Through the Looking-Glass #1

Published October 3, 2006 in the Telluride Watch

"The Himalayas aren't going anywhere, they're just getting taller," a Telluride friend said to me before I left the Happy Valley for Nepal a few weeks ago. Turns out he was right. As for Kathmandu, the chaotic city I called home for three years, it's just gotten bigger and busier.

Returning to Kathmandu after 3 1/2 years living stateside, I feel like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle. It feels like not a moment has passed, and my 3 1/2 years of life lived in Telluride vanish from my mind as if I never attended a festival, never hiked the Wiebe, never walked down Main Street. The net effect is as though I have awoken from a long sleep to find that nothing has changed, but everyone has a mobile phone.

In 2003, only a few expat friends and a few well-off Nepalis I knew had mobile phones. Today, they are ubiquitous. Even the Indian fruit-sellers on the street chat on their mobile phones between sales. I was looking forward to this trip to escape from the hectic life I used to know to be endemic only to the United States and other developed countries. Now with mobile phones and broadband internet access, Kathmandu is more connected than my own home in Two Rivers, where cell phone reception is tenuous and I still rely on dial-up internet access. Now, as ever, it is up to me to choose the connected lifestyle over the escape I told myself I was seeking. As I write this column on a Nepali friend's laptop and send text messages to friends on a borrowed mobile phone, I now hear myself saying I'll find my escape in the mountains next week...or maybe the week after.

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I arrive in Kathmandu in the middle of Dasain, Nepal's biggest festival, celebrating the triumph of good over evil. Dasain is Nepal's Christmas equivalent, and scores of Kathmanduites run around buying gifts with their Dasain bonuses, usually one month's extra salary. Traditionally, urban residents return to their ancestral villages for the end of the festival to give and receive blessings among their large extended families. For the past four or five years though, due to the Maoist conflict, many people avoided the very real possibility of extortion, imprisonment, torture and death, and remained in Kathmandu for the holiday. This year, with a UN-monitored cease-fire in place, families that have not visited their villages in years are headed home, and a palpable lightness in the air reflects that.

The Maoist conflict has raged for over ten years, and the body count has reached 15,000 in that time. The guerillas, led by Comrade Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai, waged a people's war throughout the Nepali countryside, demanding the establishment of a republic and the abdication of the king in the only Hindu kingdom in the world. (The Maoists adhere to the philosophy of Mao Tse Tung, but are in no way backed by the Chinese government.) Cease-fires have come and gone over the past ten years, but there is a strong and certain hope among Nepalis that the current one will stick. The US Embassy in Kathmandu is less certain, sending emails to the American population here to be wary of demonstrations leading up to the October 27th expiration of the current cease-fire.

Nepalis have another reason to be more content with the current political situation -- after weeks of demonstrations last April, King Gyanendra abdicated power, ending his 15-month absolute dictatorship. The last elected parliament was reinstated, the Maoists were incorporated into the government and plans for a constitutional assembly and a new round of elections were made. Everything in Nepal takes longer than it would in the West, even more so at the political level, so the country remains in a holding pattern. Even so, the most cynical of my Nepali journalist friends remains optimistic that the country is progressing, and the end of Nepal's violent conflict is truly in sight.

Although it appears to be near its end, the conflict has left permanent scars. Some months back, I read a story in the New York Times recounting some of the stories behind the conflict. One of them was accompanied by the photograph of Devi Sunwar, a beautiful Nepali mother with striking grey eyes, taken by an American friend Tom Kelly. Devi's daughter had been killed by the Army, suspected of being a Maoist. Her daughter's killers had not been prosecuted, and Devi's sorrow screamed from her eyes. At the time, I was so moved by the photograph that I downloaded it onto my computer. Even though I have so many close friends that have been affected by the violence in Nepal, this one photograph became the face of the conflict for me.

The other day I went by the office where I used to work and was surprised to find a woman working there with the same steel eyes. My former colleagues had arranged a Dasain party, and I had arrived just in time. I sat on a bench on the edge of the courtyard, observing the light-hearted banter among the group. The woman with the grey eyes came over to sit next to me and she said I had probably read her story in the newspaper. This was Devi Sunwar.

Tom's wife Carroll Dunham runs a company called Wild Earth, which makes herbal soaps, as an income-generating project for women who have been displaced due to the Maoist conflict. Hearing Devi's story, Carroll brought her into the fold of Wild Earth, and she was now among the staff that makes traditional cold-process handmade soaps for both domestic and foreign markets.

I asked Devi if she was having fun at the Dasain celebration, for I and the rest of the staff certainly were. "Of course parties like this are fun," she said, a smile wavering on her face. "But there is an ache in my heart that will not go away." Devi and her family could not return to their village. Even with the relative calm, there was danger for them at their home, she said. She would spend Dasain in Kathmandu with her two sons and her husband, celebrating the triumph of good over evil, still reeling from the real-life loss of her daughter in a war not as simple as the mythological one being commemorated.