in memoriam

One year. Has it really been that long?

One year ago I was sitting on the road outside my house, eating leftovers for dinner. Everyone was scared. I was just hungry. The earth would tremble once every fifteen minutes to show us who was really in charge. It was dark. It was also raining.

That is not what I want to talk about though. My family was far better off than most people after the earthquake. We had tents, a portable stove, gasoline, stocked food. Our earthquake experience was more like a camping trip to our front yard, really — compared to what others went through.

What I really want to talk about is what the experience taught us, as a people. People woke up, after a really long time. We saw things for what they were; the make-believe foundations that we Nepalese cherish so much were useless. It wasn’t Buddha that saved us from the earthquake. It wasn’t the glory of our mountains or the beauty of our hills. Our temples and old structures were just beautifully designed gas chambers. No god came down from the heavens and gave us all free food and water. The parliament was busy snatching tents and blankets for themselves, a parliament we put together through the bloodshed of our brothers. All of these things, useless, like trophies made from gold plated steel.

Our guardians came in forms with two hands and two feet, with rugged faces and dirty palms, some wearing army fatigues — others wearing nothing at all. With our bare hands we dug up thousands who were buried alive, with our bare hands we fed our neighbors while we had but little to eat, with our bare hands we finally unearthed that it was not the mountains or the landscapes that made Nepal great, it was the people. Us, the people, rising up from the pettiness of our differences: political, social and economic. The rich slept with the poor under the stars, both of them equally afraid of the earth.

Among the ashes of my sleeping nation, rose phoenixes made of bronze and mud. People complained, they shouted, they said that oblivion was inevitable and our efforts were in vain. All over Facebook, angry, angry people who did nothing but complain. Weak-minded, whining piles of meat without substance, screaming their lungs out. None of us heard them though, we didn’t have the time. We were busy with matters of consequence.

Never in my life had I really felt pride in my countrymen. It was a pride far surpassing any patriotic song that had ever been written. It was a pride in knowing that when I slept, someone else was working. And when they slept, I would step back into doing what was needed from me.

Yet still, cowards were among us. Cowards that stole from the defenseless. I pity them. I pity them because there they were, showing the world how powerless and miserable they were. You are always below the person you steal from, because he has what you want and you don’t. How low must they have been that they had to steal from people who had suffered the hand of god? I feel ashamed just breathing the same air.

These weren’t the only people I am not proud of. There were the stockpilers, ‘victims’ of the earthquake, always first in line when someone was giving away fried noodles. There were ‘rescue workers’ to whom distributing aid and helping villages was some sort of picnic, with merry songs and sleeping in the sun. There was ‘aid’ rotting away in the basement of a busy district officer’s building that some bank left as their ‘relief effort’. And of course, there were the politicians, who halted trucks full of supplies in their tracks because that area was under his ‘supervision’, so he could watch people starve in peace. We even saw what we really meant to our neighbors, sending us one man missions that left hundreds to die, blocking our supply lines when we had fallen and were struggling to get up.

But we outnumber them. We outnumber them all. The corruptors of this proud state. I think now is the time that we see that it was us, the people, who were the real saviors in the time of crisis. Instead of giving our pride to fake and useless symbols, instead of believing in vile and ignorant people, we can believe in ourselves.

We are not victims. We are survivors.

Never forget.

April 25th 2016.