a road in direct defiance of the laws of Nature. Most Nepalese believe that the coolies’ deaths were caused by enraged mountain-gods and I can sympathise with this view. The Rajpath is a triumphal example of man’s ingenuity, but it is also an impertinent defacement and naturally the gods would resent having their mountains so humiliatingly brought to the heel of Progress.
We reached the pass at 3.30 and here the air was tinglingly crisp and keen. To steady our nerves we stopped for tea in a tiny hut near the forest’s edge; a few moments earlier, when toiling around the last hairpin bend, we had missed by inches a grossly overloaded jeep taking the corner at top speed.
Our descent to the Palang Valley was more gradual than the upward climb – though hardly less dangerous, for the truck’s brakes were not of the best. The two-storey farmhouses scattered around the valley floor looked curiously European, with their curly red tiles and brown brick walls, and they were far more skilfully built than the average dwelling of rural India; I noticed that instead of chimneys square apertures were visible in the gable walls. The people were small, sturdy and gay, and groups of children shouted, waved and laughed as we passed; evidently many of the Nepalese are temperamentally closer to the Tibetans than to the Indians. On all sides this valley was guarded by mountains and, despite the encroachment of ‘The Road’, it retained an atmosphere of tranquil ‘lostness’. Looking at the sunny expanse of cleverly terraced young wheat, and at the high-spirited children and bounding flocks of goats, I was very conscious of being in a new and pleasant country.
When the road began to climb again the nearby mountains became bare walls of reddish clay that reflected the slanting evening light like giant uncut jewels. I felt myself getting more and more excited as we passed the new, neat milestones saying ‘Kathmandu 15 miles … 14 miles … 13 miles’ – but then suddenly it was dark, and still we were slowly rounding bend after bend, though we had just passed a notice forbidding vehicles to use the Rajpath by night.
At 8.30 p.m. we stopped near the hamlet of Thankot, six miles from Kathmandu, where a tree-trunk on trestles blocks the road outside a Police-Passport-Customs check-post. Now the spice of melodrama filled the air. Our driver – using what can only be described as a hoarse whisper – instructed us to leave the truck quietly, go through the necessary hoops with officialdom, walk on a quarter of a mile and wait for him to retrieve us. We need take only our passports; everything else could safely be left where it was.
At this point my drab European rationality prompted me to wonder what the police would make of four Westerners, equipped only with a passport and two legs apiece, appearing out of pitch darkness on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley and producing visas which declared that they had entered the country a mere ten hours earlier. But at once I reproved my rationality for intruding on this first gay day in Nepal.
The checkpoint was enchanting – a tiny bamboo lean-to, containing an affable character arrayed in pyjamas and armed with a revolver. This officer peered briefly at our visas, by the light of a wick floating in a bowl of grease, and then politely made the required assumption that we had come from Rexaul by magic carpet. However, Loo’s native honesty did cause a moment’s tension. On being asked if she had cameras, transistors, tape-recorders or binoculars she admitted to one of each and Pyjamas, looking faintly irritated by such candour at so late an hour, dutifully asked her to produce them – whereupon she saw her indiscretion and stared through the low doorway in wild surmise, while the boys and I giggled cruelly. Our driver was in the adjacent tea-house, having something stronger than tea and stolidly feigning not to be acquainted with us, so any attempt to contact him would have been monumentally tactless. But Pyjamas obviously had a quick understanding and a kind heart for now he gestured grandly, saying ‘These things are not important’ – and immediately we were released, our passports enriched by one more set of convulsed squiggles and solemn seals.
From Thankot the downhill road to Kathmandu was lined with flowering bottle-brush trees, and by the light of the head-lamps their long scarlet blossoms formed glowing curtains of colour on either side. I was a little puzzled not to see, somewhere on the valley floor, that shimmer of light which is to be expected after dark from even the least advanced capital city; but I later discovered that this was one of the not infrequent occasions upon which the urban electricity supply had quietly faded away.
It takes only a few moments to drive through the ‘suburbs’ of Kathmandu and by half-past nine I was standing in the city centre, beside ‘Bhim’s Folly’ – a cigarette-like white tower erected for no apparent reason by Bhim Sen Thapa, that murderously scheming nineteenth-century ruler of Nepal who instigated the Prime Ministerial reign. The area around the Folly is the General Truck Terminal, and therefore the scene of much haggling, arguing and general commotion at all hours of the day or night; in fact it seems to provide the only sign of life in the city after dark. Already Loo and Niall had been led away by Jean, who is familiar with Kathmandu, and I now discovered that – as pronounced by me – the address to which I was going conveyed nothing whatever to any of the surrounding Nepalese. But eventually I observed two young men, clad in semi-Western fashion, who spoke some English and soon fixed me up with a cycle-rickshaw.
Half an hour later I was installed in this dingy but – by Asian standards – wildly expensive hotel. The charge is £1 per night for a large, filthy room, containing only a plank-bed and a roll of bug-infested bedding – and no breakfast will be provided. In itself the dirt leaves me unmoved, since I have survived even greater extremes of filth elsewhere, but the excessive charge moves me deeply. I only hope that it is not a reliable guide to the general cost of living in Nepal.
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Kathmandu
3 MAY – KATHMANDU
Yesterday began well when I heard after breakfast that Sigrid Arnd – a Swiss friend first met when we were both working in India – is now living here; and last night she most generously invited me to s
tay in her Jawalkhel home, near Patan, until I leave for Pokhara on 12 May.
Sigrid prefers to live reasonably close to the local level, and she has proved that in this country one can create a very attractive home through an imaginative adaptation of native materials and customs. She rents a two-roomed wing of this three-storey brick house, and the simple living-room – where I’m now sitting – has a low, black, raftered ceiling, whitewashed walls and pale gold matting. Everything in the room is both beautiful and Nepalese, and Sigrid’s four-months-old black and silver mongrel puppy is also both beautiful and Nepalese. His name is Puchare (‘Tail’ in Nepali) and he has an adorable personality, in addition to being a good deal more ornamental than many an effete thoroughbred I’ve known. The household is completed by Donbahadur, a Newari daily servant who shops intelligently in the bazaar and cooks like an angel. (Many Westerners in Kathmandu won’t even walk through the bazaar, much less eat food that has been bought there.) Donbahadur has a bubbling sense of fun, an almost visible integrity and an awe-inspiring but quite effective method of communicating through the medium of Swiss German-cum-English. One senses that the approves Sigrid’s appreciation of things Nepalese, which interests me; in India a Memsahib would almost certainly lose face with the servants if she did not maintain entirely European standards.
The Waiting Land Page 2