Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  Everything Changes

  Across the plaza from the funky architectural wonder of the king’s four-story adobe palace, the Lo Manthang Guest House cum rakshi faucet has all but run out of suitable lodging; queri have even pitched their tents on the flat roof rather than endure the last windowless dormitory space available. Laird and I follow Ang Tsering inside past a souvenir shop (Visa or MasterCard accepted) and a video parlor (twenty-five raucous preteens watching a Hindi movie from Bollywood), up two death-defying flights of stone steps, through a kitchen with weathered ladies, didis, squatting around a stove, along a dark corridor to an interior balcony, down two more series of ladderlike steps, through a courtyard, past a room stabling a horse and a dzo, and out to fresh air and a final descent of steps to a small walled corral. “This will do?” Ang Tsering asks hopefully. The city’s six guesthouses are full of foreigners and Lobas come for the Tiji festival and our prospects are limited. Already I’m thinking how great it might be to be a kid in Lo Manthang, the whole massive interconnected dun-colored structure of it suggestive of something built out of the earth by generation after generation of castaway boys, a fantastic playground of dark interiors and climbing ramparts and courtyards and alleys and stairs and unexpected passageways and crannies where everyone lived as if under one roof.

  All is well, all is not well. A section of the six-foot-thick ancient wall has collapsed into rubble, literally pissed down by the monks whose apartments are attached to it, their leaky plumbing undermining the wall’s foundation. For their convenience, people have cut private doors into the wall to circumvent the city gates, and yes, the mayor, Pema Wangdi, a former serf, says, it’s not good to build houses right outside the walls, but you know, the king sold us that land. If he didn’t want us to build, he shouldn’t have sold us the land. The mayor wants everybody to be a landowner, house owner, have a shop, a business, but nowadays, once you’re an owner, you can’t find anybody to work for you, we don’t even have enough people to plow and harvest, he sighs. There’s a refrain in the air, a Loba complaint: Our grandfathers created so much more than we can maintain. Fields, houses, monasteries, temples, chortens, irrigation ditches. It was much easier to keep things in shape with the serf system, of course: nothing like free labor to bring a kingdom up to speed.

  Out on the jovial streets, Laird bows and hugs old friends but he can’t remember names. He says he is bad with names but, married to his camera, I’ve rarely seen him bother. By his own admission, social skills have always been “difficult,” a peccadillo that will balloon to the level of a cardinal sin before we leave Lo Manthang. We finally locate the hovel that serves as the worst police quarters in Nepal and, as we promised our liaison officer in Kagbeni, report in and are assigned a new officer to accompany us on our forays north of the city. Crime? we ask as our names are recorded in the registry. The unshaven cops look at one another, puzzled. Nobody understands the word in Mustang, nobody’s seen or heard of Maoists up here. Ah, but there is one problem, a very bad problem, the police say. Mastiffs. Two policemen have been bitten in the past year, and three villagers, thus explaining why every nasty brute in town was now, thankfully, leashed.

  I return to the compound with the others; Laird sets out to escort his wife on a long-awaited personal tour of the legendary city that once made her a type of war bride—a town of only one thousand people, a fifteen-minute walk end to end. We are having afternoon tea and popcorn in our dining tent when Tom bursts in: Quick, quick, he says to me, ignoring the others, we must go immediately for a brief audience with the raja and rani. We cross the plaza to the dark, litter-strewn entrance to the palace, the kind of grimy, step-out-of-sight niche where you’d expect to find junkies or working girls in a bad neighborhood in a bigger city. The king apparently is not big on upkeep either, but what are you going to do when your serfs bail out of the program? Above us on a second-floor balcony, two huge brown mastiffs bark psychotically and hurl themselves against their chains. The unlit passageways are steep, uneven, with cracked-off steps, and it’s so dark you can’t see the face of anyone coming the other way. On the third floor we are ushered into the main receiving room, benchlike tables fronting carpeted banquettes, ornately painted Tibetan cabinets and chests against the walls, photographs of Nepal’s soon-to-be-dead monarchs framed on the wall, scuffed linoleum covering the concrete floor. A wooden rack displays an extraordinary collection of weapons—turn-of-the-century Lee Enfields, a World War II Sten gun, various musketry, and even flintlocks with pronged bayonets that fold down to allow the long rifles to be steadied and fired while riding a horse.

  Ten years ago it was customary for peasants, in homage to the king, to stick out their tongues and prostrate themselves in his presence. Today power has shifted to the bureaucracies of Kathmandu, and the prostration is not so common, though villagers continue to scratch their heads in front of the king as a weird sign of respect. We pay our tribute in the form of ceremonial silk khatas, first to the rani, pale-faced and fine-boned and thin, elegant in her traditional gray bukkhoo and apron, her doe eyes beautiful but heavyhearted. She no longer attends public events, I am told: She is shy, she can’t stand the dust, and most of her ladies-in-waiting have expired anyway.

  In the corner along the cushions sits the taciturn seventy-year-old king, attired in a zipped blue windbreaker, a loop of prayer beads sliding through his fingers. Laird has a gift, a copy of his latest book, The Dalai Lama’s Secret Temple, a collaboration with author Ian Baker that features Laird’s photographs of the exiled Tibetan leader’s private chapel in Llhasa. The king bends his attention to the murals on the page and becomes instantly absorbed, increasingly devoted in his old age to otherworldly matters. He’s spacey but nonetheless kingly, a receptacle of that aura of divine composure that trickles through dynasties, but mostly the impression is of an aging monarch weary of all the nonsense he’s bound to adjudicate, fatigued by the stream of not-always-distinguished guests who come petitioning his favor. From the looks of him, it would not surprise me if the king’s concept of Nirvana includes retirement to the golf courses of Boca Raton. When King Jigme finally steps into that other, better world, the throne will pass to his nephew, a man fully entrenched in this one: Crown Prince Jigme S. P. Bista owns a rug factory and a trekking company in Kathmandu.

  We sip lemon tea and chat about our journey, heaping praise on the agility and courage of the king’s horses. The king is pleased (I think). When the topic turns to change, the king declares the Lobas are more prosperous, more educated than ten years ago. The city’s a little cleaner, food’s a little cheaper, and most people like the electricity introduced by ACAP, which insisted that the lines be buried underground—a difficult decision both politically and technically. As for tourism, says the king, so far so good, though he would be against an increase in the number of foreigners coming to Lo Manthang and, he adds, “the lower people don’t want hotels here.”

  But still the villagers want more tourists, they want the restriction and the fee lifted, yes? I ask. Mm, the king softly grunts, bowing his head to the inscrutable ambiguity of his quasi-royal thoughts. His thumb caresses the beads. The audience is over.

  Outside in the square, ACAP’s public-address system crackles Tibetan music through the evening chill. At dinner, Laird asks the group if it’s all right if we have guests for breakfast, an acquaintance from Kathmandu and the Italian specialist working on the restoration of the Thubchen temple. Later, Laird pulls me aside and confesses that perhaps he made a diplomatic faux pas in the way he had issued the invitation. He had met his friend Linda in the plaza; she was in the company of the Italian and an Englishman named John Sanday. I had noticed Sanday earlier in the day out on the streets of Lo Manthang; indeed, he was impossible to miss.

  Certainly the largest queri in town, Sanday was hawk-nosed, pink-cheeked, and wore a wide-brimmed leather hat, navy-blue anorak, clean blue jeans, and leather boots. He seemed given to an autocratic pensiveness, a humorless brood
ing, and one might have imagined him to be a London film director trying to wrestle the Third World into submission. He was in fact formidable in his occupation—­architect and owner of the firm Sanday Associates. His restorations were ­world-famous—Angkor Wat, the Hanuman Dhoka Palace in Kathmandu—and now, funded by the King Mahendra Trust and the American Himalayan Foundation, he was restoring the Thubchen Gompa, one of the architectural, artistic, and spiritual treasures of Lo Manthang. Linda and the Italian were his employees. Come for breakfast, Laird told them, but he failed to include John Sanday in the invitation, for reasons that he now could not explain. An oversight, he tells me. A tempest in a teapot, I think, only the teapot is Lo Manthang itself, and my friend Tom Laird is headed for a tutorial in contempt.

  The day started in gloom and drizzle, became searing by the afternoon, and by nightfall is piercingly cold. I put on a heavier coat and join the Bangkokers in Sirendra’s upstairs tearoom and nomad watering hole. The clientele might look cutthroat and unwashed, but the smiles that greet us are genuine and unceasing and the place hums with coziness, with the fellowship engendered by the hardships of the land. The captain and Mike indulge euphorically in Sirendra’s home brew rakshi, which is not as fiery or green as others I had sampled and tastes like a watered-down version of good grappa. Tomorrow I will bear witness to a poignant moment in Sirendra’s, the reunion Laird wanted, the one he foresaw, when he comes into the guesthouse bar with a copy of his Mustang book and recognizes a bashful, elfin dropka, a herder, sitting alone by the stove, staring with a bereaved look into a glass of milk tea. Their reunion is affectionate; Tom asks about the health of the nomad’s wife. She died, says the dropka. But Laird photographed the two of them together ten years ago, up in the high pastures standing proudly in front of their woolen yurt. The photo is there, in the book. The man has never seen a picture of himself or his wife, but there she is, resurrected, there they are together again, and the fellow will lean over the picture misty-eyed, and for a long time he will hold his calloused fingers on the page and quietly touch his dead wife’s lovely face.

  Before dawn, I am unhappily introduced to the call of the hoopoe, an extravagant Southeast Asian bird that migrates north of the Himalayas during monsoon season. Unfortunately it has a persistent, monotonous threnody cry that sounds uncannily like my travel alarm clock. The sunrise is dreary, cold, threatening rain, the snow line has advanced far down the slopes of the surrounding mountains, and when I crawl from my tent to brush my teeth I find that I must walk a disconcerting gauntlet of vendors who have invaded the compound with hope, their artifacts and jewelry spread atop blankets on the ground. The Sherpas won’t chase them off unless I tell them, but I won’t tell them; these people are traders from across the ravine, too poor to have shops in town. I tell them if they come back later in the day, they won’t be disappointed; bowing and cheerful, they retreat behind the compound walls to wait patiently for however many hours until the queri feel like bargaining for a yak-bone necklace or brass thunderbolt.

  Linda arrives, Sanday’s emissary, awkward and nervous but not unfriendly. She’s sorry, she tells Laird. Breakfast won’t work. Without expressly saying so, she communicates tension between her group and ours. Laird, nonplussed, chats with her about the restoration at the temple and says he’ll drop by the site to see how it’s going. He wants to photograph the team’s work but of course Linda doesn’t have the authority to commit to that. Laird and Jann remain in town while the rest of us reunite with Mahendra and the horses for a day trip north to Namgyal Monastery, the largest monastery in Mustang.

  In the valleys running toward the Chinese border and the headwaters of the Kali Gandaki, the countryside’s boundless solitude is muted by a scattering of villages within easy walking distance from one another, the quiltwork of pastures and wind-rippled barley fields, the ruins of an extensive system of fortresses and sanctuaries, the ghosts of sentinels perched atop every knoll and ridgeline. Yet all human endeavor here is overshadowed by vast wildness, the horseshoe of severe mountains above the cultivated plain that corral Upper Mustang, “one of the most remote, backward, and inaccessible valleys in the Nepal Himalayas,” according to scholar David Jackson. Sometimes wolves prowl the fringe of the hamlets; in the higher pastures, sometimes villagers will kill a snow leopard for culling their herds. This is the home of the mythical yeti, the abominable snowman, and a bloodthirsty pantheon of local spirits; when night falls superstitious villagers bolt their doors.

  My curiosity is tweaked by the captain. Ever since we’ve left Jomsom I’ve noticed he’s been taking more prolific notes than I have. Insanely comprehensive, tediously meticulous notes. Now he’s up here peppering Mahendra with the most esoteric queries. Why do you want to know the name of that little mountain poking out among all those big mountains? I ask him. The name of the village headman who never said a word? The name of that inconsequential stream? I’m a failed author, says the captain, and that’s where we leave it.

  Machiavellian Playdates

  We begin our exploration of the legendary temples of the walled city, rivaled only by their larger cousins in Tibet. The great red hulk of Champa Lha-kang, dedicated to Maitreya, the future Buddha, houses a six-hundred-year-old clay statue of this same Buddha, so gigantic that it rises from the perpetual dusk of the temple’s cellar through the floor of the altar room toward the structure’s high-beamed ceiling and its rotted wood, a disaster in the making. In fact, the temple is in such extreme disrepair, its frescoes streaked with water damage and cracked from earthquakes, that the survival of its murals, in Laird’s opinion “the world’s greatest surviving collection of fifteenth-century mandalas,” is in doubt. Laird, with a Sherpa in tow lugging his gear, photographs like a madman, groaning at the ten-year advance of decay throughout the once luminous paintings. The raja, however, is waiting to judge the success of the Sanday team and the American Himalayan Foundation in their restoration of the Thubchen temple before allowing them to rescue Champa. “What do you think?” the king asks Laird later in the day. “Are they doing a good job over there?”

  Tomorrow we will see for ourselves, but we spend the remainder of the morning inside the chapel of the palace with Tashi Tenzing, the head lama of Lo, inhaling thick clouds of juniper incense while the monks of Chyodi Monastery immerse themselves in the puja ritual with which the Tiji festival commences. Above the drone of their chanting, cymbals crash, drums rumble, horns shriek and blare—the short kagyling, the twelve-foot-long copper dunchens, squealing double-reeded trumpets—and what seems most remarkable about this sacred music is that, like Mustang’s architecture, the instruments express a perfect interpretation of the land—the stormy monsoons, goats bleating, the drawling bellow of yaks, the river’s roar—and the unceasing thresh of man’s endurance.

  The more profane vicissitudes of Lo lurk just around the corner the next day at the colossal, brilliantly pillared Thubchen temple, which a camera-laden Laird and I enter, stepping across mounds of construction debris. Directly inside, on the wall opposite the altar, a crew of local workers sits on scaffolding under the blaze of floodlights, delicately swabbing clean an area of murals. Virtually nothing is known outside Mustang of Lo Manthang’s temples, masterpieces of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Inner Asian culture. They are incomprehensible achievements, their murals painted in the glow of butter lamps, their wooden beams and massive pillars hauled by yak from the southern slopes of India, their statues cast by ancient Lo’s own metallurgists. To my untrained eye, John Sanday’s team has performed miracles—the roof replaced and waterproofed, the original banked skylight allowing sunbeams to bathe the altar rebuilt—and in comparison to the soot-darkened, stained, and cracked frescoes yet to be addressed, the opulence of the restored murals stuns the senses. The paintings gleam from the walls like sheets of jewels.

  But no sooner do we enter the great hall than the floodlights go out and the crew of young Lobas up on the scaffolding climbs down and leaves. A foreman advi
ses Sanday, an imposing figure standing amidst the forest of pillars, that the generator has broken. I approach Sanday, hoping he can tell me about the technique for cleaning frescoes. “Ask the boss,” he growls, ill-tempered and enigmatic. “I don’t know who the boss is, except you,” I say. “It’s not a trick question.” Sanday, exhaling hostility, refuses to engage even in polite conversation, and my impression of him is neither kind nor, at the moment, informed. I haven’t a clue what’s going on here, this sudden turn of bad manners, unchecked scorn. Also, I’m perplexed by Laird’s behavior, his audacious insistence on standing fast—he will take pictures of the restoration, he will wait for the generator to be fixed. Sanday ignores him; the rest of us leave.

  I meet up with Laird hours later; he tells me the generator won’t be fixed until tomorrow, when he has scheduled an hour-long shoot, for which, he adds, he has shelled out a hundred bucks, not to Sanday but to the mayor, Pema Wangdi. In the afternoon, we watch the king’s men unfurl another of the city’s treasures down the length of the square’s south wall, a three-story-high appliqué thangka, Tibetan-made and antique, the backdrop for the upcoming festivities. A few minutes later, returning from the mayor’s house, Laird and I run into John Sanday and Linda on the street; the encounter escalates directly to ugliness. Tom begins by asking about the generator and offering a reasonable explanation of his motive—compiling a before-and-after portfolio—for photographing the restoration.