Monsoon effects

This is a recovered post, originally from 2012-07-10

The monsoon here in Nepal has been late in arriving, and not too convincing on arrival. Some valleys are still parched; seasonal crops along the Jhigu Khola in Palancok have failed. Here in Pharping we’ve been lucky. Because we sit on a ridge  that catches the moisture coming in from the lowlands, we get rainstorms more often than the Kathmandu Valley below us, and even when the rain doesn’t fall we still get mist and fog leaving the leaves drenched.

I do wonder sometimes if Pharping gets more than its share of extraordinary events. With the staggering overdevelopment in recent years—new Tibetan monasteries being built every year, and the resulting income allowing Pharping residents to swap their old brick-and-tile homes for reinforced concrete towers—the amount of greenspace is dwindling fast, the quantity and diversity of birds and mammals is falling off fast, the local flora is over harvested, and the sheer mass of pollution produced by all the monasteries is appalling. Between the dharma tourist hotels in the monasteries and the ‘facilities’ for the long-haul jeep traffic to Hetauda, Pharping certainly can’t claim to be isolated anymore. We’ve got drugs, tourists and prostitutes just like Thamel, and the owners of the hotels along the new road delight in playing loud music because, as they see it, the tourists want Pharping to become even more like Thamel. We’ve got  ‘more-dharmic than thou’ tourists trying to look holy and wearing red robes they’d never dare to wear at home, being scalped for tchotchkes by locals—we’ve even got Europeans who have settled here in order to take money away from the dharma tourists, just like Thamel.

Still: Pharping is an unusual place, an old place; even if the Tibetan incomers are embarrassed to admit that the roots of their tradition are Newar and the oldest of their monasteries is only 60 years old; even if the local VDC is as corrupt as a wooden nickel; even if my old friend and the only remaining Newar Vajrayāna priest spends more time singing than guarding the traditions at his monastery; even if we’ve got Shiv Sena graffiti on the walls—somehow the old shrines and the stubbornly vivacious landscape still seem to hold this creaky place together.

So here are two fingerholds for hope in this most beleaguered and corrupted of sacred landscapes.

(1) The monsoon is preceded by the plaintive introductory notes of the mosquitoes, and by the time water has pooled up in the rice paddies and maize fields, those shrill hints have transformed into a Wagnerian shriek. After dusk we cower under our mosquito nets and debate the morality of using those awful electric mosquito fumigators (which give everyone foul headaches anyway). Closing the windows is not an option, as stifling to death would be marginally worse that sleeping gingerly just away from the nets, listening to the siren screech of those hungry mothers desperate to get the blood they need to make yet more mosquitos.  (If you touch the nets, they’ll reach right through and drink your blood anyway….)

After a few years of studying bats around Nepal the obvious solution would be to have a bat come help—and last night, to my delight, that’s exactly what happened. Bhawana elbowed me awake—a mid-sized insectivorous bat was happily swooping around our room. For that bat, it must have been something like finding a truly wonderful roadhouse along a lonesome highway in the Nevada desert. They had a whole cave full of mosquitoes to themselves, and they were certainly enjoying it. I watched as it skimmed over the net just above my face, scooping up clouds of mosquitoes rising from their anxious perches. Urp. It swirled around the room a few times then found a place to sit and digest; and after a few minutes, swooped back into action, cleaned up a few more unwelcome guests, and left as gracefully as it had arrived. It had never occurred to me that a mosquito net was designed to feed bats, but it worked just like a dinner plate for last night’s visitor.

I do hope it returns. Natural parasite control is remarkable theatre.

(2) The views from Pharping at dawn are amazing. I’m convinced that the sunrises are what must have drawn Padmasambhava and his colleagues here for their sessions of mediation and writing. This morning a vast charcoal log of cloud straddled the whole valley, forty kilometres from Campadevī towards Pulchowki Ridge. For us, it was like peering out from the lip of an iron cauldron towards the sunrise. The ridges to the north of us, towards Langtang, glittered in the morning sun, but that wall of heavy cloud blocked the light and so the sky above stayed deep cobalt blue. To the north, glinting shards of high sunlit cloud peeped over the blackness, but dead above us the clouds were faint and pale, still predawn even though the sun had actually risen. The sky was so dark that a single star still shone among those wisps. I’ve seen that effect before, up high in the Andes and the Sierra Nevada: daylight stars in a blueblack sky, but we’re no higher than 1700 metres here. It was the blunt opacity of the monsoon frontal clouds that cast such a deep shade acres the sky and allowed that single star to shine long after daybreak.