The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How to live on the roof of the world
An anthology of writing about Nepal looks past the stereotype of snowy peaks and plucky Gurkhas, finds Patrick French
politicians then failed to agree on a new constitution until last September, when a fudged version was introduced. This month, the Maoist revolutionary leader known as Prachanda became the country’s prime minister.
This is not to mention the earthquake that, in March 2015, left at least 8,000 people dead, hundreds of thousands more homeless and historic buildings in ruins. Nepal remains one of the poorest countries in the world.
Not all is doom and gloom – the ending of the civil war went better than many had expected. During the peace process, I visited Shaktikhor cantonment, a camp in central Nepal where the “People’s Liberation Army” were living, having sealed their weapons in cement-covered metal trunks. There, I met Maskey, a Maoist commander, and Balananda Sharma, lieutenant-general of the Royal Nepalese Army. Each day, the two men had lunch together, in public, to show they were committed to peace. General Sharma had previously been UN force commander in the Golan Heights. Was that easier, I asked? “Totally different. Nobody [there] wanted to compromise,” was his answer.
As tends to happen, from the ferment there has emerged a generation of intellectuals, activists and writers, committed to building a new kind of Nepal. It is to the credit of the editor of House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal that many of their names are represented in its pages. Of the 50-odd writers whose fiction and non-fiction appears here, the majority are Nepali, from fairly diffuse backgrounds and moments of history.
The sequence is broadly chronological, and we start with one of the best of the foreign writers on the Himalayas, HWTilman, who survived the Western Front in one world war and fighting behind enemy lines in Albania and the Dolomites in another. “On this stroll, the more pleasant because it was all downhill,” wrote the fearsomely tough climber in 1949, “we met with a fresh crop of flowers, most of them, like Mr Pyecroft’s lilac, ‘stinkin’ their blossomin’ little hearts out’.”
A later piece by Sir Edmund Hillary, about building a school in a Sherpa village, is a reminder of the mistakes outsiders can make when they involve themselves in a society they may not understand. When a “village elder” makes a joke to which Hillary objects, the conqueror of Everest knocks the Nepali to the ground. “He scrambled about on his hands and knees,” writes Hillary, “trying to escape, and presented the seat of his pants to my irate gaze. Next moment I had delivered a mighty kick to send him tumbling down the hill into the darkness.” Hillary’s evident satisfaction with the encounter is discomfiting to read. It’s a brave inclusion in this volume that could easily have lionised him for Anglophone readers.
The strongest writing comes in many cases from the crossover or collision between cultures. An essay by Pratyoush Onta, an academic, looks past the stereotype of the plucky Gurkha. At the start of the Second World War, women who knew what could happen “uniformly resisted the enlistment of their sons” and hid them from recruiters. A generation earlier, their husbands and brothers had not returned, and if they had, they might be like the disfigured Gurkha soldier whose forehead had been so badly damaged his eyeballs “were protruding out like that of an unearthly creature”.
In Tsering Lama’s short story “The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born”, a glamorous man called Thupten comes back home from America, his reputation preceding him. Jiggy, a 17-yearold relative, is so impressed that he cannot even look him in the eye. “‘ Thupten, my bro,’ he wanted to say, ‘ U are definitely my fav cousin and imma stick wit U like P Diddy and Biggie Smalls TILL DA END.’ But before he could work up the courage to speak English to a real English speaker, his father interjected.”
In “Three Springs”, Jemima Diki Sherpa knows that the Sherpa community is popular internationally, but not where this will take her: “Everyone loves us, everyone trusts us and everyone wants their own collectable one of us. Internet listicles call us ‘ badass’ and we have a very large, very coveted piece of real estate in our back yard.” But, “Like post-arts degree 20-somethings the world over, I was adrift.”
Some of the writing parachutes the reader into ways of life usually too remote to be understood. Many of the essays explain the hierarchy – and cruelty – of village life. In Dhruba Sapkota’s “The Scream”, an atmospheric short story about a family of hereditary prostitutes, a worrying customer is seen to pick the granddaughter: “Leading up are stairs made from a notched log. The steps are very narrow.”
The strange life of a Royal Kumari – a pre-pubescent girl worshipped as a living goddess – is explained by Rashmila Shakya, who spent seven years in the job in the Eighties. “From Goddess to Mortal”, told with the help of the American historian Scott Berry, takes us back to those childish days of privilege and torment. Every so often, Shakya is obliged appear at a window, expressionless. She is summoned: “‘Dyah Meiju, foreigners.’ I am busy feeding my dolls, and do not want to go, but I know it is my duty. It is no problem not smiling this time. I positively glower.”
If you want a book in English that tells you about Nepalese thinking, and gives a taste of the country’s contemporary literature, you could hardly do better than House of Snow.