by Sanjit Pradhananga
One of these days, they say, the Earth will shake like it hasn’t for 80 years, and I shudder to think of what will happen to fragile walls of Kathmandu valley. Sometimes, tumultuous midnights rouse me from nightmares of flicking on CNN one unsuspecting morning and seeing Anderson Cooper standing on the fallen facade of the Nepali heartbeat bemoaning the loss of streets that he never knew, parading corpses of people he never met.
We have always known the rickety sod that we lived on, haven’t we? I remember having the bejesus scared out of me in the sixth grade when Brother Jomon swore by the cross dangling from his collarino that the “big one” was due the next day. It never came, but that haunting anticipation is yet to fade. In our urban lull and political upheavals, we have often forgotten the horrors of the 1934 disaster when an earthquake 24 times stronger than the one that wrecked Haiti shook the Nepali foundations and liquefied the paved streets. Then there have been other ones, softer and transient, on quiet evenings when minor rumblings awoke us from our indifferent slumbers, knocking over glasses left carelessly on narrow window sills and reminding us of our mortality.
We cannot say we have not been warned.
Yet what do we do? Where do we start? How do we take this shantytown and convert it into a bustling metropolis without first bulldozing over these artifices of antiquity? How do we take diabolic scientific prophecies of the future and re-create our immeasurable past perched on this shaky land?
The other day, after a haunting episode during a night of rumbling thunders, I stood on a dejected sidewalk of a polished street, pining to see freckled puddles; those stagnant joys of my childhood with the beguiling blue heavens dancing in the filth. Should we start here? Those crater ridden streets, where, stumbling and falling, I learned to walk as a child. Dusty in the sun, muddy in the rain; utterly romantic in every shade of the sun. The little family-owned businesses in box-sized stores, pouring out glittering brass and copper pots out into the pavement. Hallucinogenic Shiva and Ganesh bedsheets, tie-dyed by an underpaid sweatshop tripster dangling from the windows. Those crumbling houses, built brick by brick, intricately carved window after window, by our forefathers, and handed down to us for upkeep but forgotten, then consumed by time, rain and termites, but the shaky foundations of which give root to who we essentially are as people. How do we restore that? Where do we relocate the city’s 4 million inhabitants to, with promises of having them return to redrawn neighborhoods and freshly painted streets?
As children, we were told stories of how the Himalayas embodied the Nepali spirit. These gargantuan sentinels created by the Eurasian and Indo-Australian landmasses grinding against each other, have given us a sense of self-worth and importance. We were after all taught to be upstanding, unflinching and brave as these rocky giants in our backyard. Yet today, the very forces that created these artifices that define us, gathers, rumbling deep in the earth to consume and reclaim us once again.
If a 7.0-magnitude earthquake like the one that rattled Port-au-Prince were to hit Kathmandu today, it is estimated that 85 percent of the building structures will be completely decimated. An 8.4-magnitude shake like the one in 1934 will leave nothing standing. We have watched with quickening pulses as earthquakes in Gujrat, Pakistan, Turkey, Sumatra, China, Haiti, Chile and now Tibet have ravaged everything in their wake. Kathmandu today is tabled as the city most vulnerable to earthquakes, with seismologists asking not if, but when, the next big one will come rattling our doors.
Until then we wait, with muffled prayers and heavy hearts.
(Pradhananga is a recent Loras graduate from Nepal)
