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Nepal Diary

People will help each other whether the government helps them or not.

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Nepal Diary
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True aces

The next time I hear people trash Nepal’s pilots, I’ll be very rude to them. I’ve been flying in aircraft piloted by them since the mid-1980s. Some journeys have been to places like Jomsom on Twin Otter and Dornier 228 aircraft for gut-wrenching landings at 8,800 feet. A Jetstream 41, a tiny Yeti Airlines commuter plane, brought my daughter and me and 27 other passengers from Pokhara in west-central Nepal to Kathmandu on the day of the earthquake. Our pilot was male and co-pilot female for the 25-minute flight. We left before the scheduled departure at 11:55 a.m. and were airborne when the earthquake struck. We arrived over Kathmandu valley and circled for close to an hour, watching people below stream about or clot like ants. Kathmandu airport was officially closed. We then ran low on fuel. There was nowhere else to go; all nearby airports were off-limits. The crew executed a superb crosswind landing. They did what they had to not knowing whether their homes were standing and families and friends were alive, unhurt.

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Shocked awe

My basic Nepali convinced a taxi-driver to take us to Thamel, the choked tourist mecca deep inside Kathmandu. We had a reservation at Nirvana Garden Hotel. It’s near a restaurant where I had promised my daughter a fine meal on our last evening in Nepal. Change of plan. We stopped at a people-choked crossroads just before Thamel, overlooking a corner of the Narayanhity Palace—former residence of the ousted royal family—the SAARC Secretariat, and the high-end Garden of Dreams restaurant. A wall of the restaurant had collapsed. Nearby, an electricity pole lay across a crushed Maruti 800 taxi, dragging wires and several other poles down with it in a ragged line of destruction. Locals stood dazed, yet dignified. A powerfully built Nepali man cradled the head of his spooked German Shepherd, both seated near the trashed car. Backpackers took selfies. News was passed on in a deadly game of Chinese whispers. Thousands are dead. The Durbar Squares in Kathmandu and Bhaktapur—both of which we visited the previous week—are destroyed. We sat on the pavement beside two Israeli tourists. A powerful aftershock arrived. The tops of buildings swayed. A wall collapsed. Some screamed, but the majority stayed stoically quiet. I told my daughter we must leave the area, move where buildings were lower and streets wider and try to get near the Indian embassy and its sprawling grounds. My daughter nodded. She was numbed. It seemed exactly like what I’d witnessed after the Kutch earthquake in 2001, a tragedy I covered for a newsmagazine. There was one lesson from Kutch that would surely be repeated here: people will help each other whether the government helps them or not.

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We the media

It was strange to be a jour­nalist in a news situation in which my primary assignment was to get my daughter home safe. Beyond taking some photographs and automatically registering what went on around us, that was what I resolved to do. My cellphone rang frequently. Some calls were from anxious family and friends, but mostly from Indian TV channels wanting a ‘phoner’. One channel—which in 2012, when I was on a tiny Andamans island, had ins­isted that I reach the nearest facility for a live programme—was persistent. No entreaty—that was phone battery was low, that there was no electricity, that communication lines were jammed, that my daughter needed to speak to her mother—seemed adequate. Finally, I texted back: “Don’t be silly.” It didn’t work. The channel demanded a blog.

Fat cats

On the lawns of Shangri-La hotel, near the Indian embassy, two British diplomats drank wine to delirium, some Americans ordered all the pastry in the lawn-side cafe and a group of Chinese women eased into saris they’d bought that very morning, helped by a group of Indian women dazzling in chunky gold and diamond jewellery. They giggled, tittered, exchanged namastes. We sat there smiling, like scores of others, at this bizarre cross-cultural bonhomie as Nepal collapsed around us. Aftershocks came and went. At nightfall, we camped on the lawns wrapped in borrowed blankets, clutching gifted bottles of water. It began to drizzle. I overheard the bejewelled menfolk with the bejewelled Indian ladies say they’d been placed on the embassy’s priority list for early evacuation. We’d been turned away at the gate and asked to take our chances at the airport. I hadn’t bothered to flash press credentials or leverage connections. We knew our turn would come after the fat cats. Next morning, when we woke at 5 am to a massive aftershock, they were gone.

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Last Week...

We visited ‘The Unique Tenacious Thanka Painting Shop’ in Pokhara. While it might make Alexander McCall Smith proud, a similar spirit will surely rebuild Nepal.

Sudeep Chakravarti’s latest book is Clear. Hold. Build: Hard Lessons of Business and Human Rights in India; E-mail your diarist: sudeep.chakravarti [AT] gmail [DOT] com, follow him on Twitter @chakraview

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