Kathmandu's Widened Roads And The Marginalization Of Nepal's Nomads

There can never be an ideal, true nomad: being born is being born stationary and being introduced to a sedentary life. There is a significant moment of nomadic rebellion within the mother's womb, when the infant kicks his/her feet against the wall of his/her mother's womb, asking to be let go from his/her stationary and sedentary life, and be submitted to a “life of the legs.” But the kick is misinterpreted, and the child once born is introduced to a sedentary world, placed on its back, given illusory empty space where his/her kick does not meet an object to push away, and displayed for the pleasure of other sedentary figures that surround him/her as a special destination.

Reading Lacan, one feels that the mother's walking away from the child is due to her own nomadic impulse to walk, or her way of kicking the child back as a response to her child's kick on her womb. Yet contrary to Lacan, the child does not ask the hurt-filled question “Where does my mother go?” because indeed the child itself has kicked the mother away from within the womb before the mother actually walked away. The mother walking away from the child is a result of his/her kick to her womb; the child demands the mother to walk; the child is the originator of a nomadic impulse in the mother.

Some of Nepal's villagers become nomads when they leave behind a previous more sedentary life in the village for Kathmandu. The Nepali villager comes to Kathmandu for the first time, and in that very first moment of stepping off the bus, he/she is completely directionless, lost from familiar sedentary life, nauseous from the bus travel, with the solid and firm tarmac below him as a kind of support, a kind of sign that the urban world he/she is in can be navigated. Then as he/she travels on foot, taking hesitant steps at first, he/she becomes nomad, a traveler of Kathmandu's roads, criss-crossing Kathmandu's roads without more than the most basic purpose, at most to sell his/her village goats in the market he/she cannot locate, but moving beyond that purpose too as he/she keeps walking freely. He/she doesn't care to read the sign-posts that tell him/her where the goat market is and he/she doesn't try to understand the prevailing dialect/accent.

Yet Kathmandu's main roads have been widened significantly as a part of a big development project. Supposedly the roads have been widened to aid the growing population of drivers, but these widened roads marginalize Nepal's nomads. The pavements, which are the paths that once allowed nomads travel on foot, are nonexistent in many places, and even where they exist they are unsafe to walk given drivers driving fast and reckless. Crossing Kathmandu's widened main roads is impossible given the fast and heavy traffic flow, and so there is no possibility of changing directions based on the whim of the nomadic legs, of criss-crossing Kathmandu freely, like there used to be.

Driving within the confines of their small cars, Kathmandu residents miss the nomadic travelers once found walking the pavements. Hence authorities must interpret Kathmandu's automobile collisions as expressions of a wish for all the cars to be “kicked” away and life to be enjoyed by foot again. But a large crowd gathers around the road accidents in Kathmandu, and it is a mysterious large crowd of sedentary individuals that seems made specially for the purposes of surrounding accident scenes. This sedentary crowd blocks the drivers involved in the accident from running away on foot and instead forces them to become sedentary. For the drivers this crowd signals the real possibility of imprisonment, that most sedentary of experiences.