The Vishnumati River has its source in the mountains near Kathmandu. It’s considered holy; in Kathmandu it merges with the Bhagmati, which then winds through the plains of Nepal to India and into the holy Ganges, where thousands of pilgrims dip daily. Sadly, as the cows bellowing forlornly on its fetid banks could testify, holy things in Nepal may be worshipped, but they’re not particularly well looked after.
The Vishnumati is considered one of the best places in town to dump waste, because the river just carries away what you no longer want. Apart from the bits that cling to rocks and banks, that grow false islands of foul rot, that litter the nearby roads and paths and wash back up the alleyways. Forty years ago you could fish in this river; now the black slick of human refuse turns your stomach.Slaughterhouses line the Vishnumati. The blood has seeped into the soil – the locals carry handkerchiefs to cover their nose and mouth as they walk by. On the ground lie freshly peeled skins, casually crumpled as if the buffalo has just stepped out of them into the shower. Murders of crows descend on sacks of bloody bones. Aged and bandy-legged porters pack baskets of buffalo dung and offal onto their heads, wade into the viscous waters and dump their offensive load – up there for one of the worst jobs in the world.
Yet in the midst of this carnage, potplants bloom. Women dress up for temple visits, old men hold hands together on doorsteps, children play happily with buff knuckles until their mothers scold them on hygiene principles. This community is trying to make the most of their stinky situation.
We enter Radhika’s house through an 18th century four foot wooden door. The multi-storied house is surprisingly shallow, only around 3 metres deep before it falls away into a small paved terrace, then to swampland rampant with pumpkin vines. It is not her land, nor her house, and she tells me that the landlord, who lives upstairs, counts each pumpkin.
“But I like living here,” she assures me, grinning. “It’s not where I was born, but my children have never known anywhere else. The place may be dirty but the people are good.”
Radhika’s terrace is crowded with pots containing tomatoes, capsicum and eggplant, their roots cheekily sucking on the swamp below. It’s called “zero land farming.”
“My daughter loves these plants,” she says fondly. “She was given the seedlings at school, and she looks after them every day. I never thought our family could grow our own food without land, but she’s taught me how.”
Like most people in this community, Radhika is poor and uneducated. Her children’s is the first generation around here to have a school to go to, and still very few houses have their own toilet.
“We are lucky,” she confides. “We are allowed to use the toilet in the house next door. But my children used to just go in the gutter, and even now you see other children doing that. It’s not nice.”
Though Radhika still throws her rubbish into the river in a plastic bag, there is less and less of it. She separates any bottles or tin for the scrap collectors to recycle. She carefully saves the vegetable scraps each time she cooks, for her neighbour Sunita who has a composter on her rooftop. In exchange for the scraps she regularly receives bags full of rich healthy soil to make her tiny farm thrive.
We visit Sunita’s rooftop garden, way above the odour, with a view to Kathmandu’s iconic Swayambu temple and the hills beyond. Sunita is a passionate gardener, a tender smile on her old-before-her-time face as she shows us her vegetables and cheery blooms - marigolds, lilies and a surprising red fuchsia bush. She wears a sari when she gardens, though she tells me “it’s an old one.”
Sunita’s grandfather hovers among the pots, a fine figure with his shorts, cane and oval Nepali cap to keep the sun from burning his skinny balding skull. This house was where he was born, though the family have never owned it. It’s unlikely they ever will.
He’s keen to chat with his impromptu visitors. He is the one who tells us about the long-gone days of fishing in the Vishnumati, plus the holy and convenient necessity for every Hindu in town to scatter their beloved’s ashes into the Ganges-bound Baghmati. Symbolic though it may be, this final journey is a muddy, messy and slowmoving affair and it’s arguable whether any ashes actually make it all the way to India.
My colleague Pradeep nods sadly. He remembers picnics on the banks of this river when he was a child. But that was before roads were built and legends were told of opportunities in Kathmandu, leading to unprecedented migration from villages into a city ill-prepared for its new inhabitants. Refuse, garbage, faeces, hooves and horns first fed, then choked the river’s flow as the population rose from 300,000 to nearly 2 million in 40 years.
“I’m waiting for the next earthquake,” says Pradeep only half-jokingly. “That should get rid of a few of us.”
We stroll along the riverside, namaste to the children in their school playground, gag a little as the wind wafts another polluted stench our way. Near the bridge, there is a breath of fresh air – a garden, planted and tended by a community cooperative, bursting with colour. Here there are no vegetables at all – it’s designed as a pleasure garden, with shady trees, a shrine to Krishna and, of all things, heavy sweet rosebushes.
“We worked hard to make this happen, mostly with our own money,” says Kanchar, the cooperative’s treasurer. “At first we fenced off the area and planted some grass but people still broke through – they used our new garden to shoot up drugs or go to the toilet. Then we put in the trees and the shrine. The flowers began to bloom. Now we cut and sell the flowers and use the money to pay for new plants.”
After nearly two years of work, the oasis stretches for around 200 metres along the riverbank before it disintegrates into grey and stinking normality. Upstream 500 metres, another group has now started on a similar venture in healthy neighbourhood rivalry.
“What I like the most,” says Kanchar, “is that people don’t hold their noses here by our houses. That makes me proud.”
I ask Kanchar what they’re doing about the river itself. How are they protecting it from the dumping that goes on? Does he think there will ever be fish in it again?
He looks at me like I’m mad, breaks it to me as gently as he can.
“The river’s dead,” he tells me. “We’re doing many good things here, but nothing we can do now will change that.”
