Political and Seismic Instability

The other night Amanda and I went carpet shopping. We’ll need more than this one to keep our feet warm once winter’s chill gets into these marble floors, but it’s a start.

The monsoon is running into extra innings this year. It has rained every day for at least a week, and yesterday it rained all day without letup. We were invited for daal bhat by Mark and Sarah, who are in town for a few weeks before they leave, with their seven month old son Samuel, for a two month research stint in Sikkim, India. Amanda and I were determined to have a green salad because of all of the meat and momos at my birthday party the other night, so we’d been planning on eating at Nhuchhe’s, the organic restaurant in our neighborhood. When Mark and Sarah invited us for dinner we decided we would get a salad to bring with us. A little after dark we went to Nhuchhe’s, sat at the bar while rainwater streamed off the grass roof, and had a drink and talked politics with Biraj, one of the owners, while we waited for Laurie to arrive and for our salad to be made. (The smallness of the world of Kathmandu and the Nepali diaspora surprised me once again when Laurie and Biraj made the connection that Laurie had had dinner one night with Biraj’s sister in New York City. She’s a friend of Ashmina’s and was a student at Columbia at the same time as Ashmina.)

Because of the rain it took us some time to get a taxi. Amanda and I had umbrellas which we shared with Laurie for a while but after being passed by a dozen occupied taxis at the Baluwatar Chowk, we decided we might have more success if we stationed people on both sides of the street. Laurie bought an umbrella at the corner shop, Amanda caught us a taxi on the far side of the street, and we went off to Maharajgunj where Mark and Sarah are staying. None of us had been to this house before and it took a while to find the street because, although there was a street sign (“Nursery Lane”), it was difficult to see through the steamed windows and the pouring rain. The driver would have to stop, and become the target of a barrage of outraged honking, and cars and pedestrians and bicyclists wrapped in plastic bags would pass around us on both sides while we tried to read the street signs.

Dinner was cozy. The power was out when we arrived and we had snacks and wine by candlelight. The house has a peaked wooden roof with a cathedral ceiling and exposed beams in the living room and overlapping rugs covering the floors. The rain became heavier throughout the course of the evening. Nights like this make you take stock of a roof over your head and a hot meal, and what a fortune you have in those things. The conversation concerned a number of tragedies that seem to be happening all around us, and piling portents on the already tense atmosphere of Kathmandu at this time of political upheaval and uncertainty. Some boys from the village where Mark and Sarah have lived and worked were forcibly recruited by Maoists. (Happily, they were returned to their village after the UN got involved on behalf of their families.) A helicopter with twenty-four people aboard went down a few days ago in the mountains. Many of the passengers were luminaries in Nepal’s wildlife conservation movement, and because of the small world that is Nepal, everyone seems to know someone who was on board. Another friend is in the hospital here in a coma, perhaps from encephalitis, but her condition is too delicate for a proper diagnosis. She collapsed a week ago over dinner and hasn’t regained consciousness. It seems everyone’s fortunes dangle from a thin thread. Of course it’s always true, but usually you ignore it. But the talk wasn’t gloomy. We were among friends and there was a lot of joking and laughter and Samuel is a beautiful baby and the food was delicious.

When we walked back out the winding alley to the main street, it was good we each had an umbrella. We got fairly wet anyway. The gutters on the main street were rivers. There were very few people out and the buildings were mostly dark so what lights there were, from a passing motorcycle or an isolated streetlight, served just to increase the shadows. I put my foot in a deep puddle more than once. Several groups of soldiers jogged past in the opposite direction, down the middle of the street, in fatigues and carrying rifles and huffing unhappily and getting soaked. Perhaps it was midnight training. We were lucky enough that a taxi passed, and did a u-turn, and picked us up. There was a half-ton truck full of soldiers at the chowk. We passed them and turned down winding back alleys between high compound walls and rows of old trees and shops with their gates rolled down, and we didn’t see another soul the rest of the way home.

Yesterday Amanda threw a birthday party for me. Sabina came over in the morning and made a mountain of momos. Amanda retrieved a box of glasses and some serving dishes and a momo steamer from her old place in Handigaon. She ordered chwwela, potatoes, and badmas from the Newari/Russian restaurant where we ate with the Fulbrighters last week. She bought wine and beer. People started arriving in the early afternoon. The last guests—D.C., Chandra, Peter, and Vishwa—left a little after midnight.

Peter, the director of Nepal’s Fulbright office, was the last to arrive. We had a second round of chwwela and momos in order to build up to a second round of dessert. He brought a flourless chocolate cake from the bakery at the Radisson. It was a spectacle of chocolateyness. When the box was opened, I knew from the smell that this was an uncommon chocolate cake not just in the context of Kathmandu, where baked goods are not fully understood, but even in the wider world. It was gooey and rich and bittersweet.

Vishwa asked me to bring out my guitar. He played and sang a few songs. D.C. and Chandra knew the words and sang along. Laurie and Amanda knew the words to one of them because it’s a famous song and Shambhu, their language teacher at Cornell, uses in it his lessons. Vishwa wrote this song and most everyone knows it. It’s called “Jomsom Bazaar.” (Jomsom is the name of the village that Vishwa’s family comes from. It’s in Mustang District, which borders Tibet, in the Annapurna Range, some of the most spectacular mountains in Nepal and therefore in the world. I was showing him Google Earth one afternoon and he found Jomsom and we placed a marker there. If you have Google Earth you can see it, along with a number of locations I’ve marked in Kathmandu, here: Jon’s Google Earth places. We’re considering going along with Vishwa for a quick visit when he travels up there after the Desain holidays are over to bring his father back to Kathmandu for the cold months.)

Toward the end of the evening the talk turned to politics. It’s a given that this will happen here. Politics seems to be everyone’s favorite topic in this country, among Nepalis and ex-pats alike. Peter was fairly cornered by D.C. and Vishwa on the controversial subject of the American ambassador and his involvement in the peace process with the Maoists, which most Nepalis seem to see as overly heavy-handed. Approval of American meddling in other countries is at a worldwide long-time low in popularity, thanks to our dear leader, and people here want no part of it. They get understandably nervous when the American ambassador goes on a visiting tour of army bases here.

The tap water here isn’t exactly healthful, unless your primary health goal is to lose weight after a bout of bacterial diarrhea. So it’s standard operating procedure to purify your tap water if you plan to drink it. We’re doing this by leaving filled plastic bottles in the sun. The process is called SODIS, which is short for Solar Disinfection. We top the bottle off completely so that there’s no air space in it and leave it in the sun for six hours. The UV-A light kills everything in the water. The second part of our process, which is not part of SODIS, is running it through a Doulton-style ceramic filter to remove chemical and sedimentary impurities.

Most people in Nepal seem to boil the water instead of using the ultraviolet method before filtering. This was the method Amanda used before our landlord Vishwa suggested SODIS. We liked the idea immediately. It’s free and it’s energy efficient. The technique was developed at The Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Research (EAWAG). They were trying to determine a simple water purification technique that could be implemented as easily as possible in the developing world. Since the plastic soda bottle is about as common an item as you could want, it got the honor.

We prepared our first dinner in the new place by candlelight. It wasn’t because we think food looks bad under glaring electric light. On Sunday nights from 7PM to 9:30PM we have scheduled load shedding in our neighborhood. (Nepal’s chief source of electricity is hydroelectric, and the drought in the eastern part of the country this summer is being blamed for limiting the available power. Presumably the unusual rain that’s been causing disastrous floods in the western part of the country drains into an entirely different watershed where there are no generating stations. But to mention these facts together is possibly to make political innuendoes, which I’ll save for another time.)

As inconvenient as they are for many people, there’s a certain peacefulness about the outages. The neighborhood is quieter. In nearby buildings most of the windows are dark, and the ones lit are lit by candles and always with a person’s face close enough to the light, as they read or prepare food, to be seen from outside. When the lights are on you don’t see a human face in every window, just the many bright empty windows. I stepped out onto the terrace and could see the neighborhood downhill of us lit up, and a few scattered lights twinkling on the hillsides miles away, but our neighborhood was dark and quiet like a blanket had been thrown over it.

The Bhat Bhateni Supermarket has two full aisles dedicated to biscuits. They’re apparently very popular here. Our favorite at the moment is an oat bran biscuit called Hob-Nobs. There’s a Polish knockoff of them (sweeter, less oaty, not as good) that I had to buy just for the name…

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There are two pizzas that people talk about in Kathmandu. Fire & Ice makes the most famous pizza in town, and the restaurant is something of an institution. Mike’s Breakfast, also an institution, is not a pizza restaurant, but on Fridays they do pizza and it’s said to be the best pizza available here.

Then the other day I was in the locker room at the Radisson getting dressed for a workout and I overheard a Nepali man asking an American man when his pizza restaurant was going to open. The American had a New York-via-L.A. accent and when I heard him say that their basic pizza was crust, tomato sauce, and cheese, “the soul of pizza,” my ears perked. The Nepali man was asking him what toppings were available and he seemed a bit miffed that potatoes were not one of them.

I asked the American what the story was. He said he just opened a week ago and had started the restaurant to give some of his workers work. I didn’t ask what his workers did when they weren’t making pizza. The place is called Sal’s Pizza, and, since there are now three pizzas in town that merit a try-out, I can officially declare it a quest. We shall try all of them!

(This is going to be a lot easier than the New York City edition was, I can tell you.)

We begin tonight at Mike’s Breakfast.

Lying awake in the wee hours I had some time between dog symphonies to appreciate the subtler sounds of Handigaon at night. We’re on the first floor so some of the sounds are of the neighboring yards, one overgrown and rural, the other carefully manicured. There are crickets chirping most of the time. Roosters crow here and there in the distance. An occasional cow lows. Before dawn, someone can be heard, perhaps over at Amanda’s old place which is just down the street, ringing a bell over a mandir. There’s also a mysterious trumpeter, probably also doing a blessing, who plays a descending four note tune that sounds almost like an elephant. I’ve heard it the past two mornings, and imaged a trumpet made of thin hammered brass dimpled like a cymbal. A little while ago I heard what sounded like a mechanical typewriter, for a minute or two, maybe upstair, maybe next door. It can be hard to tell sometimes whether a sound is coming from our building or a neighboring building or outdoors. The construction is brick and concrete and there’s no insulation so sounds conduct clearly through the walls. Small animals move in the underbrush. Mice or geckos shout in the corners.

Toward dawn, a motorcycle engine rumbles to life. A car goes rattling over the potholes and cracked pavement. Then a few more cars get out on the street, and the minibuses, and more scooters and motorcycles, and pedestrians and bicyclists, and the cows get up and start grazing along the bases of the streetside walls. It takes a lot of honking to move all of that traffic through the available space. Accidents must be so common they have no business being called accidents. I haven’t seen one yet, which I find surprising. But I try to keep my elbows in and my knapsack on the off side.