The Girl From Kathmandu

by Cam Simpson

  As a child, Kamala rose each day hours before the climbing sun had cast its first rays on the peak of Manaslu. Roosters usually roused her, crowing into the coolness of the morning beneath her window. Sometimes she was awakened by familiar shouts of “Ha! Ha-ha!” from her uncle leading a bull through the narrow road. The clearest sign of the new day wafted through the home’s windows as the sweetness of wood smoke rose over the village from what seemed to be a hundred kitchen fires lit each morning across the valley. Kamala would scamper backward down the steps of the ladder leading to the ground floor of the farmhouse, step onto the edge of the porch, and turn her back to Manaslu as she slid into her flip-flops. School didn’t start until 10:00 a.m. Children across the ridge had four or five hours for chores before the first bell.

  Each morning, as the sun rose and lit up Manaslu’s peak before the farmhouse, Kamala grabbed an empty plastic urn almost as big as she was, placed it on her hip, and clip-clapped down the road, past the peeping chicks that chased one another in and out of open farmhouse doors, past young goats kicking up red dust as they pranced free, beyond the road’s last stable, and then along a footpath that ran beside a hedgerow thick with emerald leaves and toward a ravine. Water from the mountain emptied into a shallow stone cistern about the width of a broom closet and built into the hillside at the cut. Behind the well, a thicket of bamboo popped and squeaked like old bones rising against the morning quiet.

  Kamala would lean her small frame over the well, skimming its cool water with a pan. She poured pan after pan into the urn until it became almost too heavy to carry, and then muscled it up onto her hip for the trudge back along the footpath. Once home, she would trade the jug for a sack of corn or wheat, which she would hoist off the ground with both arms. She’d then shuffle under its weight to her uncle’s house, next door, where a rotary stone grinder had been built into the hardened earth of the porch. Inserting a wooden handle into the face of the heavy grinding stone, she’d spin it continuously with both hands, yielding a rumble that villagers could feel rising from under their feet and up and into their chests. Fetching water and grinding grain into flour were among the few chores Kamala performed alone. She wanted to dispatch them quickly so she could join Maya and her two other sisters, Shusan and Sanu-didi, in the fields.

  Maya was the eldest of the four girls, and Kamala rarely left her shadow, even on entering her first year of school. She held Maya’s hand, hung from her arm, or, when still little enough, swung up onto her back, wrapping her arms tightly around her big sister’s neck. In the fields, she crouched beside or below Maya as they both yanked out the weeds that invaded the family’s neatly planted rows. Maya would peer down and see her younger sister mimicking her actions, perhaps by wiping her brow in the heat or waving her hands just as Maya did while speaking, or even echoing the tone of Maya’s voice. When Maya rose and moved, Kamala rose and moved with her.

  Their mother had had soft skin and thick, long dark hair, and had poured affection on each of her daughters. Not long after Kamala’s birth, their mother began suffering intense bouts of abdominal pain. She kept then-eight-year-old Maya by her side to help shoulder some the burden of her daily work. “She couldn’t carry heavy loads,” Maya recalled of their mother, “so I would carry half.” Eating corn or millet, which the family survived on after their rice stocks ran out each year, seemed to sharpen their mother’s pain. In 1987, their father took his young wife to a government hospital that was a day away, by foot and then bus, in Kathmandu, bringing along the still breast-feeding Kamala and her toddler sister, Shusan, but leaving Maya on the farm. After several weeks, he sent word to the village that Maya should come to the city to tend to her two youngest sisters, as their mother had grown weaker, while her sister Sanu-didi stayed home to take over their chores. Maya spent a month beside her bedridden mother before escorting her sisters on the intercity bus from Kathmandu back home to Gorkha. The three girls were packed tightly into the hot, tubelike bus for the all-day journey. After the last stop, Maya led the two-hour trek up and over the hills and then onto the horseshoe ridge, carrying Kamala on her back and hip. Before Maya’s tenth birthday, their mother died in a small hospital closer to home. Perhaps cancer ate away her stomach, or acute pancreatitis, or something else—no one in the village was quite sure—but the day their mother died, Maya became a full-time mother to her three younger sisters, especially to Kamala, who was then only eighteen months old.

  Percussion thumps at the heart of traditional music in Gorkha. The songs have no set lyrics, and singers freestyle to beats a bit like rappers. Tambourines and hand drums, similar to bongos, are the only instruments, though they can be accented or replaced by slapping thighs, clapping hands, and tapping sticks. Kamala and her sisters had mini rap wars daily as they worked the fields. When songs carried the sisters away, Kamala would jump up to dance through the rows, her sisters clapping out the rhythm for her tiny feet as she tried to copy the traditional style of dance in the hills, her hips slowly swirling, her hands and arms rolling out from the elbows as in a slow Polynesian dance.

  On the weekends, when Kamala didn’t have to go to school, the sisters took their act high above the village, into the uncut jungle and forest toward the horseshoe mountain’s peak. The smell of the forest hung thick and wet, held heavy in fallen leaves piled around the footpaths winding up the mountain. The trek gave the girls a chance to gather firewood or cut branches from the kind of spindly trees mostly wiped out lower in the valley, the trees that are covered in broad leaves that their cattle devoured like delicacies. Feeding their livestock these leaves also extended the family’s stores of hay and the life of their pastureland.

  Kamala could disappear up the trunk of a tree before her sisters noticed she’d left the earth. Any tree deemed impossible to climb by the sisters proved an irresistible temptation for the little girl. They would shout a challenge across the mountainside and then wait and watch and laugh as their baby sister scampered into the treetops. There, Kamala would cut the branches from the top of the trunk, letting them fall and whirl to the forest floor, where the girls would roll them into bales that they would strap onto their backs for the descent back to the village. Aside from the thudding and splintering of tree limbs at the end of the girls’ curved blades, these heights held a quiet unlike any other place near the village. You could see and hear the wind rolling up the horseshoe’s treetops in waves, like tides filling a cove. Pilgrims came this way each year, crossing over the ridge en route to one of the country’s most sacred temples, Manakamana, which translates loosely as “the Heart’s Wish.”

  The four girls were inseparable after their mother’s death; they raised one another. Kamala and Maya, especially, were rarely far from each other’s sight. Their father, enlisted as a soldier in the Royal Nepalese Army, was gone for all but a couple of weeks a year of home leave. He had remarried only days after the death of their mother, a practice strongly encouraged for widowers in Nepalese society, especially in more conservative Hindu communities.

  The reverse was true for widows, no matter how young they were or how long their husbands had been dead. This reality is captured in a sacred Hindu text, estimated to be nearly three thousand years old: “A widow should be long suffering until death, self-restrained and chaste. A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven. A woman who is unfaithful to her [dead] husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal.”1 Even beyond the question of remarrying, widows traditionally have been considered impure, almost untouchable. In 2015, when Nepal’s president, a widow herself, visited a temple in the city of Janakpur, activists performed a “cleansing ritual” because they considered her worship there an unholy act performed upon sacred ground.2

  Their father’s new wife resented the four daughters of his first wife, especially after giving birth to children of her own. Kamala became the main target of harsh words and painful yanks on her small arm. Their stepmother seemed to want to bring the favored nani to heel, which only sharp
ened Kamala’s tongue. A harsh word or an open hand directed at one of the sisters strengthened the bond among them all. They needed one another in the fields to survive each season, but perhaps even more to survive without a father and a mother, to give one another the affection, comfort, and love their lives now lacked. Kamala especially spent as much time as she could with their grandparents and aunts on the Three-House Street, but the girls had to come home at the end of every day.

  Each night, after the laughter of the sisters fell silent, one of them would snuff out the candle flame twisting in the corner against the red wall in the main room of the farmhouse’s second story. All four sisters slept together there, upon a wicker mat covered with a bedsheet spread across the mud-and-plaster floor. In winter months, they would cover the decorative wooden vent built into the wall behind their heads with thickly woven straw pads, to repel the night chill as they huddled ever closer. In the stillness of summer nights, they slept just outside the room, two by two on a narrow balcony facing Manaslu, high above the darkling valley and below a sky drenched in stars.

  Kamala would leave her sisters’ sides only to attend school. Maya had dropped out at age nine to care for them, but insisted that her nani stay enrolled. The primary school rose from a ridgeline along the very tip of the eastern leg of the horseshoe, with valleys opening below both sides of the schoolyard. It took about twenty minutes to walk there from Tin Gharey Toll, and Kamala, wearing the navy-blue skirt and French-blue blouse of the school uniform, would gather her friends from villages all along the way. In summer, they would pick wild kafal berries, or bayberries, the irresistible vermilion and purple fruits similar in size and shape to blackberries, stuffing their mouths and laughing at the sight of one another’s purple-stained teeth. In the winter mornings, they would marvel as the mist rolled up from the two valleys below the school, to reveal the mountain’s contours one terrace at a time, before melting into the sky.

  At the start of the school day, Kamala’s teachers would carefully sharpen the few pencils they had, shaving away as little as possible, to maximize each one’s life as a writing tool.3 The students shared them. Uday Thapa, a teacher born and raised on the horseshoe ridge, knocked on doors in surrounding villages to scavenge scraps of blank paper, but his stock never lasted long. Usually, he shared the long blackboard at the front of the classroom with his students, an arrangement that at least gave them some way to write out their lessons. A handful of wealthier families from the area sent their children to the boarding schools of Kathmandu or nearby Pokhara, but they were the rare exceptions.

  Kamala’s teachers kept a concerned eye on her, Thapa remembered years later. They knew she was without parents and that her stepmother had not accepted the four sisters. Yet Kamala didn’t need special attention. Whether it was Maya’s encouragement or something else, she excelled at school. She even learned to keep her quick fists down at her sides. Her tongue, however, never dulled in the schoolyard or the nearby fields, particularly in the face of what Kamala saw as unfair treatment. This seemed especially true if boys tried to bully her. Girls learn from childhood that men are very much in charge in the predominately Hindu culture of Nepal.* Questioning them or their desires is not typical. Children across the country are taught a folk saying enshrining a norm meant to silence women and keep them from participating in any public conversation: “Only the rooster crows.” In Kamala’s community, an extra line had been inserted: “The hen that does crow gets its neck snapped and is tossed over the far side of the mountain.” Kamala didn’t just ignore these mores; she openly challenged them, perhaps owing to an acute sense of fairness that had been sharpened by life in the farmhouse since her mother’s death, or perhaps because she and her sisters kept their entire world afloat almost completely on their own.4 Indeed, as soon as she was old enough to speak, Kamala spoke her mind, to boys and girls and men and women alike.

  * * *

  Kamala watched as the man tethered the boy like a calf and then led him around the courtyard in front of his family and the entire village.

  The boy was thirteen, and this was his bartaman, the Nepalese equivalent of a bar mitzvah and one of the biggest parties a family can throw. The calf ritual marks the boy’s passage into manhood and his acceptance as a full member of his family. This boy’s family elders had invited Kamala and another young woman from Tin Gharey Toll to sell home-brewed rice wine spiced with herbs and flowers to the partygoers.

  Kamala had been a few times before to this village straddling the ridgeline of the westernmost leg of the horseshoe and like none other in the area. The homes there seemed built atop a narrow peninsula reaching out like a shoreline in the sky. When the musician at the party sang to the beats he tapped on a bongo, his songs carried into the horseshoe valley and two others, the gorge behind the horseshoe to the west and northward, across the peaks toward Manaslu. Kamala found herself lost in the panoramic views. Ever seen since her first childhood visit to the village, she’d fantasized about living amid these extraordinary vistas, and the village’s hold on her hadn’t loosened now, on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

  A few days after the party, Kamala drove the family’s cows down the footpath below her village, clopping carefully on the small stones planted firmly in the mud like steps for hooves. “Ha! Ha-ha!” she shouted, waving a stick in her right hand when the beasts needed a nudge across one of the creeks snaking down the mountainside before joining the wide, clear river below. Kamala and her herd entered a pasture used by farmers from several villages. Another young woman was grazing her own small herd there. “Sister Kamala!” the woman shouted. She seemed unusually exuberant given their passing familiarity. Kamala smiled and waved back.

  Sati had attended the bartaman party, too, although Kamala hadn’t noticed. Born in the village on the ledge, Sati had married and moved to the other side of the horseshoe, closer to Kamala. Small talk between the two young women thinned quickly before Sati made it known that this chance meeting had not been left to chance. She had come to relay a message. The mother from one of the most respected families in the village where Kamala had served wine at the bartaman had taken a liking to Kamala during the celebration. After asking around about her and her family, the woman had decided that Kamala might make a good wife for her youngest son, the musician who had filled three valleys with his songs during the party.

  Kamala stood heavy under the shock of Sati’s words, motionless in the open pasture as beasts grazed around her. She expected to get married at some point, but she hadn’t thought the possibility loomed so near.

  Matrimony awaits everyone in the mountains. If physical and economic hardship were the primary conditions of existence on the horseshoe ridge, then marriage was the first inoculation against such conditions becoming chronic or critical, something that every young person here is keenly aware of. It takes hands and shoulders and backs to yield enough food to keep hunger at bay, making marriages and the families born into them anchors of security and stability, much as they were in the farm communities of America and Europe in bygone eras. Extended families also are Nepalese society’s sole guarantors of primary care, and having one is the only hedge against the prospect of living alone in old age or infirmity. When Kamala was growing up, it was nigh impossible for almost any woman in the hills to conjure a vision for her future that didn’t include joining a family by marriage. Nothing could be more essential to life, except the corn, millet, and rice growing on the terraced land.

  Because of marriage’s importance for the survival of extended families, coupling decisions are rarely left to young men and women waiting to feel their hearts swell in the mountain moonlight. Marriage normally is not forced in Gorkha, as it can be elsewhere in Nepal, but relatives almost always arrange mates and the ensuing nuptials, allowing the potential betrothed to wield choice solely by veto. A “love marriage” is not only unusual but often scandalous. Love can come after marriage, if at all, though it often does grow between men and women so deeply bound together
in the cause of daily survival, especially after they share the intensity and intimacy of having children.

  Kamala’s stepmother married off Maya and the other sisters as soon as they were old enough, at fifteen and sixteen. “We never planned on marrying so young, but these were the circumstances of our lives at home,” Maya would say. Kamala’s last sister had just left, and Kamala now lived alone with her stepmother and the three children she’d had with Kamala’s father. After the initial shock of Sati’s proposal in the pasture, Kamala grew keenly interested in hearing about the possibilities.

  Using their herds as cover, the two young women returned each day to the pasture, where Sati pitched the virtues of the musician from the bartaman party and his family. Kamala asked Sati to keep their tête-à-têtes secret. She wanted to make up her own mind and feared interference from her stepmother if word escaped. Destiny might dictate an arranged marriage for her, but she was determined to arrange it on her own, perhaps as a final act of defiance to her stepmother or a first to the culture imposed upon her. What was clear: if there was a marriage, the couple would elope, slipping into matrimony beneath the night sky.