Hello lovely supporters. Erica here. As the first 200 or so people to buy This Party's Dead, you have purchased a book that doesn't exist yet (a concept that has baffled some of the smartest people I know), so thank you for your faith in the project. You'll be happy to know that the book is basically done aside from the last few death festivals, all of which I'm visiting next year (Thailand, Japan, Indonesia and Madagascar).
To say thank you, I decided to share an entire chapter with only those of you who've already bought it. I put it to a vote on social media as to which chapter you'd like to see, and Nepal beat New Orleans, Finding Chris Dead and Mexico by some distance. Which makes sense - I've published a very abridged extract of the Mexico chapter before, similarly the chapter on finding Chris dead is a much more detailed version of this article in Guardian Weekend, New Orleans was fascinating (and ridiculous - I ended up on a friend's date) but not a death festival. So, well chosen, everyone.
The video above is from the day of the death festival and the scene is described in the chapter. See if you can spot it.
It's coming up to Christmas, so after a great couple of weeks I fully expect sales to slow or even halt, so if any of you feel like upping your pledge, gifting a pledge to someone else (there's Read With a Friend, or the Biscotti Edition for anyone who wants biscotti, or the Linguist Edition if you know someone who's up for a Spanish lesson) or even sharing it, I'll send you some Tiny-Tim-esque blessings.
Anyway, without further ado, the sneak peek at the Nepal chapter of This Party's Dead.
Thank you. x
The Smoke in the Valley
The air smells of mud, dust, and exhaust fumes. Mopeds buzz around me like mosquitoes on the cracked, half-rubbled road to Patan Durbar Square. Wing mirrors all but shave me as they whip past. I try to walk like everyone else: cautious but casual, safe in the knowledge that no one actually wants to run anyone over. People talk about the insanity of the driving in Nepal but I think I get the system. Everyone drives slowly because roads are dotted with potholes, spaces are tight, and there are no pavements for pedestrians. A beep seems to simply mean, “here I am” whether the vehicle is rounding a corner, overtaking, or passing an old lady with shopping bags. As such, the beeps are near-constant, shooting into the air like party poppers, a cacophany of people announcing their presence. Isn’t that all life is?
It’s a few days before the Kathmandu Valley’s annual death festival, Gai Jatra, and I’m stumbling about in a jetlagged haze. I half-walk, half-slip down to Patan Durbar Square, keeping my eye on the rain cloud moving in - part of the festival is to bid farewell to monsoon season, and I’m suspicious it’ll want to wrap up with a big finish.
Patan Durbar Square is a concentrated cluster of temples, both Hindu and Buddhist. Three years on from the 2015 earthquake, it’s also littered with scaffolding, with huge tarpaulins flapping in the breeze, monkeys leaping and everyone raising their voices over the drilling and the ting-ting-ting of the rebuild. I take shelter under the bottom tier of a wooden pagoda, and stare up at carvings so intricate I’d like to climb up there with the monkeys to get a better look.
“You should go in, it’s a great museum.”
I whirl round, and see a man maybe an inch or two shorter than me. He has a sweet and welcoming smile, a well-groomed goatee, and shiny hair pulled back into a neat ponytail.
“I’m going to go tomorrow,” I say.
“Why not now?” he asks, and seems genuinely interested in why I would go as far as the door without going in.
“I’m jetlagged, I’d like to go when I can take it all in.”
He nods and we end up chatting for about half an hour. His name is Sandip Bhujel and he’s a local tour guide. He’s waiting, somewhat impatiently, for the start of hiking season so he can get back up to Everest. Since he’s free this week and seems to be unstumpable when it comes to questions about the local area, he agrees to be my guide. We decide to start tomorrow when I’ve slept, but I make a comment about the carvings adorned with tiny flowers and animals and Shivas, and Sandip leaps into a passionate explanation and points out where some of the wood is old and some of it is new.
I wake up thinking about the mixture of old and new wood, and when we arrive back in Patan Durbar Square after a two hour tour of Patan, I ask how that happened. He tells me it all started with the earthquake.
“It was 25 April 2015,” says Sandip, “I was here in Patan Durbar Square, directly opposite Harishankara Temple - see the picture?” He points to a placard showing what the temple looked like before it collapsed. It looks almost back to its former glory, tall and new but racked with scaffolding, like a child who’s about to have the training wheels removed from his bike.
“I was giving a tour to an English guy,” he continues, “I had just explained to him about the temple, and suddenly I heard a sound, it was like a BOOM, like a big blast. Everything was shaking. I didn't realise it was an earthquake, I thought it was an explosion or something like that. This temple didn't fall by shaking, it just fell in one shot, boom. I was really scared that the temple we were standing by would also fall, it's a really huge one.” He indicates the temple, just a few metres away from where we first met.
“I was right at the bottom of it, and this temple had been completely destroyed in the 1934 earthquake. It had been restored, of course, and built to be earthquake-proof, but I was still afraid that maybe it would fall down again. I ran to that side,” he indicates the south side of the square, “as on the other side a temple had already fallen down. The air was all dusty, you couldn't see anything or anyone. The person to whom I was giving a tour was wearing an orange t-shirt, and I could see a flash of orange through the dust. My responsibility is to make my clients safe first, so I had to escort him safely from this area. He was all over the place, running towards the buildings that were about to collapse. I was not polite at all, I said, ‘You are really stupid, let's get away from here!' and dragged him away.”
“How did you know it would be safe over there?”
“Because there are no big buildings on that side, so there’s nothing to be crushed under. Many of my friends were also here giving a tour, around 12 or 13 of them, and we were all ok. We heard people screaming and crying. We started to dig people out from under the rubble. After two minutes the aftershocks started happening and we'd run away to the safe side until it was over, then come back and carry on pulling people out. I was wearing a white t-shirt and it went completely red with other people’s blood. We were pulling away rocks and wood to free them, but were careful not to harm the bits of windows and wooden structure, because they're really special, really old.”
“Sandip, are you telling me that while you were pulling people out from under rocks and debris, you still had preservation on your mind?”
“Oh yeah. I’m part of the Patan Preservation Organisation. At the time I was a member but now I'm general secretary.” I shake my head in disbelief and admiration. He’s too modest to notice, and continues, “After a long time the army and police force finally came. It was one hour.”
I think of the five days New Orleans waited for relief after Katrina.
“So until they turned up it was just citizens helping?”
“Yeah. Most of the citizens ran away because they were afraid, perhaps worried that their family was in trouble. There were just injured people and us. It was the worst day of my life. I saw so much blood. I had an earthquake phobia for three or four months, I got flashbacks. I'm just happy it happened on a Saturday because that's a public holiday in Nepal so children weren’t in school, if it had been on Sunday then many young kids would have died.”
I shake my head, and say, “I’m so sorry you went through that.”
He shrugs, “Yeah. It's a natural disaster, you can't do anything about it. All you can do is to first make yourself safe, then next protect others.”
It starts to rain. We run and take shelter under the temple that collapsed in 1934. Under the long rim of the temple, we’re safe from the rain, which comes down soft, then hard. We retreat closer to the wall to stay dry.
“So, tomorrow we will go to Pashupatinath,” said Sandip.
“Ok, great. That’s where they cremate bodies on the open air funeral pyres, right?”
“Yes.”
“Will that be happening tomorrow while we’re there?” I ask.
Sandip laughs and shakes his head, “Tourists always ask this, ‘Will I be lucky to see the cremations?’ It’s such a silly question!”
“Right,” I laugh, “I suppose Kathmandu is a big place and people die all the time. I don’t know why we’d assume it only happens at 4:30 every other Wednesday.”
He nods and laughs again.
“Actually,” I say, “now that I think about it, I do.”
He looks at me, interested in the seed of this stupid question weeding its way into all his tours.
“You know I’ve never seen a dead body?” I say, “Death is not something we look at. Not in conversation, and certainly not directly. We’ve managed to completely remove the corpse from view when someone dies. Well, in America they might embalm the body and have a viewing –” He looks at me quizzically. “– embalming is running chemicals through the corpse to delay decomposition. They put makeup and clothes on the body, they stuff their cheeks and eye sockets to make them look beautiful and alive, like they’re sleeping.”
His eyes are wide. “Oh…!”
“But even that is pretty exotic to most Brits. Actually looking at a dead body, voluntarily, even if it has been made to look alive – it’s really unusual. Nope, where I’m from when someone dies the body is removed by professional body removers, burned by professional body burners, and handed back to you as ash in two stapled bags and a sealed box. So the idea of seeing a stranger’s corpse is so bizarre I guess we assume it must be rare.”
He nods. “I think you will like Pashupatinath,” he says, “It’s a great honour to be cremated there. My mother died six years back, of a heart attack. She didn’t know she was going to die, it was by the mistake of doctors. She had told me, ‘you are my best son, so it’s down to you to make sure I’m cremated at Pashupatinath’. I joked with her, like, ‘oh shut up, I’ll die before you, you can take ME there!’ You know, because she’s only 20 years older than me. But I was happy to be able to cremate her there because it was her wish. I gave the first light, which is an honour as the oldest son. Most people walked away as she burned but I stood there for the full four hours, crying.”
I think of how I never saw Chris dead, how often I still double-take thinking I’ve seen him riding past me on his bike, and ask Sandip if by watching his mother’s body burn, he thinks it gave him full knowledge, deep in his bones, that she was gone.
He doesn’t. For months after he would forget she was dead, and go and ring her doorbell.
*
Sandip and I sit on a sofa in the lobby of my hotel, shoes off, drinking tea. We’re about to go to Pashupatinath temple, a little insight into Nepalese death culture before the festivities of Gai Jatra.
“We call it a great salvation if you are cremated on the bank of the Bagmati River,” says Sandip.
“Is it like the Ganges in Varanasi?”
“They’re connected, the Bagmati flows to the Ganges from the Himalayas. If the Bagmati isn’t holy then neither is the Ganga.”
Like the Ganges, the Bagmati has had issues with pollution. The cognitive dissonance required to dump corporate and toilet waste directly into a goddess is hard to grasp, but Sandip says it’s twofold: the belief that anything you dump in the river will just flow away, and because there was no other waste option. Now an alternative has been developed, and riverbank factories have now been closed.
But the Ganges suffers another pollutant: uncremated corpses. In Hinduism it is believed that fire cleanses, so the bodies of children don’t need to be cremated because their souls are pure. In Varanasi, the bodies of children are taken in a boat to the centre of the river, attached to a rope and a boulder, and placed directly into the water. However, much of the pollution from corpses is an issue of funeral poverty; not everyone can afford the costs of cremation, and sometimes the poor have limited firewood with which to cremate their dead. The result? Uncremated and partly-cremated bodies are floated into the river. In January 2015, in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district, a canal that connects to the Ganges dried up and over 100 bodies were found in various stages of decay.
Here in Nepal, children aren’t cremated either, for the same reason, but they’re not tipped into the river, “We burn the body to give it back to nature, the water, the air, the light, the sky, the different elements our body is made of. But kids, we bury them to give the child back to mother earth, because her child died too soon. We do this instead of giving them back to nature.”
“Almost like it was a false start?”
“Yes.”
I tell Sandip I'm a little nervous about the prospect of seeing, smelling and sharing a space with corpses. I told him that a Twitter friend of mine, Robert (a 71-year-old man who lives in Chicago), upon hearing the news that I would be seeing open-air cremations, sent me frantic messages, “Ugh! Stay upwind for sure! You don’t want to smell burning human flesh. Eat before you go and wait a bit.” I told him that I’d had plenty of protection from dead bodies in a nation that fears them, and that the whole point now is to put down my defenses. He found this baffling and suggested again I stay upwind of the smell.
*
“How do you think the Nepalis feel about death?” I ask.
“Most of the young people are really fearful of it,” Sandip says, “if you say 'you will die' they're like oh come on, don't say that shit. But if you say it to old people they say yes, once you're born you have to die, you have to accept this universal truth. They always say to their children when they become sick, ‘don't spend too much money for me to be in hospital and all that, let me die simply, I don't want the trouble of hospital’. So most old people think to die is normal.”
Most people in Nepal wish to die at home, and do. I tell Sandip most people in Britain say they want to die at home, but end up dying in a hospital, often in the throes of high-tech, violent attempts to save them.
“Is it very expensive, healthcare, here?” I ask.
“It is expensive, because it’s not common to have health insurance here. I do, because I work in the travel sector and I climb Everest, but many people don't. We have free healthcare centres, community run ones, but what you get is just low-level painkillers, blood pressure checks, taking your temperature to check for fever, all of which you could just do at home. For a medical procedure we have to go to big clinics or hospitals.”
“So if you have cancer and you want to treat that, it's extremely expensive?”
“Yeah it is expensive to get cancer treatment - I think now the government is providing 40 or 50% financial help now after people protested that people who don't have money have to die.”
“You said people tell their children not to spend too much money, to let them die peacefully - if it was free, do you think they would still feel that way?”
“No I don't think so.”
“So that acceptance towards the end is perhaps largely a financial thing?”
He nods.
“Wow. So that means if you get free healthcare, you may end up with the situation we have in England where people are dying over-technical, unkind deaths.”
“I think so, yes.”
*
An impossibly cute baby monkey is maintaining eye contact with me as he wobbles on a branch. We’re ascending the stone hill behind Pashupatinath, and I’ve stopped to coo. Sandip hurries me along.
“You seem nervous of the monkeys, Sandip. Aren’t they friendly?”
They answer for him by breaking into a vicious, screaming brawl behind us, in exactly the spot I was cooing over the cutie. Big primates lumber past us to get involved, and mothers with babies hanging from their bellies canter to safety. We scurry away, up the stone steps and are greeted by a view of Kathmandu’s rooftops, the gold of the temple flashing in the foreground, colourful blocks of flats fading into the distant trees and mountains. A thin layer of smoke hangs in the air like a morning mist, and in the distance I can see crowds of people hording between the buildings. As we get closer to the vista, the smoke narrows into a tighter plume. I ask Sandip where it’s coming from.
“A burning body,” he says, simply.
We make out way to a stone platform, and to my left the source of the smoke comes into view. It is, as he said, a burning body. That’s absolutely, stunningly clear. The sight and smell hit me at once; a brief terror wave flashes and my breath whips itself into me as I detect something familiar in the aroma, mixed as it is with wood and flowers and ghee. The dank, dark hallway of Chris’s house flashes through my mind, the moment the stench enveloped us, thickly, like chocolate enrobing nougat, the moment I felt a thudding wet crack somewhere deep behind my eyesockets, the moment barely-manageable terror began to pour in.
And then it’s gone, as quickly as it arrived. The smell becomes one of sandalwood and smoke and spice.
Ahead of us, below the platform and across the river, stands the golden temple gleaming proudly before the dirty stone steps leading down to the Bagmati river. There, on the bank, three men stand before a body wrapped in an orange sheet, lying on a chitha - a kind of wooden stretcher for the dead. A crowd of people stand behind them, many of them in white, the colour of mourning: a sad colour, the absence of colour. Monkeys leap from roof to roof behind them.
A woman is wailing.
“Bring him back,” translates Sandip.
My face crumples in sympathy, and he continues, “It's purely sincere, but in the Newari community, you have to cry at funerals. If you can’t, you take water and put it in your eyes.”
“How soon after someone dies are they cremated?” I ask.
“It depends, if they are from this area, the Kathmandu Valley or nearby, then the same day. Maximum three or four hours later.”
“Wow, that's really fast!”
“We have to do many types of ceremony, when they die in a house they invite all their relatives, let them see the body, and prepare the chitha, and they are most of the time carried here from their house if it's close enough. If it's a long way they might use an ambulance - ah, look.” He points across the river to where a body is on a chitha, covered in a white sheet, the family crowding around, “That place is called Brahmanal, and there we put the pure water from the holy river in their mouth,” - it’s as if he’s a narrator to this extraordinary scene, as no sooner does he say it do they start doing it, “and then we clean their feet in the river.”
“Why are all the women off to the side?” They’re sitting in a line along the river, looking sombre.
“Women are not allowed to do this type of thing, only men, because culturally men have always done it.”
“Is that because it's an honour of which women aren't worthy, or because it's hard and they want to make it easier for the women?”
“The latter. Women are more sensitive. When someone dies they cry so much and it will be harder for them to see the body.”
“What if there are no men in the family?”
“Then they’ll get his brother's son, whatever, to do it.”
“So even the most distant man is preferable to a woman?”
“Yes.”
“And if there really are no men what then? The priest does it?”
“Exactly.”
The men are draping strings of marigolds across the body, carefully, as if they might wake him up. I think of how we treated Chris’s body. Like a problem to be solved. I realise eight days is much too long, there are elements that are objectively a little problematic. Leakage, for example. Marigolds wouldn’t quite cut it when it came to prettifying that display. But I doubt whether we’d have behaved much differently if it had been eight minutes.
Off to the right, another body is being crowded around by a group of men, holding up a sheet. They look as if they’re shielding the body from public view.
“Actually they are,” says Sandip, “but because they're taking off the clothes they're wearing, since you're cremated without your clothes.”
A cultural lens is tricky to remove, which is why I’m asking Sandip to confirm every little thing I’m seeing. My assumption was that they were shielding the body to protect us, the people who might catch a glimpse of dead flesh. But they're protecting the dead person's dignity - and given that we’re gathered here uninvited to watch someone else’s death ritual, it would be a bit rich to demand protection for our delicate sensibilities. Similarly, moments later, I notice the body draped in marigolds is surrounded by burning incense. I ask why, expecting to be told it masks the smell of the body, but Sandip tells me, “It’s to give the dead person the scent. It’s a way of saying: you're dead but we still care about you.” I shake my head, almost laughing with how wrong I am, every time I guess. Time and again, I see fear where there is only love.
*
We climb to a lower platform to get a closer look. We’re not the only ones; there’s a surprising number of people sitting and watching. Tourists, Sandip says, mostly from other parts of Nepal.
“We don't burn the body completely,” Sandip says suddenly, as if he’s just remembered, “There's a small piece of bone that we don't let burn, a part of the spine. The priest tells us to wrap it in a white cloth and make a hole in the river, I mean like make the action as if you're digging a hole, and put it inside like you’re burying it. This is done for reincarnation.”
“How do you get the bone out?”
“The priest knows the right moment to pick the bone out with a special type of holy stick. Ah, look -” he indicates the body that was obscured for dignity, “he is naked now, only wearing a sheet, so now they will put him on the chitha and take him to be cremated.”
The men of the family, swathed in white sheets, transfer the body ever so gently to the stretcher.
“You can still smell the burning,” comments Sandip.
“Now it just smells like wood to me. Earlier I got a hit of the body smell and it gave me a flashback. But I know it's natural, I shouldn’t be traumatised by it.”
“Yes, this is reality,” he says, not unkindly, “You have to face it.”
“It is reality, but it seems they're doing their best to not make it harsh. They've got beautiful shrouds, flowers, incense burning. I guess we need reality but maybe we don't need harsh reality.” Maybe that’s the key to a better relationship with death. Some semblance of balance, something between finding the decomposing corpse of a loved one and a sanitized, soulless goodbye.
We watch as they scatter leaves of poinsettias, which flutter down beautifully and rest among the marigolds. Four men lift the body, others gather round with incense, and the crowd of men in white sheets trail behind.
A woman walks back and forth across the bridge, crying and wailing. My eyes well up in sympathy. The wailing gets louder and louder and more high pitched, and another woman hooks her arm around her as she howls. “This woman,” says Sandip, “she's not crying naturally.”
“You think she's hamming it up?” I ask
“Yes.”
I don’t know. I’m convinced. A tear betrays me by reaching my cheek, and I wipe it away swiftly.
“I was the only one who cried so much when my mother died,” says Sandip, “and my younger brothers still feel sad and depressed if we talk about her, but I feel ok. If you don't cry then your emotions are, like, stuck.” I think of the days in my flat, the days spent believing I was frantic, abuzz, dashing about and busy - when in reality only my eyes were moving, and my fingers flicking from one open internet window to another, how life moved on around me. I was stuck. I was a fly in amber. A fucking garden gnome.
We step down to the riverbank, directly across from the pyres, and pass the platform where around 50 chithas are built a day. The Cornea Excision Centre is behind one of the the pyres, so that donors can have their corneas removed before they’re cremated. Since bodies generally arrive at the river just a few hours after death, it’s a smart place to get them fresh. We stroll along the bank, looking for a place to sit among the many people who have chosen this as a way to spend their Saturday.
“Is this really not disrespectful, Sandip? To watch someone’s cremation like it’s entertainment?”
“From here, it’s fine. This is life, you know? But over there -” he points to a couple standing amongst the family members, “you can see some Chinese tourists who’ve joined the family to have a look. It does make them angry, but they don’t show it. In my opinion, keeping your distance, like us, is far better.”
“Right, so…” I say, trying to locate the line of offensiveness, which my instincts insist was about half a mile ago, “from this side we’re watching life and death as it happens, but getting up close is like saying, ‘I want to see details, I want to see the hair catch light and the flesh bubble’. And I suppose their feeling might be, ‘This is my mum. She’s not your day trip.’”
“Right,” Sandip nods.
“Gawping!” I say suddenly, and Sandip looks at me quizzically. “That’s the word, in English, for staring openly and rudely.”
“Gawping,” says Sandip, rolling the word around in his mouth, “Gawping, yes. And also, they’re wearing masks. That’s disrespectful too, ‘I’ll look, but I don’t want the smell’. Ugh - and now he’s taking a picture.”
The man has his camera poised and is leaning close to the body, taking a photograph of the woman’s exposed head. Thankfully, by the time the body is ready to be set alight, the couple have wandered away.
The body is laid out on the chitha, with a few strands of black and white hair visible from under the sheet that’s draped and decorated with flowers and offerings of money. The brahmin carefully places wood and straw atop the body, and empties out a jar of ghee onto it. Ghee burns easily, “It causes a smooth burn,”, says Sandip, “also when you burn yourself, you put ghee on it for relief, so it’s like: we’re burning you, but we’re putting on ghee to sooth it.” The brahmin puts some sandalwood at the base of the pyre, for the fragrance. Many rich people are burned only by sandalwood.
From the gathered family, a young man emerges, bent double under the weight of his loss. Sandip says he must be the son. His white shroud is wrapped across him, like a sling for a broken arm. An older man, perhaps the uncle, holds him around the waist, tight, as if letting go would release him to the floor like water. With the support of his uncle, the son circles the body, and touches his head to her feet, his sobs visibly rippling through him.
Behind us, monkeys clang their way across the rooftops and scuttle over the pavement. A bull standing by the wall behind us is mooing, sounding furious.
The family members drip water in her mouth. The son circles her body three times clutching a flame, and his cries travel across the river to the people watching, to the angry bull, the oblivious monkeys. As he starts to howl, a relative rushes to his other side, and they lead him away.
The priest lights incense, drips a little more ghee, and lights the pyre under the body. The flames begin to catch as he removes the scattered offerings of money.
The son quakes. He is led even further away than the women. The brahmin adds barley to the fire and it crescendos. The smoke is dark as it emerges from the pyre, turning white as it billows into the sky.
*
The funeral pyres used to be separated by caste, but in 2011 Nepal brought in laws forbidding caste-based discrimination or untouchability practices. Of course, it hasn’t disappeared the caste system entirely, and can only do so much to curb people’s internal revulsions. Further down the river in Varanasi, India, where there is a similar system of open-air cremation, the men who cremate bodies – heaven’s gatekeepers – are from the lowest caste. The Dom Raja man the funeral pyres in India’s holy city, where it is said that death fast-tracks you into heaven without any need to be reincarnated (this belief is also held for those who are cremated at Pashupatinath). Yet the men who help people make that leap, who lovingly tend the pyres with ghee and spices and fragrant wood, are untouchable. In the mid nineties, the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party pulled a publicity stunt in a drive to demonstrate solidarity with the lowest castes. The stunt? The leaders of the party would have breakfast with the Dom Raja. Even that was too big an ask for a few of them, who waved away the food for fear of being “polluted”.
The idea of pollution is a recurring one in south and east Asia, the notion that anyone who works with death might somehow be a carrier. In his book Coffinman, Japanese Buddhist mortician Sinman Aoki says taking a job as a mortician disgusted and repulsed his wife, who thereafter refused to sleep with him or let him touch her. He writes, “I was a complete damned embarrassment to the whole family...unless I quit my present job they would cut off all ties with me… For there’s nothing lower on the social scale than the mortician, and the truth of the matter is that we fear the coffinman and the cremator just as much as death and the corpse.”
(This seems to me a more extreme, outspoken version of our own notion of pollution in the west - people often behave as if talking about death will call it to your door. While writing this book I received unsolicited messages that I “shouldn’t be messing with death”. Perhaps this is why the death cafe founder, Jon Underwood, was moved to say, “Just as talking about sex won't make you pregnant, talking about death won't make you dead.” Incidentally, Jon did die in 2017, but it wasn’t because he started a global conversation about death. He suffered a sudden and unexpected brain haemorrhage, though I suspect he would have liked George Carlin’s theory, that “Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.”)
Given the love and care that goes into saying goodbye to a loved one, it seems odd that we would want the person who sees them off to be someone for whom we have no respect. If I believed in the caste system, I fancy I’d only want the best getting near my mum, my sister, my husband. That probably is fanciful; in practice, it’s likely my love for my family can’t obscure my disgust of dead bodies. It certainly didn’t with Chris. Dion told me to stay downstairs so I wouldn't see him dead, and I did not protest. Jim Morrison said, “Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders, smooth as ravens’ claws”, but clearly this only applies when we’ve cleared away the problem, the great stinking problem, of the corpse.
In Nepal, the system isn’t relegated entirely to the lower castes - the man who extracts the section of spine to be buried in the river must be a priest who is of course from the highest caste. We’ve crossed over to stand by an empty pyre, and Sandip is beginning to tell me, “Here only higher caste people are allowed to touch -” and a flash of orange skims past my face. I gasp at the realisation that it was a stretcher with a dead person on it.
“Sorry,” I whisper to Sandip, “I’m not past the shock of it yet.” They walk past the pyres - they’re headed for a building entrance. “Where are they going?”
Sandip looks confused for a moment, then his face brightens, “Ah, they're taking this body to do it electronically.”
“You mean a crematorium?” I ask. In January 2016, the Pashupati Area Development Trust installed the first functioning modern electric crematorium in Nepal, in an attempt to diminish carbon emissions, river pollution, and deforestation. I ask Sandip what’s different about this family that they’re choosing the crematorium - do they want to get it over with quickly?
“Some families might not want to see the body burning.”
Sandip also says it must be a sign of wealth. I look into it, and it’s the opposite: aside from being faster and more environmentally friendly, burning a body in a crematorium is considerably cheaper than in the open air. It’s likely that it will catch on; the traditional method has led to substantial deforestation around the Kathmandu Valley, with a huge increase in population over the past 15 years and each cremation using between 350-500kgs of wood.
As we discuss whether or not being removed from the process of the burning body will lead to less acceptance of death, the ramp leading away from the pyres becomes crowded by a procession of old women in the wake of a chitha on the shoulders of two young men in t-shirts. The body is a waif under an orange sheet, a wisp with white hair peeking out of the end. We move aside to let them past.
“I’m quite sure this party is from an old orphanage,” says Sandip.
“You mean an old people’s home?”
“I call it an old orphanage.”
He goes to investigate. There is one old man, and at least thirty old women. Sandip chats to them and the body is set before the pyre. People mill around. No one seems to be mourning, or even considering the body.
“Yes, I was absolutely right,” says Sandip, coming back over, “She's from the old orphanage. These women were saying she died one hour ago, she wanted to drink some hot water, she drank it, lay down and died a few minutes later. The other women were saying she had been in the old orphanage for eight years. She used to say that she had four sons but they never came to visit her, and they don't know if it was true.”
“Maybe they died and she doesn’t know because she has dementia or something?”
“Maybe. Or maybe her children don't like her.”
It is a sad thought that you can never assume someone was loved. If she does have sons, she's dead now and they may never know. Maybe they'll come looking for her one day. Poor Sandip stood on this very riverbank crying for his mother for hours, and here this woman is, about to burn alone.
The women file back to the old orphanage, since women don’t stay for cremations because of the supposed fragility of our sex - though none of them look fazed.
“So she's going to be alone?” I ask. “Those two guys there on the bench, do they work here? I'm trying to work out who's left for her.”
“They work at the old orphanage I guess.”
The one old man from the old orphanage comes back down the ramp, and hobbles over to the bench to sit with the young men in t-shirts.
“I’m glad the man is staying,” I say, “I was sad that no one was going to be with her.”
“Me too,” says Sandip, “I feel kind of sad.”
We step away, and leave the old orphan to her lonely exit.
*
The story of Nepal’s death festival starts, of course, with a man being trampled to death by an elephant. King Pratap Malla ruled Nepal from 1641-74, and had a unique system of rule: he wanted his sons to each take a turn running the kingdom while he was alive. His second son, Chakrabartendra Malla, was killed in the unfortunate elephant incident the day after he took over as King. His mother, the Queen, was inconsolable. She wouldn’t eat or sleep and wouldn’t stop crying. No matter what Pratap did to cheer her up, nothing worked. In desperation, he turned to his kingdom, and announced that anyone who could make her smile would be richly rewarded.
Gai Jatra was already an annual festival, literally translating as “cow festival”, a procession of people led by a cow. The procession was brought before the Queen, and people performed comedy skits for her - or, by the sound of it, at her. Anyone who’s ever been inconsolably sad and had well-meaning idiots dance around them vomiting joy will probably be skeptical about this approach, but eventually, she cracked a smile. The successful skit was one that mocked the obscene wealth of the country’s high society, and some sources even claim she burst out laughing. Whatever the reaction, Pratap jumped on it. He decreed that henceforth, Gai Jatra would feature jokes, mockery and satire, and that it would also become a death festival; every family who had lost someone that year would take part in the procession.
Every bit of the Cow Festival decree has held, aside from the “cow” part - as agriculture became mechanised the availability of cows to lead the procession diminished, but apparently, “a boy dressed as a cow will do”. Even during the oppressive Shah regime, which was eventually toppled in 2008 with the abolition of the monarchy, it remained the only day people were allowed to criticise the government.
“So is it a festival for the people who are grieving, or a festival for the dead?”
“It's a festival for the people who died,” Sandip says, “but it's also a festival for the people who were really close to them. To remind them that life and death is a natural thing. We believe that after a person dies they become a spirit, so if their spirit can see their people crying all the time, they’ll think, ‘How can I leave them?’ They will be stuck. Stuck by your sadness. So to make them happy, to make their spirit go on to heaven, we have this festival.”
The notion that life and death is a natural thing is something we know, intellectually. Yet in practise, in much of the west, we still treat it as an aberration, like something has gone horribly awry. In his book The Way We Die Now, Dr Seamus O’Mahoney details some of the bitter battles he’s fought with the families of patients who refuse to “give up on” their sick family members; insisting on violent procedures for elderly patients with dementia who are incapable of understanding why they’re in such pain; suspecting conspiracies to euthanise when given a bleak prognosis; and how in one family, when their elderly mother with dementia died after months of painful, undignified and ultimately hopeless heroics, “two of the daughters attempted their own cack-handed version of cardiac massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation”.
Denying death as a matter of culture means scheduling ourselves one shock after another. The notion of gathering together with others to accept it (outside of a group therapy context) is alien - death cafes, people meeting for coffee, cake and death chat, even made the news. People talking openly about death makes headlines in the west.
It doesn’t improve much on an individual level: after the Worst Tuesday, a friend from work texted asking where I was, so I told him I was on compassionate leave because we’d found the dead body of a loved one. He replied to let me know he wouldn’t be talking to me until I was “over it” because he’s “no good at this stuff”. What did he think he needed to do? A resurrection? A trapeze performance? Rapid-fire maths? What exactly was he telling me he was “no good” at? Friendship, apparently, because when I was called upon to pay the friend tax, he was my first installment.
Whenever anyone suggests the dead are in attendance, gifts and sugar always seems to follow. As Sandip tells me stories of the Gai Jatras of his childhood, my mind conjures up images of trick or treating, “Everyone receives and everyone gives,” he says, “They used to give coins before inflation, when it was worth it. I remember hearing the ching-ching-ching in my pockets; my pants used to come down with the weight of them. People also gave packs of sweets made from different types of flour, cooked in oil or butter. I used to carry them in plastic bags and when they became too heavy I'd drop them off somewhere and go out again. I couldn't eat it all, so I’d go to school the next day with my tiffin box big and full, and pass them out - enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.”
*
The traffic moves at festival speed; honey through an hourglass. The taxi is old, rattly, filled with the smell of exhaust fumes. But the time passes easily with my companion for the day, Junu Shrestha, a young tour guide from the medieval city of Bhaktapur.
“In this celebration people are more happy than sad,” says Junu as we sit in traffic, “It’s a festival for dead people, but it’s also for all of society. Because it’s not only your family members who died: everybody dies, so why should we be sad? If everybody dies and we have to accept those deaths, let’s celebrate it in a nice way.”
Even though we’re discussing death in these terms of radical acceptance, talk of death in Nepal always leads back to the earthquake. Death seems to hang around, ready to drop in at any moment, like a shitty neighbour you wish would just move away. Junu was lucky; she used to live in Bhaktapur’s central medieval square, but had moved to the hillside for more reliable access to water. She was watching a movie with her sister on the ground floor of her earthquake-proof house when the ground started to shake. She stares into the distance as she tells me, “From the hillside I looked down to Bhaktapur. The sky was full of dust and helicopters. It was devastating. Lots of houses from the 16th and 17th century - and even the 11th and 12th century - collapsed. Nine thousand people died and many more were injured. Dead people are dead, they have no problem, it's the people left alive who suffer.”
Hinduism and Buddhism, the two major religions of Nepal, both emphasise sharing and helping others. But in the wake of the devastation of the earthquake, when food sources were threatened, many did not come through, “There was no food, and people were afraid that no food would be provided, so even the shopkeepers and wholesalers were storing it for themselves, and not selling it.”
“Did people come out for Gai Jatra that year?”
“Yes, but they did it in a small way. There wasn’t as much money available after the earthquake - but the government provided some money to the families to celebrate Gai Jatra.” Sandip told me a similar story of Patan’s festivities, that despite the many deaths, participation was lower than usual. Barely four months had passed, and many were still afraid to go out. The earthquake on 29 April was swiftly followed by another on 12 May, with many areas still under restricted access.
We arrive, finally, in Bhaktapur, jump out of the car and make our way to the centre, an as-yet sparsely-populated square with the sounds of drums wafting through the air like bonfire smoke. From around a corner, a line of people file into the square holding an enormous bamboo structure hoisted on their shoulders. It towers at about 10 or 12 feet; at the very top sits an umbrella over a thick wig of hair. The rest is dressed in white and orange silk sheets, and draped in a pashmina. There’s a handbag hanging off the side of it.
“Is that supposed to be…a person?” I ask Junu.
“Yes,” she says, “we call this a taha-macha. They believe this is a dead person, a representation of them. We can see this was a woman because she is wearing a sari. You see there is an umbrella on top to protect them, and also hair and clothes.”
“Who are the people following it?”
“These are the people who knew the person, the friends and family. They will spend all day giving food, fruits, juice, biscuits, anything they can to other families who have lost someone.”
“Where are they off to?” I ask, watching them round the corner.
“They will walk all around the city, and come back to the same place they started.” She laughs, “It’s a strange festival!”
We walk around the back streets, and come across a static taha-macha, waiting for the festivities to start. The “skirt” is black with red and gold pendants, and it’s topped with a bright pink and yellow umbrella. Underneath, instead of a wig for hair, there are bunches of flowers. A long black and white “scarf” frames a picture of the woman the taha-macha represents; an old Newari woman with black and white hair and a bindi. Junu translates the caption: she was born in 1999 and died two months ago in 2075 – which, on the western calendar, means she was born in 1942 and died this year, 2018, aged 76.
Rounding the corner, we come to what feels like a makeshift backstage area full of children, around three to five years old, dressed as little Vishnus. The boys have thick moustaches painted on their adorable chubby faces, and some are clutching deep pink incense sticks as thick as cigars.
“The kids are dressed like gods - Vishnu is one of the incarnations of god - and this represents for the family that a grandparent has died.” Behind us a group of little girls start a chant.
“Do the children understand that somebody has died?”
“No, they just enjoy themselves, they just love how they are dressing and enjoy being beautiful, they don't understand what's going on. Next year they'll see it and think 'I dressed like that, it was so nice' and in later years they’ll understand what it meant.”
“It must be great to have such good memories of the Gai Jatras of your youth, so when you come to the point when someone's died, you know you have this support waiting.”
“Yes, people want to do Gai Jatra in a big way for the person who is gone, but also for society. If you don't do it well, society might say something.”
More and more people are starting to filter in, building into a crowd. As in Pashupatinath, the bereaved are distinguished by white clothes, and they’re joined by friends, family and relatives. Next to the little Vishnus, a few slightly older children are standing in two lines facing each other, rehearsing a dance in which they each hold a hollow stick and knock them against each other rhythmically. Junu comments that, “The sticks used to be just for the boys”.
“How come?”
“Because men dominated society before,” she says simply, “and nowadays girls say: no, we need a place in this space, so they're out now and it's nice.”
I tell her I was quite surprised at Pashupatinath that women were cut out of the experience of taking care of the bodies and preparing them for cremation because of their supposed fragility. Especially after seeing the son practically collapse under the weight of his grief; that reaction is seen in women as fragile, something from which they should be protected, yet he was simply supported and led away.
Junu says, “My neighbour's husband died and she gave fire to the husband, so I think if we want we can do it now. For years it was just for boys, but now the girls are asking for this right: why not us?”
Somewhere behind us, some drums whip up a catchy beat. The air thrums with sound. Thick wisps of incense rise from the clutched fists of the little gods.
*
We duck down an alleyway, and Junu tells me she wants to show me where some people are now living after the earthquake. We stop by a building site.
“People are still living in houses that aren’t fit to be lived in. Some houses have huge cracks - some have even fallen down but they have to live there. They have no other option.”
“Is that safe?” I ask.
“No, not at all,” she says, waving her hand, “if there is another earthquake they’ll die. But this is where some people live now.”
It takes me a moment to realise the rusty corrugated iron half-cylinder we’ve been standing next to isn’t a storage space for a building site; it’s the government’s solution to a collapsed house. The top of the door doesn’t reach the curved roof. Flaps of tarpaulin poke out from inside it, presumably to keep the rain out. The wooden door is splintered, with a flimsy lock on the front, smaller than one you’d use for a bike.
“My uncle's house was destroyed in the earthquake,” says Junu, “He got some money from the government to build a new one, but it was not enough.”
“What percentage of what he needed did he get?”
“He got 25,000 rupees.”
I do a quick calculation. Twenty-five thousand rupees, that’s…
“Wait…wait, that’s nothing.”
Junu nods. “Nothing.”
It’s £165. It’s 250 plates of fried vegetable momos. It’s about 85 beers - 65 if you want the fancy imported stuff. It’s six nights in my Patan Airbnb. It’s a quarter of an iPhone 8.
“How much would it cost to build a house?”
“More, more! And the money comes in installments.”
“So they give not enough, in small bursts. So whoever lives here might live here the rest of their life.”
“Yes.”
“This doesn't look like it protects from the rain. And it must be so hot in there!”
“And in the winter it's very, very cold,” she says, “And there are rats.”
There’s something scrawled on the door in large, orange letters. Since I’m illiterate here, I ask Junu what it says.
“‘Welcome’.”
*
I follow Junu up a set of stairs and we emerge in a cafe. We take a seat by the balcony overlooking the square, order coffee and wait for the procession to start.
“So tell me about this book you’re writing,” she says, so I tell her about The Worst Tuesday and my subsequent madness, and that I got interested in how others deal with the certainty that death is coming.
“Are you afraid of death?” she asks.
“God, yes,” I say. “There’s this perception that we’re ‘more afraid’ of death in the west. But I don’t think it’s true. I think we all have the exact same fear instilled in us just by being human, but some people are dealing with it well and others are dealing with it badly. And I think where I’m from, we deal with it badly. So badly. The death culture where I’m from couldn’t be more opposite to what you said happens here, Junu. That today is about people coming together to be reminded that you’re not alone, that we all suffer grief, that death is normal and a natural part of life. When I think about what happened after Chris died – where I’m from, instead of coming together, people disappear. Because they ‘don’t know what to say’. Instead of saying it’s normal and part of life, they say it’s terrible, that they can’t believe it happened, even though it happens to everyone. When someone dies, there is a sense that something has gone horribly wrong. It’s almost always a shock.”
“Was it a shock for you?”
“Yes, completely. But Chris wasn’t sick, so we weren’t expecting to lose him so soon, or so suddenly, or at all. You expect a decline. It was strange, because I looked at his calendar to see what he was doing the day he died, to see if anything he did that day could give us a clue. He had been at the lawyer’s office, and I called the lawyer and told him Chris had died, and he immediately asked, ‘Was he murdered?’ And I said, ‘What? No, of course not, he was attacked by his own heart like everyone else.’ And the lawyer said he thought perhaps he had been murdered by another family member, because when he went to see him it was to change his will to leave Dion his house.”
This all spills out of me without my express permission, but Junu doesn’t seem shocked.
“He changed his will the same day he died?” she says.
“Yes.”
“I think he knew he was going to die.”
As if on cue, music pours into the square. Loud drums, tinging cymbals, maracas, trumpets, a beat so solid you could climb onto it like a table. We lean over the balcony and see the procession creeping into the square. It’s thin at first, a taha-macha followed by some people, then another, then another, and soon the procession thickens with decorated wheeled chariots and teenagers with face paint. The ting-ting-ting of cymbals gets louder and the sticks come into view. Two impossibly long lines of children, jumping and chanting and hitting their sticks with one rhythmic “HEY!” after another.
The beat backs off and is replaced with a tinkling, and lines of teenage girls in matching black, white and red saris and gorgeous golden hair pieces, necklaces and anklets sidle along, doing a gentle stick dance - and are then obscured by some younger boys doing the same dance but with the kind of head-banging enthusiasm usually found in a moshpit. One boy holds his denim jacket in the air, screaming a chant and jumping up and down. It’s a chant we’ll hear throughout the day. I can’t make out the words, of course, but the rhythm is burned into my brain:
Da-da-DA!
Da-da-DA!
DA-da-DA-da-DA!
Some of the dancers are young and bang their sticks with little rhythm or skill. But before long, we find ourselves looking down on a group of men in their twenties, all dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts, doing complex choreography in their two lines involving spins, skips and sidesteps.
Sometimes the beat slows down, and the people walk a little slower, savouring the atmosphere, hitting their sticks languidly like a friendly high five, grinning at the face paints and taha-machas wavering in the sunshine…then the beat speeds up, and the line starts bobbing up and down and the cries of “HEY!” get louder, the thwacks of the sticks get harder, and the entire city crackles with electric energy.
I cannot look at enough at once. Part of me wishes I could jump over the balcony, grab a stick and thwack and jump and dance and sing along. My face hurts from smiling. I quickly brush away the damn single tear that always embarrasses me by showing up whenever I’m faced with something that makes so much more sense than my own behaviour in those horrendous months, something that could have lifted the terrified, friend-stalking garden gnome I became.
*
Junu and I pay for our coffee and dive into the crowd, let ourselves be carried along by it, the beat of the drums and cymbals. We follow a red umbrella sheltering a taha-macha. Plumes of incense whirl above us and the sun beats down. Junu is hard to follow; she’s not tall and she’s better at navigating the crowds than me, but I focus on her green t-shirt and follow her down a quiet side street.
“Just for a break from the crowd!” she says. We walk past shops selling postcards and pashminas towards a green mountain looming in the distance, framed by the red brick walls. We emerge into Taumadhi Square, and take in Kathmandu’s tallest temple, Nyatapola, a five storey pagoda that looms over us as we approach. The stairs leading to the bottom storey are steep, and blanketed with Gai Jatra sepctators.
“Let’s go up,” says Junu.
From across the square, you might not think Nyatapola (which means ‘five storeys’) as something to be avoided if you’re afraid of heights. But standing at the foot of the stairs, I look up and gulp. The temple is 30 metres tall, and sits on a five-tiered staircase. A steep one. And there are people crammed on every single step. The colours of their outfits and parasols look beautiful against the darkness of the looming wood, the flash of green grass growing out over the edges, the shock of blue sky behind. But to climb into the colourful crowd, we must climb in an uncomfortably true sense. I feel like an upright baby goat. The temple itself is solid enough; it was built in 1702 and survived both the 1934 and the 2015 earthquakes. When we find a tight space, I wobble, struggling hold myself so as not to tip backwards (annoying) or forwards (domino effect down five flights of stairs, leading to many more taha-machas at next year’s festival). Junu reaches over a short woman standing between us and takes my backpack, presumably to minimise the chances of a tragic topple.
With proper footing, the view is sensational. Bhairabnath Temple stands proud to our left, a three-storey pagoda, against a backdrop of lush green mountains, fluffy clouds and blue skies. On the ground, the procession continues gathering momentum, that same beat wafting through the air.
We get reacquainted with the ground, bones intact, and squeeze ourselves onto a shopfront step and let the procession file past us. Teenage boys do the stick dance with empty water bottles, grinning as they sweat in their sunglasses and wet shirts. A cross-dresser in a black skirt, neon green shirt and a straw hat hams up a jig for my cameraphone, behind a fat man in a t-shirt with the belly and nipples cut out. What a strange way to face your mortality.
But it works. All those centuries ago, when Pratap summoned everyone who’d lost someone that year, the Queen watched as the palace became crammed with people. And the effect today is much the same: the startling visual evidence that death, though devastating, isn’t unusual. And that’s all I can think about as the joyous crowd passes, bouncing and singing and dancing and chanting. This obvious thing I feel I’m learning for the first time.
It’s normal, it’s normal, it’s normal.
*
Later, back in my room above the continuing beat of the drums, I look up the stick chant, Ghintang Kishee Twaak, and email Junu and Sandip for their best translations. They come back with completely different versions of it, probably owing to their different backgrounds and hometowns. Junu says “ghintang kishee” is the stick dance, and “twaak” is the sound of sticks hitting each other.
Sandip’s translation hits closer to home:
"People die, but this is not the same as mourning.
We will leave that in the past.
We need to move on,
And not feel sorry anymore.
This is nature.
Let’s celebrate while we’re alive.”
_____________________________________________