Beyond Marrs

From our rooftop on the outskirts of the valley, the view holds several millennia at once – a 17th century pagoda, a 2,000 year old stupa on a distant hilltop, a freshly installed LCD billboard burning at a highway intersection, and everywhere between them the concrete and rebar of new construction spreading across the valley floor like broken teeth. Kathmandu is a city of layers. Walk a single block and you might pass a sixth-century temple, a mobile phone shop, a flower vendor arranging marigolds for a morning puja, and a cow regarding all of it with indifference. It is also the kind of place that makes you distrust your own descriptions of it – too much happening at once, too many centuries in the same frame, too many contradictions sharing the same space. Situated in a broad valley, legend says that it began as a vast primordial lake, drained when the bodhisattva Manjushri struck the surrounding hills with his sword, releasing the waters and leaving behind fertile ground. On a clear morning, you can look up from almost anywhere in the city and find looming Himalayan peaks – white, enormous, and unbothered by the city below. In their shadow, Kathmandu accumulates centuries of Hindu and Buddhist tradition pressed up against each other in shared courtyards and temple grounds; medieval pagoda temples darkened by generations of butter-lamp smoke; narrow alleys that open without warning onto ancient squares where pigeons, pilgrims, and motorbikes negotiate the same worn stone. It is a city shaped by trade, by conquest, by devotion, and by disaster, and where all of these things remain somehow visible at once.

During the monsoon season in 2003, I landed an internship with the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, an organization founded in 1991 to document and restore the valley’s extraordinary concentration of historic structures – seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites within a few square miles – most of them still in active daily use as temples, courtyards, and gathering places. That summer I spent my days climbing around on bamboo scaffolding, making measured drawings of temples, chaityas, and intricately carved roof struts slick with rain. The work was unhurried and close, crouched at the eave of a pagoda that had stood for six centuries while the city moved through its rhythms below. Kathmandu in the monsoon is a particular thing: the air thick and green-smelling, the cobblestones dark and wet, the mountains gone for weeks at a time behind a solid ceiling of cloud. I was twenty years old and thoroughly overwhelmed and absorbed by it – by the density of the history, the generosity of the people, the smell of incense and rain, the sense that the past and present had long ago stopped being separate things there.

Kathmandu is also a city that does not stand still. It is constantly being reborn, reworked, and reimagined – new construction pressing up against old foundations, fresh paint on medieval timber, satellite dishes above carved pagoda eaves. But cities can also be unmade. On April 25, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal with enough force to reduce in seconds what had survived for centuries. Temples I had measured by hand, roof struts I had crouched beside on rain-slicked scaffolding, chaityas that had anchored their courtyards for five or six hundred years – many were gone in under a minute. Nearly nine thousand people were killed across the country, and entire neighborhoods in the valley were reduced to rubble. It is the kind of loss that is difficult to hold in the mind all at once, so instead you find yourself returning to the specific: a particular doorway, a particular carving, a particular afternoon in the rain. More than a decade removed, and those scars are still visible throughout the city. Many of the historic sites have been meticulously reconstructed, but many remain in ruins, adding yet another dimension to the layered history of the city.

Kate had her own time in Nepal as a young person, her own work and her own experiences there, and when our histories eventually overlapped it turned out we had been shaped by the same place in similar ways – ways that quietly determined where we ended up living, what we cared about, and how we thought about what a good life actually looked like. We always knew we wanted to bring the kids eventually, and we always knew we wanted to wait – long enough for it to land, long enough for it to stick. Those early years in the valley feel like a different life now, but Nepal had a way of staying in the conversation regardless. When Ada was born in 2014 it resurfaced, and when Willem arrived three years later it started to feel less like a someday and more like a plan with edges. The decision itself came on a late summer day in Seldovia, descending through the alpine below Graduation Peak – the kind of walk where big decisions have a way of surfacing. By the time we reached the truck, a year in Nepal had stopped being hypothetical. 

We dreamed and planned for a year, and when we finally arrived, the city did what it tends to do: It pulled us in slowly, then all at once. The kids started taekwondo classes, and Willem announced, with complete conviction, that he had found his life’s calling. Ada fell in love with kathak dance and a teacher who was warm and quietly demanding in equal measure. On weekends we hiked into the Chandragiri hills, kept one eye on the horizon on clear mornings, and spent unhurried afternoons sketching in the places that had come to feel like our own. We got to know our neighbors. The kids played soccer with neighborhood children at the local futsal court, goats and water buffalo tied up outside, and during festivals we found ourselves welcomed into homes in ways that felt unearned and generous.

Kathmandu does not flatter every visitor. It can seem, from the outside and especially from the window of a short layover, like little more than noise and exhaust and an assault on every sense at once. For Kate and I, it has never really been a chapter so much as a through line – something that kept reasserting itself, shaping decisions we made thousands of miles away. Watching the kids settle into the city, claim their own corners of it, and leave changed by it felt like the story finally catching up to itself. I know my own view of Kathmandu is softened by years and memory, by the particular romance of having been young there and humbled by it. But I’ve also watched two children with none of that history find their own reasons to love it. That is harder to explain away as nostalgia.

In the days before we left Kathmandu, I reconnected with Rohit Ranjitkar, who served as country director of the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust for many years and was, twenty-three years earlier, my boss. Few people have done more for the preservation of Nepali cultural heritage – quietly, persistently, and largely without recognition outside the field. I had arrived on his doorstep in 2003 as a curious and somewhat unprofessional young American with more eagerness than expertise, and he had been generous enough to put me to work anyway. We met in Patan on a cold winter morning and sat in the sun sipping hot lemon water with honey, and I was struck by how little had changed about him – the hair grayer, the city around us still in the long work of putting itself back together, but the intensity with which he talks about Nepali history entirely intact. We strolled through Patan’s alleys and covered a lot of ground: the restoration projects he had been shepherding, the particular challenges of rebuilding after the earthquake, the complicated influence of Indian funding on ongoing conservation work, and the niche but endlessly fascinating subjects that people in this field tend to geek out about – seismic retrofitting of historic structures, the adaptive reuse of traditional Newari homes. Twenty-three years between visits, and it felt like picking up a conversation mid-sentence.

I am sitting in Hokkaido as I write this, somewhere between Kathmandu and home, the arc of the trip still settling into something I can fully understand. Outside, Japan is doing what Japan does – precise, quiet, impeccably ordered – and the contrast with the valley we left behind is not lost on me. Kathmandu is none of those things, and that is precisely the point. It is loud and chaotic and occasionally overwhelming, a city still healing from an earthquake that took so much, and yet somehow more alive for all of it – still rebuilding, still accumulating, still pulling people in and making itself indispensable. Kate and I brought the kids to Kathmandu hoping to share something that had always been difficult to put into words. We are not sure we found the words this time either. But the kids are already talking about going back, which is probably the only explanation that matters.