One morning, I continued to jostle through the creepy passage at Chabahil between blocks of brick houses when somebody threw a loosely-tied black plastic bag from the top floor of one of the buildings. It hit the pavement right before me with a thud! When I looked up, I saw nothing. But when I looked down at the object, it was breaking apart, from which strange mixture of yellow and red matter gushed out. But nobody seemed to bother about this fallen object. “Thank God! It didn’t hit me,” I said, as I continued to push through the madding crowd. By the time I arrived near a temple-like building, I walked past 100 such bags. In one corner, there was a prostrate man facing downward upon the pavement littered with plastic. I briefly stopped by him. I could hear a faint moan like the passing of his soul. “He would probably not live another couple of minutes. Even if he did, it will just add more torture on him,” I told to myself as I walked past the fallen man. I thought he was doing a penance for his sins. There were more men like him, many limping and starving. So grotesque did they look that for a moment I stood wondering if those old paintings and stories of sinners in hell told in the Hindu folklore were true.
The sight along the ring road was hardly different. Pedestrians walked through the streets with dust-covered faces; some wore masks to avoid inhaling the dust and black smoke belched by vehicles that looked so old and battered. In every nook and corner lay huge piles of garbage with crows hovering over and stray dogs gnawing at the goat and buffalo carcasses.
My neighbours live in sordid conditions. As the workers beat the bales of cotton on their roofs, its flakes spread far and wide. But no, their eyes are unfeeling, not even those parents’ who see their half a dozen children routinely drawing the cotton dusts into their lungs. From the next illegally-built factory comes the horrible, loud clang, clang, clang of iron. The local residents are not complaining, nor do they see it as a problem. Every minute, trucks carrying boulders and cement shriek an inch away from this building ejecting a thick cloud of dust informing them to run away from the vicinity. Such a dusty atmosphere perhaps doesn’t quite exist elsewhere.
Kathmandu is perhaps the world’s most imperfect city. The local tradition and drive for modernization is in a state of flux here. The perennial problems of garbage management are spreading like cancer around this city. The community is so insensitive to hygiene and sanitation that they litter all their garbage in the open air and pavements. Everyone throws garbage everywhere. The rivers in this once serenely beautiful valley are drying up and the pristine water that once gushed down these zigzag rivers has been replaced by sewage. The locals are so grounded in belief that the responsibility of managing the garbage is of the state that they throw it in open air, public places and roads. They then keep murmuring against the state.
Kathmandu is perhaps the world’s most imperfect city. The local tradition and drive for modernization is in a state of flux here. The perennial problems of garbage management are spreading like cancer around this city. The community is so insensitive to hygiene and sanitation that they litter all their garbage in the open air and pavements.
Nepal’s frantic surge for modernization is reflected in the people’s rapacious desire to possess a house in Kathmandu. A house in Kathmandu, of whatever diminutive size and shape, is considered an end in itself. They even risk their lives by pursuing all dishonest means to acquire one. In this process, these men built clusters of little houses here and there so close to each other that at night when the residents are fast asleep every heart beating can be heard in every room.
In their mad rush to possess riches, residents here frequently sold and bought lands. The ones who possessed large tracts of lands sold them field by field to the speculative builders. In this process, the suburban dwellings where once abundant crops and trees grew are painted red as numerous brick houses with their walls touching each other have sprouted. The original inhabitants, who once held hundreds of bighas of lands, now cling to just one plot of land with a miniature house, without a basement, running water, or a lawn. A few builders want to give all the tempting modern convenience, but they are beyond the reach of the large majority of inhabitants.
And now, power outage has added another gloom and made our life even worse. As soon as power is back, we have to run with pots and jars to collect water. But the timing for the supply of tap water and electricity does not always match. Not all residents can get water supply without their motors switched on. The discord between the two leaves us without drinking water for as long as two weeks. We have to stockpile underground water, which has become a precious commodity but that too comes only with the start of an electric motor.
Nepal has so much freely-flowing water in rivers and streams that it could even export it. Politicians and the government no longer regard the problem as particularly worrisome as long as the elite and the ministers’ houses receive the supply from alternate sources. They are cold and unresponsive to the suffering of the people. A prime cause for this shortage is the ever-increasing population, from merely 300,000 in 1960 to 40 million in 2010. The bad has just begun; the worse is still to come. There being no breathing space, let alone a venue for amusements and children parks, this city may explode any time.
nitya.n.timsina@gmail.com
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