House of Snow Read online

  I have always marveled at what has drawn foreigners away from the peaceful countrysides of Europe and America to establish themselves in outposts of civilization. In that respect Boris was to me a mystery. Why would such a man as he have chosen the strange hardships of Nepal, when all Europe and the West were open to him?

  Though I had at first regarded Boris as a sort of efficiency expert, I was soon to discover other facets of his personality when, upon climbing a rattling, spiral steel staircase, I was first introduced into his private apartments. Situated above the hotel in a studio-type loft, Boris’s flat, the inner sanctum of the hotel, is lighted by the great windows rising to the ceiling and looking out over the rooftops of Kathmandu. Here, tucked away and aloof, Boris directs his small world.

  To know Boris it is essential to know his wife Inger. Twenty years younger than Boris, she has now been sharing his life for fifteen years. Inasmuch as Boris is an exuberant extrovert it is she who protects the privacy of their personal lives. In her flat she attempts to bring up their three sons, Mikhail (nicknamed Mishka), Alexander and Nicolas, out of reach of the slightly mad atmosphere of the valley.

  Boris’s flat reflects clearly the varied aspects of his personality. Beside a huge fireplace, welcome in the cool Nepalese evenings, stands a grand piano on which rest the photographs of famous ballet stars with whom Boris has danced on the stages of Europe and South America. Beside golden Buddhas from Tibet stand the autographed portraits of Queen Elizabeth II of England and King Mahendra of Nepal, reminders of Boris’s important role in the nation.

  A huge cabinet stretching around the room harbors Boris’s incredible record collection, ranging from the music of Stravinsky, which Boris knows so well, to the folk dances of his Ukrainian homeland. Here in these surroundings Boris is the artist and musician of his youth; here are collected the souvenirs of a life so varied and full that at first I was at a loss to grasp its scope.

  So unusual is life in Kathmandu that the business affairs that fill a large part of Boris’s days are a strange combination of the modern and the medieval. Tourists arriving daily from the airport, with their minds still vividly impressed by the luxury of the great hotels of Hong Kong and Calcutta, naturally expect the same conveniences in Nepal. In this they are in for a disappointment, and they have to learn to adjust to such peculiar requirements as ordering a bath two hours in advance. On the other hand, Boris has laid out for them sight-seeing trips that would send not only the most blasé tourist into ecstasies, but even the most sophisticated and best heeled travelers.

  One of the marvels of Nepal is Patan, the sister town of Kathmandu, which up to the present has entirely escaped the encroachments of Western ways. Patan is a dream city in the same sense that Venice is: not a single structure is out of place, its narrow, brick-paved streets separate large blocks of pink brick houses whose wooden frames are covered with the most delicate representations of dragons, goddesses, and other carvings. The imperial city of Peking cannot have been more beautiful. But there is nothing imperial about Patan, nor is it, like so many of the great historical sights of today, a dead city. You do not have to close your eyes and imagine how the city was four hundred years ago, for nothing has changed. In each little workshop craftsmen perpetuate their trades and one encounters goldsmiths with their minute anvils and small hammers, bell founders with their antiquated blast furnaces, and every sort of artisan imaginable. High in the attics of the houses can be seen those who spend their lives setting jewels into the delicate work of the coppersmith.

  In the city each block of houses, surrounded by its streets, encloses a vast stone-paved courtyard where rise the shrines of the district’s gods and goddesses. Once a year the thousands of copper divinities are taken out of the surrounding pagodas and exposed in these courtyards. The Newars are Buddhists of a primitive sect that has survived nowhere in India or in the rest of Asia. Distinct both from Tibetan Buddhism and from that of Southeast Asian, the Buddhism of the Valley of Nepal is descended from religion as it was practiced in India two thousand years ago, shortly after the death of Buddha. Hinduism has now gained much ground in Nepal; the fact that the local population practices both religions has simply resulted in every other day being a religious festival.

  These festivals, if they are the delight of travelers, are one of Boris’s main headaches. There is no written calendar, and often it is only after one of these holy days has arrived that Boris realizes that there are no cooks or servants to run the hotel.

  All these problems soon have the head bearers running up the small, rattling spiral staircase to see Boris, who, before he has finished his bath, suffers at least ten interruptions. Then comes the moment for the accounts, methodically kept in a great ledger by a medieval clerk who spends most of his day squatting by the kitchens keeping an incessant eye on all that goes on. The paying off of cooks, room boys and coolies goes on all day long. If there are no unions or syndicates in Nepal, Boris still has to tackle similar problems when he runs into the incompatibility of various castes and religious groups. Sweepers will not do beds, bed doers will not sweep, servers will not cook, and cooks will not associate with anyone of lowlier occupation.

  Once he is dressed Boris immediately makes for the kitchens, which offer the casual visitor a vision of Dante’s Inferno... a dozen vast, smoke, dark rooms whose walls are blackened darker than coal. Boris cruises about through the kitchens like some sort of steamship caught up in fog. Years ago in India he learned that everything must be supervised and watched, and not the slightest thing is done without his advice or orders.

  The other side of the kitchen partition shows a different picture that does not let the tourist suspect what goes on behind the stage. Here white-dressed servants flutter around, barefooted or in slippers, with their usual smiles. Practically none speak English, Nepal never having been a British colony – a source of frustration for the guests, who are rarely understood. The servants smile wider and wider as certain guests grow angrier and angrier, all this ending in a confrontation of all involved with Boris. So the day moves on, and Boris shifts constantly between the two strange worlds of the valley – the modern one he has helped to create and the ancient world with all its picturesque ways and customs.

  Outside the hotel gates the valley continues in its leisurely, centuries-old tempo. The introduction of bicycles, today the most popular means of transport among both local people and foreigners, is the only widespread concession to Western manners. One rapidly learns the art of weaving in and out among coolies and porters, over and around stray dogs, and through and in the midst of swarms of flies and rats. The streets of Kathmandu are alive with a great variety of fauna. One might assume the animal life of the town ended with pigs, sacred cows and bulls (the fierce bulls seem to keep to certain well-defined districts where none of the inhabitants dare to go out of their homes except in sprints and dashes). This is not so; the valley is alive with animals, insects, and various birds. Giant flying foxes share the sky with countless flocks of crows whose chorus is the most characteristic background music of the entire valley. More picturesque are the hundreds of white cranes that majestically pace about the rice paddies, treading slowly above their hazy reflections, when not clustering in hundreds like great blooms upon the tentacular branches of the bodhi trees, the sacred trees of Nepal, which grow out of many wayside shrines.

  Behind all the activity of the streets, and floating like a mist above the valley, is the mystery of Nepal. Although intangible as such, it can be felt in everything. It has something to do with the thin air and the lofty mountains, ever present at the end of the slightest alley or behind each monument, that remind one that Nepal and Kathmandu are truly the lost paradise of the Himalayas. There is a sense of intimacy in the valley derived from the great peaks that cut this small part of the world off from the rest of our planet.

  KATHMANDU YOUR KATHMANDU

  Kamal P. Malla

  Kamal P. Malla is a writer and retired professor of linguistics. His colle
ction of essays, The Road to Nowhere, was originally published by Sajha Prakashan in 1979. Kathmandu Your Kathmandu first appeared in The Rising Nepal in 1967. Malla lives in the United States.

  THE TWO LANDSCAPES

  Kathmandu is an absurd city. The absurdity of Kathmandu, the capital of the world’s only Hindu kingdom, is both physical and metaphysical. The physical absurdity of the capital is in the deep incongruity between the beauty of its natural landscape and the ugliness of its human habitations. The metaphysical absurdity of Kathmandu is in the wide incongruity between the primitive, animistic and elemental simplicities of the rest of the kingdom and, the pseudo-civilisation of the capital. Perhaps in the whole kingdom nature has been nowhere more generous than in the Valley of Kathmandu. The climate of the Valley is nearly perfect: high up from the blazing malarious plains, but fairly below the snow line. Except winter and a little rough weather Kathmandu has no other meteorological obsessions. Nobody dies of the sunstroke and no human habitations are washed away by ferocious rivers. Above all, the Kathmandu sky is never dull and flat. When there is nothing to engage you right and left, the sky holds out a prospect of a dramatic gradation of the Mediterranean blue converging on the liquid horizon of the folding layers of the mountains. Receding in the background are the peaks of gold, silver and ruby, depending upon the time of the day and the angle of the light in which the peaks are bathed. There is nothing so much as dull and grey in the Kathmandu landscape if only one could step up some hundred feet above the human habitations to look around. If the pervasive colour washing the whole landscape is not liquid blue, it is bright silver, and if it is not silver it is deep gold. The opulence of Nature, refulgent in light and shade, in green and gold, becomes more and more pronounced as we move away further and further from the city centres. In every centrifugal direction from the municipal area lies an outskirt not yet overrun by civilisation. Somewhere between the municipal area of Kathmandu and its adjoining outskirts lie the fatal borders between the purity of man before the fall and his depravity since he ate the forbidden fruit. Not only that the outskirts are more neat and healthy, but these places are also in a closer harmony with the surrounding natural landscape. These places have subtle and meaningful touches of the deep interior of the country.

  On all six days a week the adjoining areas of Kathmandu are safe. They are safe so long as the weekend picnic parties do not wish to open another Pandora’s Box, letting all the civilised beasts out of their plastic bags, and desert the place with ripples of transistorised music. Kathmandu, among other things, is a sprawling city, bursting at all the suburban seams accessible to the asphalt roads of one sort or another. More and more green fields are mowed down, more and more open spaces are overrun. Even the secretive walls of the Rana compounds are coming down. In their places buildings of one sort or another are coming up at the rate of one a day. The affluence of Kathmandu is manifest. It is manifest, not only in the window-shopping and cement pavements – all refulgent in phosphorescent illuminations, but also in the suburbia where pseudo-smart bungalows are cropping up – many of them in the form of brick edifices plastered with cement and painted with garish colours of all shades. In fact, for nearly a century Kathmandu has been encircled by numerous pockets of civilisation which flourished behind the lofty walls of the Rana mansions. The truth, however, was that before the deluge of the 1950s the people on either side of the brick curtain communicated very little. Now that we have survived the deluge, the walls are coming down, the mansions stand exposed, the plasters are peeling off, and the roofs are thick with weeds. At least such are the ravages of time wherever the foreign saviours, embassies, missions, hospitals and hotels are not housed. The patriarchal Ranas have receded; their descendants are more keen and indifferent to see glib bungalows rising around their ancestral mansions than to maintain an unprofitable compound enclosed by a groaning wall.

  THE CIVILISATION BEHIND THE BRICK CURTAIN

  Civilisation started to encroach upon the heart of the selfcontained, primitive, insular and agricultural life of Kathmandu much earlier than the deluge. In many ways the Ranas were the first civilised rulers of Kathmandu. Jung Bahadur was the first Hindu maharaja to sail the high seas and pay a state visit to Her Britannic Majesty. When the first Rana Prime Minister sat with Queen Victoria in the Royal Box to hear an Italian prima donna singing lustily, the power elite of Kathmandu took a decisive step towards the Forbidden Tree. In June, 1850 the Hindu maharaja was already eating the first fruit of civilisation.

  For the next hundred years the Ranas remained religiously loyal to Jung Bahadur’s symbolic gesture. The first thing they apparently succeeded in accomplishing was a cheap transplantation of the West. By the twilight hours of the Rana regime the architects of the dynasty had succeeded in erecting monumental day-dreams of mimicry – each a monstrous monument to the idea of mimicry. Today each Rana mansion stands as a museum without character. All their walls are covered with sinister life-size portraits of the Rana ancestors, standing either by a dead tiger or a dimpled wife. Presumably, the helpless painter in the narcissistic Rana court failed to discover a third subject to smear the tall imported canvas with gaudy paints. The Ranas imported everything except probably boiled rice. Of all things, they imported Western architecture and built brick and mortar labyrinths to house their harems and prodigious households. With a redeeming touch of taste, generosity and sensibility each of these Rana mansions would have been founded in an entirely different tradition. For instance, in England “the great houses” that punctuate the English landscape were built by the nobility and the gentry who were in organic touch with the rest of English society. In Kathmandu the Ranas, on the contrary, refused even to communicate with the rest of society except for money and cheap labour. They turned their backs upon the traditional Nepalese arts, crafts and architecture. There is not a single building which shows the regime’s patronage of the homespun style. A Rana palace is not only a depressive monument to the Western mimicry: it is also convincing evidence of a collective schizophrenia. After all, the Ranas were the rulers; they ought to feel different from the ruled; they must live differently in dream-castles inaccessible to the vulgar herd. But is not all mimicry vulgar, particularly the mimicry of a culture only imperfectly understood? It was wise of the Ranas to have lived within the colossal compounds of their own, encircled by the walls, tall and thick enough to perpetuate this vulgarity among their own family tree. Mr Kingsley Martin visited Kathmandu once and unthoughtfully remarked that he did not like the tall walls of the Rana castles. The Ranas felt otherwise, and were rather wiser. Mr Martin would not probably like to guess what Kathmandu would have looked like with completely exposed and nude Rana castles. In all likelihood the capital might not have looked different from a medley of Hohenschwangau, a dream-castle of the Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The architectural prodigality of the Ranas impoverished rather than enriched the capital precisely because within the closed walls it created a dream-fantasy for the rulers who were never in fruitful contact with the ruled inhabiting the world without.

  THE TWO BUILDINGS: THE TWO WORLDS

  The Ranas did not, however, confine their fantasies within the four walls of their compounds. The mimicry was also imposed upon the city of Kathmandu at large. Here the Ranas built a number of squares converging on the traffic islands where the chivalric Ranas rode upon bronze horses. They also built a large number of edifices with rhetorical Gothic colonnades or pseudo Greco-Roman motifs, like the Gaddi Baithak, Military Hospital, Bir Hospital, TriChandra College, Durbar High School; to these were later added glib structures like Saraswati Sadan and the Police Station. Of all these public buildings the most pretentious one is the Gaddi Baithak. This was where the few state visitors to the Rana Court were ceremonially received during the last fifteen years of the regime. The architectural affectations of the regime are eloquent in the very location of this building: it is imposed upon the heart of a unique square in the whole city, the Durbar Square. With its tall colonnade fr
onts the Gaddi Baithak appears completely out of place, standing out as a freakish lapse in a chain of buildings with a distinct and indigenous character. One can come across buildings like the Gaddi Baithak in any part of the world, from say Calcutta to Timbuctoo. But the ancestral buildings like the House of Kumari, the south western front of the Hanuman Dhoka Durbar can be found only in the Valley of Kathmandu. The Ranas also contributed their share of vandalism to the Durbar Square by plastering the fine polished brick buildings with lime and mortar. In the whole Square only one building stands now in its original exterior. It is the nine-storied palace of Pratap Malla, also called the Basantpur Palace. The Gaddi Baithak and the Basantpur Palace stand side by side in the heart of Kathmandu, not only representing the two styles of architecture, but also symbolising the two incongruous worlds of values.

  THE DISDAINING REPOSE

  In an excursion to a city, to begin with architecture is to begin with the most obvious. Architecture is not just a style of building. Architecture or the style of the buildings where the people live, is often an index, as in the case of the Ranas, to what they live by. In Kathmandu the lyrical and dramatic qualities of the natural landscape surrounding the city, throw the city’s architectural incongruities into painful contrast. Here the generosity of Nature is oppressive, because the city falls apart at all seams in the face of the more meticulous and discriminating harmony of Nature. It is as if the human affectations appear less real and human than the solid walls of green and gold, the dramatic canopy of blue and orange. Kathmandu does not hold together as a symbol or a metaphor. Only the ugliness of the city acquires a sharp definition because here Nature is in a better form than elsewhere; here men are more pretentious than elsewhere in the kingdom. As we lose our ways in the old parts of the city, struggling through a maze of dark, slimy and narrow lanes, jammed with vehicular traffic of all sorts – the Stone Age cart coexists here with the space age limousines – we forget all the oppressiveness of Nature. Except a narrow strip of sky Nature ceases to matter thereafter. What compel our attention are the details and didacticism of the man-made town. Here the incongruity is not so much between the beauty of nature and the ugliness of the human habitations as between the disdaining repose of art and the bewildering details of the surrounding material squalor. It is in this labyrinth that one realises that Kathmandu was never built; it just grew up like weeds. That is why the city takes the knowledgeable tourist perpetually by surprise. He can never tell what next he may bump into after drifting along for a five-minute distance from a golden pagoda. The old city abounds in the deposits of time-groaning buildings with beautifully carved but rotting verandas, temples and pagodas in disrepair, cracking door frames with exquisite details, places of worship with obscene terracotta. It is the art in ruins and disarray, the islands of symmetry in the thick of fuming slums and green gutters, the harmony in bronze and stone thick with pious scum that unnerve every outsider in Kathmandu. Amidst such a mighty confusion of holy cows and mangy dogs, elusive men and markets, suffocating traffic and pedestrians, stubborn street-vendors and obscure holes suddenly there is an island of calm and order, repose and harmony – the work of an unknown artist or artists who betrayed their disdain everywhere in stone, wood and metals. Their disdain is eloquent in every inch of the exterior detail which is subjected to the most exacting concern for texture and symbolism. Each building or pagoda is a triumphant solution of the problems of space and scale, mass and proportion, details and perspective, parts and the whole. The windows, the doors, the beams, the posts, the capitals, the balconies announce not only the artist’s triumph over stone, metal and wood, but also his triumph over the chaos of teeming symbols and details. Yet today each classical Nepalese abode is merely an island disdaining its own environment, neither enriching nor enriched. In Kathmandu the golden pagodas float upon the entrails of the fuming city like Noah’s Ark. Each ancient pagoda in the heart of Kathmandu appears as a sad imposition upon the teeming labyrinth of mercantile slums: the golden pagoda in the heart of obscure holes displaying toothpastes and cabbages with equal religiosity.