Fantastic truth of a marvellous country
An anthology of writing about Nepal reveals the life behind the marketing campaigns, says James Belfield.
The modern appreciation for some of the world’s smaller countries can be completely clouded by how they’re marketed for tourist dollars.
But while New Zealand’s 100 per cent pure smokescreen, the perfect surf ‘n’ sand and roiling fleshpots of Bali and Thailand, or Nepal’s roof-ofthe-world selfie stage set, push and pull millions of visitors around the globe each year, they tend to undercut the lives of those for whom glossy brochures, social media video ads and holiday billboards speak little of home.
These here-and-now existences tend to be bypassed by busloads of snaphappy travellers... until some greater event throws them into the foreground and deadens the effect of nature’s picture-postcard perfection.
Here, it was our South Island earthquakes, in Southeast Asia the Boxing Day tsunami, and in Nepal the April 2015 earthquake. In the face of these natural horrors, suddenly the world starts to look at the individuals who populate these adventure playgrounds and investigate the human side of holiday hot-spots.
Nepal’s population has long been overshadowed, literally and metaphorically, by the Himalayas’ soaring peaks and Everest’s awesome, deific presence, while personalities have lost their traits to the trite, racial cliches of ferocious Gurkhas, tenacious Sherpas and ancient Hindu-Buddhists.
But a new anthology of writing about Nepal – compiled to raise funds to help the quake recovery, build schools, and train teachers – seeks to delve deeper than the marketing image.
House of Snow is a giant work of more than 50 excerpts, short stories, poems, travel writing, history, and journalism and, at times, can be a little cumbersome as it flows erratically and somewhat chronologically between themes, styles, and subjects. Brief pen portraits of the authors – including familiar Western writers and explorers such as HW Tilman, Sir Edmund Hillary, Ed Douglas, Into Thin Air‘s Jon Krakauer, and Michael Palin – are useful and a glossary at the back helps pinpoint context for the writing, but the overall effect can be a little disconcerting.
Where the anthology succeeds, though, is by casting Nepal as a country of individuals rather than lines on a map containing interesting map references. From Sir Ed’s lesson ‘‘not to judge a village by the grubbiness of its faces or the poverty of its homes’’ to Isabel Hilton’s taxi-driver fighting his way through Kathmandu’s ‘‘bizarre reality, a dissonant collage of medieval traditions and the modern world’’, the non-fiction looks intently into the faces it encounters.
A highlight at the centre of the anthology is Rashmila Shakya’s description of her childhood life as Royal Kumari, an all-powerful ‘‘living goddess’’ whose devotees believe is able to cure illness and divert ruin, but whom, as a child plucked from obscurity to sit on a throne and be adored, suffers loneliness and confusions of responsibilities. Shakya’s first-person narrative of a goddess’ daily grind scuffs any marketing sheen and shows the fantastic truth of a marvellous country.