On 12 March 1988, the weather forecast for the Kathmandu Valley in the Rising Nepal read: 'Partly cloudy with temporary thundershowers'. No prediction of impending doom. There was just a note that the sun would set at 6:17 pm – two hours and 47 minutes after the final match of the Tribhuvan Challenge Shield Football Tournament was to begin at the Dashrath Stadium in the capital. Two minutes into the match, the Bangladeshi team, Mukti Joddha Sangsad, scored a goal against Nepal's Janakpur Cigarette Factory. Eighteen minutes later, a hailstorm brought the game to a halt.
Outside the stadium, blowing at 80 km per hour, the windstorm damaged phone lines and electricity wires, felled trees and sent corrugated iron flying off roofs. Before long, large pellets of hail began pelting the spectators, who rushed in panic, all at once, towards the southern gate, through which they had entered. But the accordion gate was open enough for only one person to squeeze through at a time, thus creating a bottleneck. In the ensuing stampede, 69 people were crushed to death. Two days later, the Rising Nepal announced a rise in the number of causalities by one, and printed out a list of the perished. In the last paragraph of the first column was my dad's name, misspelled with an additional 'h'.
For the next 23 years, this incident remained just that – a news item seldom mentioned in my family, never discussed. So firmly banished were the memories of both the stampede and my father that, when my mom recently learned about a lama who could summon bais (wandering dead) and expressed her desire to talk to 'Dad', we assumed she meant her dad. My sister even made a joke about granddad's notorious temper, suggesting that his soul would come back with a stick to strike us.
The fame of this necromancer had reached Mom through our house owner, who had travelled from Kathmandu to Pokhara, in western Nepal, to appease the wandering soul of his recently deceased first wife. Standing on our porch he recounted the trip, gushing about the lama's talent in seeing both the past and the future. As it turns out, death does not fling a person into nothingness; rather, it turns them into pestering souls needing constant attention from the living. So malevolent were these spirits that, if ignored or left unsatisfied, they would stand in the way of their kin's attempt at success. A believer in supernatural phenomena, Mom began to wonder whether Dad's unhappy soul could be behind her woes: my apparent financial failure, my sister's academic disinterest, and that elusive house to call her own. If we mollified his discomfort, would he also tell us, say, the date of my wedding? And since Mom was already going to be in Pokhara for work, would I then kindly join her there?