After the Flood

Sienna Craig

The town means checkpoint. A place to stop. A crossroads. It has been such for centuries. But on the day of the flood, it was a place where things could not stop, where earth bowed to the will of water and mud, encasing the present, erasing elements of the past.

It was evening, but people had been watching the river all day. Nothing about 20 millimeters of rain in a rainshadow is normal. Yet this is what had befallen Mustang in the days before the Kag Khola burst its banks in August 2023. First came the landslide – soil saturated to the point of release. It took some hours before that obstacle was remade into a tempestuous swirl of liquid ash-colored clay. But then it flowed. Molten, but for its glacial source, this roil.

Dusk had fallen by the time the calls and texts and voice memos came from upriver, urging villagers out of homes, to higher ground. I can imagine young monks, their backs resting against cement walls in recently built quarters at Chode Gonpa, hunched over plastic Chinese-made bowls of rice, dal, and curried potatoes, their fingertips stained with turmeric. The scuttle to find a wayward sandal or imitation croc before following the khenpo up, up, away from danger. The cacophony of human and riverine voice in that moment. I can imagine a village woman I know well, her chuba hiked up around her knees, squatting on a low wooden stool in her two-room home, pounding mint, red chili, garlic, sichuan pepper into chutney for her evening meal, her arthritis acting up after a day spent weeding buckwheat fields. Her phone pings, and then again, and again: chu chenbo o-zong. Bari aayo. Chili stings her eyes as she wipes sweat from her brow, walks quickly up that shortcut to the upper fields, well-worn by goats and wayward mastiffs, to join the others.

Disaster tricks time. Was it minutes or hours until the Hotel Mandala and the Hotel Lhasa were hollowed out from the inside? They seemed to have gone from solid structures – impressive, even, built with rebar and remittance-inspired flourish – to mere haphazard portals, arching toward some other realms of existence. Was it seconds or minutes before the cobbled alleyway beside Yac Donalds turned into a soupy sea of debris? Until barrels of petrol and fermenting chang floated beside tangles of electricity wires, loosed timber, uprooted tree stumps, aluminum boxes, still locked, containing someone’s precious belongings?  Until the dozer – that coveted and sometimes terrorizing instrument of landscape transformation – was itself buried by the deluge?

Disaster warps scale. That bank recalls a torn sheet of paper, at once jagged and clean. Does it stand tall as a child or tall as a jeep? That roofline. Does it augur a house in the distance, or is it a dwelling up close yet submerged? The horizon helps to orient, but nothing feels certain.

The number of destroyed and damaged structures vary, depending on the news report. But the statistic that matters most is this one: no fatalities. The rten ‘brel of this astounds. Gratitude as an exhale. Still, estimated damages crest at more than $7 million. This, in turn, bespeaks a karmic cascade – a domino game of migratory patterns, wage labor expectations, tourism income, municipal budgets, and debt.

Appeals are posted. Calls are made. Itemized lists of donations from households across the here-there of Mustang’s villages are posted to Facebook and WeChat. Soon, caches of funds – some small and others larger – must be distributed. Ethical action is cleaved from responsibility, here at the Third Pole. Response-ability is something different. The hows and whys and to whos of relief get sorted – not without politics. Never without politics. And yet people show up for each other.  Work crews come from up and down the length of this district, speaking different languages, rolling up their sleeves. For others, clicks of commitment reincarnate, so imperfectly, as drinking water pipes; a repaired grinding mill; pressure cookers and stainless steel plates for the mother’s group are sent up such that they might circulate and recirculate these pulses of hospitality, like blood.

And yet, response-ability belies other questions: about method and material, about the pace of change. An older noblewoman looks out across the muddied expanse. “Mud has covered things, but the flood has revealed an old map,” she says. “It has reminded us of what this village used to look like.” She recalls a time when hotels and bodegas and banks and police stations did not line the riverbank. When there was more space between bridges – fit for a mule train but not for an SUV – and the labyrinthine clusters of domesticity at the heart of this place. Then, it did not seem precarious to build homes out of mud, hardened to brick in thin, dry air. Now the wind is thick with moisture and with loss, sluicing any illusion of permanence, returning brick to mud.

Sienna Craig is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). Raised in Santa Barbara, California, she received her BA in Religious Studies from Brown University (1995) and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (2006). Craig enjoys writing across genres and has published poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and children’s literature in addition to scholarly works in medical and cultural anthropology. Her most recent book, which combines literary ethnography with short fiction, is The Ends of Kinship: Connecting Himalayan Lives between Nepal and New York (University of Washington Press, 2020). She is also the author of Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (University of California Press, 2012), and Horses Like Lightning: A Story of Passage through the Himalaya (Wisdom Publications, 2008), among other works.