[Caught in the double jeopardy of politics and
nature, the earthquake diary shifted in mood, intensity and introspection in
the months that followed. Nepalis contested the meaning of the crisis through
Twitter hashtags, urging the Indian media to correct the tragedy’s coverage.
Several intellectuals took issue against the Euro-American stereotyping of
Nepalis as either Brahministically fatalistic or Bahadur resilient. The
dialectic later gave rise to a more nuanced perspective: the ‘resilience’ noted
immediately after both the earthquake and the blockade was a spontaneous
response to a calamity, and should not be confused for a national disposition
that self-defeatingly endures the systemic evils of neoliberalism,
hyper-nationalism, bureaucratic defeatism, and so on.]
By Mallika Shakya
A year after the earthquake in Nepal, the
rubble has been removed. But very little has been done to build liveable homes
and assuage widespread fear.
Most anniversaries are benign rites of
passage but few evoke intense grief and nostalgia. Commemorating last year’s
tragedy on April 25, when a devastating earthquake killed over 8,000 people in
Kathmandu and the surrounding hills of Nepal, is one such occasion. The mounds
of rubble from the ancient Durbar Square of Kathmandu have now been hauled
away, and the lengthy rows of tarpaulin shelters on the central parade ground
have been pushed out of the city’s sight. The victims of the earthquake, either
tucked away in the inner city or hidden in the remote mountains up north, spent
their four seasons in makeshift camps futilely waiting for help to come by. The
tragedy lays bare the Nepali state’s apathy towards its citizens: Sonish Awale,
four months old, became the poster child of national hope as he was rescued
unscathed from the dark rubble; a year on, his family has failed to receive any
relief from the government for not having the papers to prove that they owned
the land where Sonish was found.
A
political aftershock
The government’s focus lay elsewhere. It
decided, for example, that finalising the Constitution was a bigger priority
than instituting a reconstruction agency that would cater to the victims of the
earthquake. Politicians argued for the need to bring closure to nine years of
bickering over Constitution-writing, especially as grief seemed to have united
Nepalis, even if momentarily, thus renewing the sense of urgency. Within days
of promulgation, however, the Constitution triggered a second rupture in the
form of widespread public unrest in the southern belt. The indigenous Tharus of
the Far West region were the first to protest. They were later joined by a
bigger Madhesi alliance that had the blessings of India. The border blockade
remains a sore issue in the Nepal-India relationship as families recount how
their Dashain and Diwali went uncelebrated last year, as there was shortage of
cooking gas, and schoolchildren count the classes they missed due to shortage
of petrol.
 |
| The Author |
Caught in the double jeopardy of politics and
nature, the earthquake diary shifted in mood, intensity and introspection in
the months that followed. Nepalis contested the meaning of the crisis through
Twitter hashtags, urging the Indian media to correct the tragedy’s coverage.
Several intellectuals took issue against the Euro-American stereotyping of
Nepalis as either Brahministically fatalistic or Bahadur resilient. The
dialectic later gave rise to a more nuanced perspective: the ‘resilience’ noted
immediately after both the earthquake and the blockade was a spontaneous
response to a calamity, and should not be confused for a national disposition
that self-defeatingly endures the systemic evils of neoliberalism,
hyper-nationalism, bureaucratic defeatism, and so on.
The
ground beneath our feet
Half a dozen countries have been hit by
earthquakes since last April. Science considers this normal but the way these
faraway disasters are being talked about on social media and in tea stalls
signals that a certain post-quake consciousness is taking root among the
Nepalis. Such a consciousness may echo Salman Rushdie’s reminiscing that it is
stability that is rare, not rupture. Even so, mankind needs the “everyday” and
so houses are built for defence against the big bad wolf of change that may be
seasonal or civilisational. The irony of the earthquake is that this allegory
of home hits a reverse logic as the ground beneath our feet crumbles.
“I looked at my house as a street dog would
have looked at it,” wrote poet Abhi Subedi, evoking a gypsy spirit hovering
over a concrete jungle that Kathmandu has become. The sentiment echoed in
Lalnunsanga Ralte’s sigh from an after-shocked Shillong: “I no longer envy my
neighbour’s mansion. He stands next to me panting, barefoot, in the dirt of the
street, glancing nervously at the tall lamp post.” Ruptures turned homes into
killing machines. Fiction became fact as newspapers reported that some Nepalis
had jumped off the roofs and walls, thus risking lives during aftershocks that
were relatively minor. The irony could not be starker when compared with the
public reaction to the first jolt: so many children died because they ran home
from outside to be safe. This had happened partly because they looked for their
mothers to cling to and partly because that was what they had mistakenly
learned during drills at their schools.
Nepal after the earthquake and its
aftershocks is replete with stories of love, loss, betrayal and redemption as
families come together to mourn their loved ones. Heroism and sacrifice sit
uncomfortably with despair as people still struggle to come to terms with their
loss: a ten-year-old saved two of her three younger siblings from their
crumbling house in a village in the epicentre, Gorkha; a father blamed himself
for the loss of his three children saying they all should have run just a
little faster; a teenager struggled to accept that her educational options had
narrowed down drastically after one of her legs had to be amputated to save her
life.
A year since the earthquake, message from
ground zero is as material as metaphorical. The rubble might have been tucked
away but very little has been accomplished in building liveable homes to
replace makeshift huts. The $4 billion pledged by the international community
remains in their own coffers and Nepal’s reconstruction authority has done no
groundwork to date. In the eerie hills and valleys still haunted by the killer
tremors, people murmur as if time has stood still since last spring. Many are recounting
how difficult it is to deal with the pain of losing touch with oneself. I am
haunted by the memories of an old, wrinkly man who spoke to me without taking
his eyes off a tree he had been staring at for more than a minute: “When the
grounds are stable, we envy the wandering birds. When it tremors, we huddle and
admire the deep-rooted trees.”
(Mallika Shakya is assistant professor,
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University,
Delhi.)
