Funerals and fear for survivors
The first smoke of the funeral pyres was wafting over what remained of Nepal’s magnificent Hindu temples on Monday.
The three great royal Durbars, the whitewash and red brick squares of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur, were shattered by Saturday’s earthquake. The death toll reached 3400 yesterday with more than 6500 injured.
They can and almost certainly will be rebuilt. But those thousands who cannot be brought back were being sent to the heavens on Monday in traditional and simple ceremonies, against a broken landscape.
The scenes of the dead and, in a few joyful cases, unexpected survivors being pulled grey with dust from the ruins of their homes are all too familiar from earthquakes in poor countries across the world.
One man is pulled from a hole dug by rescuers through the collapsed floor of his house. His friend had been lying dead beside him for 24 hours.
An old woman, miraculously unhurt, is helped from the broken remnants of her material existence. A father kisses his baby daughter in joy that she is alive; mothers in desperation hold the hands of dead husbands and parents that stretch out from the shrouds that cover their bodies.
As always, the fear of what is still to come mixes with shock at what has happened. Torn between their homes and the possibility of aftershocks bringing down whatever remains of the masonry above their heads, residents flocked to public spaces. Everywhere, people embraced each other, and wept.
In Kathmandu, many ended up in the great Maidan of Tundikhel, the vast parade ground in the centre of the city that has served as a focal point for much of Nepal’s idiosyncratic history.
In a different kind of monument to history, Sir Edmund Hillary was paraded here in 2003 to mark the 50th anniversary of his ascent of Everest with the world’s most famous Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay – the event which did so much to put Nepal on the traveller’s map.
Survivors gathered here on Monday and built a tent city, one of many across the country, unthreatened by stone and cement.
Even at five-star hotels, guests took their sleeping bags and duvets to the lawns, to bed down.
The conditions of uncertainty, the aftershocks and the failure of infrastructure and especially communications that come with major earthquakes are a breeding ground for rumour.
Rumours that an even bigger quake, registering 9 or 10 on the Richter Scale would strike were repeated with certainty.
The aftershock that did strike, at 6.7, compared with the 7.8 earthquake of Saturday, was bad enough, but the intensity of further attacks from under the earth is likely now to die down.
That leaves the disposal of bodies, and the rebuilding of lives.
There were some signs that Kathmandu’s modern infrastructure had escaped with less damage than feared.
Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport, named after the grandfather of Nepal’s last king, deposed by referendum in 2008, reopened for commercial traffic on Monday, its runway secure. A Royal Thai Airlines flight from Bangkok had landed at the same time as one of the major aftershocks. The air traffic control tower was evacuated, leaving no one to direct it to the gate.
In contrast to the modern city, the majesty of parts of historic Kathmandu lay in piles of rubble. The Dharahara Tower, a 19th century folly that had already been destroyed once, in the 1934 earthquake, came tumbling down again, taking with it up to 200 of the many people who climb it every day to look out over the city, according to a policeman.
The three Durbar squares of the three ancient cities, along with the temples and palaces that line them, were also badly struck, statues of gods lying upturned in heaps of ancient brick.
One survivor was the Pashupatinath Temple on Kathmandu’s eastern outskirts. Named after Nepal’s national deity, this huge complex bestrides the Bagmati River.
It cannot be said to be a happy survivor, however. As dusk fell, every available space along the river’s banks and on its sandbank islands had been taken for the pyres.
Around these funerals, the families, hastily assembling their piles of wood, gathered. The smoke rose and floated over the city, drifting over the new lives of those who had escaped the worst but who, under their plastic and canvas roofs, have uncertain futures ahead.