Passion and Obsession in Kathmandu

I went to Nepal twice in quick succession, about four years ago, and about forty years after reading Han Suyin’s ‘The Mountain Is Young.’ Considering just how greatly I had been influenced by this book as a young girl on the brink of adulthood, I am astonished I waited so long. ‘Mountain’ is a delicate love story between Anne an Englishwoman and Unni Menon a half Nepali, half Indian engineer, portrayed as a contemporary Krishna—the blue god, beloved of all women. The story was set against the background of Kathmandu at the time of the coronation of King Mahendra, in 1956. The conflict between the absolute power of a near-medieval monarchy and the insistent voices of “damnocracy,” as one of the characters termed it, was already in place. The air was ripe for revolution and Han Suyin tried to wrap many elements, political, historical, sociological, around the central theme of sexual obsession, in this chaotic but most unusual book.

Published in 1958, the book had the added cachet of being based on Suyin’s own love story during the time she visited Kathmandu for the coronation. In literature’s best traditions, the novel is one of self-discovery, an early feminist exercise in a woman liberating herself from a terrible marriage. But what raised the novel beyond a common or garden love story in ‘exotic’ location, was the passionate voice of the author and an extraordinary cast of characters, major and minor. As one of the characters remarks, “Everything becomes colourful, significant, charged with emotional meaning when you’re up four thousand feet. Everyone here becomes more exuberantly themselves.”

Clearly Han Suyin had fallen in love not just with the South Indian engineer she met there, on whom she based the character of Unni Menon, but also with Nepal and the Nepali people. They come across as a proud, sympathetic people, highly intelligent, cheerful and sane in the face of tremendous odds; coping beautifully with the political jiggery-pokery into which their strategic location (caught between the two un-gentle giants China and India) has hurled them. Han Suyin makes fun, in fact, of all the foreigners in Nepal, the Brits, the Swedes, the Russians, the Americans; she caricatured the tourists, missionaries, the diplomats, the expats, everyone who claimed they knew and could understand Nepal better than anyone else, better than the Nepalese themselves.

I I should not have been surprised that it felt like a homecoming, when I finally did go to Nepal. There was the familiarity of the religion and some of the visible cultural symbols, and yet a bizarre sense of going back in time, as if I were a time-traveller in a miniature India before we had been invaded and colonised. As if all the centuries had been rolled back like a curtain, for us to know who we really were and what we might have been, if the Europeans had not come and Britain had not stayed. The sheer physical beauty of the country as well as the charm of the inhabitants is a great attraction. The women, especially, have small, jewel-like faces, their bodies slim and compact. They laugh readily, and yet have a remarkable self-containedness despite the admittedly huge problems; no cringing, no servility in any of their dealings with foreigners. No apologies for their culture or self-consciousness about their religious practices, take us as we are, or you are free to leave. It cannot be much fun to be referred to as an anachronism and “among the poorest and least developed countries in the world, with nearly half of its population living below the poverty line…” It cannot be much fun to be on the receiving end of so much international aid that funds 60% of the country’s development. Who pays the piper calls the tune, and certainly there is a cacophony of voices to be heard in Nepal.

On my first visit, I did all the usual touristy things: visits to Patan and Bhaktapur, two ancient cities beautifully preserved; the Pashupatinath temple with its hundreds of lingams which in the book, forms the background for Anne and Unni’s first sexual awareness of each other, beautifully described; to Budanilkantha, with the strange Vishnu idol lying flat on the coils of the serpent, his eyes staring sightlessly at the sky, and the dramatic Boudhnath stupa with the dramatic painted eyes that follow you everywhere, to the Chhangunarayan temple , the second oldest temple after Pashupatinath, with its wood carvings of gods and demons, mellowed by time and the soft, dry air.

I followed the trail of the rushing Trishula river used for white water rafting, to Kurintar where we took the dizzying cable car to Manakamana, where the goddess lives who grants all desires, to Dakshinkali, the forest shrine where lovers run away to get married. At all the temples, except the Buddhist ones, cocks and goats are sacrificed before the deity, the ground is often slippery with blood or with the water that washes the blood away. The air is filled with the alarmed bleating of goats as they watch each other being beheaded; one actually sees headless chickens running around. One of my companions had defiantly brought two white doves in a cage, which she freed in front of the goddess, loath to have animal blood on her conscience.

Through the blur of Germans, Swedes, Japanese, English, Americans, backpackers, mountaineers, trekkers, gauche Indian honeymooners, WHO personnel, UN diplomats, one is aware of the wary yet ironic eye of the Nepali going about his business. Their country has been overrun by outsiders, it is used as a channel for drugs, for unsavoury diplomatic manouevres by the China and India and to add to the confusion, now there is an overwhelming American presence.

In ‘ The Mountain Is Young,’ Suyin writes about the Girl’s Institute run by Isobel Maupratt whose sexual frustration is accentuated by her unrequited passion for Unni Menon as much as by the sensuous and erotic sculpture, and the soft mountain air. The patronising attitude of foreigners towards the Nepalis is finely nuanced in the book, along with the passionate romanticism implicit in this remark by one of the characters: “Nepal, land of the gods. ..it is still Shangri-la. Snow peaks and temples, tigers and roses, palaces and gods, gods, gods. Everyone is a god there, men and beasts, stones and trees.” Information about the country overwhelms the reader, the writer’s excitement at being in this beautiful country spills over in every sentence, her attempts at fictionalising characters and situations clear and transparent.

The large-scale violence and terrorism by Maoist groups has meant a terrific drop in tourist numbers. Does China actively help these groups? Are the Naxalites transferring some of their fearsome skills to their counterparts across the Indian border? Indeed, as a charming Nepali lady remarked sadly in conversation, “I wish we shared a common border with any other of your states but Bihar and UP. We see the worst of India, your dacoits, your drug addicts, your touts who kidnap our daughters… the gangsters who bring crime into our streets, the druggies who lie on the streets of Kathmandu. Any sort of progress is thwarted.”

I was lucky to meet people who could interpret Nepal and the Nepalis for me when I visited my sister who ran a school in a small village, some thirty kilometres outside Kathmandu. More and more middle-class Nepali professionals, architects, doctors, business people want to create a vital learning environment are coming together to build schools. Most middle-class Nepalis have to send their children away to school in India or elsewhere, and quite a few young Nepali men and women come to Indian medical and engineering colleges for further education. The more affluent ones, of course go to the UK or the US or even Australia. The Jesuits run schools which are now targeted by the Maoist rebels, as are most institutions run by foreigners.

The problems in Nepal are immense. Because of the poverty, there is a high disease and mortality rate among babies and young children as well as among women. Tubercolosis and now AIDS, take their toll; alcoholism is rife, among the men. Their once pristine environment is polluted, the rivers have been soiled, even their sacred mountains, especially Everest has tonnes of garbage left by climbers. To drag a feudal society kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century is not the easiest of tasks. We should know. India has been trying to do just that for the last fifty-four years.

A well-known Indian political commentator once spoke of India’s habit of reporting events in our neighbouring countries much as the West reports events in India. From a vast distance and with an incomprehensible sense of superiority. This needless distance even created the rumour after the mysterious palace massacre that there was an Indian hand in the deaths of the royal family.

No two countries could have shared so much: our gods, our rivers, our mountains, our borders, our histories, even the wretched caste system. We share a common belief in karma and the repeated cycle of births, part of a profound philosophy. Both our peoples are trying, often with very little success to adapt to a baffling modern world, and find it much easier to explain the world through myth and superstition and the presence of evil spirits.

In ‘The Mountain Is Young,’ Han Suyin drags her plot to a violent climax when the beautiful, child-like Rukmini also in love with Unni Menon, is dramatically slain by her malevolent Rana husband Ranjit in a monastery in the shadow of the sacred mountain Mana Mani. It is a violently taboo act, and Ranjit is himself killed by the Tibetan monks in retaliation, for as one of the characters explains earlier in the book, “ In Nepal, the women are not cowed or relegated to harems as in Muslim countries. Here they laugh and are happy and free and no Nepalese widow has ever got burnt on a pyre either. The Nepalese are wonderfully tolerant and all the harshness and cruelty of Hinduism has come out of their festivals….”

Han Suyin herself of mixed Chinese and Belgian parentage, writes more as a Western observer, rather than as an Asian. Some of her comments and conclusions might strike the Indian reader as tedious and self-evident, but there is no quarrelling with her sense of recovering a lost innocence in Nepal. Indeed, through the intrigue and general talkativeness and exuberance of all the characters, one sees the killing of the exquisite Rukmini as a metaphor for Nepal becoming a sacrificial victim in the demented politics of the region. One only hopes her writer’s percipience is not proved correct.