Photo credits: Hari Sharan Nepali

On a blustery June afternoon in 1977, Hari Sharan “Kazi” Nepali stood on the Nepali side of the Tibetan plateau with three dead birds in his satchel. He watched the winds rise and stir up a cloud of dust. The only food he had was tsampa. He had no water to make the barley flour into a paste like locals did. “Every time I tried to put a fistful into my mouth, the wind blew it all away,” he recalled. Eventually, Kazi covered himself with a blanket and stuffed fistfuls of the flour into his mouth. Still famished, he shot and injured a hare. (He had forgotten to replace the birdshot with something big enough for leporine targets). The animal limped to a small ledge. Just as Kazi was about to reach for his lunch, a Golden Eagle swooped down and carried it away.

Lo Manthang, the only human settlement in that sea of barrenness, was six hours away on horseback. He was much closer, dangerously close, to the border with Tibet, and that played on his mind. He was armed. He had binoculars. He wasn’t a local. These were reasons enough for the skittish and trigger-happy Chinese soldiers to shoot him. They had shot a Nepali soldier dead in the same area 17 years previously. Wary of this history, Kazi had brought along the son-in-law of the Raja of Lo Manthang as a safeguard. But that had been the day before. Neither of them had planned to stay the night; the aristocrat had returned home to Lo Manthang with Kazi’s son Om Sharan and two botanists. Alone, anxious, with bird carcasses he wanted to preserve, Kazi waited.

He spent the night out in the open, clad in several layers, including long johns – “Shakespeare pants”, as they were known as in Kathmandu. The decision to camp at that punishing altitude had been made on the spot (hence no tents or sleeping bags), prompted by the siren song of birds. Kazi knew they were finches, but not the ones that he had already seen. He wanted to study them, which meant shooting them. After posing for a souvenir photo with his companions, he had seen them off, asking them to return by 3 p.m. with Petromax lamps.

Now it was nearly four in the afternoon. Kazi peered into the distance. No centipede-like line in the dun vastness. Inhospitable land. Unreliable companions. He set out. Staggering to the adobe walls of Lo Manthang around midnight, he found his friends and his son sprawled out on the floor of the local school, snoring. For the next two hours, like a shaman murmuring incantations, Kazi spewed invectives at his lazy son and went about preserving the three dead birds. Then he retired, still indignant, but the first person to record Mandelli’s Snow Finch, Blanford’s Snow Finch, and the Red-necked Snow Finch in Nepal.

*

Forty-three avifaunal migrations later, the ornithologist who often climbed several hundred metres through dense forests in a day now struggled up the fifteen steps from his bedroom to his rooftop terrace. That was on good days. Sometimes, he was confined to his room for weeks at a time. Doctors had advised Kazi not to stand for minutes at a time or bend his knees. But there were no restrictions on his neck movements, and that was enough. His house was one of many concrete towers in Kathmandu that craned skywards like competing trees in a rainforest. Its terrace was his aerie, where he often sat on a carpet with a pair of jungle fowl embroidered on it. The maker of that carpet, his wife, had passed away nine years ago. The old man read, watched the sky for birds, and fed sparrows.

One winter afternoon, I climbed the stairs of his six-storey house. The first two floors were a restaurant, where tourists congregated over pizzas. Next was a cooperative bank, manned by a guard whose scrutiny of passersby was so intense that you wondered if the place held Nepal’s gold reserves. Then, hung on a wall like a totem of wilderness to ward off the insistent urbanity, a watercolour of a Lady Amherst’s pheasant. On the next floor were two blue sheep horns, chipped in places, mounted over door lintels.

I found the most revered personality of one of Nepal’s least celebrated fields basking in the sun. He greeted me with a soft smile. His laughter originated somewhere deep within him and manifested itself as tremors that made his entire body quake. That, and his habit of lowering his head to make eye contact through his tinted glasses, reminded me of the Dalai Lama.   

I asked him what he had been up to since our last meeting, and he brightened. He told me that the past week had been memorable. He had seen an adult Imperial Eagle from his terrace – the first time ever he had laid eyes on the species. The raptor had always eluded him though he had spent decades in its habitat, including a four-month period in the early eighties. “I began observing, keeping records, and collecting specimens of migratory birds forty years ago. I could write the date of the sighting of that Imperial Eagle and wear it around my neck.” At 90, he was still ticking off checklists.  

*

Kazi was born in 1927 into a middle-class Newar family in Kathmandu. Khamba Shumsher, a prominent Rana, had adopted his father, Ram Sharan Shrestha. Growing up in the aristocratic household, Shrestha learned to play the piano. When he finally returned home, in his twenties, he was an accomplished pianist.

It was common practice among the Nepali elites of the time to get their daughters to learn to play the piano. Shrestha found a job teaching the daughters of Mohan Shumsher, at the time a general and later the last Rana prime minister of Nepal. When all his daughters had been married off, Mohan Shumsher asked the pianist if he needed anything. Shrestha could have asked for anything: a job, money, land, a house. “I have all I need, my lord,” he said, bowing, hands pressed together in humility. Mohan Shumsher suggested he accept a job in the civil service. He declined that, too. He didn’t have the necessary skills, he explained. All he knew was how to play the piano, and that was how he would make a living. “My mother used to tell me for years what an unbelievable man my father was, a man who did not ask for anything when Mohan Shumsher would have given him anything he wanted,” Kazi reminisced with a chuckle. Perhaps as a reminder of his days in places of power, his father nicknamed him Kazi, which means “minister”.

The doyen of Nepali ornithology might have grown up to a be pianist like his father had he not tried to open a U.S. Army Second World War surplus can of tuna he had bought at an army auction in Kathmandu. While trying to peel the can’s lid off he sliced through his right index finger. Kazi rushed to the pharmacy around the corner of his street. The compounder there, believing it was just a deep cut, cleaned it and stitched it up. Actually, the tendon in the finger had been severed. The wound healed but Kazi could never move his finger again. The disability allowed him to move away from music without disappointing his father.

But that is only half the story. Kazi never took a liking to the piano in the same way he did to the slingshot. “I always had a slingshot with me. I even took it to school [Darbar High School, Nepal’s first public school],” he recalled, his eyes twinkling with boyish mischief. “No one my age could use it. It required a lot of strength to pull the bands back. I killed ducks that were at the centre of the pond in our neighbourhood. The stones would be embedded in them!”

Kazi and his catapult were inseparable. He brought his favourite toy to school, but a school was not where it belonged. Before long the boy started spending more time outdoors than in classrooms. Schools required a minimum attendance for pupils to be eligible to take the annual exams. The bird-chaser never qualified under that rule. His mother frequently cleaved his prized possession into two in exasperation. He would get a new one. Her son’s ceaseless band-pulling reduced her to string-pulling. “My mother somehow always got someone influential to convince the headmaster to allow me to take the exams.”

Kazi’s obsession with the catapult was nothing out of the ordinary. Until the advent of handheld devices, it was the toy of a Nepali boy’s childhood. I remember wearing one around my neck whenever I went out to play, my pockets bulging with pebbles, trousers pulled uncomfortably low under their weight. As I walked, the stones clinked in rhythm to my steps, the soundtrack of a phase in my life in which my aim in life was to have better aim.

But Kazi was different. He was remarkable in having both a love for shooting down birds and a deep interest in them as subjects of study. He walked into Ratna Pustak Bhandar, the famous Kathmandu bookstore, and asked for a book on birds. (The owner laughed. No, he didn’t have such a book. He told Nepali that no one had ever asked for such a book before.) The truant was uncannily diligent when it came to doing his “homework” on birds. Every time he saw a new bird he would observe it carefully, listen intently to its song, and commit it to memory. When he returned home in the evenings, he made meticulous notes about the day’s sightings to the accompaniment of his mother’s tirades. The only time he was indoors for a significant time was when he was in a library, where he pored over books on wildlife. He did this even though he could not read English, in which most such books were written. Pictures sufficed.

Like any kid, Kazi eventually outgrew his love for the slingshot. His interest in birds, on the other hand, only deepened with time. The wilds beyond the Kathmandu Valley beckoned. He wanted to study birds. But it was the late 1940s. Nepal was in the iron grip of the Rana oligarchy. Shree Teen Maharaj, as the prime minister was addressed, was head of state and owner of everything, including forests – especially forests. Wildernesses were the playground of the nobility. For everyone else, they were off-limits. Besides, the fact that only the Ranas, their relatives, and courtiers were allowed to own guns rendered jungles a “why-go” zone.

In 1917, the poet Lekhnath Paudyal wrote his famous poem “A Parrot in a Cage”. The poem was a satire against the Rana regime: the parrot symbolized the poet and, by extension, every common Nepali; the oppressive regime was the cage. Paudyal’s poem was in the first Nepali textbook that the future ornithologist ever read. He was too young to understand the metaphor in those verses, but his dreams would one day prove too ambitious to fit in the constrained society of his boyhood.

The Ranas were big on hunting. They indulged this obsession in the forests around Kathmandu. Their bigger hunts, conducted in the Tarai jungles, are the stuff of gory legend. To keep the sport exclusive, the Ranas had declared most of the wilds around Kathmandu their private hunting preserves. They also had hunters on their payrolls. These men went into forests in the city’s vicinity and beyond to furnish game for the rulers’ tables. In the Kathmandu of Kazi’s childhood, all hunting parties set out from houses of power.

An uncle of the Shah King, Tribhuvan, lived within walking distance of Kazi’s house. When his father went there to teach piano to the nobleman’s daughter, Kazi sometimes tagged along. There, he kept his eyes open for any signs of an upcoming hunting trip. He also had ears there. A playmate of his, the son of one of the servants, informed Kazi whenever preparations for such a trip were afoot.

The night before a hunt, at around ten or eleven, Kazi would get out of bed. He would wrap his mother’s shawl around him, take the family’s stove with a few live coals in it, and head to the aristocrat’s house. Arriving at the gates, he squatted, knees almost touching the stove, and enclosed the shawl around him and the fire – a “tent” for the vigil to come. He passed the night shuddering in the cold, keeping the feeble fire alive with meager morsels of wood chips. All this so that he wouldn’t miss the hunters as they left.

Not that getting into an aristocrat’s hunting party was that simple. The first few times he tried to merge into the retinue as it left the house many in the group tried to chase him away, shouting abuses. The boss, however, was accommodating. “Let the kid tag along,” said Ram Bahadur Shah, the king’s uncle’s son, and that was that. Sometimes, in a jovial mood, Shah even let Kazi carry one of the guns.

Within a couple of years Kazi had endeared himself to Shah so much that he was often called to the house, given a gun and bullets, and sent out to hunt the ducks that wintered in the valley. Then, in late 1948, came the hunting trip of his dreams. The pivotal School Leaving Certificate examinations were less than a fortnight away when a servant told Shah that there were Himalayan tahr in the hills near his village. This was close to Panauti, a medieval town southeast of Kathmandu, beyond the hills that enclosed the valley. Tahr, large ungulates that spend most of the year above 3,000 metres, were irresistible quarry for Shah. For Kazi, the place was terra nova: the people of Kathmandu, including the closest relatives of the ruler, couldn’t venture beyond the valley’s rim without written permission. Kazi told his mother that he would be back in time for the exams and left.

The ungulates eluded the party. Towards the end of the trip, as the hunters combed the forest for kalij pheasants, Nepali sat under a tree, sandpapering the rough edges of a cast bullet he had just made. A bird called out from the branches overhead. He had never heard the call before, though he felt it was a barbet. Tracing the song, he located an underbelly within a leafy frame. He lifted his airgun and fired. The bird tumbled down, landing almost at his feet. Kazi laid eyes on a Golden-throated Barbet for the first time in his life.

Nepali did not return on time for his exams. He never stepped into a classroom as a student again after that trip. The parrot had had a glimpse of the world outside the cage.

*

Listening to his exploits with a catapult and later his adventures on hunting trips, I once asked him when he switched from hunter to ornithologist. He was slightly miffed. “I’d already begun studying birds by the time I went with the Shahs on their duck hunts and other trips. I tried to determine the song of each species and the family to which each bird belonged. I learned to tell one bird from the other based on its song and behaviour. Even on hunts I was always looking for birds. That is how I got addicted to hunting, not so much for killing birds as to find and examine birds I hadn’t seen before.”

Kazi’s aspirations were at odds with the political reality of the time. It was not just the regime’s no-guns-for-the-common-people policy that was keeping him from taking the step from being an amateur to a full-fledged ornithologist. Ultimately, it had to do with who he was – a common man. He lived in a country of unequal laws whose rulers reserved for themselves the right to do anything and the right to deny the ruled everything. Getting permission to travel beyond the city’s hilly periphery to hunt was a mere formality for the nobility; for a commoner, it was the stuff of daydreams. Kazi got to go on extended ventures into the bird-rich jungles only when his high-born friend wanted to go on hunting trips and invited him along.

Kazi’s life seemed like a representation, in flesh and bone, of the changes in his country. As a teenager he had to wait through cold nights outside a house of power to indulge his passion. Waiting at the palace gates for deliverance was what almost every Nepali did, metaphorically and, many times, literally. Almost as a natural corollary, the watershed political event in modern Nepali history also proved the most telling one in Kazi’s life.

When Kazi went on that tahr hunt he had been part of the underground movement to overthrow Rana rule for some time. He was in the crowd that had marched to the gates of Tangal Darbar in 1947. He remembered Padma Shumsher, the prime minister, coming out to placate them, promising to hand over power to the people. He seemed to me to have lived a double life in that period: he was the hunting buddy of a nobleman as well as a resistance movement cadre. His friendship with Ram Bahadur Shah was earnest, he emphasized, but he drew the line at freedom. “Anyone who joins a movement against authoritarian rule does it for the same reason: he wants freedom. I believed people should have freedom. I was against autocracy. That meant opposing the Ranas.”

In 1950, the Rana oligarchy’s grip on Nepal was finally pried loose. The country got a new ruler, a new constitution, and a new parliament. It had new hope. A year later, Kazi, whose family name was Shrestha, took on a new surname: Nepali. “I adopted this name because I no longer wanted to be known by my ethnicity, caste or religion. I was a Nepali before anything else.” Anyone who knew him would argue that he was a bird lover before anything else.

Kazi, like his countrymen, had new rights. Two of these – the right to own guns and the right to move about unhindered – would become the cornerstones of his new life.

Kazi went about training himself for life as an ornithologist. In early 1950s Nepal, where telescopic lens were decades away and many species yet unknown, studying birds meant shooting them and preserving the specimens. Kazi also needed to know taxidermy. He asked his neighbourhood compounder how he preserved medicines. Kazi used the same chemical – borax – to preserve birds.

Then he got to work acquiring the other essential tool of his new life. He knew a man who owned a Birmingham Small Arms .22 air rifle, but the man was not interested in selling. In the end, he sold the gun for 400 rupees, a big sum in those days. But it wasn’t the money that made the owner sell. “I pestered the guy so much that he gave it to me, saying he didn’t want anything for it,” Kazi remembered with a laugh. Within a year of the end of Rana rule, Kazi had started collecting bird skins.

With the fall of the Ranas Nepal opened its doors to the world. The first wave of tourists brought a windfall of much-needed money for Kazi. He found work on birdwatching tours as a guide. The money he earned he spent on expeditions to collect specimens. “I don’t think I was home for more than two months in a year. As soon as I had some money and time, I was off. If I had money for two weeks, I went on a two-week trek. If I could only afford a four-day jaunt, I went for four days.”

When he started out as an ornithologist, Kazi did not know of any previous collectors of bird specimens in Nepal. “I just wanted to find out how many bird species there were in Nepal. I went on expeditions and collected specimens for that.” He did not know that he had taken on something that had begun with Brian Hodgson, the British Resident in Kathmandu from 1820 to 1843. The diplomat, who was forbidden from traveling beyond the Kathmandu Valley, had employed local hunters to collect bird specimens for him.

There was no missing Hodgson when seeking out birds in Nepal. “In due course, I came across Hodgson’s name, found out that he had lived here and collected birds. But he hadn’t given any to Nepal. He had taken all of it to England.” (Hodgson’s collection is housed in the Natural History Museum, London.) Hodgson inspired and angered Kazi in equal measure. “I thought, if he can collect birds why can’t I, a native? I was angry at Hodgson for taking thousands of specimens but not teaching anyone here how to collect and preserve birds. Moreover, he didn’t name his collectors.” Looking at the Brit’s legacy from a wider perspective, though, Kazi was grateful. “He exposed Nepal to the world because his collection made an educational impact.” That impact was deepened by some of Hodgson’s successors and later by European and American ornithologists. Kazi was the country’s first native ornithologist.

On an expedition

Educational value was the standard by which Kazi measured all ornithological work. That explained his ire at Hodgson lugging all his bird skins away from the country of origin, leaving nothing that would help those who came after him. “Books on birds were aplenty, but the real birds were not in a book. You couldn’t touch a bird’s feathers in a book. I felt one ought to be able to touch a bird. Preservation was key, so a specimen lasted several years. It was possible a bird would go extinct in ten years. If that happened, there would at least be a specimen to study and base research on, to make comparisons between the same species thirty years ago and today.” Kazi’s ability to take the future into account made Nepali ornithology what it is today.

In 1956, Kathmandu had its first photo-op with the international media. It was King Mahendra’s coronation. The occasion presented an opportunity for Kazi to showcase his collection and, through it, Nepal’s unmatched birdlife. He was initially reluctant. “I was devoted to research and study. My collection was not for any other purpose.” His friends were able to change his mind. He displayed 200 species of birds. Those were early days in his collector’s life. By the time Nepal crowned its next monarch, King Birendra, in 1975, he had over 800 specimens for the royal guests to admire. Eventually, the public was allowed to see the exhibition. It remained on display for a month.

He once got an offer for his collection, but declined when he learned that the skins would be housed in a museum in Japan. The birds belonged in Nepal. He did not look at his collection as private property. So when it was suggested that if he donated them a natural history museum might be built around the collection in Nepal, he handed it over. His painstakingly amassed specimens have been in the Natural History Museum in Kathmandu ever since.

Kazi always had an uncanny ability to see beyond the present. In the 1970s, even while he guided one group of foreign birders after another, he worried about birds. Birders were migratory, flying in from Europe and the U.S. He never came across another Nepali who was really interested in birds. Would people still go birdwatching when he was no longer around? He wondered: “After Brian Hodgson left Nepal, it took more than a century before a Nepali took up the study of birds. What if no one did it after me?”

And what if there were no birds to watch in the future? His concerns came from the evidence all around him. In only a few decades the pristine valley of his childhood had succumbed to urban sprawl. The pond where he hunted ducks with his slingshot was gone.

Kazi decided the only way to save birds was to graft his love for birds onto other hearts and minds. He started with his daughters. He took them birding, taught them to identify birds, and make field notes. In 1976, he established the Birdwatching Club of Nepal. The club organized birdwatching trips in and around Kathmandu on weekends. Preparations were meticulous. An itinerary was prepared for the eight-month season: sites were selected for their birdlife, and visits to sites planned to coincide with the peak in bird activity in those areas. Members pitched in to cover all expenses, including food and bus fares. Kazi arranged for binoculars, buying them whenever he could.

Early birders

In time the club’s membership grew. Patrons were found around the world: some donated binoculars, others money. There were also unexpected outcomes that proved immensely beneficial for nature conservation in Nepal. Eight members of the club, who joined as youngsters, went on to get PhDs, becoming leading figures in the conservation field. In 1982, the Birdwatching Club of Nepal became an NGO, Bird Conservation Nepal. An institutional manifestation of Kazi’s concern for avifauna, today BCN works to protect birds and their habitats, funds research, and trains ornithologists.

A week after he passed away, I searched online for obituaries. When I typed in “Hari Sharan Nepali Nepal’s first ornithologist” and hit enter, one of the hits I got read “Meet the Nepali researcher who led the team that discovered… .” I clicked on the link, expecting to read an account of a long-ago expedition led by Kazi, sponsored by a prestigious institution. It turned out to be an article about a Nepali PhD candidate in the U.S. who had discovered a bird in Borneo that was new to science. As I read on, half annoyed at this encroachment on what I felt ought to have been the old man’s web territory, I found it was the best tribute possible to the late birder’s legacy. It turned out Kazi had taken the discoverer, Subir B. Shakya, on his earliest birdwatching trips, and taught him “about different birds and how to distinguish one from the other at a young age.”

Kazi did not like naming a favourite bird, but when I persisted, he told me it was the fire-tailed sunbird. Fitting, I thought, for the man who blazed a trail for ornithology in Nepal.

*

The end of an era had allowed Kazi to embark on the life of an ornithologist. The beginning of another ended it. In 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist declared war against the Nepali state. Almost overnight, Kazi was faced by a Nepal he thought he had left behind. A commoner could not carry a gun, step into forests, or travel freely without endangering himself. Kazi’s haunts – forests teeming with birds – became the sites of pitched battles between state forces and Maoist guerillas. “Can you imagine me in my olive-green outfit, binoculars around my neck, combing a forest in those days? The army would have taken me for a Maoist. The guerillas would have thought I was a soldier. Both sides would have shot me.” Kazi had to stay home.

The armed conflict also spooked binocular-slingers from abroad. “Nepal stopped being a gathering place for bird enthusiasts from around the world,” Kazi lamented. Business dried up. Soon, even if he wanted to risk bullets, he did not have the money for forays into wildernesses.

Kazi’s expeditions had always been self-funded, low-budget affairs. Many a time the kindness of strangers had helped make up the deficit. He collected birds at a time of innocence and peace: a stranger on the threshold of a village home was a guest by default. That ended with the civil war. Trust was in tatters across the country; hosting a stranger was inviting trouble. “I couldn’t have done those collection tours on my own. People’s hospitality and help made it possible. The lifestyle of people in those days, the social relations, were very different. The way people treat each other has changed. People hardly ever turned down a request or failed to help someone in need. I have been chastised in some places when I tried to pay for the milk I had asked locals for. They saw visitors as guests, not customers. That age is never going to come back.”

In 2006, the civil war ended in Nepal. Trekkers and tourists returned. Birder numbers, however, were nowhere near those of the pre-war heyday. And Kazi’s legs gave up on him: he was diagnosed with arthritis. The age of the diminutive researcher on a shoestring budget, walking ahead of a porter or two, camping in forests and mountains, succoured by locals, never came back. Kazi was back in a cage again.

*

Even the most reclusive birds are not loners. Birds often go about in flocks, or at least in pairs. Kazi, who spent his life studying these creatures of proverbial companionship and life-long unions, was always lonely. His childhood friends didn’t share his fascination. No one was with him that day he went into the bookstore and asked for a book on birds. He was the eccentric one in a shikar party, caressing a dead bird by the camp fire, turning its feathers over and over to determine which species it was. People called him crazy when they ran into him in the neighbourhood, a grown-up without a proper job, wearing binoculars around his neck. He had friends he drank countless cups of tea with, but the conversations were never about birds.

I asked him one day about that aspect of his life. He became silent. His face, usually taut with his characteristic half-smile, became flaccid, suddenly old. He sniffled. I ascribed it to a cold until a tear ran down from behind the tinted glasses. “I always felt lonely. I didn’t have many friends who understood me deeply because there weren’t people who took up the same passion I did, when I did. I didn’t have a friend with whom I could talk about birds. There were some foreigners, like Robert Fleming, Sr., but other than that I felt very lonely. No one understood what I wanted to say. You needed to be interested in the field to understand it. But there wasn’t anyone like that.”

One day, I asked him what he did to pass the time, and he told me that he sat on his bed, closed his eyes and recalled all the places in the hills that girdle Kathmandu where he had shot a kalij pheasant. “That’s how I keep from going insane,” he explained.

Birdwatching is not a popular hobby in Nepal even today. So it is that Kazi wasn’t very well known, other than amongst ornithologists. He was by far the most quoted bird expert in national publications, but that was a seasonal affair. At the onset of winter, when migratory birds arrive, and as spring unfolds, with birdsong reaching a crescendo, there is a small window in which the Nepali print industry feels the irresistible urge to cover birds. At those times, journalists flocked to Kazi’s house, gleaned a quote or a bit of bird trivia, and wrote their pieces. (They tended to be depressing, reporting the alarming drops in bird numbers.) Birds came and went. Journalists scribbled and left. The expert remained, cloistered in his room, surrounded by books, feeling forgotten. “I felt very strongly that he didn’t think his work was valued,” says Arend van Riessen, an ornithologist who has conducted long-term studies on bird populations around Kathmandu.

Van Riessen’s words reminded me of what Kazi had once told me. “I couldn’t follow an academic path in life. I spent my life collecting bird specimens and birdwatching.” Not having a formal degree in ornithology did bother him sometimes, triggered by cases of what he perceived as belittlement and ingratitude. He was convinced former protégés had schemed to undermine his position in ornithological quarters. Sometimes, his research findings had been used without crediting him. In one book on the birds of Nepal, he pointed out to me a stinging slight: the author, an ornithologist Nepali had helped immensely, had left his name out from the acknowledgements. Another ornithologist had turned the author against him. He believed one former mentee had even managed to divert an award meant for Kazi to himself.

There was no way of finding out how much of this was true, and how much constituted the assumptions of an old man who felt neglected. I tried to console him by saying that no one could take away an award meant for him. Besides, why would they? But he had made up his mind. In all the hours I spent with him, it was the only topic that vapourized the smirk from his face. The man who had the cheery disposition of a laughing Buddha became mildly wrathful. His eyes and quivering voice left no doubt that he had passed his verdict on those men. “Their behaviour taught me that humans are unpredictable,” he concluded sadly. Through research you can learn about the behaviour of any animal species. But you can’t know what a human will do.”

More than once, when talk of betrayal came up, he fetched a tome published by the British Museum from his shelf and pointed out his name in the summary of the history of ornithology in Nepal. “I’m the only Nepali mentioned there.” He was otherwise so humble that the sentence had the ring of a challenge. “I worked in the field. The proof of my contribution to ornithology is this book. If other ornithologists had done as much fieldwork, their names would have been mentioned there too. Why was it that a field that dates back to Hodgson’s time [1820–1843] only mentions me? They wouldn’t have if I hadn’t done anything. If I hadn’t collected those skins, there would be nothing today. No one has done it since.” He paused, as if he had caught himself drifting on a thermal of vanity. Touchingly, he moved away from himself, towards the greater concern of birds. “Perhaps there will be someone who will do what I did. Someone should. There should be an addition to my work.”

In conversations with Kazi, sadness and hurt were rare, and evanescent. They troubled him only when they surfaced, but they were too often lost in the sheer depth and volume of his life’s work. He had discovered 13 species in Nepal, re-discovered more, left nearly a thousand specimens for posterity. I felt showing me the books was an act of reminding himself who he was – a man without a formal degree but an ornithologist nonetheless. And one who discovered birds. He had dreamed when no one dared, done things none of his countrymen had, seen places no one would. I was glad that he had not followed an academic life. What classroom could have given him what he had found in all those wild places?

Lack of fame did not trouble Kazi. Lack of bird sightings did. He never stopped caring for them. He had announced a reward of 500 rupees for a vulture sighting in the Kathmandu Valley. The offer was a last-ditch effort by someone unable to do fieldwork, and so see for himself, the plight of the scavengers. No one came to claim the money, but many realized what had been lost.

Serious ornithologists, birding aficionados, researchers, conservationists, and journalists respected and loved Kazi. Monarchs and presidents had given him awards. Jimmy Carter had gone birding with him. Diplomats sent him coffee table books. Wildlife photographers gifted him framed pictures. Any event that had the word bird in it wanted him as the guest of honour. But Kazi’s most profound contribution to the welfare of birds, in my eyes, was the impression he made on the ordinary person. His love for birds leached into others, sometimes percolating through generations. Years ago, when I first heard about his reward for vultures sightings in Kathmandu, I mentioned it to my father. One day, I got a call from my father. He was returning from the annual festival of Ghatal, a deity in the town of Dadeldhura in west Nepal. It was an event he rarely missed. He had seen black figures circling the sky above the highway and stopped to call. “Kapil, I just counted 14 vultures

wheeling in the sky. I remembered that old man you told me about. I thought you guys would be interested.” Since then, every time my father is on that stretch of the highway, which winds around an old-growth forest, he stops and calls me. There is excitement in his voice when he sees many vultures. When the numbers are low, he wonders why. If he doesn’t see any, the call comes later, when he is back at home. Even if in just one place, he becomes a birder. He counts. He calls. He cares.

*

Three things made up Kazi’s memory of a place: altitude, vegetation, bird. It was as if he could not figure out geography without avifauna. You named a place and he had a story about it that, invariably, would be about a bird. And he was eager to add to his narrative. Once, I called him to let him know I was leaving for Rukum. After he inquired about the when, why, and who of the trip, he said that he had a favour to ask. “Look out for Cheer Pheasants. Some locals keep them as pets. I was never able to collect one. Please take photos if you find one.”

“An addict rejoices when he arrives in an opium den,” was how Kazi once described the joy he felt at arriving at a place to look at birds. He felt that way even when he had to leave home at four in Kathmandu’s frigid winter mornings. Once he was at the site, however, he forgot all about the biting cold. When he was no longer able to visit the wilds where he once rejoiced, Nepal’s oldest ornithologist chose a new den for himself. He started getting his fixes on his terrace.

He had found a world within the cage.

One winter afternoon, I joined him as he sat on his terrace, basking in the sun, feeding sparrows. The sparrow is the commonest species in Nepal – so common in fact that even though newspapers reported a drastic fall in their numbers in Kathmandu, people did not seem to notice. Or care: a sparrow is not majestic like the Golden Eagle or enrapturing like the Impeyan Pheasant, Nepal’s national bird. Kazi remembered trees in Kathmandu bristling with hundreds of sparrows settling down to roost as night fell. He decided to find out what had driven them to such a dire situation. He wasn’t just feeding sparrows. It was rooftop research.

In the lowly bird, the pre-eminent ornithologist had found his late-life mission. With a small digital camera and a plastic bag full of rice grains, he had been diligently studying sparrows on his terrace. “What is the reason for the sparrow’s decline in Kathmandu?” he wondered aloud. He conjectured it had something to do with the disproportionate ratio of males to females. Sparrows had already started congregating on the terrace as we talked. To demonstrate the source of his hypothesis, he tossed a fistful of grains on the floor and whistled. Sparrows alighted to feast. (Pigeons duly arrived to partake in the handout. He shooed them away, the harshness of his tone betraying disdain. “They are the stupidest birds in the world. Can you imagine a species that builds its nests on ledges?”) He asked me to count the males and females in the flutter. Fifteen males, two females. The researcher then fished out his camera, turned it on, and pushed a button until he found photos of sparrows. In the first picture, a lone female had showed up with six males for the rice grains. The second showed ten males and two females.

“Perhaps that is the reason for their decline, this drastic difference in sex ratio. Sparrows are not polyandrous, you know. Why are there so many males?” I joked that perhaps times had changed and polyandry was the norm in the sparrow world now. He allowed himself a laugh. Maybe, he said, then returned to serious bus

iness. “I will provide the annual data on sparrow numbers I have collected over the years to researchers. I will probably give it to BCN. They will do something.” As if to warn against his own oversimplification, he added that understanding birds was not as simple as taking photos and counting numbers. “There are many mysterious habits of birds that we do not know yet. Sparrows need to take dust baths to ward off parasites. But where do they find a place like that in Kathmandu’s tar- and concrete-topped grounds?”

Kazi had a lifetime’s data to share. That was invaluable in itself. But what made his insights into birds priceless was his familiarity with the past. As a nonagenarian, he was old enough to remember the physical and social contexts which provided room for birds in the midst of humans. “Houses nowadays do not have holes in their facades like in the old days. Before, houses used to have small holes for sparrows and bigger ones for mynas and pigeons. People believed it was auspicious, that they had to provide shelter to birds. I don’t know what it was, religion or something else. House owners believed that they couldn’t be happy without having allocated space for birds to nest in. Now, houses don’t have those holes.”

Across the street from his terrace was a recently completed concrete building, ten storeys high. Next to it another, six storeyed. Their facades were all glass. No holes. No birds.

The recollection resonated with another of Paudyal’s poems. This one, titled “The Chirruping of a Swallow” (Gaunthaliko Chiribiri), first published in 1935,  has a swallow asking a human:

You say this house is yours,
I say that it is mine,
To whom in fact does it belong?
Turn your mind to that!

At the end of one long interview on his terrace in the salubrious winter sun, I asked him if he needed help going down to his room. He declined. He would stay a couple of hours more, he said. I asked if he was staying for the sun’s warmth, seeking confirmation of what I thought was the real reason. “No, it’s not for the sun. I can’t stand the sun, actually. I sit here to watch the birds.” It was late February, still quite chilly. The veteran birder knew it was time for wintering raptors to return north. He had been on the lookout for them. “I come up here at seven in the morning and peer through my binoculars. I don’t mind the cold. I’ve seen all the birds there are to see in Nepal fifty years ago, so I don’t come here on the roof to watch those. I come here hoping that I might see a new species.” The reward of the stakeout had been his first ever sighting of an adult Imperial Eagle.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry to see an outdoors man confined to a single building in a city, reduced to peering at birds from his roof. Perhaps as a consequence of studying birds all his life, his mind had grown wings. He soared on updrafts of plans and possibilities. The idea of new dis

coveries never got old for him. I never saw him weighed down by anything, even when his physical world had shrunk to a room and a terrace. His passion – his preferred term for it was “addiction” – for birds was boundless and ageless. It was the only constant in his world. Today, he could only walk as far as his roof; tomorrow, he might be back doing fieldwork. (Even though well over a decade had passed since he had been out in the field, he kept a hand-written note in his wallet, folded to half the size of a credit-card, that had conversions of metres into feet – handy for recording the altitude at which a bird was seen.)

I once asked him if he would be out in the field if his legs allowed it. “Yes, I could still do it if I didn’t have the problem with these legs. I still believe I could find two or three species new to Nepal. I know places where I might see new birds. I think I even heard a bird that was possibly new to science. It was on the trail to Begnas Tal via Ghan Pokhara. I hadn’t heard that birdsong before, nor have I since. This was some fifteen years ago. I had planned to go there again, but the trip never happened and eventually my legs became like they are today. I had a tape recorder. I would have lived there and meditated like an ascetic until I recorded that bird’s song. Food and serviceable legs. That is all I need.”

*

The last time I saw him, in March this year, his legs seemed to have magically strengthened. He was gliding across the room, fetching old newspaper cuttings and photos to show me. He told me he had recently walked on the street for the first time in years, to take his phone to a repair shop.

I asked him how he spent his days, and he said that the first thing he did in the morning was take a bath, followed immediately by a meditative moment. “I don’t believe in the soul, but I remember my parents. After all, they showed me the earth and the sky.” For some reason, he then talked about Upper Mustang. He recalled that inside the earthen walls of the city of Lo Manthang, in the left corner, was a tree. Then his mind’s eye travelled away from that last human habitation, further and higher, to the emptiness of the plateau, the place where all those years ago he had found three species new to Nepal. I knew from listening to him tell his story that he had never been quite at home around people, the places they loved, the things they believed in. “You know, they say that if you go thrice to the Jagannath Puri Temple, you go to heaven after death. My Jagannath is Upper Mustang and Dolpo. I want to go there at least one more time.”

On the Nepal-Tibet border