The fire that changed Khoplang

Somehow, we seem to never lose Santa Man Shrestha. He follows us like a silent shadow, wherever we go. After a day’s hike, we start to find us a refugee for the night’s rest. We notice the blue light from his small torch in a distant bush. It stops, when we do. The light then disappears. And a little while on, it comes back on again. Later when we climb up to our small room over a cow-shed to lie down on gundris, we discover his bag hanging from the ceiling. [break] No one touches it as it swings eerily to a soft breeze coming in from an open wall of our shelter. About an hour later, a small wooden door creaks open on our left. Against the evening’s fading light stands a thin silhouette in a daura suruwal and dhaka topi. Santa Man Shrestha wants to share his room with us.

In the afternoon earlier, we first saw Santa Man, sitting on the steps of a neighbor’s house, smoking as he stared at us. He sees us before we see him when we descend down the final steps of a three hour hike that brings us to Khoplang from Chhebetar, which was four hours walk away from Gorkha Bazaar. The hike was hard on our city knees. The monsoon rains did not help us at all. The trail was extremely slippery and we tread carefully, trying to find dry spots to avoid tumbling down the hill. We finally enter Khoplang and see that the street has ended even before we started off.

I had tagged along with two friends, a writer and a photographer who were on a lookout for materials for their story around the villages of Gorkha. We first heard about Khoplang from a jolly tea shop owner in Bandipur. Khoplang used to be on the main travel route from Birgunj to Kathmandu, he informed us. All the goods being taken from the border town for selling in Kathmandu passed through there. Naturally, over time, Khoplang turned into a small yet busy village, a much more convenient location for nearby rural folk than far away Kathmandu. Things have changed ever since.

After sitting around a while in the deserted looking village, my friends decide that Santa Man Shrestha - now looking the other way - seems like an interesting character, someone who would have stories to share. His sunken cheeks, huge glasses and dark, saggy skin made him look wise. My friends are right and Santa Man does not need much prodding either. It’s like he has been waiting all his life to tell us his stories. He speaks slowly with a thick gaunley accent. When asked to repeat something, he looks annoyed that we couldn’t keep up with him. The story he told us turned out to be as much about him as it was about the village.

When Santa Man was 27, the Nepali year was 2027 - the year of the big fire. The fire that changed the fate of the little bazaar-village where the houses were made of wood, mud and straw. The fire spread and took down some of the biggest houses of the bazaar. “This house we are sitting on was taken too. And this one and that one and the one behind the skeleton of a house,” says Santa Man, pointing everywhere at once.

He remembers how the place used to look like a festivity at all seasons and time – people, children, shops, and animals. Everyone had good business. “It took us four days to put out the fire. We stood shoulder to shoulder from here to the water tap and passed bucket after bucket of water to put out the fire, but it was too late. The fire took the bazaar down. The people who owned the houses had nothing to do here. So everyone left,” Santa Man’s voice trails off. Santa Man points out in the general direction of the house where king Birendra spent a night, some decade ago. King Mahendra too, apparently, stopped for a night in a nearby Putalikhel. Then Santa Man leaves without informing.

That fire and the construction of the highway linking Kathmandu to the Terai belt breathed the life out of Khoplang bazaar, reducing what once was a vibrant market village to a silent, sad settlement. Whether the development is a much needed cry, the villagers don’t know. Today the village is literally lined with houses that no one lives in. A chautari stands alone, providing shade and shelter to no one that pass by. There are few young children or old people; no young people are to be seen anywhere. They have all left to find work in a nearby villages or bigger cities. Most have left for good, the locals sulk. The elderly folk looking out from small windows and from their thick glasses, they seem to be waiting for someone, or something, perhaps the opposite of the fire that changed this place. Or anything that would bring back all that they seem to miss, that was there.

Santa Man Shrestha did not room with us that night where we ended up sleepless. The animals beneath our shelter woke us quite rudely as they rub their itchy necks on the wooden pillars that support the shed. Walking around the village, without a sense of purpose, talking in a voice that starts off strong and then gets softer until it’s no longer audible and trying to connect with us strangers with his village through the medium of yesteryear stories, Santa Man sums up the state of the village for us - a ghost town trying to find its place in the world.

In the morning, as we get ready to leave for Gorkha Bazaar, we see Santa Man eyeing us from a distance, sipping on some tea and smoking a cigarette. When we get closer, he comes out from the small house, grabs one of our hands and leads us to the edge of the road. “That’s the house king Mahendra spent the night in,” he says. And then silence, as if he could not let us go without adding that last, Royal detail. When I look back at the village as we turn the corner and lose sight of the village, I see Santa Man Shrestha looking in our direction, hands folded behind his back. Then he fades away from the horizon.