House of Snow Read online

  HOUSE OF SNOW

  An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal

  FORWARD by

  SIR RANULPH FIENNES

  INTRODUCTION by

  ED DOUGLAS

  Start Reading

  About this Book

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  About House of Snow

  In April 2015, catastrophic earthquakes left Nepal devastated. Over 7,000 people lost their lives and more than twice as many were injured. Hundreds of thousands were made homeless and UNESCO World Heritage sites were destroyed.

  House of Snow is the biggest, most comprehensive and most beautiful collection of writing about Nepal in print. It includes over 50 excerpts of fiction and non-fiction inspired by the breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural heritage of this fascinating country.

  Here are explorers and mountaineers, poets and political journalists, national treasures and international stars such as Michael Palin and Jon Krakauer, Laxmi Prasad Devkota and ManjushreeThapa – all hand-picked by well-known authors and scholars of Nepali literature including Samrat Upadhyay, Michael Hutt, Isabella Tree and Thomas Bell. All profits from sales will be donated to charities providing relief from the 2015 earthquakes.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About House of Snow

  Foreword: Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Introduction: Ed Douglas

  Nepal Himalaya: H.W. Tilman

  Mad (Pāgal): Laxmīprasād Devkoṭā

  Mountains Painted with Turmeric: Lil Bahadur Chettri

  Schoolhouse in the Clouds: Sir Edmund Hillary

  Tiger for Breakfast: Michel Peissel

  Kathmandu Your Kathmandu: Kamal P. Malla

  Poems: Bhūpi Sherchan

  The Waiting Land: Dervla Murphy

  Narendra Dai: Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala

  Time, You are Always the Winner (Samay Timi Sadhaimko Vijeta): Bānīrā Giri

  Against a Peacock Sky: Monica Connell

  Dukha during the World War: Pratyoush Onta

  So Close to Heaven: Barbara Crossette

  Chomolungma Sings the Blues: Ed Douglas

  Into Thin Air: Jon Krakauer

  Music of the Fireflies (Junkiri ko Sangeet): Khagendra Sangroula

  The Tutor of History: Manjushree Thapa

  Trap: Maya Thakuri

  The Scream: Dhruba Sapkota

  Chhinar: Sanat Regmi

  Letter from Kathmandu: Isabel Hilton

  Massacre at the Palace: Jonathan Gregson

  Himalaya: Michael Palin

  Forget Kathmandu: Manjushree Thapa

  From Goddess to Mortal: Rashmila Shakya and Scott Berry

  The End of the World: Sushma Joshi

  Buddha’s Orphans: Samrat Upadhyay

  Snake Lake: Jeff Greenwald

  Karnali Blues: Buddhisagar Chapain

  Nothing to Declare: Rabi Thapa

  Wandering Souls, Wondering Families: Weena Pun

  The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born: Tsering Lama

  The Royal Procession: Smriti Ravindra

  Aftershocks and Let the Rain Come Down: Samyak Shertok

  Pep Talk: Muna Gurung

  Flames and Fables: Prabhat Gautam

  Chamomile: Byanjana Thapa

  The Letter: Rajani Thapa

  Battles of the New Republic: Prashant Jha

  The Living Goddess: Isabella Tree

  The Vanishing Act: Prawin Adhikari

  Candy: Nayan Raj Pandey

  Three Springs: Jemima Diki Sherpa

  The Bullet and the Ballot Box: Aditya Adhikari

  Kathmandu: Thomas Bell

  Poems: Itisha Giri

  Cracked Earth: Niranjan Kunwar

  Ram Vharosh is Searching for His Face: Shrawan Mukarung

  The Kabhra Tree at the Chautari: Swopnil Smriti

  The Deeper Catastrophe: Shradha Ghale

  Poems 1976–2015: Wayne Amtzis

  Extended Copyright

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  House of Snow is the literal translation of the Sanskrit word “himalaya”; a combination of the word “hima” meaning snow and the word “alaya”, meaning “dwelling” or “abode”. Home to nine of the world’s highest peaks including Mount Everest, the Himalaya is a vast mountain range that spans India, Nepal, China (Tibet) and Pakistan.

  The lofty heights of these dramatic landscapes were raised as a result of a collision of the Indian tectonic plate with the Eurasian plate. These plates are constantly moving, so it is an area of outstanding beauty, but it is also very geologically vulnerable.

  My expeditions have taken me to many such stunning vistas, formed by forces of the natural world. The Earth’s surface is constantly changing as a result of phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanoes.

  Nepal is particularly vulnerable to such threats as is situated completely within the two plates’ collision zone. Geophysicists and other experts had warned for decades that the country should expect a deadly earthquake, particularly because of its geology, urbanization, and architecture, and in 2015, it happened.

  The April 2015 earthquake in Nepal killed over 8,000 people and injured more than twice as many. The epicentre was east of the district of Lamjung in the Gandaki region, however, the majority of the casualties occurred in the nearby capital Kathmandu.

  The aftershocks continued for days afterwards, causing further devastation. Villages were flattened and hundreds of thousands were made homeless, UNESCO world heritage sites and centuries-old buildings were destroyed. It was the worst natural disaster to strike Nepal since the earthquake in Bihar in 1934.

  Despite its geological vulnerability, Nepal is a country with a rich culture and a fascinating history. There is far more to this nation than its mountains, though this is where the focus of outside onlookers often lies.

  Neolithic tools found in the Kathmandu Valley indicate the area has been inhabited for at least eleven thousand years. It has seen great dynasties rise and fall and witnessed wars and empires. It is the birthplace of the Buddha. And in recent years, the location of a royal massacre, lengthy civil war and establishment of democracy. Its diverse terrain ranges from the loftiest of peaks to hills, plains and lowlands.

  Home to those accurately famed for being some of the strongest people on Earth, the instinct and capacity for survival and evolution is undeniably powerful. In this volume you will find not only the voices of explorers and mountaineers, but of authors from the length and breadth of this fascinating nation that have been chosen to represent it as fully as possible.

  INTRODUCTION

  How do we Discover New Countries?

  Ed Douglas

  How do we discover new countries? In 1950, after two centuries when the kingdom of Nepal kept tight rein on who could and mostly could not cross its border, the doors opened a crack and the world rushed in. Geographers, explorers, aid workers, anthropologists, filmmakers, mountaineers, hippies and art dealers rummaged through the valleys and up the mountainsides as though some vast emporium of the exotic had just announced a fire sale. Toni Hagen was among them, arriving 1950 as part of a sustained Swiss development aid project; he walked the length of the country, filming the people he met and wrestling Nepal’s complex geography into some kind of order. A blank on the map was rapidly filled in.

  The opportunity to get to grips with the greatest mountains on earth was equally irresistible. In the following decade all the mountains of Nepal over eight thousand metres were climbed. In the same year as Toni Hagen arrived, the wry and self-deprecating Bill Tilman, whose writing features in this book, joined
a team of Americans to become the first Westerners to visit Khumbu and the southern base of Everest. Within three years the mountain was climbed. Nepal became one of the most desirable destinations for the world’s adventurers, a country apparently lost in time, full of arcane spiritual wisdom, near-continuous religious festivals and a people who seemed endlessly hospitable and wholly lacking, it seemed, the cynicism and materialism of the modern world. It was a similar impulse that sent me to Nepal for the first time more than twenty years ago, following on the coat-trains of earlier generations of climbers and explorers.

  That rush of discovery was invigorating and transformative but it didn’t come close to unravelling the dense and complex tapestry of Nepali culture and society – or finding out where decades of political oppression and cultural stagnation had left ordinary people. For this kind of work, poets make better explorers. In 1959, the Bombay-born poet Dom Moraes arrived in Kathmandu, still only twenty but already a published poet and the winner of the Hawthornden Prize. He later wrote a book about it, Gone Away. Moraes, drunk half the time and excited by the louche sensuality of the recently deposed Ranas, was not complimentary of the poetry he heard, but on his last day in Kathmandu he took the chance to sit with Nepal’s great poet Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, who was dying of cancer, aged only forty-nine, near his own funeral pyre at the temple of Pashupatinath. I came across Moraes’ book by chance and left it with a desire to read Devkota and much more – and so a fascination with Nepali literature began. Overshadowed by its colossal neighbours, Nepal’s voice often struggles to be heard, but it is a voice that is distinct, often playful, long-suffering, proud, resigned but undoubtedly of its own making.

  Devkota was a great liberalising force in Nepali literature, which had previously cleaved between the formal, highly metrical Sanskritised poetry of the elite and that of the oral, folk tradition. Despite his disdain for the colonialising weight of the British Raj, Devkoṭā was an admirer of English Romantic poetry, translating Wordsworth and Coleridge into Nepali and drawing on their guiding spirit for his most popular poem, Muna Madan, written not in an arcane, highly stylised form, but in the jhaure metre and more colloquial lexicon of the Nepali folk tradition. It is a story of separation and loss, of true love and human worth beyond caste or ethnicity, and consequently popular – and still is – with a wider public despite Nepal’s woeful literacy rate in the 1930s. For myself, his later work, Pagal, about his experience of mental illness, is even better and certainly more experimental and challenging.

  My discovery of Moraes led to Devkota, Devkota to the work of the English academic Michael Hutt and his book Modern Literary Nepali, which included many of the best Nepali writers from the late twentieth century, particularly Gopal Prasad Rimal and Bhupi Sherchan. The sardonic sense of fun in Sherchan’s work, blended with the tragic, seems to me essentially Nepali. ‘This is a land of uproar and rumour / Where deaf men who must wear hearing-aids / Are judges at musical contests,’ he wrote in the 1960s, ‘and those whose souls are full of stones / are connoisseurs of poetry.’ It’s easy to see why, given Nepal’s protracted political and social agonies, his poetry still resonates today.

  Modern readers are doubly blessed, with access not just to translations of famous Nepali works but also to new generations of Nepalis writing in English. Manjushree Thapa’s novel The Tutor of History is a moving exploration of thwarted lives and cynical exploitation of democratic ideals. She is also a formidable journalist and traveller and her non-fiction works are also an essential part of modern literary Nepal. In the last couple of years I’ve been introduced to new Nepali writers, particularly Rabi Thapa and Prawin Adhikari, who have published vital and revealing collections of short stories. They capture seismic social upheavals that were only reinforced by the actual seismic upheavals that captured headlines around the world in April 2015.

  It is rewarding also to know that while the literature of exploration and adventure that drew me to Nepal may not have penetrated deeply into the fabric of Nepali culture, the awareness and appreciation of Nepal’s complexity and richness among foreign writers is also there, particularly Thomas Bell’s exploration of his adopted city Kathmandu. I haven’t read anything by an outsider that captures this most exceptional of cities better.

  Ultimately, ironically, and I think Bhupi Sherchan would appreciate the joke, discovering another country, one that starts off seeming foreign and exotic to a European sensibility but ends up, in the Nepali phrase, as manpareko jhutta – a favourite pair of shoes, reveals only how little we know of our own country, or else how unfamiliar it can become when we shift perspective a little and look afresh. Dom Moraes, like Devkota, died prematurely, having lost his way after an electrifying start, but finding it again, to some extent, towards the end. One of his later projects was a biography of the Elizabethan traveller Thomas Caryate, who walked to India and whose first-hand knowledge of Indian customs had a deep impact in his native England. Caryate lived in the Somerset village of Odcombe, and it was there that Moraes requested that some of the soil from his grave be sent, the East mulching the west. In the churchyard, carved on a block of Rajasthani stone, is a small memorial – the end of all our exploring.

  NEPAL HIMALAYA

  H.W. Tilman

  Major Harold William “Bill” Tilman (1898–1977) was an English mountaineer and explorer, renowned for his Himalayan climbs and sailing voyages. He was involved in two of the early Everest expeditions in the 1930s.

  THE LANGTANG

  The upper Langtang is a fine, open valley, rich in flowers and grass, and flanked by great mountains. It is a grazier’s paradise. At 11,000 ft. one might expect to find a few rough shelters occupied only in the summer, but at Langtang there is a settlement of some thirty families rich in cows, yaks and sheep. These are, besides, like young Osric, spacious in the possession of dirt; for their fields are no mere pocket-handkerchief terraces clinging to the hillside but flat stone-walled fields of an acre or more growing wheat, buckwheat, potatoes, turnips, and a tall, strong-growing beardless barley called “kuru”.

  The grazing extends from the valley bottom to the slopes above and far up the moraines and ablation valleys of both the main and the tributary glaciers; and dotted about are rich alps with stone shelters, called “kharka”, where the herdsmen live and make the butter. Considerable quantities of this are exported to Tibet. In the Langtang gompa I saw 25 man-loads of butter sewn up in skins which a lama had bought for his monastery at Kyerong, and which, he told me, represented a year’s supply. Besides being drunk in innumerable cups of tea, butter plays an important part in religious ceremony. In well-run monasteries butter lamps burn continually before the images and at certain festivals pounds of butter are moulded into elaborate decorations for the altars. I noticed the Langtang lama placing a dab of it on people’s heads as a blessing, while a little is always placed on the edge of the cup or plate offered to a guest.

  The valley has religious traditions. Like many out-of-the-way places it was originally the home of the gods, those happy beings, to whom, with their ready means of locomotion, remoteness was of little account. But at a more recent date the beauties of the valley were revealed to mortals in a way reminiscent of that other story – “Saul he went to look for donkeys, and, by God, he found a kingdom”. In this case the missing animal was, of course, a yak which its owner, a very holy man, tracked up the Langtang. The spoor was not difficult to follow, for at the Syabrubensi and at Syarpagaon the beast left on a rock the imprint of a foot which is visible to this day. The lama caught his yak at a place called Langsisa, seven or eight miles above Langtang village where, having fulfilled its appointed task, it promptly died. The lama, with less regard for sentiment than for money’s worth unfeelingly skinned it and spread the skin on a rock to dry; but the yak had the last laugh; for the skin stuck and remains there to this day, as a big reddish coloured rock at Langsisa plainly testifies.

  Near Langsisa there are two other rocks of greater note. A couple of miles up a valle
y to the east, standing some hundreds of feet above the glacier, are two big rock gendarmes which are said to represent two Buddhist saints, Shakya Muni and Guru Rumbruche. Tibetan lamas come as far as Langsisa to worship them. Since the etymology of many English placenames is still, as it were, anybody’s guess, I have little hesitation in offering the following derivations. “Lang” is Tibetan for cow or yak, “tang”, or more correctly “dhang”, means to follow. Langsisa means the place where the yak died.

  A valley with such traditions is, of course, a sanctuary; within it no animal may be slaughtered. According to the lieutenant, the observance of this ban on slaughter, which dated back for hundreds of years, had been neglected and the present headman, Nima Lama, took it upon himself to visit Katmandu to have the matter put right. The original decree, having been looked up and verified, was formally confirmed, and the fine for any breach of the rule was fixed at Rs. 100. Our wish to shoot small birds for specimens had to be met by the issue of a special licence; but apart from two sheep thoughtfully slaughtered for us by a bear of non-Buddhist tendencies, we had no meat while in the valley.

  The people of Langtang are very like Tibetans, engagingly cheery, tough and dirty; but they have sufficient regard for appearances to wash their faces occasionally and were scrupulous to remove those lice which strayed to the outside of their garments. They themselves say their ancestry was a mixture of Tibetans from around Kyerong and Tamangs from Helmu – the district to the south of the valley. They now call themselves Lama-Tamang. (It should be noted that “lama” is the name for a class of Gurungs, one of the Nepal tribes from which many of the so-called Gurkhas are drawn.) They conversed very readily with our Sherpas in what was presumably some sort of Tibetan dialect. According to Tensing their speech is like that of the people of Lachen in north Sikkim.

  We had arrived on 5 June, and since the monsoon might be expected to break at any time we immediately began the survey of the middle valley so that we could have fixed points to work from when we reached the frontier ridge at the head of the valley. The triangulated peak of Langtang Lirung, only two miles to the north, could not be seen from the village, and a tiny triangle of white, sometimes visible over the rock wall behind our camp, might or might not have been the tip of a 21,500 ft. peak to the west of it. Accordingly we started next day with six Langtang men carrying three weeks’ food, leaving behind Polunin and the escort. With him we also left a Sherpa, a lad called Phutarkay who had been with me on Rakaposhi two years before, who as well as looking after his master had already learnt to press and handle specimens. On the march few strange plants escaped his keen eyes.