Stood up by a living goddess

To appreciate Kathmandu, you have to look past the obvious – the obvious being that it is a third-world city: chaotic, dirty, impoverished, less-than-fragrant. Okay, glad we got that out the way. Because look past this you must, for on display is one of the richest historical and artistic heritages than any world city could hope to boast. It is something of an outdoor museum. Beautiful (and ancient) Hindu and Buddhist temples and statues lurk in the most unassuming of back-alleys; locals light candles to them and clang their bells in the morning and evening. This is no ossified, neatly-packaged culture, like that of much of Europe.

There is a near-impossible amount to take in, and KTM is best attacked in piece-meal skirmishes. The old city is where it’s at, temple-wise, and is the locus of the popular, post-card image of exotic, medieval Kathmandu. Navigating it – or, more likely, getting hopelessly lost – is exhausting. The streets are narrow, dark and winding; the press of people is like the thickest of custards. Pedestrians play a delicate dance with the motorbikes and cars (largely the former) – a million near-misses a minute. My dodging skills improve daily. And there’s animals, farm animals, everywhere.

The old town seems to be crumbling around you – literally, in places. And many of the residents are selling off their antique doors and window-frames to finance new, more comfortable (but hideous) concrete blocks, often in the place of their picturesque, rickety wooden homes. Not that I’m one to begrudge Nepalis self-improvement, but…well, you know. So, people, see it while you can. You heard it from me.

At the heart of the old town – and the heart of the city itself; culturally, at least – is the Durbar Square. A ‘durbar’ is essentially a royal court – its etymology is Persian: the Shah’s noble court. It resembles an epic parade ground, suitable for elephant fights and other such courtly fun. Temples venerating different Hindu deities are dotted about the place: Shiva, Ganesh, Durga, Gorakhnath (the Shah-King lineage deity), all get a look in. A much chuckled-at feature of Nepali temples is their erotic carvings, usually placed somewhere discreet, like the struts supporting the thatched, pagoda-like roofs. There are threesomes, bestially and some truly impressive athletics to ogle at. Many disagree over their meaning: some suggest that sex is being portrayed as a tantric path to enlightenment; the union of bodies as well as of souls, that sort of thing. But a popular native belief is that the goddess of lighting is a chaste virgin, who would shy from striking at such as bawdy building.

Perched in the centre of it all is the old royal palace, the Hanuman Dhoka, much of it built by the Malla Kings in the 17th century. But the royal family relocated to a quieter spot on the outskirts in 1886, where they built an Art-Deco monstrosity. Now, of course, with the recent abolition of the monarchy by the (ironically) now-dissolved Maoist majority government, that too is empty and open to the public. Expect a withering critique of that in a future post

The Hanuman Dhoka is so named after the monkey deity from the Ramayana, who occupies a special place in the hearts of pious Nepalis. My favourite of his many exploits goes a little like this: when his beloved Lord Ram is severely wounded in one of the many, largely indistinguishable battles of the Hindu epic, Hanuman flies from Sri Lanka to the Himalayas in search of a life-restoring herb. Being a little short of time, Hanuman doesn’t waste it browsing the hillsides but simply lifts the Himalayas and flies them back to Sri Lanka. Ram is promptly cured and the two of them make passionate love on a beach. Okay, I may have made the last bit up, but a lot of sweaty homoeroticism goes on between Ram and Hanuman in the course of the tale, I kid you not. They allegedly portray the model master-retainer relationship – rather like Suresh and I – the acceptance of hierarchy and consequent duty being a key facet of Hindu Dharma (law, roughly translated). Or something like that.

The true celebrity of all the buildings in the Durbar Square is the Kurmari Chowk, the gilded temple housing Raj Kumari, the holiest of over a dozen ‘living goddesses’ in the Kathmandu Valley, worshipped as incarnations of the goddess Teluju. The Kumari selection process echoes that of the Dalai Lamas of Tibet – elders interview hundreds of girls from the Shakya Buddhist clan of goldsmiths, all aged three to five, in search of those displaying 32 auspicious signs: a body like a banyan tree, a neck like a conch shell, eyelashes like a cow’s, among other desirables. The shortlisted few are then subjected to a ceremony at midnight in the Durbar Square, where freshly-severed buffalo heads are set about them, and men in demon masks dance around and make sinister noises. The idea is to scare the shit out of them. And the little girl who doesn’t flinch, identifies the belongings of previous Kumaris and whose horoscope doesn’t clash with the King’s, is then rewarded with the privilege of being locked up inside the Kumari Chowk till puberty, only allowed outside a few times a year to be paraded around in Hindu festivals, where her feet are never allowed to touch the ground. The spirit of Teluju deserts her on her first menstruation, and she may retire to normal life. But she will find it a little tricky finding a husband, seeing that there’s a curse that any man who dares marry a Kumari will die young. Honestly, some people just have it all.

When someone slips her ‘handlers’ enough rupees, she is known to appear at one of the first floor windows, draped in auspicious red, her forehead painted red with a ‘third eye’ in the middle. This is quite a karma top-up for all involved, and the mere look on her face is alleged to answer the unspoken questions of any who gaze on her. But I, being full of unspoken questions, was not so lucky that time; and besides, there was something of the zoo about the whole thing – the windows even have grills on them. But I’m here till September, and I’m bound to catch a wave at some point – possibly even a blown kiss. Just don’t expect ant photos of the girl; it is expressly forbidden, as with the idols in the inner-sanctums of temples. For a statuette of a god, no matter how crude, is as unique as any human, and attributed with special powers of its own. Hence why they are often treated as living people: brahmins bathe them daily, feed them, even put them to bed in the evenings. To reproduce their image, through photography or otherwise, robs them of their uniqueness and so degrades their power – or so the logic goes.

Thamel, a little below the neighbourhood where I sleep, is the backpacker ghetto. It used to be Jhochhe, a.k.a. Freak Street, one of the slacker capitals of the seventies, back when it was a stop on the over-land ‘hippy-trail’ from Europe to South-east Asia. It thrived on an abundance of near-legal weed, among other things. But a government clampdown changed that, and Thamel took up the mantle. Thamel has its counterparts in most Asian capitals – Paharganj in Delhi; Sudder Street in Calcutta; Jalan Jaksa in Jakarta; and, unholiest and unholies, Bangkok’s Khao San Road – like one extended, burger-chomping family. As with its siblings, the proprietors of the Thamel’s restaurants and guest houses work on the logic that most backpackers don’t actually want to be in a foreign country. So, they have created a haven where whities can drink, eat pizza, and listen to live bands warble out Beatles songs – all the above richly deserving an inverted comma or two. After Joe-backpacker has finished his ‘steak,’ he can score some weed off one of the multitude – actually, make that ‘swarm’ – of touts, then browse shoe-box shops for pirated films, tie-dye bandanas, Buddha figurines, t-shirts with yaks on them, and other assorted shite. As the sharper of you may have grasped by now, I am not terribly enamoured of Thamel.

*

I’ve done my first week with Himal. It is wonderful to work with such intelligent, interesting people – such a change from the illiterate droids I’ve had to work with in past jobs. Things are really coming to a head with the July issue going to the printers on Tuesday. So far, I’ve been doing rather a lot of fact checking – assessing whether three or three-and-a-half million Pakistanis have been displaced in Swat, or whether So-and-So Patel is actually the Health Minister of Gujarat – which is just as much fun as it sounds. At this, I have excelled. I am really quite the fact-checker. Writers, beware.

The office is in Patan, Kathmandu’s sister city, also known by its modest Sanskrit name, Lalitpur (city of beauty), as well as its rather less delicate Newari name, Yala, meaning god-knows-what. Once upon a time it was a separate city state, with its own King and courtly culture. It has its own Durbar Square – smaller, less bustling, but more refined than Kathmandu’s. But, Kathmandu’s burgeoning suburban sprawl being what it is, Patan is now merely a borough of Greater Kathmandu. Yet it has retained a distinct identity: quieter, more Buddhist, with an even denser concentration of temples and stupas. It has always been a city of artisans; loud tapping and filing still dominates the soundscape. Some label it Kathmandu’s left-bank. It has also become Nepal’s foreign aid capital, with the UN and multiple well-meaning NGOs setting up shop.

If the calendar is to be believed, the monsoon is supposed to be well underway here. The start date is conventionally 10 June, give or take a couple of days. But odd weather in the Bay of Bengal has held the rain-clouds up, now said to be hovering over Sikkim, slowly making their way east. For now, it’s simply hot – very hot. Not Indian-plains hot, but close. However, a short, intense shower hit us on Friday; I was out on my lunch break, and had to run into a temple for shelter. This is not poncy British rain, I assure you.

All goes well with Suresh the servant boy. We continue to have our non-conversations, where I speak and he merely nods his head and says, ‘yes yes, very good.’ (Might be handy to pick up a few words of Nepali at some point.) But that kid is a master-cook in the making. He made me a mean chilli-chicken the other day. Might just have to take him home with me.

And another thing: power cuts. They happen every day, multiple times, though most noticeably in the evenings, when Kathmandu is plunged into a medieval darkness. Still, Kathmandu-wallahs can count themselves lucky to be among the 15% of Nepalis who have access to electricity at all. Me: I have truly discovered candles. To put it mildly, they are fucking excellent.

Ta-ta for now.