“Fetch me some water, will ya? It’s getting ridiculously hot,” she takes off a layer of her clothing. “I want to wash my face.” Her two great-grandchildren show up at the door and dart across the house. They play tag but the house, a single room make-shift hut, is too small to accommodate their game. The children hardly have a meter for their mischief with two wooden planks serving as bed in one diagonal and firewood stove three steps away to their right. Nonetheless, they play.
“Careful,” Ram Kumari Rai raises her voice. Her great-granddaughter, the elder one with wounds all over her chin and spreading all over her face, looks up and continues to carry on with the game. It is unclear whether the great-grandmother is reminding herself to be careful. She’s been forced to stay all day and look out the door for the past two months. She can’t even change sides while she sleeps.
“I was out fetching water to drink when suddenly this motorbike hit me here,” she points toward her right hip, “It pains (grumbles). I can’t even move at ease.”
A light breeze from the Bagmati River next to her hut relaxes the elderly. She doesn’t mind the accompanying nose-burning stink the breeze brings to her home. Her walls move, yes, they do, sometimes violently making a strong sloooshh sound. Soon, someone has to attend to the wearing plastic, jute and flex that comprises three sides of her house. The fourth and concrete wall belongs to her neighbor. The black tarpaulin holds strong as a roof, for now.
“They (doctors) operated on me and I have steel in me now. I’ve run out of the medicines they initially gave me,” she leans a little to get her latthi, “I can’t afford medicines.”
Prem Bahadur Rai is at the door. He’s home early. It’s been a long walk to and from Naya Bazaar. But the 57-year-old man couldn’t find any work today, once again. He looks at his grandchildren, now fast asleep, three steps away from where he squats. The silence breaks as the man breaks into tears. Besides him, his wife Prem Kumari Rai turns stone. On the bed, the elderly sobs!
“The man cries,” the daughter-in-law is uneasy, “He’s been trying hard. It’s not easy to find work.” She walks out the door. “I’ll get water for mother.”
Back in Nuwakot, this family’s house is abandoned, and the fields as always a victim to the swelling river that washes away everything and their produce, and if not, never sustaining them. “The river gives for some and takes from some,” the man says, taking off his topi and clearing his perspiring brow; the burdens that have uprooted with abandonment are visible.
“Rice costs Rs. 42 a kg, so that’s Rs. 84 for two meals. Lentils are Rs 20 so that’s Rs 40 more. Vegetables, oil and kerosene for light...some Rs 200 a day. I don’t know what to do,” he cries again and looks at his elderly mother. “If I don’t, who will?”
Abandonment is something that this family has endured all their life. Be it abandoning their home, tired of enduring nature’s fury (and buying the Kathmandu dream), or like in our man’s case, where he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his three sons and two daughters, or for his elderly mother who’s seen her family just weather away. She doesn’t even have a picture of her younger son whom she hasn’t heard from since ages, and the two daughters whose whereabouts she’s unsure of.
“Mother, here’s water,” the daughter-in-law is back, “I’m going to fetch some firewood to cook. No one has eaten today. You (man) must be hungry.”
The old lady on the bed gets herself comfortable. The pain her right thigh endures with every move she makes is visible on her face as she readies to wash her face. “If I could only find some work, anything, we could at least eat,” the man says, “And I’ve inherited these grandchildren from my daughter. I don’t know where she is.”
“We have to eat. To live.”
“During monsoon, the Bagmati swells and gets here,” washing her face, the old lady points to the floor. The river’s fury seems to haunt her wherever she goes. She inquires with her son about the day’s hunt for work and the next visit to the doctor.
The children wake up, puzzled to see their grandfather in the room. They have no school today. “They are brilliant students,” the man says, “Hey, don’t poke there (the chin injuries).I have no idea how she got that. It just keeps spreading on her face.”
There’s a long silence before the children pull a nap again. It’s probably hunger that’s wearing them out. And below the tarpaulin roof, there’s no sign of food or water. Near the firewood stove, there’s a foot of wood that’ll ash fast. Someone’s been gone looking for firewood for a long time now.
In the house, scattered clothes lie here and there. Flies are all over. An empty quarter-vodka bottle that acts as the makeshift lantern and the only source of light in the house has no kerosene in it. A pouch hangs from the roof and in it are their citizenship cards and grandma’s medical files. Above the firewood stove, a poster of Goddess Laxmi looks down on them. On their neighbor’s concrete wall is a typical Marwari tile engraved with the image of the almighty Hanuman. But the gods and goddess have turned deaf and blind on this family, or perhaps abandoned them.
The muddy banks of Bagmati that is now the residence of Rai family and hundred others is but just an example of the disparity the capital hosts with sheer negligence for the people below the par. It’s not just an irony that Nepal’s most expensive private hospital is a minute walk away on the road that Rai family passes through every day. And the prime minister’s office, merely five minutes north. While Kathmandu’s slums are nowhere near the size of one in Bombay or Calcutta, they still remain notorious among valley denizens.
Outside in the Paurakhi Basti, right under the Thapathali Bridge, it’s a deserted scene as if a curfew has been imposed. A few hours ago, there were children who were playing volleyball and a few youngsters hitting a few guitar chords, and some teasing the 1st semester nursing students who were concluding their five-week-long field study of the community.
“There are some 250 houses here,” says Supriya Shrestha, 17, who’s from Sankhuwasabha. She’s one of the research students who see no “scope” in Nepal. “On average, one household has five members.”
“They come from all places – Kavre, Dang, Sindhuli...,” Shrestha’s pair Shristy Maharjan, 17, a Kumbheshwor resident, adds, “This polluted river vicinity isn’t good for these people to live in and their awareness levels of hygiene is poor since they are largely uneducated or primary school dropouts.”
“They don’t even boil water before drinking. And the water that comes out of the tube well isn’t fit for drinking even if you boil it. The water is yellow and produces some kind of foam,” Shrestha adds.
The two bright students have a host of other things and stats to share, and soon the likes of Ram Kumari Rai, Prem Bahadur Rai, Prem Kumari Rai and the two inherited grandchildren who live in the Paurakhi Basti will be reduced to mere figures and stats under development and health jargons such as ‘poverty,’ ‘lack of drinking water,’ ‘household income,’ ‘respiratory tract infection,’ ‘diarrhea,’ ‘education’ etc. And as mere figures, they’ll travel all over the world; and in big hotels, development-wallas will comment on ‘vulnerability’ and ‘community empowerment.’
As the center holds firmly concentrated on policies around the capital, letting go off the issues and concerns of rural Nepal, under-development and lack of jobs are merely issues of this poverty spectacle. Kathmandu never gave up its economic, political and developmental centricism. Exacerbated by decade-long insurgency, the government’s policy to care less for the poor and more for market and growth has led to the problem now paradoxically troubles the capital itself. Rural migration will not stop until you have health care and education in villages. And what the center wants to do is get rid of poor from these neighbourhoods and make parks. Seriously? Getting rid of poor will not get rid of poverty.
What transpires under the bridge, no one really seems to care. Like the filth and the industrial waste that floats in the holy Bagmati as it speeds to Teku and Chobhar, the people who live here are forgotten and loathed. In simple words, they are unwanted and abandoned.
To quote a recent piece of careless journalism, “The Bagmati River, which flows through Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city, is considered a holy river in Hinduism, the country’s majority religion. But passersby say they have to cover their noses, thanks to the stench of its pollution – a result of the thousands of landless people who squat along its banks.”
PERIOD!
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