tourist guides+nepal+radio+me

The Patan Durbar Square is an ancient cluster of temples and palaces. Its historical significance is recognized by UNESCO in the world heritage list. Although when SUTRA international artists workshop 2006 invited me to work there, what struck me was not the glory of its past, instead the comfort with which a Chinese perfume shop has housed itself under a great pagoda of the giant emergency bell and many other such instances of past-meets-present. The shopkeepers have cleverly made a niche for themselves in the ancient city architecture. This to me was fascinating. The area looks lived-in and not sanitized and bleached like most of our Indian monuments. Which of course can raise an entire discourse on the issue of maintenance and restoration.

The square is swarming with vendors selling trinkets and souvenirs, with beggars and with tourist guides. I decided to work with the last category. They are people who know the history of the square, meet new tourist everyday, speak several languages and are full of exciting stories of their trek up in the Himalayas.

Meanwhile Nepal, (I learnt at a community radio workshop in New Delhi), has a rich community radio scene. So, when I got there one of the first things on my agenda was to visit a community radio station. Radio Sagarmatha is a community radio station located in Lalitpur, not far from the Patan Durbar Square. The crew at Radio Sagarmatha was extremely receptive and warm.

I decided I would work with the local tourist guides of Patan Durbar Square by recording their stories and creating a half hour collage of it and broadcast it from Radio Sagarmatha. My art project would be a radio show.

Radio has a larger audience in the third world than any other medium of broadcasting, for the simple reason that a radio set is relatively inexpensive. The art of oration and story telling is progressively getting replaced with the advent of cable television. Sound pushes the mind to imagine a corresponding visual. That sense of imagination, for me is very important.

Mohan Bista, Station manager Radio Sagarmatha heard me out and immediately agreed to broadcast the show from his station, infact he went ahead and offered his digital recorder and the permission to use the editing studio at the station as well.

The next challenge would be to penetrate the community. This surprisingly was not as difficult as I imagined it would be considering the time limitation of 10 days.

If you hang around the square long enough a guide WILL approach you and ask if you would like to be taken on a guided tour of the wonderful Patan Durbar Square. I gladly consented to be taken on a guided tour of the square. That is how I met Sabin Khadka, who later became one of the key people of my project. A 25 year old boy, married and divorced, has a son, is a recovering drug addict and is HIV positive. And this in short is the story of just one of the 27 of the 40 guides of Patan Durbar Square I worked with.

The first few days were spent on getting acquainted and recording the initial stories. Once the ice was broken and we had spent enough time with one another, I would find these guides waiting for me ever morning on the steps of the palace. This was to be our adda for the duration of the workshop. We chatted endlessly over cups of sweet chai. Fortunately the other artists at the workshop were working inside the courtyard of the same palace, so the guides hung around getting a sense of art and understanding its process in a new light. Relocating it in their vocabulary as a legitimate language of expression regardless of the art they were familiar with on the walls of the temples.

Gradually the real stories emerged.

Bicky, a trekking guide spoke about his near death experience in the Himalayas, and of how he was then saved by the tourist he had taken to the mountains. Ravi nursed a leech in his shoe for several days in the snow, till he found a camp and had to get the leech surgically removed from his foot. He still carries the marks of the operation as proof of his adventure.

I was introduced to the concept of a Godfather by these men. It so happens that visiting tourist mostly from Europe and Japan, either get moved by the poverty of Nepal or for various other reasons adopt a guide and pay for him to either visit their country or pay for his education or sponsor him in some way or another. Vikram found such a German Godfather who sends money regularly for his education, although Vikram uses the funds for everything other than schooling. Sabin’s godfather paid for him to visit Japan and spend two years with him there. Sabin’s godfather had lost his family in a plane crash in Nepal and thought Sabin had a striking resemblance to his son, so he decided to pay for Sabin to be with him for two years in Japan.

A number of fascinating stories were of love. A few of these guides have girl friends in foreign countries. Raj has a German girlfriend who he regularly chats with four hours a day. Kumar has a Korean girlfriend and he would bargain his rates to the minimum just to make enough money to pay the cyber café to check her mail. Although they refused to talk about their love for the radio show, they did share with me how they wished to one day marry or not marry the woman in question.

When it is the tourist season, September- December, some of them have made up to a lakh plus in one day. Surender ji, an older member of the gang saved enough money to buy land and now comes to the square for sentimental reasons and not financial. Sometimes they have to be happy with a pack of Japanese cigarettes and no payment at all.

Drugs seem to the problem with a few and the solution to problems for the rest. In the evenings we would sit around and listen to Babu Raja play the guitar or listen to Binod play the flute. During these music sessions joints were ceremoniously rolled and passed around. Sabin, after spending eight months in a drug rehabilitation center sounds mature and shudders at the memory of his cold turkey. Mahendra’s arms on the flip side tell tales of his supernova life. Punctured with syringes his veins are covered with sores of his last trip. “It is not me; it is my pain that asks for the damn drug”.

There were a number of tales of foreign women inviting these guides for sex. It works very simply, for them it is a win-win situation. They get to sleep with a gori and get paid for it too. As a result some of them have got STD’s. The AIDS awareness is low and the discrimination and humiliation high. Krishna went for his regular HIV tests and the nurse refused to take his blood for the test. His expertise in injecting drugs helped him to draw his own blood for the test. He should be resting 18 hours a day, but comes to the square at the crack of dawn, because he needs money for his expensive medication.

At the end of 10 days I no longer had to ask or explain anything. Two of the guides Sabin and Binod had perfected the handling of the recorder and could sit and conduct the project flawlessly. They completely got the hang of it. After some three-three and half hours of recorded footage I took it to the editing table. Rishi Acharya of Radio Sagarmatha helped me sort the show out. We spent two days editing the work into a half hour show. The show had to be recorded in their local dialect of Nepalese or Newari, since Radio Sagarmatha is a community radio channel and believes in using the local language ONLY for their shows. The half hour assimilation of their stories started with their introductions: “mero naam Binod ho, mero naam Mahendra ho.. “ and so on. The second half of the show was a compilation of sketches of short stories and conversational memoirs. The last fifteen minutes of the show were detailed narratives of a slightly somber content, where the stories of HIV, substance abuse and poverty were collaged. Woven into the fabric of the interviews were soundscapes I recorded during the workshop. Like the blaring speakers of the CD shop which invariably played “om mane pemehom”, Binod playing Hindi movie tunes on his flute, Babu Ram strumming his guitar to a hip Nepalese rock song. Rishi helped me to recreate the ambiance of the Patan Durbar Square through sound.

I purchased cheap Chinese radio sets, about 40 of them and gifted them to the people who I worked with. On the open studio day (exhibition) we all sat around the palace steps and heard the show together. They were all thrilled with the show and the fact that their lives and stories were on air for all of Katmandu to hear. One of them took the Radio Sagarmatha contact from me and wanted to do a show on discrimination against patients suffering from HIV positive. I think he has something important to address and if I had in any way facilitated that I would call it a day. Binod told me that the community of the guides had been at war for a while due to professional reasons. But since I had started this project with them, they had started hanging out together and the ice had broken.

Email id’s were exchanged and I got a few gifts and an invitation for dinner and a chance to learn from the lives of people and a chance to be accepted into their lives. When my cab was driving away from the square for the airport each one of the guides I worked with came to bid me farewell. And my mailbox has atleast one letter from my friends in Nepal per day.

I guess it will be fair to say that my work is still under process.

Aastha Chauhan

Sutra International artist’s workshop

2006