On Caroline Walter, When the Soul Leaves (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

ON CAROLINE WALTER (Satis Shroff)

I took a walk to the old cemetery
With its cultural treasures,
And saw the Dance of Death
At the entrance of Michael’s chapel.

The gravestones expressed
The self-consciousness of the citizens.
There were many stories
That made their rounds
In the town of Freiburg.

I felt drawn to one gravestone
It was that of Caroline Walter
Lying on her bed of concrete,
Her head reposing on a big pillow.

She had aesthetic features
And wore a long dress.
Her left arm rested on her breast.
Her nose was elegantly long and pointed.
Her eyes were closed,
As though she’d fallen asleep
In the afternoon.
Her lips were well chiselled.
On her right hand
She held a book she’d been reading.

I discern the strings of a fiddle from the neighbourhood.

Fresh scarlet and pink roses
Lay under her chin,
As if she was taking in their scent
With her fine nostrils.

A breeze undulates the leaves on the floor
And disappears.

The expression on her face
Was serene and tranquil.
A lady in harmony and peace
With herself and the world
She lived in.
A Fräulein from a decent family.

*****

WHEN THE SOUL LEAVES (Satis Shroff)

Like Shakespeare said, 'All the world's a stage'
And we've played many different roles in our lives
In various places and scenarios.
As we grow old and ripe, our knowledge of the world grows.
We hold what we cannot see, smell, taste and touch in our memories.
We only have to walk down memory lane
To find the countless faces, places, sights and sounds that we have stored,
To be recalled and retrieved through association
In conversations with others
Or when we contemplate alone.

Why should elderly people be scared of social terror and aging?
Aging is a biological phenomenon.
We should be glad that we have lived useful lives,
Filled with good experiences.
The wonderful children that we have created,
The very gems of our genes,
Each so individual in their personalities.
The house we lived in and filled
With love, laughter, songs and music.
The parents and grand-parents, friends and relatives
We have had the time to share with.
But we should be able to assert our exit from this earthly existence
In the manner that we desire,
And not leave it in the hands
Of an intensive life-extension unit.

Let us dwell on common experiences and encounters
That we can take with us,
When the massless soul leaves the body
And races with the speed of light
Towards space and becomes unified
With the ever expanding, timeless cosmos.

-----------------------------------------

Let's Live Together, Despite the Differences (Satis Shroff)

Eva Gerhards, Satis Shroff & Toni Hagen at a pub in Freiburg

Let’s Live Together, Despite the Differences

(Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

I met Toni Hagen ages ago in Freiburg where he’d come to give a talk about Nepal, and I must say he made a jolly good impression. As a long-time Freiburger, I went with him to a local tavern near the Schwabentor for a swig of German beer. ‘I’ve travelled 14,000 km on foot in Nepal’ said Toni Hagen, a soft-spoken, silvery-haired Swiss-geologist who would be 89 years now, hadn’t Yamaraj beckoned him earlier. He had that typical Schwyzerdeutsch accent, and he liked to think of his days in Nepal in the early fifties as his ‘wandering years,’ for as is the custom in Switzerland and Germany, when you’re through with learning your trade you embark upon an adventurous trip seeking expertise in as many cities and countries as possible before you settle down some place. His poor wife had to remain in Lenzerheide with the children.

In the case of Toni Hagen, however, he seemed to be a wandering soul, even in the winter of his life, spending half of his time in the Swiss Alps and the other half in the Himalayas. He was one of the last living witnesses of a secretive Nepal of the Middle Ages. He entered the Kingdom at a time when it was a “forbidden land” in the early fifties. As the first foreigner who had the freedom of travelling in Nepal as he pleased, Hagen visited areas which are still forbidden to most people even today. Most Toni Hagen admirers can view his life and experiences in the film ‘The Ring of Buddha.’ It is a melange of original film material from the fifties, colour transparencies from his book on the geology of Nepal, and the viewer gets an idea of the Kingdom of Nepal and its peoples. When I saw the film, I had the uneasy feeling that he was saying goodbye to us all.

With the passage of time, Toni Hagen changed his profession from geology to development-work, and he was deeply concerned about the problems of development aid, its successes and failures not only in Nepal but also in many other countries. The people interested him more than the stratigraphic formations. In a book published by the Unesco, dealing with the ‘socio-economic problems of Nepal’ he mentioned the development projects in Nepal and said that the ‘ecological catastrophe prophesy’ that he made in the early fifties ‘has come true’ and talked about the pioneer work in the geological survey of Nepal from 1960 till 1970, and wrote about his new edition of ‘Nepal’ and proudly mentioned that it was a fourth edition ‘without any changes’, and called it a standard work on Nepal, which indeed it is.

He took delight in the fact that the World Bank stopped the Arun III project in Nepal thanks to his efforts and the united lobbying on the part of the ecological organisation Urgewalt, Dr. Hermann Warth, and the political fractions from the SPD, Bündnis 90, the Greens and the PDS in influencing the German government, in addition to the decision of the new World Bank president James Wolfensohn and the assertion of the then prime minister Adhikary. After the World Bank decision not to finance the dam project, it was taken for granted that the 235 million marks from the German side would be set aside for other smaller projects. The Arun III was observed in Germany as development-politics gone haywire.

‘What Nepal needs,’ he stressed, ‘is not road-building projects but genuine and effective help in the agricultural sector. What Nepal needs are not atomic plants but water-works.’ And he wasn’t tired of mentioning, with a sense of pride, that His Majesty King Birendra had read his old reports and had asked him for his opinion regarding Nepal’s optimal development.

‘Is it too late for my country?’ was the question asked by King Birendra, he said, and in the same breath he expressed his admiration for the Nepalese King. He was of the opinion that ‘constitutional monarchy and continuity are essential for Nepal’s survival,’ and praised the advantages of decentralisation, which according to him, is a central characteristic of democracy and is important for every case involving planning whether it’s hydroelectric plants or tourism. In those days, the only pressure that Nepal had as a sovereign state was from India in connection with the trade and transit disagreements. Times have changed and the threat is from within, in the form of maoists, and not from without.

Toni Hagen said, ‘Development must come from the grassroots.’ He was awarded the title of ‘Distinguished Person of Kathmandu City’ on 15th of June 1995 by the mayor of Kathmandu Mr. P.L. Singh, who also presented him a key to the city. On this occasion Toni Hagen went on record as saying ‘Despite the failure of some politicians and parties, freedom of speech, press-freedom, multiparty system and the role of the opposition in the parliament remain the most important trait of the new system in Nepale­se politics.

Nepal can be divided into seven zones: the Terai, the Siwalik Hills, the Mahabharat Mountains (Lekh), the Nepal Midlands, the Himalayas, the Inner Himalayas and the Tibetan marginal mountains. And according to Toni Hagen the river system existed before the Nepal Himalayas came into existence. The Himalayan rivers carved gigantic gorges. According to him it would be appropriate if the Midlands were not ignored today. Almost lamentably he said that the terai urwald, primeval forest, did not exist anymore and talked about the World Bank and the Nepalese government’s project of settling people from the hills to the terai.

From the terai to the hills you have in ascending order of crop cultivation: rice, wheat, maize, millet, potatoes and grassland. Wheat is a relatively new crop in Nepal. He found the soft green revolution in Kathmandu welcome, but at the same time he pointed to the fact that the population had risen in the last decade at an alarming tempo, and called it ‘schlimm’ and bad enough. Nepal, in comparison to other Asian countries, has five persons per hectre of land’, he said and ‘possesses the biggest concentration of population density’.

And then he started to talk about the soil erosion. From the terai at the gangetic-level upto a height of 1800m you have rice terraces and from there up to 3000m you have the Kampf­zone (battle-zone) for existence and above that you have, till an elevation of 3500m, forests with increasing erosion and then grasslands in the Himalaya regions. He pointed out that the steep terraces resulted in soil erosion caused by human beings. The yield per hectre had been decreasing and the land for cultivation had also been decreasing.

As far as the terai was concerned, his prognosis was that it would produce surplus food for a decade, and mentioned that most of the food went to India, because the traders in the plains offered better prices and the transport infrastructure was already there in form of good railways and roads.

In the terai the ground water can be reached at a depth of 2 metres. The terai, with its rich alluvial soil, could be developed into the corn-chamber of Nepal, much like the Punjab in India. And Nepal should not export its rice to India but keep it for domestic demands in the Kingdom. He shook his head and said, ‘It’s easy, but it doesn’t function. We may have a surplus at the moment but the question is whether we can keep up this production or not?’

The farmers must be helped was his argument. Toni Hagen admitted he didn’t have a patent recipe for the problems of Nepal. The farmers had been ignored in Nepal according to Toni Hagen (not so in Taiwan and Niger). He complained that the Foreign Aid until 1976 invested money mostly in road-construction projects which was a grave mistake, for it sucked up the last reserves of Nepal.

Nepal is like a very sick patient. Multilateral and bilateral aid agencies at the governmental and non-governmental level have injected foreign cash and material into Nepal, and the result is that the very economic structure has been weakened. A sum of US 552.8 million was transferred to Nepal without any visible changes in the economic structure of the country and has created an aid-industry in which the corrupt middlemen earn a good living. The country’s masses suffer stoically, as they have done throughout the centuries at the hands of other rulers. Chakari, nepotism and corruption are just as rampant in the post-democratic era as in the past.

It must be noted, he said, that above 90% of the Nepalese population lives on agriculture. The first priority was given to transport, then agriculture and lastly energy. The other way round would have been better on the long run.

He held a pedagogic finger and reminded one Nepal is a country with the biggest hydro-electric potential in the world. ‘Even back in the fifties I suggested to the government to develop energy. Some officials regarded him as ‘backward in his thinking,’ and according to him foreign ex­change was wasted on useless thermal energy projects.

Whereas the population of Nepal in 1950 was 8 million, in 1988 it was 17,5 million. Today it’s 27 million. And whereas the mean life expectancy in 1950 was 26 years, a Nepalese now can live to be 40 to 50 years old if not more. Malaria was rampant in 1950 with 3 million cases, and in the eighties malaria, which was thought to have been eradicated, has made a comeback because the ‘mosquitoes are immune’. Whereas there were 2,5 million domestic animals in 1962, there are over 3,2 million these days. And whereas there were 6,4 million hectares of forest in 1950, it was reduced to half, namely 3,2 hectares in 1982. And whereas the illiteracy in 1950 was 98%, by 1976 almost 77% of the boys (and 25% girls) had gone through compulsory primary school. And as for the medical aspects, 50% more Nepalese doctors are concentrated in Kathmandu Valley than anywhere else in the Kingdom. Due to the war between the Maoists and the government troops and police there has been a steady decline (38%) in the tourist since 1998. And more than 13 000 Nepalese have died in the struggle for power. This would have appeared like a nightmare to Toni Hagen, who had another picture of Nepal in his mind—corrupt, but peaceful and tolerant. Live and let live was the life philosophy. Today it’s live and let die.

The rate of people leaving the rural areas was 3% in 1951 in comparison to 12% in 1982. The crop production figures and prospects according to the Swiss expert look gloomy with a deficit in the year 2000, beginning already in the early with a downward trend.

To a question about the Swiss road in Jiri, which had been praised in German TV as an ecological and technical masterpiece, he said: ‘It’s well built, but wrongly laid (falsch Angelegt). Neither did he have words of praise for the Nepal-India road, nor for the Kathmandu-Lhasa highway, which were great engineering feats. The Tribhuvan Rajpath connecting Nepal with India (built in 1956) was very bad because of erosion along the sides of the road. He called it a ‘terrible construction’. In the meantime the road is open for traffic.

‘In development aid there’s always a wrong investment. The aid-donors wanted to do too much in Nepal. That was the problem’, says Toni Hagen.

On the 11th of April 1996 there was a two-day ‘Nepal Aid Group’ conference in Paris, the first of its kind since 1992. The participating 13 donor nations were: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, the Saudi Development Fond, Switzerland, U.K., USA, in addition to various international finance organisations. The summit granted for the period 1996-97 assistance worth US$ 993 million to Nepal.

The then Nepalese finance minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat said, ‘The meeting in Paris has proved that the donor-nations show a cooperative attitude towards Nepal. The main points that these countries complained about were: the constant posting of the government employees, their sinking morale and the delay in the posting and transfers of the civil servants engaged in the development works. The aid-donors suggested that the prices of the public service should be oriented to the actual costs and emphasised the necessity of controlling the rampant corruption’.

Another current trend in development aid from Europe is this ‘Help to Self-Help’ especi­ally from the Germans. In 1995 Nepal received 29.3 million German marks for the projects and programmes of the financial and technical cooperation (FZ & TZ). The financial cooperation involves family-planning, a road infrastructure and a biogas project.

Toni Hagen said, ‘The Nepalese, for instance, should plant trees and care for them for five years. Integral projects would be good for Nepal’ and went on to talk about big projects with the motto: ‘No money, no water’ in other countries. The big organisations of rich countries have lots of money for development projects but how the money was invested was another matter. In his book on development problems he analysed 230 development projects, and according to him in rural areas only small projects have a chance to survive.

He quoted the villager who said, ‘My village has survived so many development projects’. Does it do good to bring the villages in developing countries to modern levels?

Even Swiss villages have come into being through laborious processes of development over long periods of history. Nepal is trying to catch up with the developed world within a few decades. There’s also the question of loss of identity due to development aid. Toni Hagen’s world existed during the Hippie-happy and Flower-power days, for there were no signs of militant maoists in those days. I remember a visitor from England, who was travelling with his side-kick from south India, who said, ‘In Nepal even children can walk around the countryside without fear of being molested or abducted. The Nepalese are such a wonderful people.’ Today, the parents would think twice before they let their children roam about in Nepal.

During my Tri Chandra College days, the communist students came from Doti, Silgadi and Dharan and had stacks of literature penned by Kim Il Sung, Lenin, Marx and Mao’s red books, all made available by the respective cultural centres of these communist countries in Kathmandu. Nobody raised an eyebrow, for these books were available every, even at the Sajha shops of Kathmandu and elsewhere. Today the maoists have spread from Rukum and the Far West but also in Kathmandu. An educated working mother from Kathmandu, with a PhD from Germany, wrote recently to me, ‘Imagine how life in Kathmandu is, due to the corrupt politicians. Right now there are street blockades, actually economic blockades around Kathmandu imposed by the Maoists, The market-price of food commodities have gone pretty high. Sugar, kerosine and other fuels are not available. The businessmen are also responsible for the artificial scarcity. One has to be prepared to pay thrice the price for these commodities and you will get these. Life has become insecure for us Nepalese these days. Once you leave your house, you will never know what might happen. A bomb on the roadside might blow you up.’

Toni Hagen would have thought differently were he living these days, for Nepal has been undergoing a political and military turmoil and Nepal’s face has changed a lot. But let’s talk about our ageing Swiss friend. Toni Hagen’s eyes twinkled when he spoke about the humorous and sunny nature of the Nepalese soul. He called it ‘die Heiterkeit der Seele’ in German, which means the joyousness of the soul.

‘The Nepalese don’t take anything seriously, and themselves the least,’ he said with a smile. And then he switched over to an anecdote about one of the first DC-3 landings in Pokhara in 1950, which was quite a feat then. There was a big crowd of Gurung, Thakali and Tamang farmers gathered to watch the propeller-driven Dakota- aircraft. Out of the DC-3 came a jeep along the ramp and an astonished Nepali farmer said: “It’s like a birth. The small vehicle will learn to fly soon!” In his film he also mentioned his early porters who’d thrown his geological data, namely rocks from the Himalayas, because they’d though rocks are everywhere, so why carry them. It was a hilarious situation in the film, but such a thing wouldn’t have happened if he’d taken the trouble to talk with his porters in their lingo about the importance of the specimens they were carrying behind their backs.

‘Nepal hasn’t changed since the last 45 years in the hills,’ he said, with a twinge of nostalgia and talked about Pokhara with its backdrop of the gigantic Annapurna and Dhaulagiri mountains. He liked to call the Machapuchare the ‘Nepalese Matterhorn’ in his exquisite Swiss accent and said the Swiss Matterhorn looked so insignificant when compared with the Fish-Tail Mountain. And then he expressed his praise and admiration for the ‘precisely laid rice terraces in Nepal, a wonderful innovation of the Nepali people.’ The terrace farming is a several 100 year old tradition in Nepal. Speaking English as a Swiss geologist from Lenzerheide is one thing, but learning the Nepali language and speaking it is another. Most visitors to Nepal have the attitude that the Nepalese speak English, and they should learn German, Japanese which easier and more convenient for visitors than the other way around.

‘Rice is regarded noble and millet as of lesser quality,’ said Toni Hagen and spoke of the golden yellow millet fields below the Machapuchare. Below the 2000m Dhaulagiri you have the red ‘kodo’ millet-fields and kodo is protein-rich. He was also all-praise for the Nepali farmers with their diversification of products. There was no monoculture in Nepal (except in the tea-plantations of Ilam and Darjeeling). The farmers planted rice, wheat, potatoes and varied them.

The Rara lake at 3000m reminded him of the Swiss lakes in the Alps. And Langtang at 3,500m had lush meadows, with hundreds of edelweiss flowers like in the Alps. He said: ‘When I was in Langtang for the first time, I thought we could make cheese here with yak-milk and that’s how the Swiss-idea of setting up a dozen cheese factories in the Nepal Himalayas began. The cheese is transported on the backs of the Tamang and Sherpa porters from a height of 5,800m to Kathmandu. The Tibetans, Sherpas, Tamangs and other Nepalese ethnic groups knew only churpi, the Nepalese hard-cheese, which is pure casein.

I told him, ‘We, Nepalese, call it Nepali chewing-gum’ and he laughed. Toni Hagen appreciated the Swiss-aided Himalayan cheese and said they tasted just as good as the Swiss ones.

‘And some even have Swiss-holes in the cheese,’ he said with a laugh. This scribe remembers eating cheese and drinking yak-milk during his Amrit Science College days with his Nepalese Ascolite friends at the milk-shop in Thamel. It can happen that some have no enzyme called lactase in their intestine flora and cannot digest the milk-products and suffer from Kathmandu-quicksteps. The Swiss-idea was also a boon to the tourists, foreign residents and western-oriented Nepalese.

Recalling his surveys in the Khumbu area: Ama Damlam, Makalu and Mt. Everest he said, like a boarding-school boy who had gone out of bounds, “ In 1956 I managed to go to Tibet, to the north of Everest without permission. The Chinese were then in Tibet.” And talked about the dangerous and treacherous glaciers: “You’re never sure when water flows under the glacier.”

According to him there was an increasing population mobility in Nepal, but the racial schemes still exist. Then he was ecstatic about the incomparable harmonious religious tolerance in Nepal.

‘Take Swayambhunath for instance, which is for all Hindus and Buddhists. The Nepalese live near each other, mingle with each other: nebeneinander, durcheinander.’ he said. Today it`s more durcheinander due to the war in Nepal. But he certainly wasn’t thinking about Nepal’s political problems with the Maoists. What Nepal needs is a culture of tolerance between the warring political parties, for after battling with each other, the Maoists, democratic parties and the monarch should realise that what all in the end desire is peace. Peace and tolerance is a better path than violence. Aggressive behaviour and politics has only lead to destruction of all involved in Nepal’s struggle. Like old Hagen said, “Let us live together, despite the differences.”

Toni Hagen is dead, but my memories of him remain. His ashes were strewn over the Khumbu Himalayas at an altitude of 5500m by his daughter Katrin from a Karnali Air helicopter. I still see him with his blue glassy eyes, as he raised his beer glass, and said with a tinge of nostalgia, ‘Auf Nepal .’ I followed it up with ‘Auf die Schweiz!’ He’d invited me to Lenzerheide, but I never made it.


Satis Shroff describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. He lives in Germany according to the motto: once a journalist, always a journalist and has written over a period of three decades, what the Germans would call a “Landesumschau,” for his Nepalese readers with impressions from Freiburg, Venice, Rottweil, Prague, Paris, London, Frankfurt, Basel and Grindelwald. Satis Shroff has worked with The Rising Nepal (Gorkhapatra Corporation), where he wrote a weekly Science Spot and editorials and commentaries on Nepal’s development, health, wildlife, politics and culture. He also wrote weekly commentaries for Radio Nepal. He has studied Zoology and Geology in Kathmandu, Medicine and Social Science in Freiburg and Creative Writing under Associate Prof. Bruce Dobler, MFA, Iowa University and with Writers Bureau (Manchester). He was awarded the German Academic Prize.

Writing experience: Satis Shroff’s anthology ‘Between Two Worlds’ published by www.Lulu.com is about a writer caught between upheavals in two countries, Nepal and Germany, where maoists and skin-heads are respectively trying to undermine democratic values, religious and cultural life. Satis Shroff writes political poetry, in German and English, about the war in Nepal (My Nepal, Quo vadis?), the sad fate of the Nepalese people (My Nightmare, Only Sagarmatha Knows), the emergence of neo-fascism in Germany (Mental Molotovs, The Last Tram to Littenweiler) and love (An Dich, The Broken Poet, Without Words, About You), women’s woes (Nirmala, Bombay Brothel). His bicultural perspective makes his poems rich, full of awe and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political and social terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his poetry. Read his poems, articles and essays on www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff

Impressions From Switzerland (Satis Shroff)

Switzerland:

Impressions From Central Switzerland (Satis Shroff)

It’s a sunny afternoon when Claudia and I boarded the ICE (Inter City Express) train from the Black Forest town Freiburg, then switch trains at the Swiss Badische Bahnhof (SBB) and travelled via Olten in a Swiss regional train towards Luzern. The train sped past small hills, spurs, lakes, scores of tunnels and towns with church spires, Swiss cows and horses grazing on the lush green meadows.

Inside the train were young men and women in trekking outfits, talking rather animatedly and laughing incessantly at their own jokes told in the Schwyzer dialect with a lot of guttural sounds and softly produced words with ‘Ts.’ If you know Schwyzer Deutsch, you’ve won the hearts of the Swiss people. I find it just wonderful to hear and reproduce the Schweizer sounds, especially the Basle dialect.

A grey-haired obese lady was siting with her husband near us. She was wearing spectacles and had a cloth bag in beige leather dangling in front of her legs with the words: ‘Wir handeln für die Umwelt.’ There was a pun on the word ‘handeln,’ which means ‘we trade for the environment’ or ‘we do something about the environment.’ The Swiss engage themselves a lot in humanitarian, cultural, environmental and money matters.

We are surrounded by hummocky hills and then blue snow-capped mountains. There are Swiss farms in the foothills of the mountains. Miles of maize fields appear. The Swiss train is heading for Central Switzerland. We’re approaching Luzern. An impressive grey castle fleets by and then you come across pompous mansions. An Appenzeller advertisment appears with the message: ‘Seit 700 Jahre in Einklang mit der Natur,’ which means that the Swiss cheese is in harmony with Mother Nature since seven hundred years.

A well-dressed, curt train-conductor comes along the gangway with his ticket-puncher looks through his glasses and says, ‘Richtig, gute Reise.’ Something like ‘Richt ho! Have a good journey.’ We’ve left Luzern behind. You see myriads of Schreber gardens, which are small patches of gardens for city dwellers who want to flee from the smoggy cities and enjoy a bit of greenery, flowers and barbecues in the weekends. A lake algae-green water dashes past and hundreds of houses on the lakeside hillocks and spurs. That’s quality of life for you. The hills in the outskirts of Luzern reminded me of those in Grindelwald, where you can ride up almost to the mountains Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in scarlet cable-cars. Suddenly a wonderful view of a lake and mountains appeared, with the Swiss autobahn below. An ugly landslide scar made its appearance. Aqua-ducts, bridges, hills, meadows, houses with the old traditional church of Arth-Goldau.

A merry holiday whiff floated in the air. A sleek train from the Südostbahn came by. Near the railway station was wood stacked for the winter. A crane, a lorry and cars sped by. The well-fed and obese Swiss youth in the train were having a jolly time. We went via Schwyz and took a bus to Morschach at an elevation of 800m, with mountains all around.

It’s evening and the sun is going down in the central Swiss Alps. You can see the snow on the summits and the ice-walls from the spacious balcony of the Swiss Holiday Park. There’s a serene and tranquil atmosphere, and the air is so fresh in the Swiss Alps. That’s landluft for you.

Morschach lies on a plateau at the foot of the 1922m peak called Fronalpstock with 900 souls, and its known for its Swiss Holiday Park and also Landal Parks. Morschach lies above the Lake of the Four Cantons (Vierwaldstättersee). A cable car brings you to the skiing area of Stoos-Fronalpstock, where you can also do a bit of trekking in spring, summer and autumn. The scenery of the Lake of the Four Cantons really took my breath away, even though I’m originally from the foothills of the Himalayas.

After a sound sleep with an open window to let in the fresh alpine air, you are woken up by the ding-dongs of the Swiss cow-bells, as they are herded and walk languidly on their way to the higher meadows. As you look out of the window you see the black and white coloured cows grazing in the green meadows above the Bauernhaus which is three-storied with white windows and dark brown wooden walls.

The next morning it was refreshing to go to the local bakery run by Ms. M. Judd and her lovely Swiss girls. You could buy balance bread, Schnitzer, Kneipp and Ballenberg-bread in addition to croissants and small round buns. Digestion is excellent in Switzerland due to the cereals and high percentage of Ballaststoff (roughage) in the bread in addition to folic acid.
After a hearty Swiss breakfast we went from Morschach (800m) to Stoos (1300m) and from there to the Fronalpstock (1922m), which is the highest viewpoint of the Stoos region.

There is a relative easy panorama walk up to Fronalpstock but you can also use the cable-car and ski-lift to the top and can see the healthy cows grazing below you. They don’t even bat an eyelid when the ski-lifts come near. They’re used to visitors from all over the world. There’s an excellent summit restaurant and naturally souvenir-shops. Last summer, one of the most beautiful ridge hiking trails in Switzerland underwent thorough reconstruction for the 150th anniversary of the hiking trails in the Canton Schwyz.

A burly Swiss man and his wife who had rosy cheeks said to me in the cable-car, ‘I’ve worked in Basle for 41 years. We live in Morschach now and are very happy. In Basel I had a brain-stroke and had to take Marcumar, and as a side-effect I developed asthma. I had to inhale all the time.’

He made a hand movement as though he was inhaling.

‘Don’t you have to take Budes, Salbutamol and Singular anymore?’ I asked him.

‘Nein, Gott sei Dank! Meine Lungen sind frei.’ Thank God, my lungs are free now.

I ventured to say, ‘It’s the wonderful Swiss alpine air, I suppose.’

‘Jawohl, it is. We’ve bought a house and don’t want to leave this place anymore.’

From the summit of Fronalpstock you can not only see the Lake of the Four Cantons but also the village of Brunnen, where we went later to visit a dear friend Gertrude, who is a nun in retirement. Her home-peak (Hausberg) is the Mythen.

An expression of cool exhilaration comes across as you peer at the Swiss landscape unfolding before your eyes. Nature manifests itself in every season in its characteristic way and all the four seasons have their own charms. The Spring in the mountains with its Crocus flower mantle and patches of snow covered meadows. The Summer with its magnificent and colourful alpine flora pristine in beautiful sunshine. The grey misty and rainy days, accompanied by thunder and lightning, landscapes after the torrential rains and Swiss houses under water and schlamm. Muddy everywhere. The Autumn with its brocade of diverse leaves in the trees and everywhere. Strewn wantonly by the wind in yellow, scarlet, light green and brown colours. And in the distance clear views of the mountains, valleys and spurs. Just as in Nepal’s hills you hear the grass-cutting women singing their ghasi-geet (grass-songs) and a refrain or even a spontaneous reply comes from the other side of the hill, the people of the Alps fold their hands to a cup in front of their mouths and shout their prayers to the Gods in the Alps. It could be Jesus, Holy Mary or one of the many Saints. The prayers deal with the protection of the people, cows, Alpine-huts, meadows and they expect the blessings from God or Maria Hilf.

When humans are confronted with the elements and Nature they have similar lines of thinking irrespective of their domiciles. In Hinduism and Buddhism for instance when a bhakal (Gelübde) or promise to God has been made in exchange for a favour, then it is expected that the promise is held. My Mom had wished a son and had prayed to Shiva, Sita and Mahakal and had promised to go on a pilgrimage if her wish came true. She got her son and complied by undertaking a pilgrim’s journey to Darjeeling’s Mahakal temple, Kathmandu’s Pashupatinath temple, Jagannath Puri, Hardwar and Sita’s temple in Janakpur. If she hadn’t fulfilled her promises then she’d have remained an uneasy, restless soul for the rest of her life.

The Ocean of Wisdom (Satis Shroff, Freiburg)

The Ocean of Wisdom (Satis Shroff)

Tenzin Gyatso, the spiritual and former
Temporal ruler of Tibet,
Came to a town in the Black Forest
And conquered the hearts of the Freiburger.
A lama in a back limousine,
Applauded by hundreds of Europeans and Asians.
You could feel the goose-pimples in your body,
Tears of joy came to your eyes.
His Holiness prays and blesses
The Tibet Kailash Haus,
A thousand Tibetan prayer flags
Flutter merrily in the wind,
Carrying the mumbled words to Himmel.

At the Freiburger Town Council
Says the lama:
‘Nations, races, social classes
Even religions are secondary.
What is important is that
We are all human beings.

Even the sun breaks through the clouds
When Tenzin Gyatso folds his hands,
Smiles from the balcony,
And throws flying kisses
To the German masses.
Even Petrus seems to be smile in Heaven.

The Ambassador of Peace
Hopes for a peaceful change,
In Tibet, the Roof of the World,
Where the economy booms
Under the control of the Chinese,
But where democracy and human rights
Are still stifled.

I remember seeing His Holiness
As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas,
As he fled across the Abode of the Snows.
Crowds thronged with snow white khadas,
To greet the Dalai Lama.
And here was I in Germany
With my humble prayers,
And there His Holiness,
Blessing us all,
The personification of the Ocean of Wisdom.
A seventy-two year old monk,
With the charisma and spontaneity of a child.
A message which said:
‘Whether you are a Christian, Buddhist or atheist,
If you have compassion for humans,
You can’t be wrong.’
What counts are the inner values
Within us:
Love, forgiveness, tolerance and self-discipline.
Religions help us to make these values even stronger.
Like the inner love and dialogue,
Between a mother and a child,.
To help create a Century of Dialogue.

Book-review by Satis Shroff: YAKS & YETIS

Grünfelder, Alice (Editor), Himalaya: Menschen und Mythen, Zürich Unionsverlag, 314 pages, EURO 19, 80 (ISBN 3-293-00298-6).

Alice Grünfelder has studied Sinology and German literature, lived two years in China and works in the publishing branch in Berlin. This book is comparable to a bouquet of the choicest Himalayan flowers picked by the editor in a hurry, because a lot of authors have been left out, and deals with the trials and tribulations of a cross-section of the people in the 450 km long Abode of the Snows—the Himalayas.

The book orients, as expected, on the English translations of Himalayan literature. The chances of having Nepali literature translated into foreign languages depends upon the Nepalis themselves, because foreigners mostly loath to learn Nepali. If a translation is published in English the success of the book is used as a yardstick to decide whether it is going to be profitable to bring it out in European or in other languages. Nevertheless, there are some Nepalese authors who have made it in the international publishing market. When I visited the International Frankfurter Book Fair, like every year, I was surprised that at least one poet from Nepal had made it, with a German self-publisher and photograph.

Nepal is conspicuous with contributions by the anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista, the climber Tenzing Norgay, the Kathmandu-based journalists Kanak Dixit and Deepak Thapa, the tourist-guide Shankar Lamichane, the poet Pallav Ranjan and the development-specialist Harka Gurung. For regular readers of Himal Asia, The Rising Nepal and GEO some of these stories are perhaps not new but this book is aimed at the German speaking readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition to the seven Nepali authors, there are also stories by seven Indian, three Tibetan, two Chinese authors and two Bhutanese authors.

Some of the themes that have been dealt with in this collection are: the pros and cons of westernisation as told by Kanak Dixit in “Which Himalaya would you like?” and an endearing story of a journey through Nepal as a Nepali frog named Bhaktaprasad. K.C. Bhanja, the ecology-conscious climber writes about the spiritual meaning of our fragile heritage—the Himalayas. “The Himalayan Ballads” by the Chinese author Ma Yuan, “The Eternal Mountains” by the Han-Chinese Jin Zhiguo, the Indian climber H. P. S. Ahluwalia in “Higher than Everest” und Swami Pranavanadas in his Pilgrim journey to Kailash and the Manasovar Lake” have presented the mountains from different perspectives. Tenzing Norgay, the first Nepali who reached the top of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary, says that he was a happy person.

The Nepali journalist Deepak Thapa portrays the famous Sherpa climber Ang Rita as a social “Upwardly Mobile” person. Whereas in Kunzang Choden’s story (In the Tracks of the Migoi) we learn that the Bhutanese, as a Buddhist folk, are not capable of harming even a small animal, in another story Kanak Dixit tells us about the 100 000 Lhotshampas (Bhutanese citizens of Nepali origin) who were thrown out by the Bhutanese government and live in refugee-camps in Jhapa. The curio art-trader Shanker Lamichane’s “The Half Closed Eyes of the Buddha and the Slowly Setting Sun” is a poignant tale of a paralysed boy’s karma, related as a dialogue between a Nepali guide and a tourist. The helpless child makes us think in his mute way about the joys in everyday life that we don’t see and feel, because the world is too much with us.

Whereas Harka Gurung has gathered facts and fiction“ and tells us about the different aspects of the Snowman, another author who is a psychologist from Bhutan, tells us about yaks, yak-keepers and the Yeti and we come to know through an old yak-keeper named Mimi Khandola, how the friendly creature called the Migoi, alias Yeti, gets chased and killed by a group of wild-dogs. In “Not Even a Corpse to Cremate” we learn about the traumatic shock and tragic fate of a girl named Pem Doikar, who was kidnapped by a Migoi.

This anthology does not profess to represent Himalayan literature as a whole, but lays emphasis on the people and myths centred around the Himalayas. For instance, the Nepali world that the poets and writers describe and create is a different one, compared to the western one. It is true that trekking-tourism, modern technology, the aid-industry, NGOs, aids and globalisation have reached Nepal, Bhutan, India, but the areas not frequented by the trekking and climbing tourists still remain rural, tradition-bound and untouched by modernity.

There are hardly any books written by writers from the Himalayas at the Frankfurter Book Fair. It's always the travelling tourist, geologist, geographer, biologist, climber and ethnologist who writes about Nepal, Tibet, Zanskar, Mustang, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh and its people, culture, religion, environment, flora and fauna. The Himalayan people have always been statists in the visit-the-Himalaya-scenarios published in New York, Paris, Munich and Sydney and they are described through western eyes.

But there have been generations of thinking and writing Nepalis, Indians, Bhutanese and Tibetans who have written and published hundreds of books and magazines in their own languages in Nepal, Benaras (Varanasi), Kalimpong, Kurseong, Darjeeling. In Patan's Madan Puraskar Library alone, which Mr. Kamal Mani Dixit, Patan's Man of Letters, describes as the "Temple of Nepali language", there are 15,000 Nepali books and 3500 different magazines and periodicals about which the western world hasn't heard or read. A start was made by Michael Hutt of the School of Oriental Studies London, in his English translation of contemporary Nepali prose and verse in Himalayan Voices and Modern Nepali Literature. It took him eight years to write his book and he took the trouble to meet most of the Nepali authors in Nepal and Darjeeling.

In the meantime, there are a handful of websites that cater to the demands of creative writers in Nepal and the Nepalese diaspora, and more and more Nepalese from Nepal, India and abroad are using these websites to write about Nepalese literature and let their own creative juices flow in the web. Some of these sites are: sonog.com, nepal.com, kantipur.com, mos.com.np, hknepal.com, wnso.com, geocities.com. The Nepalese living in the USA have their own International Nepalese Literary Society with prizes for publishing, in good olde Germany they have Nepal Information (where you can have your dissertations published, otherwise it's very Royal Family centred), which is closely related to the Nepalese Embassy and, of course, Boloji.com. Nepalese literature describes also the situation of Nepalese in the diaspora in other Himalayan states. Nepalese literature exists in Kathmandu, but also in Darjeeling, Kurseong, Kalimpong, Assam, Nagaland und Gangtok (Sikkim).

There are literary societies and annual literary awards for Nepalese authors and poets. The most renowned prizes are: Royal Nepal Akademie Prize, Tribhuvan Puraskar, Madan Puraskar, Sajha Preis, Nepali Literatur Society Prize (Darjeeling), Nepali Academy Prize (West Bengal) und National Literature Academy Prize (Delhi).

The readers in the western world will know more about Himalayan literature as more and more original literary works are translated from Nepali, Tibetan, Hindi, Bhutanese, Lepcha, Bengali into English, German, French and other languages of the EU. The first foreign language, however, will remain English because the East India Company got there first.

This book compiled by Ms. Grünfelder creates sympathy and understanding for the Nepali, Indian, Bhutanese, Tibetan, Chinese psyche, culture, religion, living conditions and human problems in the urban and rural Himalayan environment, and is a welcome addition to the slowly growing translated collection of Himalayan literature penned by writers living in the Himalayas.

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About the reviewer:
Satis Shroff is a journalist & poet. He did his schooling in Darjeeling, studied Zoologie und Botanik at the Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu). After that he worked as a science teacher in an English school in Kathmandu and later as a journalist in the features section of The Rising Nepal. He has written two books on the Nepali language for German readers „Sprachkunde Nepals“ (Horlemann Verlag) and published in: The Christian Science Monitor, epd-Entwicklungspolitik, Nepal Information (Cologne), Himal Asia, The Rising Nepal, The Independent, Nelles „Nepal“, Nepal: Myths & Realities (Book Faith India). He studied Creative Writing (under Associate Prof. Bruce Dobler, MFA, Universität of Iowa), und Writers Bureau Manchester). He was awarded the German Academic Prize, and works as a pedagogue in Germany and lecturer in Basle (Switzerland).

Fatal Decision in the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)

FATAL DECISION (Satis Shroff)

‘Please give me a glass of water,’ said the London-trained Nepalese physician, as he came into the room, where a group of Nepalese people with Mongolian and Caucasian features were gathered, either pitying or wondering what the strange illness could be.


With the glass of water in his hand, the swarthy, thick-set, bespectacled doctor approached the thin, emaciated girl, who'd retreated to a corner of the apartment like a cornered cat, and was having fits. A brown froth oozed out of her thin mouth.


As soon as she caught sight of the stranger with the water, she let out a chilling scream that seemed to echo in the Himalayas.


The physician turned to the girl's father and said, "I'm sorry Mr. Rana, I cannot do anything for your daughter. She has hydrophobia," And with that he packed his black medical bag and left.
Mr. Rana was stunned. The shock of the doctor's poker face, and dry diagnosis hit him with such a vehemence that he reeled mentally.


"But there must be some hope or solution for Sudha, my daughter," he uttered.


He told his wife what the doctor has said, adding that their daughter had no hope of surviving the dog-bite, for Maya Devi spoke only Nepali and no English.


The doctor had spoken in English, as all educated Nepalese did, even among each other.
Sudha was dying and there was no help at hand. Even modern medicine, with all its antibiotics, cortisones, antiferons wouldn't be able to help their child.


"Oh, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva! Please don't let us down", cried Maya Devi, summoning the Hindu Trinity, with a mixture of fear and worry. And she decided to send for the local shaman, a jhakri, and dispatched a female relative of hers with the nickname 'Bhunti’, which means a fat person, not that she was pregnant or had a pot belly, but because she had a hollow back, with the result that she went through life preceded by her belly.


Mr.Rana had faith in allopathic medicine and didn't trust the traditional medicine or that which passed for traditional medicine, especially the jhakris, dhamis, bijuwas, lamas and others who took to what he called "phuk-phak" methods, which literally meant 'blowing-and-throwing.'
He preferred the old western school-medicine for himself and his family. That was because his brother and grandfather were physicians, having studied at the Grant Medical College in Bombay in the days of the British Raj.


It had almost become a family tradition, and he was contemplating to send his eldest son to this college, despite the astronomical sums that the medical colleges demanded in India in general. They called these criminal sums open-donations, and was a rather done thing.


His wife, being a traditional Tamang tribes-woman, didn't think much of modern medicine and went back to the traditional healers that she knew through her parents and grandparents for they'd lived in the foothills of the Himalayas and had heard only hair-raising stories of the practitioners of modern medicine. Whereas a local shaman was happy with a dozen eggs or a small goat, you had to pay in currency notes to the modern doctor. And currency notes were scarce in the hills of Nepal, where people bartered with natural products.


Maya Devi had seen a sick neighbour receiving a glucose injection with an outsized hypodermic syringe, and that had scared the wits out of her. She didn't know what the thing was, but it certainly looked frightening. The patient, a diabetic, had died soon after.


After that experience she'd decided that she'd definitely not go to a modern doctor.
Her grandpa, who had been a village shaman, had treated and cured the whole village, sometime or other, ever since she knew him. And what's more, he was her grandpa and that meant a lot to her and she had confidence in him, because he'd never do any harm or inflict injury, as was expected of true shamans.


She remembered once asking him how he'd become a shaman, and he'd told her that he'd been picked up in his childhood by the ban-jhakri, a wild, wise man who lived in the jungle in a cave, and who became his guru and had taught him the secrets of the healing plants and profession. Her grandpa had long hair, like that of the Hindu God Shiva of the Snows: unkempt but braided, and it gave him an extraordinary appearance as he'd sit near his house altar, where he had his ritual objects. To her he was Shiva reincarnated.


Maya Devi's husband, an educated civil servant of His Majesty's government, sneered at times about her faith in the jari-buti, as the medicinal roots-and-stems were called.


After what seemed like ages, Bhunti turned up with a lean man, who had Mongolian features. He was thought to be a 'knowing' practitioner of his blow-and-throw trade. He was half Tamang and half Bhotay, as people of Tibetan origin are called, and looked as though he, himself, was suffering from consumption. He was untidily dressed, had blood-shot eyes and stuck his thin black hair under his monkey-cap, and had a pair of drooping moustaches. He was left alone and Bhunti catered to his needs and demands.


First of all, he demanded rice grains to be brought for the blowing part of the ceremony, and then alcohol, since he belonged to the matwali-jat, which means the 'caste-that-drinks-alcohol.'
In the high-caste, ritual purity-pollution thinking Hindu society, it is regarded as a direct affront when one is offered alcohol. But since this was an emergency situation, a matter of life and death in the family, there were no protests. Neither from her otherwise orthodox Hindu husband, not from the relatives and neighbours.


Meanwhile, after gulping some of the raksi (alcohol) as though he was drinking lemon juice, he began the treatment by raising his voice and reciting a mantra and counting the rice grains on a copper plate. After each chant he drew a deep breath and blew his breath thrice in quick succession.


His first intention was to find out whether the child, who was letting out screams intermittently, was seized by a witch in the neighbourhood or a distant demon (bhut), for only then could he apparently begin treatment. After more swigs of the Gurkha raksi, his mantras became unintelligible and he seemed to withdraw within himself.


After a great deal of time, he began shaking and said in staccato bursts, "It's the demon from the othay-khola". A rivulet in the vicinity of the town. 'Othay' means a 'lip' in Nepali.
The diagnosis having been completed, a blood-sacrifice had to be made to appease the concerned river-demon along with a prayer to the Mahaguru: Shiva. It had to be a little red rooster.


Bhunti organised a red rooster in no time, and the jhakri prepared his ritual.
Although Mr. Rana showed respect this time for the traditional methods despite his distrust, he just couldn't help feeling irritated by this particular species of his sort, especially his preference for alcohol at a critical moment in someone's life.


"Perhaps he's just an alcoholic and practised traditional medicine as a quack, a dabbler who could in effect do nothing," he thought. There was nothing he could do at the moment. He had to try it out with this quack too. It was faith healing at its best. Either you believed in someone or not. Take it or leave it. There was no choice. And when you're in a desperate situation, you had to take all the chances that were available to soothe your conscience."


Meanwhile, the thin girl had started seeing double, because her optic nerve was affected, and her brain stem was assaulted by the rabies-virus and she had problems with her swallowing reflex.


Her mother had tried to give her water not knowing the medical implications and her daughter had a spasm of panicky angst and screamed again.


"Oh God, my poor Sudha, what's become of you?" cried Maya Devi as she held her daughter wrapped in a brown blanket. It was pathetic to see a pretty daughter, a girl who was only eight years old, with beautiful black hair and an olive complexion turn virtually into a skeleton, so that even the teeth seemed to jut out, the body growing thin, dehydrating and the psyche a chaos, for she was no longer able to take in the world as it had been.


There was a mighty struggle going on in her nervous system, and it registered through her brown and frothy saliva and her screams of angst and terror, which had seized her. She was evidently losing the fight.


A neighbour suggested that the patient should be immediately transported to Kathmandu for "further treatment." Another thought it would be better to try out a local dhami, a traditional healer, and yet another an ayurvedic practitioner from the town, who wore spectacles and a turban and was from the Punjab. A well-meaning Lepcha neighbour said, "Ranaji, you should call a Lepcha Bongthing who is a mediator between humans and the Spirits. If that doesn't help we could engage a Limbu Yeba exorcist.


Mr.Rana had often seen the Limbu Yeba males going about wearing their ridiculous creased white skirts and turbans, with long feathers, cauri and rudraksha garlands.
"Why not try homeopathy?" said another.


In this lost and helpless state there was nothing to do but to try everything, like a drowning person clinging to the last straw, and so began an odysee of 'treatments' carried out in the hope of saving a child whose body and mind were rebelling and running out of control.
Mrs. Rana's thought wandered to the day when her daughter Sudha had returned with a neighbour's daughter after the bhai-tika ceremony from a distant part of the town. Bhai-tika, the festival during which the sisters proffered various honours on their brothers after a ritual puja, whereby the brothers are blessed with prosperity and protection against the adversities of human existence and unseen evils. And who could think that evil would strike on such an auspicious day?


As is the custom in Nepal, the people have their chicken, dogs, yaks and goats outside the courtyard. The dog, which was a bitch, had let out a few snarls and barks to warn passers-by that they were trespassing her marked territory. The children had been scared by the angry barks and had emitted shrieks of fear, and the bitch had made for the two scared children in a frenzy and had bitten them on their legs after a short pursuit.


The two girls had returned home crying and told their parents about the fierce dog that had bitten them. However, the parents who were entertaining guests in the afternoon hadn't thought anything worse about the consequences of a dog-bite and Mr. Rana had only used the zinc oxide and eucalyptus salve that you find in every household. He had faith it would heal the wound, as in the past against other bites and wounds.


And that had been a terrible mistake.


Whereas the other girl Chitra was immediately sent to a local doctor, who gave her anti-rabies injections, Mr. Rana's daughter was treated with only a smear salve.


"That ought to do the trick," Mr. Rana had thought. "Why spend more money unnecessarily on the doctor? Injections were expensive. And after all, if the salve had the same effect, why not save the money for another purpose?"


Only last Monday the Nepalese Brahmin from Dhankuta had visited them and had predicted something inauspicious in the near future in the family. But in order to counteract that he had suggested making an amulet for his two daughters, with vedic mantras inscribed in them, which were thought to have preventive and protective effects against the bad planets (grahas) that had changed their constellations. The Brahmin was a jotisi, a learned Benaras-returned astrologer, with the ability to interpret and analyse the astrological data of Hindus, for every Hindu possessed a long scroll (janai-patra), which bears all the lucky and unlucky, the auspicious and inauspicious days in one's lifetime, noted according to the constellation of one's zodiac sign, and starting from the date of one's birth.


In the Nepal of yore, this scroll of paper was an important document, and it still is, in the Middle Mountains of Nepal where the Chettris and Brahmins live.


Mr.Rana though a Chettri from birth, didn't think much of the jotisis and other wandering brahmins. As far as he was concerned, they were slimy, garrulous, cunning fellows who went from house to Hindu house talking fancy Sanskrit with the married women who were unfailingly always at home, and departing with a handsome dakshina (offering) in the form of: rice, currency notes and coins, and sometimes even a whole cow. The Hindu religion allowed it, and the priests and astrologers made the best of this belief.


The doctor's words had struck Mr. Rana like a guillotine. It was a death sentence.


A dark, monsoon-like cloud hung over the family. A feeling of mourning, depression and helplessness spread, even though the daughter was breathing, shrieking and struggling with death. Their daughter had developed a hoarse throat and her whole frail body was shaking.
Mr. Rana had heard that it took at least 15 injections to treat the rabies virus. In these days it was even possible to do it with three shots, but what was the use of knowledge? Or when a medical therapy is refused due to the ignorance on the part of the parents who have the money, and therefore the power to decide whether a member of the family should be medically treated or not, through traditional or western healing methods.


The way Mr. Rana saw it, it had been a blatant misuse of power. And he had a terribly guilty conscience regarding his daughter. It had been a fatal decision. One part of his mind accused him and the other seemed to rationalise and shift the blame to the uselessness of medicine, even though man had set foot on the moon and the skies were studded with satellites belonging to the western world.


And Sudha died that night.


ENDS

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About the Author: Satis Shroff is a writer and poet based in Freiburg (poems, fiction, non-fiction) who also writes on ethno-medical, culture-ethnological themes. He has studied Zoology and Botany in Nepal, Medicine and Social Science in Germany and Creative Writing in Freiburg and Manchester. He describes himself as a mediator between western and eastern cultures and sees his future as a writer and poet. Satis Shroff was awarded the German Academic Exchange Prize. Please read his poems and articles in www.google & www.yahoo under search: satis shroff.


Satis Shroff’s bicultural perspective makes his prose and poems rich, full of awe, and at the same time heartbreakingly sad. In writing ‘home,’ he not only returns to his country of origin time and again, he also carries the fate of his people to readers in the West, and his task of writing is a very important one in political terms. His true gift is to invent Nepalese metaphors and make them accessible to the West through his prose and poetry. (Sandra Siegel, poetess, Germany)

Women's Woes in the Himalayas (Satis Shroff)

The Nepalese women are very hard-working and there's need for gendering in the Nepalese society as they have been too long ignored and discriminated. When a Hindu woman gets her menses, which is a physiological phenomenon, they are treated as impure in a society which promotes purity and pollution thinking, leadint to discrimination of women. If a Magar, Rai, Gurung, Lepcha,Madhisay would like to add his views it would be only too welcome.

This work draws on my own experience and observations during my visits to Kathmandu and sojourn and student-days in Nepal. Since Nepal is one of those rare places which Nature and culture-enthusiasts would like to visit, I thought the plight of the Nepalese women ought to be told by your truly, because till now Nepal is only known for its tough male Gurkha soldiers, who fought on the side of the British in the First and Second World Wars, in the Falklands and in Kosovo and Croatia, the sturdy male Sherpas who have worked for the glory of all climbing nations in the Khumbu area, and is also known as the Land of the Yaks and the abominal Yeti.

I thought it would also be topical to talk about the fate of the Nepalese women in the Shangri-la. In James Hilton’s book ‘The Lost Horizon’ the local women never get old (unless they leave the enchanting Shangri-la environment), but the average Nepalese women have a lifespan of 50 years in one of the least developed countries in the world, and they never live to be 60.
Women who have spontaneous or natural abortions, or give birth to still born babies are charged with infanticide and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment because Nepal’s former abortion law was based on an ancient, draconian Hindu law. Imagine: 20 years of imprisonment for a woman, when the average lifespan is 50 years ! Abortion was prohibited in Nepal under any circumstances (rape, incest, or when a pregnant woman’s life is threatened). There are no fair trials for the needy and poor women of Nepal and the justice caters only to the rich and influential people.

‘ Due to the lack in clarity in Nepal’s Law, many Nepalese women have been victimised on the ground of spontaneous abortion, whether it was a simple miscarriage or abortion caused by the heavy manual labour on the part of the woman. The women of Nepal cannot defend themselves because of the lack of definition of abortion’, says Singh B. Moktan, the director of PAM Nestling Home (PAM= Prisoners Assistance Mission) in Kathmandu.

What is needed is a mobilisation of women in Nepal, the USA, Europe and the world over in fighting this ancient, archaic practice of the Rule of Garbhabat. Despite the fact that democracy has dawned in Nepal and different political parties are allowed, the male population still dominates Nepalese politics and the plight of women hasn’t changed much, even though there are tourists in Kathmandu and along the trekking-trails, flocking to Nepal to see the Himalayas and take pictures of its rural women and children for mellow home slide-shows, amid relatives and neighbours. The benefits of democracy and westernisation haven’t caught up with the majority of the Nepalese women as yet.

The entire world knows how hard the average Nepalese woman works in the fields and in urban areas, and the price she has to pay is immense. Ethnic Nepalese women sell their own products in the local markets and provide for the family. In other cases, the men give their earnings to their wives and the latter have a feeling of sharing the income, but when it comes to deciding what to buy, it’s always the men who take over. The desires and plans of the women are just ignored. Nepal’s males control property and decide all financial transactions in the family, and the women are left with peanuts. The women cannot take credits from the banks because they never possess anything, and hence have no security. The women tend to be traditionally docile and dependent upon their husbands due to the fact that they’re cut-off from financial sources.
The Nepalese men spend the family-savings as they please, for drinks and eating out with their friends, and for their own chauvinistic needs.

The women and children, on the other hand, have to do without basic items like clothes and school-fees. The majority of the illiterate and thus socially handicapped women think in the traditional hinduistic way and leave the men to make decisions. Many women also fear that they might lose their positions as family-treasurers.

There are a lot of doctors for the rich people in Kathmandu but none for those in the rural, isolated and God-forsaken hamlets of Nepal, and those deprived, hungry souls eking out a miserable existence in the hovels and slums under the Bagmati and Vishnumati bridges. A land where children are jailed if a mother is sentenced for aborting a dead child. The women in Nepal are handicapped from birth till death in their Himalayan environment--in their families, education, farms, offices and in every sphere of life. It’s a long and thorny path till the Nepalese women are accepted as persons, and not as properties that are malleable, and without wills of their own. The Nepalese women have to develop an awareness and self-esteem of their own worth, women’s rights, potential and the important roles they play in the economy of their families and the country in general.

According to a Unicef report, the children of Nepal have to start doing important work at an early age. They have to do baby-sitting, gather fire-wood, forage for feed for the domestic animals or drive them to the meadows. These chores take such a lot of time that the children don’t have time for school, especially daughters who have to help in the households at an early age. They have to work eight hours a day and the sons work just half of the time. Most Nepalese children work barefoot and wear inadequate clothing because they cannot afford it.

Nevertheless, Nepalese children attract your attention with their attentive looks, open and curious faces and their spontaneous and cheerful laughter. 46 per cent of Nepal’s population are younger than 15 years. And although 45 per cent of the six to eight year olds go to school, only half of them do their primary school exams. Nepal has millions of children without school-education and without carefree childhoods. Education can improve the survival chances of the children because there is a direct relationship between the literacy of women (4 per cent in Nepal) and infant mortality (child-death). In Nepal 134 out of 1000 children die in the first year of their birth.

It was only in 1950 that Nepal’s doors were opened to the outside world. Till then we lived in an age of political darkness. To the average Nepalese, going to Kathmandu was traveling to Nepal, because Kathmandu was Nepal. Later, the Panchayat government talked about a decentralised form of government but it was just a hoax. It was very much centralised, and still is, even after the democratic movement in 1990.

A lot of men and women lost their lives in their attempt to free themselves from the shackles of the Panchayat government and monarchy, and the result is that there’s no stability in Nepalese politics. There’s a change of government after short terms, with an alarming corruption and nepotism, and the NGOs in the aid-giving countries only shake their heads in disbelief, because their counterparts are shuffled and posted to remote places, depending on their political color.
The fact that the Nepalese woman suffers in society is deeply rooted in the social system and the anachronistic and discriminatory, patriarchal, hinduistic Civil Code (Muluki Ain) which was formulated under the reign of a king named Surendra Bikram in 1853.

It was modified by King Mahendra (the father of the present King Birendra) in 1963. If a Nepalese woman gives birth to a still-born child she is charged with infanticide on the evidence of a denunciation, without so much as a gynacological examination, and sentenced by the rule of Garbhabat, which is the Nepalese word for: destruction of life. The Nepalese Civil Code was made in a dark age of Nepalese history during which another form of social and cultural values were prevalent. Though the winds of change have swept in the Nepalese kingdom, the Code still remains unchallenged as far as the poorer section of the Nepalese population is concerned.
Many women who miscarry hide the evidence by not going for medical tratment and this can lead to infertility or even death. The Nepalese Code assumes that every pregnancy that fails due to natural causes is the fault of the mother --in effect, a deliberate attempt to abort the pregnancy, and it’s horrible to see a woman hauled off to jail as a criminal on top of the personal tragedy of the loss of a child that may have been longed for. It is possible for influential Nepalese women to get away with abortion without much fuss in the male-dominated Nepalese society.

Hindu marriage ceremony: If a Nepalese couple wants to elope and marry fast and cheap, all they do is perform a minimum of ‘tika-talo’ ritual ceremony, and they don’t even have to be registered. The normal hinduistic marriage is elaborate and arranged by the parents and is a family matter in which the caste plays a big role even today. The well-educated bridegrooms of Kathmandu Valley prefer to see a video of the bride-to-be in the case of arranged marriages to avoid the ‘cat-in-the-sack’ phenomenon. For the family of the bride it is a matter of prestige and the marriage is celebrated with much ado, and hundreds of guests are invited. This may have ruinous consequences for the family of the bride, because it means blowing up a lot of borrowed money in case the family isn’t wealthy. The dowry comprises both gifts and money and this is also an incentive for the bridegroom. The tradition is stronger than the legislation .
During the marriage ceremony the couple sit down cross-legged in front of the altar where scores of sacrificial objects are spread out on small cups made of banana leaves held together with tooth-pick sticks. The offerings consist of flowers, incense, water, oil-lamps, cinnober-powder, rice, sweets, fruit (depending on the season), coins, and even cloth.

Not all the stainless-steel thalis and Meissner porcelain are ritually pure in compari­son to the hand-made natural taparas from banana and other smooth leaves for the Gods and Godesses of the hinduistic pan­theon. The priest who performs the marriage-ceremony is a Benaras-educated Sanskrit-reciting Brahmin. In civil-life he works for the Nepalese government, but since he is a Brahmin by birth, he is often invited to carry out all forms of pujas by the Hindu population of Kathmandu. The house-bahun is consulted, who calculates the time for the rituals to be performed by consulting his astrological calendar. An auspicious day for the wedding has to be found, for the human being is a microcosm of the rhythm of the universe.

A young daughter is treated as a holy person, even holier as the cows that you see in the streets of Nepal, Sikkim and India and a young daughter brings a lot of positive aspects or punya to her parents. Normally the parents of the bride wash the feet of both bride and groom. The foot-washing is accompanied by the recitations of vedic lore by the Bahun priest beckoned by the parents of the bride. After that follows the gift-of-the-virgin (kanyadan) ceremony.
The bride wears a scarlet seven meter long sari, an embroidered silk blouse, traditional jewelry and her hair is parted in the middle. She wears pearls on her ears decorated with gold. A number of sacrifices are made to the Gods and Goddesses by sprinkling their symbolic effigies with jamara and holy water. This is followed by the entire family chanting "Om jaya jagadisha hare" to the accompaniment of a small ritual drum (dama­ru), the chiming of a bell and the blowing of a conch.

And then comes the actual swayamvara-ceremony with the sacrificial fire, which is made in the form of a quadrangle that encloses the ritual article: the sacred altar, with the fire in the centre.
Hindu Offerings

Various offerings are made to the dieties: Ganesh, Agni the God of Fire, the sky, wind, earth, water, and the hinduistic trinity: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Sacrificial rituals have been an essential part of the vedic way of life. The sacrifice is simple but its meaning can be complex. This is followed by the sindur-potay ceremony. The bridegroom has to place vermillion (sindur) as a sign of marriage on the parting of the bride’s hair. A Hindu bride is expected to apply the sindur as long as her husband lives. After that the couple are obliged to walk around the sacrificial fire three times. In Hinduism, Agni (latin: ignis) is not only the God of Fire and ritual but also the fire itself and summons the power of the Sun God Surya to the sacrificial altar.
Divorce among Hindus

Even though Hindu marriages are elaborate, they can be annulled quicker than the marriages that end on the rocks of Reno. The divorce rate among the Nepalese is rising even though most marriages are arranged by the parents. It’s the male who files the divorce because he might have been forced to marry by his parents, and later when he has financial resources and is independent from his father, decides that his spouse is an unsuitable match. A couple is divorced when the man denies the relationship. And if the woman has the misfortune to be pregnant or has children, then she’s stigmatised and branded as immoral.

Article 11 of the Nepalese Constitution states that the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on the grounds of sex, but in Article 9 it states that the children of Nepalese male citizens are deemed to be citizens of Nepal by descent. The children of Nepalese female citizens with foreign fathers are considered foreigners, and have to reside in Nepal for fifteen years before they can be granted Nepalese citizenships.

Nepalese males should examine their own attitudes towards girls and women in their immediate surroundings. Do our daughters and sons get the same attention, affection and the same status?

Motherhood and Child-rearing: Marriage and rearing children shouldn’t be the sole aim of a woman’s life. In Germany, for instance, there’s an alarming high number of mothers-with-kids (alleinstehende Mütter). Living with a partner seems to have gone haywire and they prefer to live alone, cashing alimony cheques from the fathers of their children or living on hand-outs of the Social Department throughout Germany. The German law makes it possible. The Nepalese women have a tough time in their hinduistic, patriarchal milieus, which hardly give them a chance to get up once they have fallen in the eyes of the pollution-purity professing Hindu society.

Despite the sweeping changes that have been introduced in Nepal’s Civil Code since 1975, most women are ignorant of their rights because of the high illiteracy, low self-esteem and lack of self-consciousness. The Nepalese society plays a pivotal role in victimising women who have divorced or have separated from their partners. Widows are not allowed to wear scarlet saris, no wedding necklaces and the vermillion powder called tika. They have to wear white as a sign of mourning . The social stigma attached to these unfortunate women reduces their chances in the marriage-market. Nepalese males prefer chaste, untouched females, almost girl-children, as their brides.

After the success of the people’s movement, the new constitution of Nepal was promulgated in November 1990 and broke new ground as far as women’s rights to equality and fair-play are concerned. The State has been given the authority to legislate specific laws for the protection of the special rights of women.

Nothing has changed since then in practice, even though laws have been proclaimed by different governments. Although provisions have been made in the New Nepalese Constitution in favour of women and gendering, the elections showed that the major parties, and especially the males, are not prepared to improve the status of women in Nepal. Women are treated as second-grade citizens and even like servants, as can be seen in the laws relating to property rights, family rights and sexual rights.

My question is: Quo vadis Nepal?

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What others have said about the author:
„Die Schilderungen von Satis Shroff in ‘Through Nepalese Eyes’ sind faszinierend und geben uns die Möglichkeit, unsere Welt mit neuen Augen zu sehen..“ (Alice Grünfelder von Unionsverlag / Limmat Verlag, Zürich).
“ Since 1974 I have been living on and off in Nepal, writing articles and publishing books about Nepal-- this beautiful Himalayan country. Even before I knew Satis Shroff personally (later) I was deeply impressed by his articles, which helped me very much to deepen my knowledge about Nepal. Satis Shroff is one of the very few Nepalese writers being able to compare ecology, development and modernisation in the ‘Third’ and ‘First’ World. He is doing this with great enthusiasm, competence and intelligence, showing his great concern for the development of his own country”. (Ludmilla Tüting, journalist and publisher, Berlin).
“Due to his very pleasant personality and in-depth experience in both South Asian, as well as Western workstyles and living, Satis Shroff brings with him a cultural sensitivity that is refined. His writings have always reflected the positive attributes of optimism, tolerance, and a need to explain and to describe without looking down on either his subject or his reader”. (Kanak Mani Dixit, Himal Southasia, Kathmandu)
“Satis Shroff writes with intelligence, wit and grace”. (Bruce Dobler, Associate Professor in Creative Writing MFA, University of Iowa).