Berlin: City of Satan's Throne

"It would not be enough for a poet to have memories," said Rainer Maria Rilke's protagonist and oracle, the young poet Malte Laurids Brigge. "You must be able to forget them."

Whether memories are something you have or something you should forget resonates and echoes in almost every street in Berlin. There are all the obvious echoes, Frederick the Great laying the foundations of what we now know as Germany, not just territorially, but culturally in the row of Hohenzollern palaces and universities at one end of Unter den Linden . Nazism, the Holocaust, Communism, the Warsaw Pact and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the symbols and icons are everywhere. Here’s a remnant of the Berlin Wall, there’s a sign indicating the site of Hitler’s bunker. Here’s where the Communist leaders lived, set apart from the general populace, there is the office of Hitler’s secret police, now the Ministry of Finance. The uplifting realist murals of der volk, smiling and strong, are intact. One’s responses are inevitably cliché ridden. The ghosts stalk the streets and everywhere sotto voce can be heard Wordsworth’s still sad music of humanity. But, that Berlin is still there, intact and vibrant, is itself a miracle. It is a miraculous city of ghosts. Ghosts which it seems the city has decided not to forget.

Berlin’s museums contain three of the most remarkable relics of antiquity anywhere in the world. The Pergamon altar is a gigantic, classical temple of statues, pillars and carved friezes. Construction began about 160BCE; the altar was dedicated to Zeus and was a site of human sacrifice in the great city of Pergamon, in what is now Turkey. Ancient texts call it “Satan’s Throne” and it crops up in the Book of Revelations. The sculptured frieze depicts the struggle of the Gods and the giants, but also contains numerous embedded literary references. The library in Pergamon was second only to the great, now mythical, library at Alexandria. It was built following the decline of Athens when no other city had gained hegemony. Pergamon had ambitions. The heroic and morbid qualities of the Pergamon altar recommended themselves as inspirations to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. In this one of the greatest ancient monuments anywhere, with the benefit of hindsight, are the first resonances of Berlin’s heroic ambitions and tragic realities.

Also in the Pergamon Museum is the equally astounding Ishtar Gate, built by King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, now Iraq. It is a solid crenellated fortress wall around a high perfect arch. The wall and the arched gate are covered in the deepest blue ceramics decorated by alternating rows of aurochs and dragons. The dragons are elegant and long-legged, rather than frightening, conveying their unnatural, magical qualities. They are creatures of another world. The approach to the gate was made along a processional avenue, also tiled in blue. The frieze is inlaid with rows of life size lions, strutting with calm and dignity towards the Ishtar Gate. Statues of the Gods were paraded down this processional route on New Year’s Day. A replica of the gate was built in Iraq but has reportedly been badly damaged in the recent war.

The third great antiquity in a Berlin museum is the statue of arguably the most beautiful women the world has ever known, Nefertiti, the wife of Akhenaton and the mother of Tutankhamen, both beautiful too. Olive-skinned, long necked, with high cheekbones and a long angular jaw line, her forehead thrust back, her eyes pointing upwards, the air of mystery and beauty is only compounded by the fact that Nefertiti now only has one eye, the other socket is blank but not empty.

Fast forward to Berlin’s troubled and tragic twentieth century history. The Nazi period is commemorated in two immensely sensitive, subtle and sad memorials. Under the cobbles in the square across Unter den Linden from the Humboldt University is a glass panel. Invisible from a distance, it is less than a metre square. Below the glass pane is a lit room of empty white bookshelves. This is the site where the Nazis brought 20,000 books from the University and burnt them. No commentary is offered. The empty shelves, as it were, speak volumes.

Near to the Brandenburg Gate and opposite the Tiergarten are a vast collection of oblong grey stone blocks. This is the Holocaust memorial and, once one knows that, one immediately imagines in a literal way that these stones represent coffins. Perhaps, but not only that. From the edge of the blocks they all seem more or less the same height, rising evenly to the horizon. This is an optical illusion. Walk amongst them and the cobbled stone floor undulates and sinks rapidly down into a valley. Very quickly the blocks, now apparently set on their narrow ends, loom above you. Above only the sky. The alleyways between them are narrow and no one else can be seen. Occasionally someone fleetingly crosses your path – and immediately disappears. Again no commentary is offered, the passerby must decide on meaning and symbol for themselves. Children, unaware of meaning and symbol and unburdened by history, run around amongst the blocks treating them as a playground or a maze. They have accepted Rilke’s injunction about the necessity of forgetting.

Attitudes to remembering communism seem to be more ragged, much less clear cut. The tall, thin radio tower with its disco mirror ball at the top remains and dominates the Berlin skyline as its builders intended it should. Below is the spiky white concrete radio building, still a masterpiece of modernist aesthetics. Walk away from Alexanderplatz and towards Unter den Linden and you come upon the huge site of Frederick the Great’s Royal Palace. Much of it is now a car park, but about half of it was where the Communists built their people’s palace. In its latter days it was known as Honecker’s lamp shop. Square and gargantuan, through the smoky brown glass, clearly visible within were many of those gigantic hanging lamps with long cords and many white plastic shades which you used to see in every hotel lobby and public building in the old Eastern Europe. They cast a baleful and inadequate light, never enough to read a newspaper, over orange leatherette furniture and patterned chocolate carpets. But now the lamp shop is gone. It is being dismantled by huge cranes because demolition would do too much damage to the surrounding historic buildings, including Berlin’s cathedral, which was virtually demolished twice during the Second World War. Accidental demolition in peacetime would be frowned upon. So the brown glass skin has gone, as has much of the concrete structure. What remains is a rusting steel skeleton which is being removed piecemeal. Once the demolition is complete the intention is to build a facsimile of the old Royal Palace. This time around it will be a shopping mall, offices and a hotel. The price tag currently is estimated at 750 million Euros, which will no doubt prove conservative. Public funds are not yet forthcoming. That building, if it ever gets built, will tell its own story about what shall be remembered, albeit in a bastardised form, and the uses that memory can be put to. Outside on the chain link fence that surrounds the building site is a poster in English saying ‘East Germany asserts its legitimacy.’

Gendarmenmarkt is the most beautiful square in Berlin. On each flank are identical rococo churches, one the French church built for the Huguenot émigrés and the other the German Lutheran church. Between these two and facing the square is the neo-classical concert hall, all sweeping steps, arcades of pillars and statues stalking the edge of the roof. It is vaguely reminiscent of the Pergamon altar, as perhaps all neo-classical buildings are. In the evening all three of these buildings are built in different soft pastel colours, orange, pink and green this evening. The buildings glow and appear weightless; ethereal. On one corner of Gendarmenmarkt is a fantastic chocolate shop, Fassbender & Rausch. In the window is a gigantic dark chocolate sculpture of the Brandenburg Gate, complete with chariot and charging horses about to smash through the shop window and rush across Gendarmenmarkt. In the next window is a similarly huge chocolate structure of a perilously tilting Titanic.
On the south eastern edge of East Berlin is a fascinating flea market, not mentioned in the guide books. It too can be interpreted as a site of memory. The people wandering through the town square where it is held are punks, white Rastas and Mohicans. Occasionally people sunbathe nude in the market and cool off in the fountain. The books for sale at the second hand bookstalls speak of a particular moment of twentieth century intellectual history: Freud, Kafka, Koestler, Susan Sontag ‘On Photography’, Camus’s ‘La Peste’, of course. Anarchist slogans have been printed on clothes and bits of material: ‘Stop me before I kill again’, ‘the system works because you work’, ‘television is not the revolution’. The second hand records for sale are divided by cardboard dividers: ‘doom’ and ‘death’ are two of the categories. We use to have places like this in London, like Camden Lock, but mostly they have been redeveloped now. In their place are Starbucks and Lush. Unburdened of memories of tragedy and clinging dimly to memories of heroism perhaps we wonder what to remember and what to forget.

See the photos of Berlin at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets

Love on Lamma Island, Hong Kong

Hong Kong has two monsoons. The winter monsoon which begins in October is blown in on south winds from China. Those winds now come from Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Shenzhen was a fishing village until a couple of decades ago. Now it’s a manufacturing powerhouse where 11million people live. Factories making tee shirts and trainers are stacked up against barracks for workers for miles and miles. The pollution from all this activity blows down to Hong Kong and gathers in Victoria Harbour. As a result when you get the star ferry from the central terminal to Kowloon, by the time you arrive in Tsim Sha Tsui a few minutes later the famous Hong Kong skyline is covered in a muddy brown haze. IM Pei’s knife like Bank of China building and the giant finger of IFC2 are hardly visible.

Few tourists bother to get the ferry from pier 4 at the central ferry terminal to go to Lamma Island. The ferry chugs across the front of the harbour, leaving the glass and steel skyscrapers behind and passing rows and rows of high rise flats, past Hong Kong University and out beyond the western end of Hong Kong Island. In this outer part of the harbour there are only small islands around. They are hilly and verdant, not built up at all. You also leave behind all the frantic seaborne activity of Hong Kong Harbour. The ferry only passes the odd large, flat barge loaded with containers for Indonesia or Malaysia. After about half an hour you arrive on Lamma Island. The atmosphere here could not be more different to Hong Kong. No cars, no high rise, no flyovers, no walkways in the sky. When you leave the ferry, what looks like hundred of bicycles are tethered to the railings on the jetty. The municipality has built some narrow concrete trails to navigate pedestrians and hikers across the island with helpful signs pointing to pagodas, temples, beaches and villages. The dark green, monsoon-fed hills extend up to the skyline, as once they must have done on Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, before all that flat land was reclaimed and created with sand imported from Singapore and Indonesia. Victoria harbour has been pushed back, narrowed and become more turbulent, especially at typhoon time.

A few hundred metres down the jetty a small village straggles along the shore line. The buildings barely extend back a couple of streets. Little blocks of six or eight flats are built behind concrete yards. Colourful, homely washing blows about on washing lines on balconies or out of windows. The buildings are clad in white or grey ceramic tiles, as they are in many places in China, giving them a shiny, slippery look, but they still seem a little unfinished. Telephone and electricity wires enter and leave the flats at unlikely points, their trajectory determined by random functionality. The need to keep facades uniform and clear, a lesson we learnt in the UK from the Georgians and Palladians, is neither here nor there. On the ground floors, all the front doors are open and the dark, the stark interior is covered with a bead curtain. The sound of a TV filters through from some houses. The front yards contain selections of fishing nets, tyres, boat engines and all manner of other objects, each in its place notwithstanding the disorderly appearance. A few enterprising locals have acquired coca cola fridges and are selling bottles of water and fizzy drinks from their front yards. People sit around in the shade of the front yard, playing cards, chatting or fanning themselves, staring out in a preoccupied or vacant fashion. You might have seen a similar scene on Greek islands or in the south of Spain, though perhaps not for much longer. This is not a place where people go away from home to work. They either put fishing boats out when the right time and tide comes, run restaurants and cafés from the front of their houses or sell drinks to passers by. Many do all of the above. There is no industrial division of labour. The ferry to Lamma Island seems to have taken you back fifty years in half an hour.

On the other side of the island are some larger, swankier restaurants where fresh fish are kept in tanks aerated by pipes. You choose the one you want and it is cooked up for you to eat at a plastic table overlooking the sea. You can have a decent bottle of Australian wine to go with it. Just below the restaurant balconies in the sea fisher folk wearing large, traditional straw hats (for sale for HK$10, about 65 pence) are out on their own on launches spreading fine white nets near the shore line. But the fish served in the restaurants was probably flown in live from the Philippines or Thailand. Eating out on Lamma Island is popular with Hong Kong people and some of the restaurants have their own boats plying back and forth.

If you follow the path for 15 minutes or so, you come to a beach, not a big beach, not Bondi or Venice, but nevertheless a golden sandy beach, where people in their swimming costumes play with beach balls, children build their own sandcastles and destroy those created by other children. Complex irrigation systems are constructed with plastic buckets and spades, the hilarious fun being in watching a small wave overwhelm the six inches of sand barricades in an instant. Under the trees the adults keep out of the sun and smile benignly. Some go swimming. A portion of the sea is roped off with yellow ropes and buoys for safe swimming. A handsome lifeguard in a surprisingly large concrete watchtower surveys the scene apathetically. The dangers are minimal. No one is taking any risks at all. The swimming is sedate, the swimmers keeping their heads out of the water. Some swim with their sunglasses on. The tinies are ankle deep in the shallows, clinging to their parents’ fingers.

A young couple come down to the beach for a photo shoot. The photographer has an enormous paparazzi lens. The girl is dressed in a flouncing white cotton gypsy dress. The boy is wearing a bow tie, cream silk shirt and white trousers with a sharp pleat. They pose in numerous informal poses on the rocks and on the beach. Then they go into the sea fully clothed, get themselves soaked and adopt various suggestive poses, rolling in the surf, the boy bearing the girl in his arms while emerging from the waves. She is obviously hysterical with pleasure. Her worlds of fantasy and reality have finally aligned. He looks more nervous and wary, perhaps a little embarrassed. He needn’t be. Everyone gathers to watch; everyone has an approving look; small rounds of applause ripple round for particularly good magazine-like poses. Other people’s happiness is contagious.

The photographer has presumably taken care to screen out of shot the enormous coal fired power station that flanks one side of the beach. The chimneys are huge and billow clouds of white steam and there is a mountain of coal standing in readiness to feed the hungry beast. This power station is owned by the richest man in Hong Kong, Li Ka shing, and provides all the electricity for Hong Kong Island. Those lights that dance across the buildings on the harbour waterfront as you return, celebrating hypermodernity, start their journey in that mountain of coal amidst the fisher folks, the swimmers and the newlyweds.

The revolution in Nepal starts today

The dawn chorus in Kathmandu is unique. Himalayan birds have a high, pure melodic song, still beautifully evident, even omnipresent, particularly at sunrise. But their delightful sound is being elbowed aside by the caw caw of large black crows. According to Nepalis they are blow-ins from India, like so many other unwelcome things. In the distance the sound of metal on metal could be a temple bell, or a hammer on an anvil. It’s probably a temple, because you can also hear the Tibetan-style chanting now and again. A Bollywood song floats across the fields from someone’s transistor radio. But above all this chaotic but gentle near-harmony rises an atonal symphony of dogs barking. Big and small, some bark in loud, deep staccato bursts, others snap in a rapid-fire high pitch; some issue protracted howls. One responds to another, sensing some atavistic threat or possibility. Inaudible are the sighs of the stirring, turning and waking people as the frequency and volume of dogs barking rises to a frenzied crescendo. It’s too early to get out of bed.

Once you do get out of the bed, get dressed, leave the house and get out on the street, the shops are open. Children in smart matching uniforms, hair parted and plastered down with water or oil, are off to school. People go to work on motorbikes or wait for a bus. Hailing a taxi is a vain hope. They are all stationary in endless queues for petrol stretching hundreds of yards; dirty white small Maruti Suzukis (not dissimilar to the short-lived British Mini Metro) wait patiently in line. The drivers are nowhere near the cars because the queue isn’t moving. They have disappeared for a cup of tea. Some have appointed children as watchmen. In the unlikely event of the queue moving, the children scamper off to find the driver, but there is no hurry. Progress is made in yards over hours. Or perhaps there is no petrol at all and the wait will be entirely futile.

Indian Oil supplies all Nepal’s oil, like its crows, from India. It is paid for by the Nepali government. The Government then sells it on at the pump at a subsidised price. World oil prices are now as high as they have ever been - $82 a barrel and still rising for the time being. The wholesale price rises and the retail price stays fixed, so the payment by the Nepali government to Indian Oil simply continues to rise, or to be more exact the Nepali Government’s debt to Indian Oil continues to rise. The Government cannot afford the repayments and Indian Oil have run out of patience, cutting off credit and petrol supplies. The Government is reluctant to increase the price at the pump for fear of a citizens’ revolt. Perhaps their fears are justified. Although the Nepali petrol shortage started some time ago, it was a Government-imposed petrol price increase that resulted in the monks taking to the streets in Burma. Events in Burma will not have encouraged the Government to increase petrol prices – and so the shortage simply continues with no end in sight.

In the UK taxi drivers have opinions about everything and are treated by journalists and politicians as having a Delphic connection to ‘what’s really going on’. In many poorer countries servants play that oracular role. Reality as experienced by most ordinary people only intrudes on the sequestered life of the elite when the servant tells them of some disaster or depredation in their life or in the life of their family. These tales almost always feature unconscionable hardship for someone close to the servant. So the servant of a friend in Nepal reported that her husband, a taxi driver, had defaulted on the bank loan he had taken to buy the taxi as a result of the petrol shortage. The car had been repossessed; the repayments he had already made counted for nought. He was now unemployed and without savings. The family now relies on the maid’s wages.

But the traffic situation was to get much worse as the day wore on. By lunch time news was starting to filter out from a meeting between the Prime Minister and the two Maoist leaders, Prachanda and Bhattarya, that they had not reached an agreement about the Maoist demand that a republic be declared and the King removed from all constitutional roles forthwith before elections to a constituent assembly which had been agreed in a UN-brokered ceasefire. The Maoists had indicated that without the declaration of a republic they would leave the seven-party Government and that would put the elections scheduled for November in jeopardy. Almost everyone agreed about the Maoists true motives for withdrawing from the Government. They had recognised that they were not going to do well at the ballot box, perhaps reduced to eight or ten per cent of the vote so they were keen to find an excuse to delay the election. Sure enough, no deal was reached to continue with the Government and a rally was called for a sports field in central Kathmandu where Bhattarya was to announce the Maoist programme of action to bring about a republic.

Notwithstanding the Maoists tactics one can understand the growth of Republican sentiment in Nepal. The Nepali royal family has a particularly colourful recent history that would make most other royal families blanch, even those with the most bloodthirsty pasts. In 2001 a psychopathic Crown Prince committed regicide, murdering the King, his mother, several other members of the Royal Family and, finally, himself. An uncle of the dead king was quickly found to replace him, King Gyanendra. The previous Kings, while not exactly having the superstar reforming status of Spain’s Juan Carlos, had more or less kept Nepali politics in one piece. In particular they had succeeded in keeping the Nepali army in their barracks, except where they were fighting the Maoist insurgency in rural areas. This the military had done in a dirty, oppressive and not very effective way. By the standards of say Latin America in the 1980s, this war was nevertheless a pretty mild affair. About 13000 people are said to have died in the State’s war with the Maoists, but this sounds like a very unreliable statistic.

The new King Gyanendra had pretty quickly tired of his (admittedly ineffectual) Governments and sacked the Prime Minister, executing a kind of a constitutional coup in 2005 with the lukewarm support of some of the army. That situation had only been prevented from sliding into dictatorship by the intervention of the international community, particularly India, who had its own insurgent problems across the border in Bihar. A peace process was established and, one way and another, the Maoists were persuaded to abandon their uprising and join a seven party Government. In reality the Government’s seven parties divide into three factions: the monarchists sympathetic to the military; a broad left republican movement and the Maoists. Plans were put in place, hugger mugger, for a new constitution and elections. All that came to a juddering halt this afternoon.

The Maoists reckon that the monarchy is extremely unpopular and calls for a republic are likely to make them popular with the electorate. They’re probably right about the unpopularity of the Monarchy. Not only has the King displayed unappealing tendencies towards authoritarianism and incompetence, the Crown Prince Paras is also a pretty unattractive prospect. Exceedingly overweight, he also has a reputation for hard drinking, womanising and a generally dissolute lifestyle. He recently had a heart attack at a relatively young age and, according to one of the heart surgeons, was smoking in his hospital bed whilst still coming round from the anaesthetic. Not a nice guy.

The belief that the unpopularity of the Monarchy would make them more popular stands on less sure foundations. The original intention was that the Constituent Assembly, once elected, would decide the fate of the Monarchy, perhaps through a plebiscite of some kind. Calling for a republic now gives them casus belli for further agitation in the streets, villages and towns that would lead to the cancellation of the elections. Their real motives for wanting the elections cancelled is that their polling suggests that they would only get about 10 per cent of the vote and that would leave them in a weak position to join a new Government. This has come to a shock to the Maoists. Perhaps they believed their own PR: that they ‘controlled’ 80 per cent of the country. Nearer the truth is that they had the run of 80 per cent of the country and in some areas where traditional administration had more or less collapsed, they had established some rudimentary local administration along with rough and summary justice, no doubt with considerable emphasis on protection and racketeering.

Again the experience of servants provides a small insight into what’s really going on. An expat was unhappy with her maid and wanted to be rid of her. So she sacked her; not an unusual event. The servant was mightily disgruntled and reported the matter to the local Maoists, who visited the erstwhile employer and demanded compensation. After much discussion and some mild threats, modest compensation was paid, not to the Maoists, but to the servant. Whether a proportion passed to the Maoists is a matter of speculation, but maybe they nevertheless did the lady some good, by fair means and foul. Allegations of skulduggery abound.

The Maoist rally to announce their programme of action was held on a sports field in the centre of Kathmandu. The prospect of the rally pretty soon brought traffic, which rarely flows smoothly through narrow, pot-holed lanes, to a standstill. Occasionally a bus from a rural area would cut its way through the streets full of young people, including those packed on the roof. The horn blared and the people on the roof waved large red flags with hammers and sickles. Many wore combat fatigues and red bandanas emulating Che Guevara chic. Others wore red and blue tracksuits with Y.C.L on their backs: Young Communist League. On the sports fields there was a large passive crowd, mostly standing around, many clearly from rural areas, mostly young. Some stood with their back to the stage, others read newspapers and most looked bored, but mildly apprehensive. The only cheering or clapping came from people at the front near the stage, usually at the mention of Washington or Iraq. Over the stage a large sign had been erected calling for the immediate declaration of a republic. Many people milled about the stage and to one side was a lectern with a hammer and sickle flag planted on it. Prachandra, the boss of the Maoists, had cried off attending the rally through ill-health and Bhattarya was making a long speech lacking much animation, in the familiar prolix style of Leftist leaders, who generally do not regard brevity as the soul of wit. Nor do they have to worry too much about the intimate scrutiny of a television camera. Long-windedness is not a problem.

Bhattarya promised that they would go from house to house seeking support for their call for a republic. They would organise rallies and demonstrations. He stopped short of saying that the Maoists would ‘return to the jungle’ calling out their cadres from the camps where they had been more or less harmlessly installed since the peace process. There is widespread scepticism about the extent that the Maoists had given up their weapons and a ready supply of more guns is available over the border in India, where the Maoists move freely without official obstruction. Presumably they could resume the armed struggle, but, for the time being, they are not going to.

India’s role in all this is complex and contradictory. One often-recycled rumour is that Chou En lai and Nehru did a deal many years ago. China could have Tibet and India would control Nepal. China duly took over Tibet but when India sought to exert its own expansionist territorial claims in 1962, the Chinese sent nearly a million PLA troops over the Himalayas and India was swiftly put in its place. That story is so neat that it is almost certainly apocryphal.

The source of all this tamasha in Nepali politics is increasingly obscure. What everyone wanted and what they want now is more or less lost in confusion. Peace seems far away and economic prospects are very poor. Tourism is still moderately busy, but mostly of the low return backpacking variety, and very susceptible to a crash in confidence. (Neighbouring Bhutan is doing very well at attracting the high net worth crowd, like Mick Jagger and Sting, and they don’t come much higher net worth than them. If you go to Bhutan you are required to spend a minimum of US$200 a day.) Handicrafts are not well organised and exports are minimal, logging is extensive and mostly illegal, even though Nepalis have done groundbreaking work in the past on forestry governance. Long-term investment is negligible. Hydroelectric power generated in the Himalayas to be sold to power-hungry India, though a long-cherished ambition, is for the moment a pipedream.

Because of the Maoist rally many of the tourist sites in Kathmandu’s wonderful Durbar Square were relatively deserted, at least as far as foreigners were concerned. The locals went about their business as usual. The only Sanskrit University in Nepal carries on. Hindu and Buddhist temples made from red brick and beautiful, carved wood, stand side by side in religious and architectural harmony. Some are festooned with colourful bunting. On the steps courting couple sit talking quietly, or just looking at each other. Inside, worshippers light incense and walk along wooden balconies rotating prayer wheels. Someone rings the temple bell, chanting their prayers sotto voce. In the Hindu temples you can buy the prashad. The blessed temple sweets made from condensed milk and sugar.

One temple in Durbar Square is the temple of the Kumari, the child Goddess. Priests choose a girl destined for this role early in her life and she leaves her family and lives on an upper floor of the temple. There she remains until puberty. Occasionally she appears at the window and will, in some circumstances, bless a visitor. Whilst we were there the current Kumari did appear at the window. A full-faced girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old (and therefore nearing the end of her tenure), olive-skinned and heavily made up, her eyes blackened and pointing upwards like an Indian dancer, wearing a surly, bored, unhappy expression appeared for a few seconds, her face filling the carved wooden window like a framed portrait. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished again. Visitors were instructed not to take photos and to put some money into a box for her ‘private tuition’.

The Kumari, despite her divine status, is being drawn into Nepal’s current political tribulations. King Gyanendra has said that he is going to leave his palace and go to the Kumari’s temple to seek her blessing. This was interpreted in the media as a way of currying favour with the more conservative rural citizens of Nepal who still revere the Kumari and the idea of living deities. As a result they would be reluctant, it was believed, to vote for the extinction of an institution and its office holder whom the Kumari had blessed. The Prime Minister evidently took this threat seriously because he was quick to publicly denounce the King’s ‘irresponsible behaviour’. More no doubt anon.

At the end of the Maoist rally towards dusk, the YCL cadres took once more to their buses and, horns blaring, flags waving, left Kathmandu. Rumours were that each participant was paid about 200 rupees to attend, about £1.30. Most people cancelled their evening arrangements and stayed at home and so, after dark, the streets were quiet, the shops were shuttered and the only people on the streets, other than us, were a group of brightly made up transvestite prostitutes, mourning the poor business, hoping that we might offer a little relief, or perhaps they might offer us some.

see the photos of Nepal at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets