Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “We’re making progress,” I told him. “Now we know where not to go.”

  He snarled.

  The next week he started in again. But he was still sick, and appeared to be getting sicker, so it got harder and harder to put in a full day.

  One day someone in the Department of Information told him the road was being paid for by the Chinese, but the King didn’t want the Indians to know about it. That got us excited, and only a day or two after that, someone in the Local Development Department told him that one of the ministers in the cabinet had gotten the construction contracts for his family, and so he didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  A couple of days later a third official in the Department of Old Terai Roads informed him that the road was a secret because it was being paid for by the Indians and the King didn’t want the Chinese to know about it.

  A few days after that, an informant in the Panchayat took a packet of baksheesh and told him that the Ministry of Finance had gotten both the Chinese and the Indians to pay for it, so they didn’t want anyone to know anything at all about the matter so that neither side would find out what he had done.

  “That’s so likely it’s probably not true,” our friend Steve told us.

  But there was no way to tell for sure. And all the while George was wasting away in those Singha Durbar offices, waiting to be received by one official or another, until one day he came home and I asked him where he had been that day and he said “Don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, don’t know? Where did you go?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I waved my hand in front of his face. “What’s your name, George?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I suspected he was starting to burn out, and took him to dinner. Afterwards when he had roused a bit I said “Hey, man, I should go along with you. That way you’ll have someone to talk to while you’re waiting.”

  “Freds, you just don’t look like an official person.”

  “Well no more do you! You look like a trekker who died of altitude sickness.”

  “Hmm,” he said, studying a window’s reflection of him. “Maybe so.”

  So we went to Yongten to get more baksheesh, and some haircuts. “Make us look just like we got off the plane,” George told him.

  “Sure.”

  “Aid agency types,” I said, “with lots of money.”

  “That will take longer,” he said. But he worked away on us with a little set of carpet scissors until he had us looking almost like Young Americans for Freedom.

  So I began to accompany George, and we went back to another branch of the Department of Roads, both of us spiffed as aid agency types, and in fact that’s what we said we were. The office looked like Central Immigration only bigger, the walls covered by bookcases filled with giant black ledgers which were also stacked on the floor and on the desks in the room, the ledgers collecting dust while the desks were manned by Hindu bureaucrats in bucket caps and worn baggy soft beige suits, doing nothing as far as I could tell but chatting among themselves and glancing at us. Finally one of them gave us an audience, but he denied that the Department of Roads had anything to do with this road we mentioned, new or old, hill or Terai.

  That night over dinner I said, “Let’s ask the Swiss what they know. Since they built that last extension, they should know who’s gonna do the new one.”

  “Good idea,” George said.

  The fact that I was the one coming up with ideas struck me as a bad sign. George was looking discouraged, and his intestinal troubles continued to disrupt his nights. And Colonel John had returned to town, and every night when we came home he grilled us about how the day had gone and gave us a tongue-lashing about what miserable progress we were making. George would snap back at him and he would bawl us out, and I would start chanting in Tibetan trying to calm John down, and sometimes he got mellow and joined me and other nights he just got mad and yelled louder at us in English, and occasionally he got confused trying to do both and went into a sort of catatonic fit. Our neighbors in the hotel were displeased with us, and George was getting exhausted.

  But we kept at it. Next day we biked south across the Bagmati River into Patan, the old holy city. There the Swiss Volunteers for Development and the Swiss Associations for Technical Assistance had their offices.

  After Singha Durbar the Swiss were so efficient we couldn’t believe it. It was like talking to aliens. Two of them brought us immediately into a bright shiny white room with prints on the walls and sat us down at a couch before a coffee table and gave us espresso, and they stayed and asked what they could do for us. It was so amazing that George at first forgot what we were there for, but he collected himself and asked about the road extension.

  Unfortunately they couldn’t tell us much. They had heard of a proposal to extend the road to Chhule, but they didn’t consider the area in question to be suitable geologically. They suspected the project might have been taken on by the Chinese. They suggested we try the Ministry of Administration, but they warned us that each government that gave aid to Nepal was a semi-independent power in the country, so the regular Nepali government might not know much. They really weren’t sure—in the usual Swiss style they were as unconnected to any other government as they could be, making most of their aid arrangements directly with local businesses.

  So they were no great help. And the next day we found no one in the Administration offices wanted to talk to us, no matter the baksheesh.

  George threw up his hands and went back to our friend Steve. “Give me a contact,” he asked him. “I don’t care who it is.”

  Steve gave him the name of a guy who wrote for the Nepal Gazette, the paper that publishes notices of all the official actions of the government. Apparently this guy had been a supporter of B. P. Koirala, the Prime Minister jailed by King Birendra’s father back in the sixties. This was a good sign, and indeed when we went into this guy’s office in Singha Durbar and George plopped five hundred rupees on his desk and said, “Please let us take you to lunch and ask you some questions, nothing secret, only some information help,” the man actually seemed interested, he looked at his watch and said “Well, sir, I am just going to lunch now. If you came along I could try my best to answer your questions, if I am knowing the answer.”

  So we took him to lunch and he sat there looking at us with some amusement. Little Hindu bureaucrat with a red dot on his forehead and all the rest. His name was Bahadim Shrestha, and he had been born down in the Terai. He had been to Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, and had chosen to go into public administration. All this was good, because most of the administrators in Singha Durbar were Brahmin or Chetri, born in Kathmandu, and fallen into their jobs through family connections as an easy way to make money without working. Bahadim was outside this crowd, and naturally he disliked it. “Poverty and bad administration are Nepal’s two big problems,” he told us, “and we will never solve the first until we are solving the second. Every year or two we have foreign administration expert come design for us a new system—organization, promotion, all very much detailed and with points and an absolute end to corruption, and these systems the Palace Secretariat orders us to use and then they are forgotten before anyone understands them.” He shook his head gloomily. “It is a veritable museum of systems.”

  “No lie,” George said fervently. “So, if I want to find out who in Singha Durbar is responsible for building a certain road?”

  “Oh, sir, it will not be anyone in Singha Durbar at all!” Bahadim looked shocked at the thought. “That is the government house.”

  George and I looked at each other.

  “You must understand,” Bahadim said, rubbing his hands with somewhat ghoulish pleasure. “There are three centers of power in Nepal. Singha Durbar and the Panchayat are one center, foreign aid community is another center, and Palace Secretariat working directly for King Birendra is the third center. It is not determined officially who is responsible for what, but in practice, nothing can
be done without the King and his advisors.”

  “But what about the government?” George said, grimacing at the thought of the work we had put in.

  Bahadim spread his hands. “The Panchayat government is not important for your interests. As the King says often, in Panchayat system is no danger of one being lost in a labyrinth of democracy. It is the real administration you must be dealing with.”

  “But that’s what we’ve been trying to do!”

  “Yes. Well. You must go to Palace Secretariat, then.” He saw the expression on George’s face and shrugged. “It is confusing.”

  “You aren’t kidding!” Pretty soon George was going to grab his head to keep it from exploding. “But why, Bahadim? Why is it so confused?”

  “Well.” Bahadim made diagrams with a finger. “In administration there are eleven ministries and twelve departments, headed by ministers or directors. All have assistant directors, deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, and gazetted officers. But there is no chain of command. Each person is reporting to any superior he likes. The superiors then give orders to subordinates at any level, without the knowledge of immediate supervisors. This creates problems, and to deal with them many new positions at every level have been created and filled, without the knowledge of the Finance Ministry in most cases. The civil service therefore grew so much that the Finance Ministry refused to disburse funds to the agencies, agreeing however to do so to individual officials. To deal with this a Civil Service Screening Committee was formed, but it became defunct after a time without tangible result. Similarly the importation of Indian experts.” Bahadim shrugged. “Responsibility for decisions is therefore difficult to determine.”

  George put his elbows on the table and held his head. “My Lord. How did it ever get so messed up?”

  Bahadim smiled at George’s innocence. “It is a long story,” he said.

  And with that same mordant pleasure he began to explain. He took George all the way back to the Ranas, the family that had run the country for over a hundred years. They held the prime ministership and all the important posts, while keeping the royal family on a leash and siphoning the country’s wealth to private accounts in India. Being Hindu they had over time set up a caste system within their own family, so that you could be Rana A, B, or C, depending on whether you married in the family or out, etc. Finally enough Rana Cs got disgusted by the As that they were willing to help kick them out of power, and in 1951 there was a successful revolution that booted the whole family. The King at that time, Tribhuvan, naturally loved this revolution with all his heart as it unleashed him and his family, and he helped to write a new constitution that set up a democratic government based on the Indian Congress Party model.

  But then Tribhuvan died and his son Mahendra became King, and Mahendra wanted to run everything himself. He kept trying to take over, and the Congress Party kept resisting him, until in 1960 he got the Army to help him stage a coup and he arrested and jailed Prime Minister B. P. Koirala, and disbanded the Parliament. To make that look less like what it was he started up the no-party Panchayat Raj, a classic rubberstamp government. He also began to use the Ranas as his ministers, the better to keep an eye on them, and so they weaseled back into things, except under the King rather than on top of him. They took up their old ways as quick as they got in, and under them the Palace Secretariat became the real source of power.

  Then when Mahendra died in 1972, his son Birendra took over. Now Birendra had been educated at Harvard and had learned a number of modern vices there, and people assumed that he wouldn’t be as interested in absolute monarchy as his father, which was true but didn’t matter as anything that Birendra wasn’t interested in his Rana secretaries grabbed. So it was back to the Ranas, under a King who was nearly useless. “And I am very sorry to say that the disease of corruption is worse than ever,” Bahadim said grimly.

  George was looking a little desperate. “So what the hell do we do?” he asked.

  Bahadim shrugged. “Whatever you do must be done in the palace. All the ministers there of any importance hold a durbar every morning.”

  “What’s that?”

  Bahadim explained that people who wanted to get the ministers to do anything had to show up at little receptions in the mornings and lay on the baksheesh and flattery as thick as they could. Then something might happen.

  George considered. “Well listen, could you try to find out for us which agency is doing this road? They must have published the information in the Gazette, didn’t they?”

  “No, they did not,” Bahadim said. But he agreed to look into it for us.

  * * *

  The very next day he confirmed one of the stories George had been given during his time in Singha Durbar. The Indians were building the road. Definite fact. No doubt about it. And it was being kept strangely hush hush.

  So I says, “What’s your plan, George? I mean when you get hold of the right person, do you have a plan?”

  No reply from George.

  But he did take me down to the Human Fit Tailor Shop on New Road, so we could upgrade into two perfectly fitted young-executive-off-the-plane Western suits, which were nearly convincing. And we went to the Palace Secretariat to find out what we could.

  The Secretariat was a big new squat white concrete building on the edge of the palace grounds, which was the best thing about it—it was just outside of Thamel, so every day we could walk down the street in our Wall Street pseudosuits with our forged paperwork dodging the cows, and in ten minutes we were there and could dive right in.

  But once inside it was much like being in Singha Durbar, except everything was upscale—new offices, new furniture and typewriters, snappy dressers in fresh white jackets. We shuffled from office to office and waited till we had counted every crack in the poorly set concrete walls, only to find out that the functionary we were waiting for was happy to talk about or take our money, but knew nothing and didn’t know who did.

  And every night Colonel John gave us hell. And George continued to suffer from the runs. It all was beginning to get to him—one day we staggered out into the rain and George looked up into the tall pines in the palace grounds, and he saw the flock of enormous bats hanging head down from the branches and said, “That’s them! That’s where they go when they get out of the office! Hey!” He yelled at them. “Where the fuck is the office responsible for the road, you vampires!”

  People stared at us. The bats didn’t stir.

  “George,” I said, “you got to remember that these people are under pressure to be corrupt. They aren’t paid much, and this city is expensive. And they get into an office, and everyone there is on the take and they’re given some of the group take, and what can they do? There’s hardly any way to avoid it.”

  “Don’t give me that Buddhist mellow trip,” George snarled. “They’re crooks, and Colonel John is right, there are times when you’ve just got to kick some ass! If they’re not vampire bats, they’re vultures. I just wish one would land on me so I could wring his fucking neck for everything he knows.”

  The next day he got his wish, almost. A secretary in the National Development Council, Foreign Aid Office, India Branch, took one look at George and his eyes lit up. George smiled and explained that we were from the William T. Sloane Foundation for International Development of Houston, Texas, and laid some baksheesh on the table and asked after the road project. Oh of course, the secretary said, nodding. Naturally we would want to speak directly to the deputy minister, Mr. A.S.J.B. Rana, who spoke with visitors and interested parties every morning in the south patio of the Palace Secretariat.

  “Rana,” says I to George as we left. “That’s the Ranas, you know. All the real Ranas have the same last four names, that S.J.B.R. stuff.”

  “I didn’t know. But that’s good, very good. Getting into the power structure at last.”

  So we dropped by A.S.J.B. Rana’s durbar next morning. Again we were the subject of great interest, and George went at it in his usual style,
explaining who we were and looking like money was weighing him down like millstones he wanted to get rid of. A. Rana, a slick character in the usual white jacket, allowed he was interested, and would let us have an audience later in the day.

  So we met with him, presented him with a token of the Foundation’s appreciation, and George laid his rap on him. Foundation grant, road construction in Nepal, feasibility study of current projects. Questions we wanted to ask about the extension to Chhule. A. Rana was accommodating, and told us he would look into it and we should come back later, putting his eye on the Foundation gift as he said this.

  So we came back later.

  I didn’t always accompany George, but he started going every day. And A.S.J.B.R. seemed more interested every time, asking all sorts of questions about the Foundation and asking outright for money help for his department, and from time to time dropping a tidbit of information, confirming that the Indians were building the road, or giving us figures about the cost, or sending us to one of his colleagues, who also asked for money.

  But as he saw he could string George along he got a bit suspicious, and then high-handed. One time we attended a durbar where the group spoke in Nepalese the whole time, and A. Rana laughed and glanced at us or away from us, until it became obvious we were the object of his jokes. And he wanted us to understand that. That made me think that he knew we were bogus, and was just milking us for cash and entertainment value. But George thought we should continue to try.

  Then another time George was there alone and another minister came in shouting angrily at A. Rana, and Rana pointed at George and said loudly It’s this American’s fault, he insists on pestering me! Oh, the other minister said. So this is the one. And they stared at George, giving him the strong feeling that he was well known in the Secretariat. “You know I think we’re being set up as scapegoat for something A. Rana is doing on the side,” George growled when he told me about it.

  But that was nothing compared to the following day. Apparently A. Rana had passed by George on his way out and they had bumped legs, and before he could stop himself Rana had snapped “Don’t touch me!” looking disgusted. George didn’t get it. I explained to him that as foreigners we were technically untouchable. Our touch was unclean.