Back in Kathmandu; back at work. Politically, things seem to have grown a bit more confrontational in the short period we were away with both sides lobbing more than just bombs and bullets at one another: the Maoists are considering an unprecedented 42-day strike, which would cripple the country, and the RNA—that’s the Royal Nepalese Army—is purportedly strong-arming human rights organizations since they have been quite critical as of late regarding atrocities committed by the latter. The Asian Human Rights Commission (based outside of Kathmandu and so not taking the risk that domestically-based human rights orgs would) had these scathing comments:
Both sides kill with impunity. Inevitably, a growing number of civilians are leaving their homes in search of security and shelter. Many do not find it. Instead they end up dead, tortured, disappeared, rearrested, raped, illegally detained or hopelessly displaced, like thousands of their fellow citizens. Whereas the Maoists are operating without a chain of command and respect for international law, their government opponents are operating under a chain of command—starting in the palace—that has institutionalized the same lack of respect for international principles…. The king has failed to adopt a realistic and sincere approach towards a solution to the conflict. It is his decisions that have paved the way for the continued violence and impunity of state security officials along which the whole country is now being dragged.
Of course, there is much, too, that can be said about the Maoists and their own deplorable practices, but many in Kathmandu now feel that the king has no desire to move quickly, particularly as he, by all appearances anyway, inches further and further outside of his constitutional monarchy role. Still, one never really knows since the papers are full of speculations about either calling elections or holding peace talks. The palace has at least dropped many of the “conditions” for the latter.
What this means for the average Nepali is a new year ushered in by more strife and struggle—struggle for daily subsistence. I seriously wonder whether the project I designed for rural Mahottari district will be able to operate effectively in such a milieu. Yet, the resiliency of many poor Nepalis is astonishing. On the brink of starvation, their are village women who chase off Maoists with their sheer numbers, only to have them come back and have to chase them off once again… Some villages are on the threshold of starvation, and, again, it’s the women who walk days and weeks foraging food for their families.
For us, Kathmandu seems not too troubled by shortages, except when the Maoists call Kathmandu Valley strikes (luckily, we were out of the country during the most recent strike). Currently, most of the city, and the country, are up in arms about the hike in fuel prices. This includes kerosene, which many households outside of Kathmandu use for cooking fuel, and many restaurants—certainly, every hole in the wall chai shop—use. The price is now about 50¢ per litre—a whopping sum in a country where many live on $1 per day. And it is quite difficult just finding the stuff—we have a kerosene heater that I have yet to buy kerosene for since no one seems to know when and where to get it… Nepalis love to use the terms “up there” and “down there,” so when I inquire about places to buy kerosene, it is normally an “up there” that I get in response. But “up there” has remained quite elusive. And when I have seen supplies, there is normally a long queue of people waiting—there is no beating Nepali women to the punch, who seem to have a knack for the exact time that it will be delivered and go on sale… Only because of the good graces of our landlord (who feels a little bad about the stolen bicycles, I think, but is a great guy nonetheless), who gave us a couple of litres to stoke up our heater, have we been able to knock off the chill these last couple of nights. Nothing much comes between Migyoung and myself, except the hot water bottle in bed…
These are relatively minor hardships for us. Indeed, over the longest and hottest summer I can ever remember, how I longed for cold nights like these. I now have an even more decrepit, used and beat up bicycle to replace my stolen steed that in reality wasn’t that much better. This one, along with the other corps of beater bikes abandoned behind the VSO office, was blessed with a blob of red tika powder on its front fender (serving as the forehead, I suppose) and has a red and white “offering” tied around its handlebars, so I’m hopeful that this may ward off any thieves that also happen to be devout Hindus… It makes an awful squeaking racket when I peddle it and the rear brake pads are threatening to fall off, but it gets me to work and back and other places around town when I just can’t be bothered to cram into another auto rickshaw/three-wheeler. The irony is that I am probably the only ex-pat in town that chooses to ride an Indian pushbike as opposed to a more modern and sleek mountain bike. I chose the Indian bike because 1) I thought it would be less likely to get stolen (wrong) and 2) because I just enjoy riding it more and I can never really get going fast enough to hurt myself. I love to be able to sit up straight on it and take in my surroundings (but not too much lest I get swiped by another two-wheeler of the motorized kind). The Indian-made bicycles are virtually indestructible—sure, nuts and bolts fall off from time to time (even pedals!) but you can stop on practically every street corner and there will be a little roadside place with an array of new and used parts. Besides, those mountain bikes only look good, and it’s only a matter of time before their nuts and bolts fall off as well…
I now come home from work and have a shower immediately before the water turns from luke warm to cold, but the cold weather and short days mean that we’ve yet to have anything really hot, but we’ve grown rather accustomed to the one-minute bath… A seemingly permanent morning haze hangs over the city this time of year—partly fog, exhaust fumes and the smoke of a thousand street fires. There is a woody, sweet smell to these fires—combinations of straw, cow dung, scrap wood, briquettes, rubbish and corn husks fashioned into miniature logs—that I love and unconsciously associate with this part of the world. When I stepped off the plane in Mumbai many years ago, it was my first sensation; the same, too, this time around in Kathmandu. In the early mornings and late evenings there are groups of people huddled around these fires, perhaps cupping a small glass of chai, down virtually every alleyway and inter-city vegetable patch. They’re welcoming: you can stop, warm up your hands, exchange a few pleasantries and move on.
Friday the 14th
Today is the first day of the Nepali calendar month Magh, and, appropriately enough, the festival Maghesankranti. It’s supposed to be the end of the coldest winter months and a harbinger of better days to come, but although it was quite sunny today and moderately warmer, it was still quite cold in my freezer box of an office… It’s also a day of ritual bathing in the rivers for Hindus—Devghat being the place and river of choice. And like most festivals, there’s the obligatory food served on a plate made out of sal tree leaves—today it was a sticky ball of sesame seeds and molasses, a piece of raw yam and a hunk of refined butter or ghee. Not exactly lunch, but I always enjoy being able to partake of these little treats. Today I celebrate my major coup—5 litres of precious kerosene for the heater. There we were in the queue—myself and a horde of ragamuffin children sent out by their parents to get the fuel for the night’s cooking, heating or lighting. In actuality, the rise in prices has made it a bit easier to get kerosene, since, I believe, many people are cutting back in favor of cooking over an open fire. Already, public transportation fares have rise, much to the chagrin of the general public—yet another reason why people are taking to the streets…
At work, my new task for the year is to somehow link my new organization with the dalit rights project that my old organization will soon embark on. This will be no easy task, since my new org is quite a bit more strategic in terms of governance and may balk a bit at taking a more secondary role, but, at the same time, Aasaman (ASN) has been receptive to preliminary discussions I have had with them, and my old org, WCDC, also seems interested in receiving some assistance from ASN (particularly if it will give me more time to work on the project) or linking some of their programs (a child labor eradication component) with the overall goals of the dalit rights project. I’m excited that the collaboration could lead to great benefits for both organizations (not to mention beneficiaries), but the devil is always in the details, and I will have to exert quite a bit of effort, I think, in liaising between the two groups. The project will continue for another 2 years—beyond the scope of time that I have committed to stay in Nepal—and already I am thinking that I may be able to extend my time and commit those last few months with the close out of the project, and, more particularly, how to sustain it beyond the funding cycle. But that’s a long way off, and the security and political situation, I assume, will play a large part in my decision.
Musings from India
Christmas morning, Jaipur, India, 2004:
There were no presents under our tree this morning—nor, indeed, a tree—but we ordered a bucket of hot water each from the irrepressible proprietress of our guesthouse, Mrs. Singh, after a very cold edge of the desert night. For breakfast, we had masala dosa—a flat, thin crispy pancake stuffed with curried vegetables—and hot coffees in the appropriately named Indian Coffee House. It’s a delightfully grubby place set back off of the main M.I. Road in a haveli courtyard with dirty, lime green walls, chipped concrete and portraits of the Indian political triumvirate: Indira, Nehru and the Mahatma. Waiters here wear soiled white outfits complete with cummerbunds and those funny, Raj/ice cream cone hats. The urinal in the courtyard is just that with a sign that reads: “urinal only; we regret the inconvenience due to legal litigation.” I wanted to ask, but didn’t… For Christmas Eve, we watched a Hindi film (not as much singing and dancing as we would have liked) at the most opulently grotesque theater imaginable—the Raj Mandir—a cross between retro art deco and bad 80’s furnishings.
Our flight to India from Kathmandu was delayed by a day due to the ubiquitous fog/haze that blankets northern India/southern Nepal this time of year, and rather than wait around another day for a flight to Varanasi, we opted for Delhi. After a bit of wrangling in the Delhi Airport, Indian Airlines put us up for the night (it took us 26 hours to finally get to India…). We stored our bags in the Old Delhi railway station—cloak rooms as they are affectionately known—and wandered around the back alleys and amazing bazaars of OD for almost 10 hours: spice markets, used car parts, cricket bats and paraphernalia, street vendors offering all sorts of curried things, mosques, Sikh temples and even a Jain bird hospital. We took the night train out of Delhi and arrived in Jaipur the next morning at 6:00 AM. There, in the darkness, we were met by a gaggle of touts immediately upon stepping foot on the platform—that much of India has not changed. We did half of Jaipur on foot—much to the chagrin of the thousands of bicycle rickshaw wallahs—and the other half the following day. Jaipur is appropriately called the pink city (although it is more accurately a sort of rust color) and is loaded with palaces (the famous one being the lovely named Palace of the Winds) and Maharaja sightseeing stops, yet the other half of Jaipur has grown into a rather bustling city. Like most things in India, the best of times and places are found just wandering around.
And other days & nights:
We boarded the night train for Bikaner (375 kms to the northwest)—a fairly grubby version of the Indian train on this not so popular route, but we had upper berth, 2nd class sleepers reserved despite the antiquity of the train. Crossing this part of the desert at night with nothing more than a few shawls was foolish on our part—temps dropped down to freezing as we shivered through a few hours of sleep. I finally gave up on it around 5:00 AM, had a cigarette in the carriage entrance/exit next to the smelly toilets (or hole in the floor) and was lucky enough to see the full moon rising (or was it setting) simultaneously with the break of dawn over the Thar Desert—stunningly beautiful. Once in Bikaner, we beat back a group of rickshaw wallahs long enough to have a cup of chai and share a bidi and a chat with Corporeal Singh (every other person has the surname Singh it seems) around a crudely lit fire of rubbish in a dirt lot next to the station.
Bikaner is a fairly large, dusty city but its walled old city with Mughal influenced architecture and narrow lanes were a pleasure to meander through. We witnessed several wedding processions with the groom on horseback being led by blaring Hindi music and large groups of men dancing wildly in front. Somehow we found our way to the 550 yr old Jain temple—a 3-tiered with each progressively smaller from bottom to top. Bikaner’s fort was quite a surprise: more beautiful and better preserved in our estimation than the much ballyhooed city palace of Jaipur. Bikaner sees fewer tourists/travelers than other Rajasthan cities and so has a rather unspoilt feel about it. People are generally quite friendly and outgoing if not a little over the top. I use a lot of Nepali here, which is usually understood once I attempt to change around the verb endings, but, alas, sometimes not at all.
India is a dichotomy: it has grown up tremendously yet remains much the same. The burgeoning middle class is all around at tourist haunts with their mobile phones and digital cameras, but so too is the ubiquitous poverty. It is hard to say which is the poorer of the two, India or Nepal, although by appearances poverty seems to be more prevalent in India, I tend to think this is a matter of India’s population dwarfing that of Nepal. Beggars and street children seem more rife here, and although visible in Kathmandu, because we tend to be in more “residential” areas we don’t encounter people on the streets as frequently in Nepal. Certainly, Mahottari, where we lived in southern Nepal, is as poor as any area in India, but because no foreigners ever stopped there, we never encountered anyone asking for anything. The appearance of westerners/travelers no doubt prompts, perhaps enables, this process the world over.
We made the 7-hour journey across the desert (once again—Rajasthani cities are very spread out with wide swathes of empty desert between) by bus from Bikaner to Jaisalmer with what seemed to be mostly turbaned and handlebar mustached men. India’s bus service has also grown up, or at least it has in Rajasthan. A decade ago, you through something through the open window of the bus (and hope it landed in a seat) and that was how “reservations” were made… Now there are printed tickets and even seat numbers! We arrived in Jaisalmer just before sunset—the penultimate time in this desert outpost—and were met, of course, by a horde of touts (mostly boarding the bus before we even had an opportunity to disembark). Jaisalmer is dominated by its old fort—a tangle of houses, narrow alleyways (and frequent cow jams), Jain temples and former Maharaj palaces—but when I stayed here over 15 years ago, there were only two guesthouses in the fort. Now there must be between 20-30 and the charm and quaintness of the area has no doubt been spoiled somewhat. With popularity comes kitsch and pushiness, but luckily for Jaisalmer, the town has remained small. This pushiness and constant hawking of something or other, meant that we changed guesthouses 3 times before settling into a place that left us alone (at least from the pressure to buy or do something through them) with steaming buckets of hot water for bathing and unbeatable rooftop views. We did the almost obligatory camel trek through the desert for 2 days and one night (years ago, I did a 3 or 4 night trek) and camped out under the stars on New Year’s eve—the first time since childhood I have been to bed before midnight). Our first day on the camel (one for Migyoung and one for myself) was a difficult and cold trek through a blustery sandstorm, which, thankfully, finally settled down by sunset. The second day was a beautiful, cloudless day through desert nothingness and small Muslim and dalit villages. The children in these villages are well rehearsed with their mantras of one rupee, one pen, almost unbearably so. I preferred the slow, rhythmic and surprisingly meditative rocking of the camel ride itself, despite a very sore bum at the end of the second day. Chapatis and curries never tasted better than when prepared over an open fire in the middle of the desert.
Post-camel trek back in Jaisalmer, we opted to spend a few lazy days in town (and the difficulty of getting train tickets back to Delhi during this popular time of the year to visit the desert) doing many things on foot and just taking in the general ambiance. Back in Delhi on the 6th and then on to Kathmandu on the 8th. Delhi, and I imagine Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, is almost unrecognizable to me a decade later. Middle class development is everywhere within the heart of the city (despite the slum areas still being thrown up all along the rail lines as you make your way into the city) and there is a new, fashion and status conscious breed of Indian on the rise. Despite more automobiles on the roads and the smattering of newer homes here and there, Kathmandu has remained more in a time warp as compared to Indian cities it seems. High tech development in India is the most ubiquitous (it seems that having a mobile phone is more important than the evening thali) and has led to the whole remaking of cities such as Bangalore in the south (the Indian silicon valley). Still, with only a cursory view of village life on this trip and based on the recent elections in India that kicked out the government which oversaw all of this development in favor of the old-guard Congress party, much of this development has not trickled down to the masses, and that much is the same in Nepal as well. Social and economic indicators as a whole are higher in India than in Nepal (a civil war, new King and totally inept government has hampered any development in Nepal) and that much is quite visible. And on the whole, for whatever reasons, Nepal remains the more “relaxed” of the two countries. At times, India seems a country totally on the make.
I have also reached an age in my life where I can say that I have been there and done that before things changed. I remember India (and Nepal for that matter) as a place where only the most hardy of backpacker ventured due to the difficulty of travel and the sheer overwhelming nature of the country. The place still generally smells of cow dung and sandalwood, but infrastructure developments have led to a new breed of traveler (even an army of newly wealthy Indian tourists) making the rounds to places once considered outposts. This has been both good and bad for India, I imagine…
There is both good news and bad news upon returning to Kathmandu: the good news is that our house now has solar panels for a bit of hot water (there is no real storage system, so it is “make bath while the sun shines”), but the bad news is that our bicycles were stolen while we were away despite being locked in addition to being inside a locked and gated compound. The locals say the most likely culprits are the glue sniffing street kids in the neighborhood. I’ll give them credit for scaling a wall, passing the bicycles over the wall and then having to break the bicycle locks. A bit of thievery (one digital camera, two bicycles) has sullied our Nepal experience a bit, but not enough to hold a grudge against the country as a whole. Other good news is that my grant proposal to the European Commission was accepted and the contract has been signed. You may remember that this was something I put together for my previous organization—a two-year Dalit Rights and Inclusion project, which includes the formation of inter-caste community-based associations, allied women’s groups, human rights and activist training and advocacy, income generation skills training and seed money, community generated/activist newsletters and forums, and even working with local government officials on appropriately allocating funding for dalit-focused projects. I am elated with these developments, and will be lobbying hard to return to the south to help set this project up and engage in periodic monitoring and evaluation.