Hiraeth in Karnali

Not that I had never travelled with roosters, but it had been many years since I was confronted by the crow of one in a bus. I was at the bus stop of Surkhet, a town in Southern Nepal, and the bus was going to Karnali, a remote northern region nestled below the Himalayas. I had heard of Karnali as a faraway, inaccessible place that took months to travel to. But recent constructions had changed all that, and now a bus could take me there in 1.5 days. I took a deep breath and climbed in.

I gently brushed the rooster aside from my seat, and sat down next to a friendly looking woman. I told her I was eager to see all the sights I could.

“You are on the wrong side, the river view is on the other side,” she said. Then she leaned across me to the man on the other side. “Oh hey, baini here is going to Karnali for the first time. She MUST see the sights. You exchange seats with us!”

No ‘please’ there, but the man immediately agreed, (“Oh yes, of course she must see the sights!”) and shifted to our seat, complete with rooster!

The bus passed by antique villages, a shimmering green Karnali river, and ruins of old palaces, and I did not even blink. I feasted my eyes on the delights that and novelties that did not exist in the capital city anymore, where I lived. Verdant green forests, layers and layers of terrace fields glowing with freshly planted rice. Somehow, the leaves seemed greener here and the skies bluer. The mud houses looked pretty as a picture, but I also knew that life in these houses could not be so pretty.

When night fell the bus stopped at a remote hilltop, and the driver told us to find lodgings nearby. I followed a hotelier who had come looking for customers, and ended up at what seemed like a big ruin: bare, empty rooms, only pillars and no walls on the upper floors, and an eerie cold peculiar to graveyards. Turns out all these things also applied to under-construction houses that hadn’t been warmed by a single summer.

The hotelier was apologetic as he took me to a room that oozed coldness from bare cement walls. A single, ramshackle bed lay in the room, and nothing else. “I am sorry but we have not had the time to fit a door into this room. Please close the flat door instead!” I was thankful that at least the window panes were in place, or I would have died of cold.

I seemed to have caught Karnali in the midst of a transformation, as it was leaving its traditional lifestyle behind and adjusting to modernity. This phenomenon was to define my trip.

Gumgadhi was one such town, with wi-fi hotels and wooden sheds with grass roofs standing side by side. As a bus revved nearby, horses and mules grazed lazily, ready to take goods and people to remoter locations.

Not just Karnali’s town, but its people too were in the midst of a transformation. As I walked into Gumgadhi, many women come up to my bus, and later went back with sacks of cement on their backs. The women were dressed in colorful fariya and blouses, and wore traditional silver necklaces made of coins was rarely seen in the rest of Nepal.

As I walked around town, the same women were gathered under the eaves of a house, smoking and sheltering from the rain. They seemed to be laughing at me.

“Are you laughing at me?” I asked.

“We were just wishing we could go around in pants like you,” one of them, in her 30s by the looks, giggled. She was wearing sneakers under her traditional fariya choli and company mala.

“Why don’t you?” I giggled back.

“My husband will beat me up when he comes back from the field!” I couldn’t figure out if she was being serious. I decided she was being sarcastic.

“If you have your own fields, why do you work as labourers, carrying sacks of cement?”

“Oh that’s just to pay for the husband’s drinks…” she sighed. “Husbands these days are totally worthless, aren’t they?” This time I decided she must be serious.

As I walked away, she began singing it out. Her voice seemed to ring around the entire valley, rising and falling with her emotions.

Oh poor one

My heart sways wildly

For my own destiny is faulty

Goosebumps rose on my skin as other women joined her. Here, everyone was a superstar. Because they did not have televisions. They did not have cinema halls. They were not yet told what they felt. So they expressed what they really felt, when they felt.

Indeed the people of Karnali held their emotions very dear, and their stories. Everywhere I went, I found stories that made the dreamy landscape come alive. In Sinja valley especially, with a lazy meandering Karnali river going through miles and miles of rice fields, people told stories of kings and the treasures they left behind.

“My neighbor was digging his fields to plant them, and found a big box full of treasures, old metal utensils!” said one person.  

“This is where the mythical princes Pandavas lived,” said another, pointing to the ruins of a palace. Then she pointed to a cave: “and that is where they hid when their enemies pursued them.”

The Pandavas are characters of Mahabharata, a Hindu myth beloved all over South Asia, but nowhere else did they seem so alive. People pointed at sets of five stone pillars that seemed to lie around in every field, and said they were put there by the five Pandava brothers. The stone pillars were of varying heights, from 2-5 feet, and full of ancient looking, beautiful basic shapes and carvings. More likely they were made by real kings rather than Pandava princes whose existence is doubtful. But here in Karnali, don’t you dare tell people that their myths are not real.

You may not be inclined to believe in all these stories of gods, kings, and hidden treasures. Until you visit the Kanaka Sundari temple, on a hilltop right in the middle of Sinja valley. The temple itself is unassuming, a crumbling mud structure full of ancient, neglected stone panes. The priest then told me that when they were digging to lay the foundations for a new, renovated temple, they found some old statues. Since everyone wanted them, the statues were taken to the local police station and locked up.

Curious, I walked to the police station and joined the queue of waiting people. “What a day this is! When devotees have to take their gods out of jail!” said one of the local women, as the policeman took a key out of his pocket and opened a big wooden box.

Out came five little statues, no more than a foot tall each. Two of them were broken, and three of them were almost whole: ancient Hindu deities Indra, Sachi, and Vishnu. I stared and started and stared at the intricate beauty of the statues, the delicate poses, the peaceful faces, the height of imagination and artistry.

In Kathmandu, they would have been prized in temples thronging with devotees. Anywhere else in the world, they would have been venerated in museums. But this is Karnali, and here they languish in a police station as the people lobby the government to build them a museum.

Glumly I walked to the bus station. I passed a village that was about two hours away from any buses, and was clearly built only for pedestrians. The houses were interlinked, to go from one end of the village to the other you had to walk up the courtyard of one, through the living room of another, and past the kitchen of another, and so on, ascending and descending bamboo ladders that stuck out at odd angles. Houses stood on top of one another, like terrace fields, and water from houses above flowed through canals that ran besides houses downstream. Later I was told this used to a fort, which was why the houses were so tightly packed together.

Soon I got to the bus stop and took a bus to the next town. People of Karnali who were going the same way didn’t accompany me. “The bus will take you there in an hour, and I can walk there in the same time. Why should I take the bus?” said one woman. “Beside, bus rides make me puke!”

On the bus I contemplated everything I had seen on this trip, and was hit by an aching sense of loss. Soon there will be roads all over the region, and children who grow up on buses will not have the same enthusiasm for walking that today’s women do. The village full of ladders, I wonder what concrete roads will do to it. It will be replaced by concrete, standalone buildings and people will not need to walk through each other’s homes, I assumed. The stone pillars will be moved aside and the ruins will be built over, and no one will think they are a magical connection to myths. Nobody will remember the Pandava princes any more, or make the effort to visit their gods at police stations. There will be televisions and cinemas that will air new songs, and people will stop making up their own. 

For a girl who had grown up in a city and had never known a place connected to her myths, never heard a song passed down through the generations, never seen jewellery going back hundreds of years, the whole trip was like a journey back in time, a search for roots.

This longing for unknown roots filled me completely: Hiraeth, a homesickness for a lost home, or a home that perhaps never was. I just wanted to close my eyes and stay right there. This place seemed incredibly precious, and the people of Karnali incredibly lucky.

I sighed, because I was romanticizing things as an outsider, and perhaps the people of Karnali prefer roads that will make their life easier, over this sentimental nonsense. I took the bus back to Surkhet, letting the people of Karnali walk and sing their way home.