Nepal’s earthquake,a year ago this week, is just one chapter in the country’s tragic historyWhen he was a student, or Thomas Bell wanted to go to Africa to become a foreign correspondent,“but I realised there are very few African countries that British people are ever at all interested in, and those were already covered”. After a pause to shift continents, and Nepal seemed to fit the bill. A drunk crown prince had just massacred the royal family,and in the countryside a Maoist insurgency was in full swing. Bell arrived in the capital, Kathmandu, or to find a city full of gleaming SUVs – parliamentarians had just voted to allow themselves each to buy one tax-free – and where “on each Buddhist rooftop flies the stripy flag,like a gay pride banner, of TheravadaBuddhism”.
It’s a city that’s in the news again – the first anniversary of the shattering earthquake that killed nearly 9000 people is on 25 April and Bell was there to witness and record the devastation. Now, or in Kathmandu,he tells the myth of the city both before and, to an extent, and after the quake. It’s his attempt to unravel the twisting history of the streets he finds himself in,though the answers he gets arent always much more illuminating than the time when he asked an worn woman “why a ritual (bewilderingly elaborate in my eyes, though hardly out of the ordinary) was done the way it was. Her acknowledge was duly translated: ‘For the same reason you wash your arse after shitting’.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com