Whiskey a drop of relief for quake survivor

Reporter scales Himalayan foothills to deliver bottle to 80-year-old woman

Sometimes the most important thing you do on a reporting trip is not reporting. So it was two Saturdays ago, when I found myself scaling a mountain in Nepal’s Himalayan foothills to deliver a bottle of whiskey to an 80-year-old woman.

When we canvassed drivers in search of someone willing to take us up the road, through 14 kilometres of villages smashed in by the earthquake of April 25, one candidate emerged: Santosh, a man in his 20s who had decorated the interior of his truck with images of big-breasted women in recumbent positions. He gave us a fishy, sideways smile as we climbed into the cab. “Now,” he said, “I’ll show you what a real road looks like.” We lurched up the side of a ridge with a boisterous squeaking of springs, and the multicoloured pompoms hanging from his windshield whipped around like atoms in a particle accelerator. This would continue for four hours.

I had intended this mission to be something more heroic. On the day after the earthquake, I was rushing to catch a flight to Nepal, in the usual blinkered breaking-news trance, when I discovered that it had touched someone close to me: My daughters’ nanny, Beena Lama, who lives with us in New Delhi, learned that her father had been crushed to death under falling stones inside his house. This news made me gasp. I had spent the entire previous day recording horror stories, but those were the stories of people I did not know. As I worked, filing reports every night from a hotel room, the details nagged at me. Her mother, Japa Tamang, was living in an open-sided shed once used to store grain, in hills still shuddering from aftershocks. My husband had the idea of giving her a ride back to Kathmandu and a plane ticket to Delhi, and this idea cheered me up greatly. But when this offer was conveyed to her, she said no, thank you. She did make one request: Could I bring her a bottle of whiskey?

Would I have agreed if I understood it would be a 14-hour journey? Hard to say. As we made our way up the road, we seemed to pass into deeper and deeper levels of suffering. In a town called Dhap, so many animal carcasses were trapped in wrecked buildings that the whole stretch of road reeked of decay, and people jogged by with handkerchiefs clamped over their mouths.

The families from Dhap were huddled in a schoolhouse, their eyes wide: If they even approached the rock piles that had been their homes, flies swarmed around them in such numbers that they turned back. Here I saw, for the first time in Nepal, something like despair. As we passed that town, I saw a woman sitting on a hillside, staring into empty space, as if part of her had already left this earth. By the time I reached the village that was my destination, I was beginning to understand. They were alone up here. They had been alone for a long time. Only seven years had passed since the road to the village had opened to vehicles.

I found Tamang sitting among piles of stones: tiny, her spine curved, missing most of her teeth. I asked her three times whether she would come to Delhi, and three times she refused. Everyone knew that trouble was coming. When the monsoon arrives, the road will become too dangerous for vehicles to pass. And nobody knows how long the food will hold out. Still.

“I will have to die where my husband died,” she said. She thanked me for the whiskey. When I told her she was stubborn, she agreed, clearly pleased. So we headed back — without Tamang, without the whiskey. The journey was no easier, into gathering darkness that, the driver warned us, concealed the flashing shape of a tiger. But I had something to take back, even if it was just a photograph. I felt unaccountably lighter.