A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE ROOFTOPS OF KATHMANDU
The city of Kathmandu, which covers an area of almost 50sq.km., lies at the literal and cultural heart of the Kathmandu Valley, once, according to geophysicists, an enormous lake which Buddhists believe was drained by the bodhisattva Manjushri. Today Kathmandu, along with its neighbouring districts of Lalitpur and Bhaktapur, form a densely packed, heavily polluted metropolis from which the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas are visible on far too few days in the year.
One of the reasons for the pollution is the population — just under 1½ million in the Kathmandu District alone — and the high density housing which has sprung up since the start of the new millennium in particular to accommodate it. The official price ceiling for land in Kathmandu is 5 million Nepali rupees per aana (i.e. about US$43,000 per 31.8sq.m.): however the market price can be at least double that in the capital’s most desirable residential and business districts. It is this high price of land, driven by an economy dependent on remittances, that has resulted in houses being built on plots measuring an average of a mere 4 aanas (about 127sq.m.). An inevitable consequence of the high land prices/small building plots scenario is that there is little, if any room for a house to spread out laterally or for a garden except, perhaps, a small confined space for parking a motorbike or two. Instead, the “build high” phenomenon has emerged, with three storeys — seemingly the legal maximum for a 4-anna plot — topped by a kind of half-sized storey being the norm. It is up here, on the split-level flat concrete rooftop with its tile-clad parapets — one part on top of the third storey, the other, reached by a spiral iron staircase, on top of the fourth half-storey — that many of the activities that in less densely packed suburban areas in the West would be associated with ground level take place To see how typically Nepali and yet at the same time strangely universal these are, here is an overview of a day in the life of a Kathmandu rooftop.
Day breaks gently in Kathmandu to the sound of small brass hand bells (ghanta in Sanskrit/Nepali, drilbu in Tibetan) being rung on a myriad rooftops while the scented smoke of incense fills the air: the gods are being greeted and respected at the start of another new day. Earthenware votive oil lamps (diya batti) are lit and carried hither and thither to purify every nook and cranny of the house right up to the rooftop itself. In a country where Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism blend so seamlessly together in their essential practices and rituals, including the piercing ring of the ghanta and the resonant deep-throated notes of the holy conch (shankha in Sanskrit/Nepali, dung dkar in Tibetan) it is often almost impossible to detect which of the two faiths is being practised were it not for the accompanying lyrical chants of the Vedic Gayatri Mantra in Hindu households, and the Avalokiteshvara, Green Tara or other similar mantra in their Buddhist counterparts.
As families begin the daily round of less spiritual, more domestic activities, the rooftops show their more practical side. Black and green plastic or shiny stainless steel tanks, capable of storing from five hundred to several thousand litres of water, are a feature of all rooftops, sometimes with the addition of an attached solar panel. Water for household use is pumped up here in order to regulate and maintain its pressure as it flows down to bathroom and kitchen taps. It is here also that laundry — so often bright and vibrant in strongly contrasting colours — is hand-washed in buckets and bowls then firmly pegged out to secure it against strong breezes and left to flutter gaily in a gentle mockery of the five-coloured prayer flags — blue, white, red, green and yellow — strung nearby if the household is Buddhist. In the monsoon season the washing is left to fend for itself all day, all too often getting drenched by the heavy rain and hanging limp and unlovely until the next sunny day restores it to lightness and life.
In a society in which ladies with short hair are as rare as a day without dal baht (the traditional Nepali meal), it is on rooftops that women young and old dry their newly-washed tresses in the sunshine, brushing and oiling them into lush luxuriance. Grandmothers, wrinkled and aged before their time, lovingly coiffure and braid their wriggling granddaughters’ locks, while dreaming, perhaps, of their own youthful days, untroubled by life’s harsher realities.
Some rooftops become taken over by the householders’ horticultural skills: some retirees spend a greater part of each day tending their precious blooms: ruby red and candy pink geraniums to welcome the warmer days of Spring; showy blue, violet and cerise petunias trumpeting the delights of Summer; marigold pompoms glowing golden during the Dashain and Tihar festivals as the year turns to Autumn; and scarlet poinsettias, harbingers of Christmas in the West, throughout the winter months.
In the cooler hours of early morning or late afternoon, children learn to skip or how to ride their dinky bikes on the smooth concrete while their elder siblings look on or coax their kites to soar higher than the eagles in the post-monsoon days of September and October, letting out hundreds of meters of string from their tightly wound spools. Traditional kites, crafted from lokta or handmade paper, have, sadly, largely given way to cheap plastic replicas emblazoned with gaudy images of Disney princesses or Japanese manga characters.
TikTok, with its fifteen second bursts of lip-synching and dancing which can turn any star-struck adolescent into an instant Nepal Idol hopeful, has taken Nepal by storm, especially since the onset of the COVID pandemic. Confined to home due to lockdown, teenagers have found the Chinese application an outlet for their creativity, a safety valve for the mental health and, yes, a boost for their burgeoning egos. Young girls in particular can be seen primping and miming on rooftops here and there as they hone their TikTok skills and dream of stardom.
For it has to be acknowledged that rooftops are very public places, locations from which not only to observe but also to be observed. For every rooftop denizen there are umpteen onlookers, around, below and above especially on the populous slopes of areas like Kapan, Mhepi, and Arubari. The cheek-by-jowl building style on pocket-handkerchief plots of land, with the windowless side walls of adjacent houses often totally abutting each other and people able to reach out from their balcony and touch their neighbour’s, inevitably leads to more than the occasional neighbourhood quarrel, usually between the ladies of the houses. As they shout at each other from their respective rooftops in ever increasing volume and vindictiveness, other neighbours brazenly come onto their balconies or skulk behind the curtains of their open windows to watch the latest real-time soap opera, a live, more entertaining alternative to YouTube, with the potential to involve more antagonists and even the encouraging barks of the family dog if it does not quickly fizzle out.
Indeed for some pampered pooches, the extremely lucky ones in a metropolis where street doggies struggle to stay alive and crave a home to call their own, a rooftop is their palace in the skies where they become kings of their own small realms, barking at innocent intruders on adjacent rooftops, at washing flapping in the wind, at crows audaciously coming to perch on the railings, carrying scraps of food in their beaks.
But it is in the evening, when daylight dims, the sunset sky flares orange and violet, and the hills surrounding the Valley are thrown into sharp relief that the rooftop world assumes its most poetic and beguiling aura. The rooftops become locations for whispered intimacies, for silent reveries, for introspection. Then, as darkness descends and extinguishes the sky’s final embers, millions of lights across the Kathmandu Valley start to twinkle brightly and the rooftops are left serene and silent until the dawn of another day.