The story of maligaun

The story of maligaun is the story of Kathmandu and its peoples who aren't actually from Kathmandu.

It began a little more than fifty years ago in a village in the East. My grandfather had had two young children, my dad being the oldest, and he was barely out of his teens. He didn't want to live in the village for the rest of his life. So he escaped the village, and came to Kathmandu.

In Kathmandu he lived as a student, and got two degrees. One rented shared apartment after another, he saw all the different types of families and people. He settled in this particular area near Baluwatar. It was accessible by public transport, close to everything else, and still pretty much a marsh. It was massively undervalued. As soon as he started his job as a civil servant, he started saving up his salary to buy land there. This was in the late sixties and seventies.

As years went by, my grandmother, my dad, and my uncles and aunts came to live with him. Along with my family came his brothers' families, and their cousins, and so on, until slowly the entire extended family had a presence in Kathmandu. The city was new to them, and they needed a place to put their roots down. They settled down in the same place my grandfather had decided to settle down. It was cheap, but more importantly, that's were the family was. This was between mid seventies to mid eighties.

The clan grew and grew and grew. The second generation (along with some of the older generation) joined civil service and foreign service, and prospered. Prosperous young men made way to prosperous families, and young, healthy children. Ahh the heydays of Maligaun.

Perhaps it's my clouded memory and a fondness for one's childhood that's fogged up my judgment, but it's not unfair to say the greatest days Maligaun saw were in the late nineties and the early noughties. The Maoist rebellion hadn't taken off yet, but more importantly, it hadn't made its way to Kathmandu. There was an abundance of young people -- the younger ones of the second generations and the older ones of the third. Blue, red, green, yellow, pink -- a rainbow of kites covered the skies during Dashain through late tihar. The air did genuinely smell of hope and excitement for the future. There were so many possibilities. The country was stabilizing, and the politics was bound to improve. The number of good schools was increasing, their were foreign brands coming in. There was so much to look forward to.

And then the palace massacre happened. And then the deuba scandals. And then the intensification of the maoist attacks. And finally in 2006, the peace treaty. Maligaun however, saw through the lies and fake promises of the peace treaty. It had seen those false hopes before, and didn't fall for them. It knew things were going to be the same, at best.

The trajectory the country was going, the peace treaty didn't change much. Unemployment was still rampant. Corruption didn't go down. Each government after another got progressively more corrupt and open about it. Schools started getting disrupted, villages were getting desperate for change.

The changes were already happening in the background, but now they took the front and center stage. A few years after the peace treaty, everyone saw it for exactly what it was -- an agreement between most honorable gentlemen in the old boys' club that wouldn't shift the society fundamentally. There was still a desire for more, the world was moving ahead, the two neighbors had gone up way too far, but the country had been in stasis since time immemorial. Something had to give.

Two things did. For the folks that were in the villages, opportunities in South East Asia and the Gulf regions opened up. They were not great, the salaries were barely livable for Kathmandu, but they were better than that they got in the villages, and more importantly, no one was there too judge you for the lowly things that you did because everyone was in the same boat. The numbers began to grow. Gradually at first, and then massively. Villages emptied out. There were no able-bodied young men to carry the bodies of the dead, so women and the elderly took up to the task. Until slowly, and this is still happening now, the women too started looking for opportunities abroad.

The second things, for the folks in the cities. They started discovering educational opportunities abroad. In Canada, the U.S, Australia, places in Europe. Kathmandu had become so crowded and expensive, since everyone moved there even after the peace treaty, that those places were not outrageously expensive compared to it. They realized the educational opportunities could be turned into immigration opportunities, not just for themselves, but for their families too. So everyone had a cousin or two or three who started moving abroad.

This is still the story of Maligaun. The youngsters of Maligaun moved abroad too. The first few years were harsh and demanding. Many almost couldn't make it abroad. But they persisted. Eventually, several years later and a marriage and a child or two later, things stabilized. Both spouses began working, and realized even those expensive places were reasonable for a family with two working incomes. What was expensive was child care.

And that was solved quite easily, the traditional way. Parents of those that had moved abroad, the second generation of Maligaun, started visiting their children and their families abroad. For short visits first. After all, Dashain was to always be in Kathmandu. And then for longer visits. And eventually, they spent more time outside Nepal than they did in Maligaun.

And that brings us to this year. Dashain in Maligaun used to be a grand affair. Many dozens of families, at least three centenarians, almost a half-dozen goats, dozens of chickens and ducks across the families. It was a multi-day event where people came in from far and wide for the celebrations. This year, there are two families celebrating it there, and that too, barely. Maligaun is not in Maligaun anymore, it's moved.

What now? As those houses are lived less in, they'll lose their value to the owners, and get sold. For a comparable house in a suburb in Virginia or Toronto. The family-community will move out because the family's not their anymore. And the journey that began more than fifty years ago will have ended. For a different one. A more separated, disjointed one. A unified journey of a people will turn into dozens of individual journeys. The stories will diverge.

Don't let the romanticism of it all get into your hearts though. Of a feudal country, in a feudal city, it was a feudal neighborhood mostly despite its humble origins. Things have changed now, though not because of the generosity of people's hearts, but because of the very same migration patterns mentioned above. People who didn't see themselves as people are discovering they too are person, and deserve the respect and dignity of one. People who didn't see hope or a place for themselves to grow, bound my the tight social fabric, have broken free to explore their interests and vocations. They're not just surviving anymore, they're living and thriving and exploding -- not just as a community, but as individuals.

Maligaun was a swamp a little more than a half-century ago. It became a stepping stone for villagers from the hills to walk the earth, to go beyond sustenance, and to mattering. While by itself it didn't precipitate any changes, its bounds were not strong enough to stop those that were happening outside. It's all for a better future.