Supermarket Series III

Why Supermarkets? In my mind they are places wryly sad, but then so is every fluorescent tube-lit store with cluttered and bright plastic and deep shadows; but then, so is Wal-Mart late at night, so is Ikea. The oddity in Kathmandu is in the plentitude, is in the convenience, is in the tension of a store whose value-add is time saved in a country where time is the resource most in abundance. There are clutches and clutches of everything in the supermarkets of Kathmandu--stores that combine groceries with shoes and school notebooks and kitchenware and towels and clothes floor after floor--for the word here denotes bazaar.

In a country of scarcity, they are loci of abundance, not so much of abundant things as of feelings of the absence of lack, of want.

Bishal Bazaar, New Road, Kathmandu

Supermarket Series II

Why Supermarkets? In my mind they are places wryly sad, but then so is every fluorescent tube-lit store with cluttered and bright plastic and deep shadows; but then, so is Wal-Mart late at night, so is Ikea. The oddity in Kathmandu is in the plenitude, is in the convenience, is in the tension of a store whose value-add is time saved in a country where time is the resource most in abundance. There are clutches and clutches of everything in the supermarkets of Kathmandu--stores that combine groceries with shoes and school notebooks and kitchenware and towels and clothes floor after floor--for the word here denotes bazaar.

In a country of scarcity, they are loci of abundance, not so much of abundant things as of feelings of the absence of lack, of want.

Bluebird Supermarket, Lazimpat, Kathmandu

Supermarket Series I

Why Supermarkets? In my mind they are places wryly sad, but then so is every fluorescent tube-lit store with cluttered and bright plastic and deep shadows; but then, so is Wal-Mart late at night, so is Ikea. The oddity in Kathmandu is in the plentitude, is in the convenience, is in the tension of a store whose value-add is time saved in a country where time is the resource most in abundance. There are clutches and clutches of everything in the supermarkets of Kathmandu--stores that combine groceries with shoes and school notebooks and kitchenware and towels and clothes floor after floor--for the word here denotes bazaar.

In a country of scarcity, they are loci of abundance, not so much of abundant things as of feelings of the absence of lack, of want.

Bhat Bateni, 2nd Floor, Bhat Bateni, Kathmandu

Two Very Different Workshops, Sakhu and Kathmandu, Nepal

Men at the Bearing Shop, Teku, Kathmandu

A KawaaDi, Teku, Kathmandu

That's not a typo in the title, but the standard way of marking that D as a retroflex--as opposed to dental--consonant. (By sound I think the standardized spelling should be KhaawaDi, but my Nepali tutor says otherwise..)

Anyway, Aaron and I spent yesterday fishing through kawaaDis--junkyards--in the industrial neighborhood of Teku for parts to build this ridiculous washing machine with.

All I could think of was how beautiful a lot of these piles were--and how the only people who would think so are those of us for whom replacement parts are easily had, who have the privilege to visualize a pipe outside of its ability to carry water or a conduit wires, who can see a bag of seized bearings and be happy that someone knows they're worth saving, that they'll be useful for something.

Boudhanilkantha, Nepal

My friends Sareena, Olivier, and Kholga--aka Rai ko Ris--had a little show at Sareena and Olivier's house in Boudhanilkantha on Monday. Most of the pictures ended up more than a little blurry, and the highlight was Sareena calling me up to, uh, demonstrate the Bollywood dance moves that some of the little kids at P.A. Nepal made me learn. I would humbly suggest that I stole the show. There's a video somewhere, which will almost certainly come back to haunt me later.

Koteshwor, Kathmandu

Monsoon? What Monsoon?

Oh, yes.

Looking South Across the Valley, near Dacchi, Nepal

Watching the visa queue

They don't let you take pens into the Consular Section at the US Embassy in Kathmandu, much less notepads or cameras, but you can write on the handouts they give, handouts with brutalist, all-caps titles like PHOTOGRAPH REQUIREMENTS FOR PASSPORTS ISSUED OVERSEAS. Because the only pen you can get is either attached to a table via a ball-chain and heavy block—there's only one of these—or in the breast pocket of the blue-uniformed, name-tagged security guard¹ who spends much of her day shepherding rejected visa applicants out of the walkway, taking notes discreetly is something of a challenge.

This challenge is further compounded by the huge amount of distraction: you are liable, on any moderately busy day, to see and often hear, crisply, someone's hopes of bettering his life be whimsically, or capriciously, or hardheartedly crumbled². That's the nature of the place, after all, and if you were allowed to make purely touristic visits they would be something akin to safaris to crocodile-populated watering holes on the African savanna. That, or to a parole hearing.

One of the more interesting things about the Embassy here, I think, is how in recreation or reconstruction of the United States overseas—the massive noncontiguity that the Embassy not just represents but putatively is—the Embassy repeatedly and faithfully transports the physical objects and structures that most typify the America of dominance. From the street the Embassy itself looks like nothing so much as an over-fortified office park, with brushed-aluminum, swept-arm benches and pink stone and even, incredibly, corporate art; the parking lot is attended by security guards who arbitrarily allow or disallow parking, standing, or walking through certain sectors of an asphalt lot; the security checkpoint is a little room with blast-proof glass and twice as many guards as petitioners, if not more; and inside there are two sections of seats: a section for American citizens and green-card holders that faces the windows of the consular officials, and a section for Nepalis that faces the south wall.

Considerately, on the wall is attached a rectangular, HDTV television, looped to show again and again and again how a Nepali ought to put his finger in the fingerprint scanner.³

This is all weighted with symbolic power—the embassy could still be in the more high-school-like Phora Durbar compound across the street from the old Narayanhiti Palace, or in an elegantly decrepit Rana Palace, or in a building that is an exact replica of the White House—but who is this symbolism for? The aforementioned handout, for instance, has at its top the heraldic US seal of the bald eagle with its wings displayed, a scroll in its beak and its claws grasping a branch—an olive branch, not that you can tell—and a clutch of arrows, all in all vaguely Roman, vaguely Germanic, undoubtedly corporate-imperial. In fact, to my Western eyes it's almost a caricature of a seal, the type of thing most appropriate—if you and I were not already inured to it by familiarity—to a Hollywood dystopian movie about the corporatist or corporate-fascist state. Something like Demolition Man, say.

It is almost certainly lost on the Nepalis who come to visit, as the symbolic language is Western, is just as incomprehensible to a Nepali as the Nepali language is to a bideshi, a foreigner. Pink marble Hollywood presents, typically, as tacky; heraldic emblems are self-consciously European; and here the banality of corporate power—the visual allusion of the place—just looks banal. It is certainly bideshi-looking, and perhaps intends to take some of its power from that fact, but in the end conveys that—as my new friend Prasad says, smiling—“Americans are very rich,” and little else.

Clearly I am unafraid of making judgments, but here I find my understanding lacking. Is the Embassy—built only recently—set up like a business in reflection of the lesser Bush administration's aesthetic and moral preferences? To demonstrate to citizens abroad that American standards and praxis of bureaucracy have fruited here, mycelium-like? Because Americans, as a whole, are an aesthetically dulled people? Because of the amazingly persistent American inability to see the world through another's world view, another's history?

No matter. It is enough to see how America chooses to display the power it has: not through military strength, the most common colonial strategy; not through the promotion of liberty and autonomy and market capitalism, as during the Cold War; not as a friend to whom you owe a favor, nor as a friend who's doing you a favor preemptively; not as the center of cool—the home of jazz, of Hollywood, of television, of rock and roll; not as a working model of a more efficient and developed way of life⁴; but through corporate strength, economic strength, the type of strength that works in the developing world not through a morally legitimate exchange of labor for capital, but as often as not through a false dichotomy of job-or-no-job, through the real dichotomy of this-job-or-homelessness, of this-job-or-hunger.

It's American greatness, and to some degree American “exceptionalism,” that's presumed here. “They did not want to hear just that US education is better than Nepali education,” Prasad says. “They know already.” Or take instead a passage from Kiran Desai's somewhat silly book The Inheritance of Loss and its description of the Consulate that Biju visits: “In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would be begging to come crawling in....”⁵

And so, waiting in the chairs facing the consular officials, waiting for them to process my application for a passport renewal abroad, it strikes me that perhaps the job most analogous to that of an Embassy official in the Consular Section is indeed parole officer. The excess of this analogy is that Nepal, then, is the prison; or rather, that the prison is the SAARC countries where Nepalis with citizenship papers can travel freely. But nonetheless, the Nepalis want to go, often just to visit, and this is the place, by structure, for the consular officers to tell them they cannot, that though they have good grades or are qualified the official isn't convinced.

Yet a place of birth is luck; I no more “deserve” to be from San Francisco than Prasad “deserves” to be from Kathmandu. Further, the great number of visa applicants will be denied for luck: for not having enough family money, for not being an oldest son, for not speaking English well enough and earnestly enough to convince the officer behind the glass of their desire not to make money but to help their own people (whatever that phrase—my own—means).

Still, the consular officers enter with upright motives: they believe, by and large, that they are doing something necessary, something good. They participate in a system that, in effect, treats blocks to capital flow as mortal sin (see WTO) but impediments to the free flow of people—of labor, in economics-speak—as legitimate, and their places as person-sieves as necessary, if not always perfectly justifiable. Indeed, it's the literal structures of the place they work that emphasize this world view, that emphasize economic power more than anything else. The visual structures of American capitalism are, in Kathmandu, at the Embassy, consuming. Are they, the officers, complicit actors or victims?

Yes, I say.

Prasad, by the way, successfully got a visa to study at the University of Texas at Arlington. He started talking to me because he was so excited he couldn't help himself; we were both going out of the Embassy at the same time. “Tell everyone thank you,” he said to me as we waited for security to retrieve our bags. “Tell your friend”—meaning my friend at the visa office—“thank you.”

*

¹ Note that “for security,” the only people with nametags are the Nepalis who are the security and custodial officers—the people who, as potential collaborators, are explicitly most vulnerable in the event of attack or siege.

² I choose not to use “validly” (or a more elegant synonym) intentionally, for reasons that this essay should elucidate, at least dimly; though in the minds of the consular officers many Nepalis are rejected for reasons they, and the US government, see as valid or legitimate.

³ I've been to the Embassy four times now, and every time the vast, vast majority of Nepalis applying for visa have been young men—I'd guesstimate about 70–75%, though I'm sure the Embassy itself keeps those sorts of statistics.

⁴ Terms used with all possible irony.

⁵ Because it's actually quite insightful, here is a lengthier excerpt, with only a tiny bit of cutting:

Some would be chosen, others refused, and there was no question of fair or not. What would make the decision? It was a whim; it was not liking your face, forty-five degrees centigrade outside and impatience with all Indians, therefore; or perhaps merely the fact that you were in line after a yes, so you were likely to be the no. He trembled to think of what might make these people unsympathetic. Presumably, though, they would start off kind and relaxed, and then, faced with all the fool and annoying people, with their lies and crazy stories, and their desire to stay barely concealed under fervent promises to return, they would respond with an indiscriminate machine-gun-fire of NO!NO!NO!NO!NO!

On the other hand, it occurred to those who now stood in the front, that at the beginning, fresh and alert, they might be more inclined to check their paper more carefully and find gaps in their arguments.... Or perversely start out by refusing, as if for practice.

There was no way to fathom the minds and hearts of these great Americans, and Biju watched the windows carefully, trying to uncover a pattern he might learn from. Some officers seemed more amiable than others, some scornful, some thorough, some were certain misfortune, turning everyone away empty-handed....

Biju watched as the words were put forward to others with complete bluntness, with a fixed and unembarrassed eye—odd when asking such rude questions. Standing there, feeling the enormous measure of just how despised he was, he would have to reply in a smart yet humble manner. If he bumbled, tried too hard, seemed too cocky, became confused, if they didn't get what they wanted quickly and easily, he would be out. In this room it was a fact accepted by all that Indians were willing to undergo any kind of humiliation to get into the States. You could heap rubbish on their heads and yet they would be begging to come crawling in....

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2006, pp. 183-184.

2 ways of looking at a classroom, Sinamangal, Kathmandu

Pepsicola, Nepal

Art and Seeing at Changu Narayan

Changu Narayan you have seen from afar but never—until today—visited, set on the final turret of a ridge jutting west from Nagarkot, looking north to Sakhu, south to Bhaktapur, and west to Kathmandu.

It is—you've heard and will discover—the site of the Kathmandu Valley's most beautiful temple, dedicated to Narayan, an incarnation of Vishnu.

The town of Changu Narayan has grown up around the temple, built on the site of an especially important Vishnu shrine and then rebuilt in the early 1700s by the Malla king of Bhaktapur. Indeed, when you go to the Changu Narayan Museum—situated in an old Newari house with mean, cramped stairs and intricate wood screens in front of and around the windows—you see a panel-by-panel description of the town's origins: a boy or spirit keeps stealing a local man's milk, then disappearing; the man tracks the boy to a specific tree and cuts it down; Vishnu's face appears on the tree, and the man is scared he has angered the god; but Vishnu tells him that he will forgive the man if the man builds a shrine on that spot; and this is because Vishnu killed the man's father. The drawings, drawn with perspective but little other composition, and brightly colored and cross-hatched, look like they were done by a local schoolchild. The effect, you think, is endearing.

Indeed, much of the whole of a visit to Changu Narayan is endearing. On a bicycle, you go east out of Kathmandu on the choking road to Bhaktapur, but then turn off towards the town of Pepsicola and then right to Thimi and past it—the roads up to now smooth and mostly empty of traffic, restrained on both sides by the decrepit and failing fences and gates of private high schools, of orphanages, of the government's testing center for vocational skills certification, the ramshackle gray-blue concrete building where young and old take exams to become licensed mechanics of cars and motorcycles. Past Thimi the road becomes more typical, rutted and cratered, covered often by a sloppy, messy mud thick as cake icing, and at Bhaktapur finally, the traffic comes again, with burning unburnt exhaust and a general miasma.

But on the road north to Changu Narayan—there is only one road north to Changu Narayan—you travel almost immediately from the constraining atmosphere of industrial trucks on medieval roads to the sleepy feel of great open spaces interspersed with red-saried women crouching among rice plants and boys fishing in the flooded fields and stone-walled houses mortared and stuccoed with mud. The colors are no longer wan and pale and dusty, but bright: lime greens, rich yellows, cheerful reds. Everything—everything—looks crisper.

It is like this as you go uphill, climbing both switchbacks and, at times, directly up the sliding hill, slopes of 20% or 25% the few public buses balk at traveling either up or down. Stopping for a moment in the shade—the sun is intense, the type of sun, even through the humidity, that you imagine cracking and splitting dry earth—you look out at a hillside of green terraces and a valley bottom of rice and corn, with miniature people moving along. It is altogether a landscape a master would have painted in the heyday of landscape paintings, with verticality, the repeating irregular lines of fields, with scale.

At the top, the town of Changu Narayan, dozing off as it waits for midday heat and the few callers it gets this time of year. Today you are here, and a Spanish couple will arrive on the bus, and then an Indian family—pilgrims—in a taxi, but that is all. Little boys will scatter across town—two parallel streets atop a ridge, and some houses and terraces along the sides—when the Indians come, looking for the priest who is working his fields, but the Indians come late, almost at noon, and by then everything will be washed out, burned out, in the sunshine, and you will already have spent a couple of hours, solid hours, in the temple courtyard.

Why so long? Indeed, you have not spent so much time at the Buddhist stupas of Swayambo or Boudha, nor indeed at the Durbar—royal—Squares in Patan or Kathmandu. Those places you have seen what interested your eye and gone. You took what you wanted to take, what you could take, which was little.

The temple at Changu Narayan is different, though; it is colorful, for one, like the encyclopedic Mahadev Temple at Gokarna but better. Here the wood friezes along the temple are painted red and white, the gods on the struts are given the illusion of shadow and depth, the door is gated with gold. The gray stone griffins and lions and elephants that protect the temple have eyes, stylized but expressive, giving more than blank stares. A shy but interested boy named Razan, dressed in brown pants and a shirt striped white and sky-blue, follows you around the complex, from shrine to shrine in a circuit around the main temple, pointing out gods when you don't know their name. At a carving of Gautam he points out that Gautam is also on the 10-rupee note; you pull one out of your pocket, dirty-looking as all 10-rupee notes are, and so he is.

You spend the most time, though, just looking at the temple, almost as if in communication with it. Looking from the playfully fierce mouth of a lion to the unsure eyes of a saffron-painted griffin, you begin to see more and more: an emotion in structure, a feeling in restriction. For a long time you stare, but the best views require you to stand in the sun, and this tires you.

So you retreat to the shade, where the priest motions that he doesn't want his picture taken; you do it anyway, clicking the button three times at slightly different angles but looking at other things with your head and shoulders and eyes, hoping that he won't notice. Why you have done this, you can't say, but you have, and do not regret it. The priest will look at you crossly later, when you are sitting under a cheap cloth umbrella in town drinking a vaguely cool Sprite—soft drinks are safe to drink, and it is too hot for tea—but he looked at you crossly when you first came through the doorway from town, past the sign reading “Save Our Self Esteem, Don't Encourage Begging” and in a purely selfish manner you will rationalize that he is simply a cross man. In town he will have changed clothes and carry a pick, but you will recognize him for his head, shaved save one braid the size of your littlest finger on the back.

You begin to feel an unease though, a clenching in your stomach, as you dialog, in your own way, with the temple, with the art on it. You ignore it as best you can, but though you are disturbing no one, hurting nothing, it grows and grows until a vague sensation is a vague discomfort, and you decide, rightly, that it is time to move on. You go back towards town, take a phone call rescheduling that afternoon's meeting, and decide to visit the museum. Your favorite exhibit is the 225-year-old rice, kept for no reason except that it is old.

Sitting under that umbrella afterward, you begin to think, begin to wonder whether your dialog with the temple was, in fact, a monologue. Were my eyes,you think, talking to themselves? Certain of Tibetan Thanka paintings, you know, were and to some extent are anti-art; their intent is solely to aid in meditation, in Nirvana, an extent that precludes—or tries to preclude—deep visual reading, that denies any value except of efficacy. Who am I, you think, to look at this temple areligiously? Who am I to assume that there is ever an emotive, affective message beside the religious one, the spiritual one?

These are questions you can get the answers to: whether a Newari Hindu in the 17^th Century understood religious art as valuable for those lacking in faith, for those who would forever lack in faith; whether the visual language that you understand, the visual cues that move you, can coexist separately, as in the mind of a polyglot; whether there is for the eyes a base universal grammar, Chomskyan, that cleaves cultures together rather than apart.

For now, though, you sit and try to cool yourself in the slightest of slight breezes that tickles the hair on your arms and head. And you think, and you wonder.

You think, even when I get the answers, if I like them, there is still the problem of communication; what the temple is saying, or intending to say, is not what I see. But this is a problem too in your native language, in English, even when talking among friends.

Blogger errors

For some reason blogger screwed up and posted neither yesterday's posts (the essay above) nor today's (a couple of picture of signs in Pepsicola). So I'll leave the essay up, and today's pictures will hopefully come tomorrow.

-Mario

Ritual apologies and other gobbledygook

I'm having trouble uploading pictures, and the essay on Changu Narayan still isn't done--oddly, I more or less said out loud the direction of it with a bunch of friends last Wednesday, and have been less interested in it since.

It's like I figured out what I needed to about the visit, and so have less compulsion to write about it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I'll do my best to finish it up very soon, before I forget anything more about going.

I've also been busy with a couple other writing projects, of course, as well as with Wrench Nepal. Oh, and there's another mechanic coming August 12th! Which means that I am out of Kathmandu August 19th or thereabouts, to southeast Asia for a bit and then back to the States.

I'm looking forward to new places, there are only like 7 places in the Kathmandu Valley listed in the Lonely Planet that I haven't been to.

For today, look down and see some Nepali kids having fun and asking for a rupee.

Boys near Indrayani, Nepal

Ah, when the police take hostages...

From today's AP report:

Nepal riot police revolt over bad food Jul 13th, 2008 | KATMANDU, Nepal -- About 500 riot policemen took senior officers hostage in a revolt in western Nepal over ill treatment and poor food, officials said Sunday. The policemen seized the riot police camp at Nepalgunj, about 310 miles west of Katmandu, on Saturday and were holding seven senior police officials hostage, said Krishna Acharya, a government administrator in the area. Armed rebel policemen were guarding the camp's entrances and there had been some shooting but no one was injured, Acharya said. Other police surrounded the camp and the area has been cordoned off while negotiations with the rebel officers continue, he said. The rebelling policemen told reporters they were protesting ill treatment of lower-ranking officers by their supervisors, low-quality food they are given and other police force issues. Home Minister Krishna Sitaula said he ordered the police chief to take "all necessary action" to deal with the situation.

Now, the AP is taking a little bit of a liberty with the headline--the police at (by the way) the Riot Control Battalion are revolting because of systematic mistreatment; the Kathmandu Post reports that they are complaining about "providing low quality food to the rank and file, involvement in rampant corruption, financial exploitation of juniors [i.e., junior officers] and misuse of resources." And the kicker: the senior officers had ordered an exercise for Saturday morning, the typical Nepali day off, and had snuck off and gotten drunk instead of participating. In essence, they armed and enabled their captors. Ain't Nepal grand?

Waiting out the Rain, Hanuman Dhoka Palace, Kathmandu

We had just a massive rainstorm Wednesday, but short, dropping something like 2 centimeters of rain in 25 minutes in the heart of the old center city. It was more like watching a waterfall than a rainstorm--and there was, as you might expect, a lot of watching and not a lot of walking or driving.

Celebrating the Dalai Lama's Birthday, Boudha