A Mountain Lets Go

There was no warning. No sound. Not a drop of rain, nothing in the sky to suggest that a river had already started coming down towards the valley faster than anyone could run.

A woman was shopping. Onions, carrots, the small daily arithmetic of what a family will eat tonight. A young man with firm views about God, and a specific God, was somewhere close by, being certain about things. A dog, ritually impure by somebody’s reckoning and entirely beloved by somebody else’s, stood near a buffalo at a shed nobody had ever called prosperous.

Further along, a man from Australia and a woman from South Korea waited at the border with a dozen other nationalities, passports in their hands and identities in their heads, which is how all of us stand in a queue.

The senior government officer for the district. His deferential assistants. School buses, the children in them, the drivers who knew every turn of that road. Travellers. Atheists who had come for the mountains and priests who had come for God, both of them looking at the same view. Touts helping everybody. Guides who knew the name of each peak, standing shoulder to shoulder with influencers getting the light right.

One movement of the mountain. Gone. People, dreams, passports, identities, carrots, buffalo, shed.

They did not get to say goodbye. Almost none of them did.

Everybody becomes an extra

The numbers will arrive over the next few days. They always do, and they will be wrong, then revised, then settled, then forgotten. Thousands missing.

The videos arrived faster than the numbers. Somebody standing on a slope with a phone, filming a brown mass moving where a road used to be, the voice behind the camera going up in pitch until it stops being words. Then the drone footage, steady and level and much worse, because the drone shows you the scale that the man with the phone could not. A whole flank of hillside simply missing. Then the choppers, hovering over a place that no longer has anywhere to land.

And then a boy of eight, filmed at a hospital bed because nobody knew whose son he was. He had run from his school into the forest and climbed a tree and stayed up there, and he still had in his fist the two ten-rupee notes the police gave him to persuade him into their vehicle. His mother found him through that video. Her first verdict on getting him back was that he is always a mischievous kid and this is not his first broken bone.

Then back to the drone footage. I have watched more of this than I can justify. There is no reason to keep watching, and I keep watching.

I keep thinking about the extras in Tamil films. The hero fires the machine gun and twenty men fall, and their whole purpose in that scene is the falling. Nobody in the theatre wonders what any of them ate that morning. And each of those men was cast, and travelled to the shoot, and had somebody at home who asked how the day went. In a death toll like this, everybody becomes an extra. The criminal and the kind man. The software engineer, the yoga teacher, the woman who had come to visit for four days.

Years ago one wave took a man standing on the sand at Velankanni and a man standing on the sand at Phuket. One was there because of a vow made at the church. The other had two weeks off work. Further out it took fishermen off the Sri Lankan coast and people on islands in Indonesia whose names most of us learnt only afterwards. The sea did not ask any of them why they had come.

We ran out of theories in ninety seconds

A friend called and we tried, the way people do, to find something to hold on to. We discussed this Reuters piece. A foreign president behaving badly. An ambitious neighbour and its dams. Climate change. Consumerism. 

The reels, the crowds, tourism gone feral. Each one held for about ninety seconds and then slid off. We ended up at the sign of the times, which is what two grown men say when they have run out of theories, and we hung up soon after. Why these people. Why now. There is no answer, and that is the cruellest part of it. A reason would at least have given the grief somewhere to stand.

There is an album of photographs from Nepal on an old hard disk of mine. A sunrise coming up over a valley filled with cloud, which is still one of my favourites. Two peaks catching the first light while everything below stayed dark. A bare tree against an orange sky.

I look at them now and see what is not in them. No people. I met some of the kindest people I have met anywhere, and I came home with pictures of rock and light. The rock and the light are what did this.

The carrying

There are two kinds of pain here. One belongs to the people who are there, digging, waiting, identifying. That pain is not mine and I will not pretend to it. Real people have been carried down that river, and finding them and laying them to rest with some dignity is the work of the coming days.

The second is smaller. It is there all the same. You scroll past a missing person post, a face, a phone number, a note about what he was wearing when last seen, and something catches in the throat. Then you close the app and go to a meeting. Giving money helps. Giving time helps. Both are worth doing. Nobody explains the third thing, which is going about the day with this sitting at the back of the mind, numb and slightly ashamed, drowning it out with work and errands and, this morning, with these words.

I do not know what that carrying is for. I have decided it is for something.

Somewhere in Rasuwa this week, men pulled more than a hundred people alive out of a hydro plant tunnel, so covered in mud they looked like they had grown a second skin. That is who they are. Nepal will rebuild, with far too much practice at it. Unfairly. The mountains will be extraordinary again by winter, and photographs will be taken, and none of them will have people in them either.

Sit with the uncertainty. Take each minute as both a limit and an opening. Be kind, to each other, to the buffalo, to the shed. It is not an answer. It is the only thing on offer today.