What follows is by a good friend of mine Elif Koksal, who is from Turkey, and who's working in Nepal for the past several years as a reiki-master.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
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By Elif Koksal
I realised last week at the Nepathya concert that Nepal feels like my child now; I feel filled with love and concern and I badly need to believe it will all turn out alright- the way I feel for my son Tenzin. Family. Sitting in the concert hall enveloped by sadness, relief and joy, I wanted to hug Nepal and give her a kiss on her forehead.
The ten year civil war lasted almost throughout my thirties; we went through so much together. This country and I. Here is a very personal account now:
The Maoist movement that we call the Maobadi here, started in ninety-six with a bunch of university teachers going underground with their students in rebellion against the caste system, a feudal structure, the king, and poverty and corruption. Civil war came not long after, lasting ten years, with most of the country falling into Maobadi control. Too many people died, too many orphanages opened in Kathmandu. The charming city I saw ten years ago gradually filled with buildings and brick factories, and displaced people sleeping on the pavements. This is not the city I arrived at: or am I anymore the curious person who arrived ten years ago, so fascinated by the exotic traditions here. This dirty crowded new city is now my home and it all feels normal.
True, I have been lost in the details of my life. I started my days saying ‘Oh my God, how terrible! How sad!’ but quickly forgot the previous day’s casualties.
Every Friday I felt very sad reading the details in the Nepali Times weekly and then put the paper away.
I lived in Istanbul in the eighties and one third of my country on the other end of Asia Minor was broken in a terrible war that we weren’t even able to read much about. This of course was just after the endless shortages, shortages of electricity, sugar, oil, cigarettes and turkish coffee...Then the university students killing each other, then the military coup.. According to our mighty State, the other party, the enemy, was of course wrong and was asking to be terminated. There really was no goodwill.
At least Nepal kept trying to talk and finally it’s over.
The war here didn’t actually show its sad face to us, we were among the lucky ones in Nepal. Yet there was no ignoring it. Sounds of a bomb or protest from the street came into our home. My son witnessed a riot and three weeks later, had a very frightening episode of post traumatic shock syndrome that lasted ten sleepless days. He was four years old and we tried everything in vain until, in a very Nepali turn of events, a Tibetan elder, my precious Rinpoche, magically took his trauma out.
The war came to our street once when neighbours, a police officer and his wife, were killed on their morning walk as my Nepali ‘son’ Mahesh was coming to work. Bombs went off. I passed on my bicycle through streets where there were now police or army posts surrounded by heaps of sand bags on three sides outside as well as on the rooftops of police stations and government offices and whatnot. The bombs that came nearest to my daily life exploded near the cheese factory, the cinema, and outside where we go to pay phone bills. The Maobadi blocked the roads to our valley and at one point the only vegetable left at our corner shop was a couple marrows already partly eaten by rats...
The war sent a mustard coloured cheap leather jacket and a pair of cowboy boots to our house when our other Nepali son Chuda Mani´s police uncle got killed and his own children were too young to inherit the precious fancy clothes.
Then there is this one day in 2002 Spring when I had to go to the central hospital and the gates were locked and they weren´t letting anyone in. Being a foreigner I followed a nurse and made my way into the Emergency hall, which was extraordinarily quite empty. The doctor sitting there all by himself told me this wasn´t a good day to see the doctors because of the disaster. What disaster, I thought, and kept walking. There I saw: on the floor on makeshift beds, soldiers were quietly lying right adjacent to each other one by one by one all along the corridors. Soldiers, very young men, covered in bad blood stains. Quiet, like they were trying to figure out how life could accommodate this much violence. Two nurses were frantically tearing a roll of white fabric to make sheets for the coming ones.
The official death toll was around twohundred that day. How we round up figures talking about the casualties of our collective anger and greed and ignorance.
I really thought then that that snapshot of bloody soldiers would never leave my head. But it did, along with other less terrible moments, and surfaced again when the other day I found a letter I wrote that week talking about those silent corridors. Looks like I have wanted to not remember much about the war, not feel much...
Development projects closed down, foreigners started leaving. Maybe because I wasn’t the only one scared, or because I didn’t know where to return to, I stayed in this country where day in, day out, everybody felt a little dark inside.
The first day of every Nepali lunar month intellectuals gathered at Maitighar, or motherhome junction, where there is big a Buddhist mandala on the ground, to light candles. One candle for every person who died in the war in the previous month. I was there only once- the number of candles were just too many and the helplessness was too heavy.
Also at the motherhome junction, across from the mandala, is the National Archives of Nepal, where after filling an application form with a five rupee stamp, you can access more than thirty-five thousand manuscripts of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Tibetan ancient world. You could shout by the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in the world and be heard where candles were lit every month for the dead of this horrible war.
Nepal is the Buddha Siddharta Gautama`s homeland.
I can’t remember how many times I was frightened. This very morning that miserable feeling of no security blew through my soul when I couldn’t find gas for cooking and heating because of the riots down South. No petrol, not many cars on the roads today and cucumbers were sold for eight times their normal price on Sunday. I did go shopping to stock up on food. Got a packet of milk powder- something in me was dying to buy three. A fearful, anxious something. I refused to go along with this urgent need for grasping security that was squeezing my chest, left the shop with the one pack of milk powder and without the sack of rice and another of lentils that my Nepali elder sister Littlelove (Sanumaya) had told me to get. This was February 5, 2007.
The other day in the shop they told me I could buy one liter heating gas only. The same trembling in me wanted to grasp ten liters and not care about strangers living in cold houses just like mine. It’s easy to be kind to our friends when feeling safe and nourished by life.
Nepathya is a band singing Nepali folk songs in the form of sharp rock ballads. Even in the middle of the war they went and sang in places that were most on fire and the gate money went to build schools and libraries. Amrit Gurung, Nepathya´s singer, dances like a happy dervish whirling back and forth with one arm in the air in the style of this land, his long braid of hair flying in the air. He´s got nepali eyes and a not very nepali moustache. Amrit says of those concerts that people are very afraid, afraid of both the Maobadi and the Army. They are faced with guns everywhere, so they are afraid of walking to the next village and reluctant to go down to the market town. With these concerts, he says, they have begun to move about once more, to meet and talk to their neighbours. I guess this is as noble an intention as it gets, to get people to walk around and sit with each other again.
The Sundar Shanta Nepal (beautiful peaceful Nepal) concert series was seen by two hundred thousand people in eight places from the west to the east of the country, with the beautiful snowy Himalayas in the backdrop and in school yards for lack of concert halls.
Wherever we go in Nepal we know that far north there are the Himalayas, six, seven and eight thousand metres high. Rishis, the wise people of the ancient times, have said that just looking at the Himalayas purifies one of his sins.
Truly a strangely beautiful feeling, looking at the vast mountains: vastness, spaciousness, relief...
After the peace accord was signed some two months ago, Nepathya toured the country again. I took my son to the last leg of the tour in Kathmandu last week. Wish we had followed them through Nepal, I could write happy pages about the joy and the energy then, and my book could finish easily.
The first song hurt all of us deeply. In 2004 in Charikot, a passenger bus happened to pass between soldiers and guerillas shooting at each other. 14 people died. Amrit hears the news, probably sees the photo on Kathmandu post the next day, gets up and goes to Charikot. On the big screen behind the band on the stage the burnt down bus, plastic slippers in the grass...
That photo I still remember from the following day’s newspapers of a grandmother, her daughter just widowed, with a baby tiny as a hand in both her hands, staring at the space in front of her, just staring- and there are no other words to come near how we hurt for our children. The song flows slowly and deeply and is disturbing, although I don’t understand the words. The grandmother’s picture keeps coming on the screen. With this song, Amrit is not dancing.
The baby was twenty days old, and they came to the concert when afterwards Nepathya went to Charikot to sing. There was no time left to sing the Charikot song that day, for the villagers all had to get back home before dark.
I can only guess how frightening nights can be in war time.
When Nepathya was singing in Japan in ninety-nine, one or more members apparently did not come back. The same thing might have happened with another rock band, Mongolian Hearts, this month on their US tour. Two of them might have chosen waiting on tables in America to celebrity status here. A lot of people want to get out, the way I wanted to get out of my country, and I can´t remember how to go back home anymore.
Amrit says when he returned from that Japan tour the papers pestered them. He was so depressed he withdrew and couldn’t make music for a couple of years. This shy man who can also make two hundred thousand people feel better says he lost the meaning of his life at one point. Finally, he found new musicians and the songs feel sharper now.
My son these days dances like a happy elf to Nepathya’s songs, jumping out of bed and dancing some more at bed time. And then some.
Between songs, Amrit asks people if they are proud of being Nepali. Yesss! they all say. This is the same excitement that my mother’s generation had with our new republic. And then there wasn’t much left for my generation. We were raised by a self righteous state punishing dissent while importing American cigarettes of all brands enough for everybody.
The riots down south are worrying us all, the roads to the valley are blocked again but we are all celebrating the peace, with a kind of joy that hurts because the war was bad and we’re all a little broken inside, even smug foreigners like myself. Finally for me it feels safe to feel sad and to remember how terrible it all was..
Sitting there at the concert I want to hug Nepal, this land sings beautiful songs, has just signed the peace accord, and can dance, one arm in the air, graceful wrists drawing crescent moons in the air.
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