Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART I - Before
Chapter 1 - Urban Bardo
Chapter 2 - Fear of Shoes
Chapter 3 - Black Armbands
Chapter 4 - Lotus Land
Chapter 5 - Mail Call
Chapter 6 - Make Me Laugh
Chapter 7 - Otherwise Engaged
Chapter 8 - Nag Pokhari
Chapter 9 - Shivaratri
Chapter 10 - On the Ghats
Chapter 11 - Meet the Artist
Chapter 12 - New Diamond Intermezzo
Chapter 13 - In Person
Chapter 14 - Swayambhunath
Chapter 15 - Nighttime in Hadigaon
Chapter 16 - Lhosar
Chapter 17 - Water Music
Chapter 18 - Playing in the Bandh
Chapter 19 - Heaven and Hell
Chapter 20 - The Boxer
PART II - During
Chapter 21 - Happy Birthday to You
Chapter 22 - Emptiness
Chapter 23 - Egyptian Wing
Chapter 24 - An Apartment in Philadelphia
Chapter 25 - Lindsay
Chapter 26 - The Wind Tunnel
PART III - After
Chapter 27 - Kunda Mainali vs. the Leeches
Chapter 28 - Critical Mass
Chapter 29 - New Year’s Day
Chapter 30 - Life During Wartime
Chapter 31 - Grace Under Fire
Chapter 32 - Word of Mouth
Chapter 33 - Why Westerners Love the Ocean
Chapter 34 - Milk and Cookies
Chapter 35 - Promises
Chapter 36 - Grace Before Lunch
Chapter 37 - Wheel of Misfortune
Chapter 38 - Mike’s Breakfast
Chapter 39 - Nagi Gompa
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
GLOSSARY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
for Jordan
Who is brave enough to remove the bell from the neck of the fierce snow lion?
The one who tied it there in the first place.
—Buddhist riddle
PART I
Before
1
Urban Bardo
THE BRAWL BEGAN with an eggplant. Maybe the sauji’s scale was off by a few grams, or his change short a few paisa; maybe the woman in the pale blue sari had miscalculated. But her outraged shouts caught the attention of six local boys, who stood smoking unfiltered Gaidas in a nearby doorway.
The Indian merchant shouted back, his brooding face screwed into a mask of indignation. The teens sidled up beside the shopper, adding their own racial insults to the mix. Their voices carried down the alley, inciting a state of alert. Guava and tamarind vendors, freshly arrived from the Indian border, glanced nervously up the lane, counting out change with fresh precision. The housewives and didis pretended to ignore the altercation, but held their purses more tightly against their bellies.
The brinjal seller was on his feet now, yelling at the teens. He was a thin man with a square face, a few years older than the boys but much smaller. He grabbed an eggplant and raised it high, meaning to display the fruit’s tender flesh, expound upon how difficult they were to transport. But his gesture was misread—and before anything could be explained, one of the boys seized one of the purple fruits and pitched it with tremendous force into the little man’s chest. It burst against his shirt like a balloon. The seller shrieked with rage and groped for the hardwood stick reserved for pariah dogs and greedy cows. The teens charged, grabbing his cart by the corners and heaving it over.
Eggplants and lead weights rolled at drunken angles down the filthy street. As the shoppers scattered, sellers leaped to defend their wares. Most of their stands were spared—but the hooligans toppled a pyramid of tangerines, and kicked over a basket of onions before skipping away.
THE INCIDENT MIGHT never have registered if the taxi driver hadn’t been chewing pan. We were stopped at a traffic light on Kalimati Avenue: the ugliest road in Kathmandu. My driver cleared his throat and tilted his head out the window.
“Fight,” he observed, and spat red spittle.
“What? Where?”
There was an alley on our right: a sloping chute angled between precarious brick tenements. Women were fleeing the lane, moving awkwardly in their saris. Oranges and potatoes fled with them, rolling across the sidewalk and into Kalimati’s gutter, where they were snatched up by a gathering crowd of pedestrians and dogs.
I felt a certain thrill. “Who is fighting?”
“Everyone fighting.” He craned his neck to see over the crowd. “Always fighting. In Nepal, too much fighting. Over there, market, many Indians. Too many Indians in this place.” He spat again.
Further up the lane I could see the unmistakable aftermath of chaos: overturned carts, scattered produce, men waving their arms like agitated mantises.
I opened the taxi door and shouldered my daypack. “I’ll get out here.”
“Better you stay in car. Very danger here. Maybe shooting, also. If police come, maybe shooting.” He squinted as I pulled a large bill out of my pocket. “Sorry . . . no change.”
“Never mind.”
“Sir?” The driver held my sleeve.
“Hajur?”
“You are a very lucky man.”
“Why is that?”
“You can leave Nepal.”
I grinned at the irony. “Drive safely,” I said.
THE SITUATION HAD calmed by the time I arrived. The produce sellers were reclaiming their wares, arguing among themselves in rapid, overlapping Hindi. I spoke with a few bystanders, but there wasn’t much of a story. Tensions between Nepalis and Indians had been escalating for months, and incidents like this were common. But the locals needed vegetables, and Indians needed to sell them. In a few days the street market would be open again, with a bored soldier leaning against a utility pole. Or maybe not; another half hour passed, but the police never arrived.
Back on Kalimati, I held my breath as a convoy of diesel trucks roared by. Gravel dust swarmed above their beds with every bounce. A pall of black soot hung above the ground. Taxis navigated the miasma like devils on the fly, weaving erratically to avoid cows, bicycles, and pedestrians.
I was standing just before an uphill grade. Along the roadside, boys and men in tattered and grimy rags hauled huge, flat carts loaded with pipes, lumber, rebar, or tin roofing. Their bare feet left shallow prints in the asphalt as they pulled the wagons with woven hemp ropes. Twenty yards up the rise, the grade became steeper; half of the pullers on each cart would drop their ropes and run behind to push, their backs bent at right angles to the road. Beneath leathery skin, the sinews of their calves bulged like balls of twine. They moved so slowly I could almost feel them breathe, hear the breath hiss out between their lips, sense the ache in their ruined lungs. Their labors were never-ending. Once these loads were delivered they would collect their pay and buy themselves just enough food and chiya to fuel the next uphill push.
A stream of foot traffic coursed along the sidewalk, moving in both directions. Men in baggy darwa-surwals, their black woolen vests absurd in the afternoon heat; women in bright polyester saris; kids chasing metal hoops through the gutters, their threadbare clothes the weakest link in a decade-long chain of hand-me-downs. All beneath a soundtrack of ceaseless diesel thunder, the blaring of Hindi movie soundtracks, Radio Nepal soap commercials, car horns, bicycle bells, barking, braying, shouts.
ONE MEMORY DOMINATED my thoughts every time I found myself on Kalimati. Years ago, when I was green around here, I’d bicycled down this avenue with a seasoned traveling buddy named Paul Janes. Janes had prematurely thinning hair and pale blue eyes, the youn
gest son of a Texas panhandle preacher. We’d stopped at this very point on Kalimati, straddling our bikes, and squinted up the filthy, congested road. Paul raised his eyebrows, and shook his head.
“This is it,” he said.
I turned toward him. “What’s it? What are you talking about?”
“This, man! Kalimati! I know it.” Paul gazed up the road with theological dread. “One day, we’re gonna arrive in hell,” he whispered. “You and me. We’re gonna drop down that long, slimy chute and land bare-assed on the griddle. Then we’re gonna stand up, and look around us. You know where we’ll be?”
“Where?”
“Right here, man. Kalimati. Wait and see. This is it.”
WHETHER OR NOT Kalimati would prove to be hell itself remained to be seen. But it certainly qualified, in the here and now, as a bardo.
Not, of course, as the Bardo. The Bardo—capital B—is the spooky purgatory mapped out in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In that ancient treatise (one of the first great travelogues), the Bardo is defined as the terrifying obstacle course that awaits the soul between death and rebirth. While migrating through this zone, our final spark of consciousness faces all manner of demons and obstacles: pits of fire, multiheaded cobras, rabid weasels. But these demons are all self-generated. It is during this crucial test that the trained mind can attain liberation—or control the circumstances within which it will be reborn.
In a broader sense, though, any difficult passage can be considered a bardo. Life, for example, is the bardo we navigate between birth and death. And there are bardos within bardos. Enduring a root canal, for instance, is a kind of bardo. A bout of dysentery is a bardo. Facing gridlock on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, standing in a grocery line behind an old man counting out pennies, and paying off a student loan as an unemployed English major all are de facto bardos.
At this moment, Kalimati was the latest in a series of brief, personal bardos—this one transporting me to an appointment at the Kalimati clinic.
The clinic was one of the few places in Kathmandu where I could get an injection with confidence. It was run by Western nurses: people who believed in germ theory and practiced the option of sterilization. It is very important to seek out such enlightened caregivers in Asia. Otherwise, one runs the risk of contracting ailments far worse than hepatitis B: the debilitating liver disease that I was attempting, through a stringent schedule of gamma globulin shots, to avoid.
Fifteen minutes later I descended from the clinic with a limping, but relieved, step. Common sense dictated I walk or jog the four miles home, exercising my hindquarters in order to stave off soreness from the injection. Laxmi would be waiting, a lunch of noodle soup and home-baked bread at the ready. But for some reason (to flaunt my fresh immunity to the local germs?) I detoured into a tea shop and ordered a glass of chiya.
The bhojanalaya was dark and musty. A few flies circled in the air. There were no lights, and scant illumination filtered through the windows. The cement floor had been recently mopped; there were streaks of wetness and the sharp smell of bleach. Posters of current pop idols—Bruce Lee, Bob Marley, Phoebe Cates—were tacked to the walls.
The table by the kitchen was occupied by a little girl, drying metal plates with a dirty towel. I chose a spot near the windows, the better to see what I was drinking.
“Khaana khaanuhunchha?” A woman in her late thirties turned from the glass cabinet above the cash box and addressed me in Nepali. “Will you eat?”
“Hoina . . . duud chiya matrey dinus. Cheenie chaindaina.” No thanks. Milk tea, please. No sugar.
“Haus.” The woman set down her rag and walked through a curtain of plastic beads into the kitchen, returning a moment later with my order. “Biscoot khaane?”
“Haus.” She brought a packet of arrowroot biscuits. They were good and crisp, as they should be in February—a far cry from the waterlogged wafers that had constituted my very first purchase in the Kingdom of Nepal, more than ten years ago, during the heart of the monsoon.
TEN YEARS AND seven months ago: That was July 1979. It already seemed like ancient history. Nepal in 1979 was unknown to me, a place that had never crossed my radar. I’d been lured to Asia by a gorgeous woman I’d met in Athens, a medical school graduate on her way to Kathmandu to study ayurvedic medicine for six months before starting her internship. After a month together in Greece we parted, vowing to meet in Nepal. But in the time it took me to scrape up enough money for an onward flight, she’d fallen in love with someone else. Her Dear John letter reached me in Cairo. I’d held a match to my ticket, but finally succumbed—not to hope, but to sheer momentum.
Cairo to Bombay, Victoria Station to Patna. I’d arrived in Kathmandu by overnight bus, during the thick of the rainy season. Though the ground was a sea of mud, the magic of Kathmandu filled the air like ozone. I loved the monsoon. It was a miracle, a dual baptism in water and fire. After each lightning storm the sky broke open, and rainbows arched between impossibly green hills. Then the clouds coalesced, and with a clap of thunder the rains fell again. It was as if the whole valley were being washed clean, over and over again. With my broken heart, Nepal was the right place to be: a green world.
Mornings I followed the trains of pilgrims walking in bare feet or rubber thongs up the empty avenues, watching with curiosity and delight as they offered flowers and coins to Ganesh, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles and lord of auspicious beginnings. There were always drums beating from someplace, tablas and horns and bicycle bells, the grating scream of ravens, arguments and laughter. Yet, somehow, Kathmandu was also the quietest place I’d been. Between every sound was a beat of pure silence, so pure that the temples and pedestrians seemed like brilliant, abstract stitching on a sheet of air.
I’d never expected it to be so cinematic. Every sight, large or small, was a flawless frame in a motion picture. A sacred cow poised in a carved wooden doorway, three schoolgirls in bright purple uniforms, a street stall selling pistachios and masks. I shot picture after picture: a beggar with a melted face, the hallucinatory displays of the glass bead district, butchers’ shops displaying the fly-blown heads of freshly slaughtered goats.
My senses awakened with a vengeance. Smell, especially: juniper incense, tobacco and ganja, cow shit, jasmine, frying honey, kerosene and eucalyptus. I spent my afternoons at the Yin Yang Coffee House, filling my journal with a wild energy fueled by hashish, ginger tea, and french fries. As I rode home on my rented Hero bike, the thunderstorms turned the streets and alleys into a slush of cow manure. Primitive electrical lines spat and shorted, with blue and red explosions, above my head. On clear evenings I’d watch the sunset from the roof of the Kathmandu Guest House, waiting for the fruit bats to drop from the trees and soar over the grounds of the Royal Palace. I could follow their path across the valley—which was still, in July 1979, a patchwork of emerald paddies, uncluttered temples, and white palaces.
It was like no place I’d ever been, no place I’d even imagined. Yet it was so familiar that on my very first afternoon in Nepal, I sat on a cane chair in the garden on the Kathmandu Guest House, opened a package of soggy arrowroot biscuits, and—surrounded by flowers and a grinning plaster Buddha—wrote down the words I’d waited all my life to write: Welcome home.
BUT BARDOS LIKE Kalimati were part of the scene, too. The avenue connected the country’s capital with all points west and south, including India. Since nearly everything that came into Nepal was imported from India, Kalimati remained a congested conduit for diesel-spewing lorries and buses.
For decades, the friendly relationship between Nepal and India was one of the few reliable facts of South Asian politics. The two countries have more than a border in common; they share cultural and religious bonds dating back thousands of years. Siddhartha Gautama—the historical Buddha, who traveled and taught in India during the fifth and sixth centuries BC—was born in southern Nepal, in a small kingdom called Kapilavastu. The long friendship was also sanctified by two treaties, giving
landlocked Nepal special trading status. Nepal was able to export goods to India virtually tax free, and to import petrol, medicines, and other critical goods without paying high tariffs.
India’s concern for its poor neighbor wasn’t purely altruistic. The Kingdom of Nepal, a vaguely rectangular country roughly the area of North Carolina, is wedged between India and China. In a geographic irony, the Himalaya on Nepal’s northern border, formed by the violent collision of the Tibetan and Indian plates, is all that is holding the Chinese and Indian armies apart. If Chinese troops were to gain control of Nepal’s high passes, only rolling foothills and dry scrub would stand between them and New Delhi.
A reasonable fear, or groundless paranoia? It mattered not. Even though the treaties didn’t spell it out, it was understood that Nepal’s privileges came at a price. India’s concerns were Nepal’s concerns. The two nations would enjoy free trade, open borders, and a cozy solidarity against the Chinese threat.
Imagine, then, India’s astonishment when, in the late 1980s, Nepal blithely permitted China to build a road right over the mountains, and smack into Kathmandu. Once the road was completed, Chinese factories began to spring up on Nepal’s southern plains, striking distance from the India border. This deviant display was followed, only a few months later, with news that Nepal had violated a secret treaty with India—in force since 1965—by purchasing arms from Beijing. The tanks and guns were no threat to either neighbor—but for India’s prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, this was one more act of betrayal.
In March of 1989, the India/Nepal treaties came up for review. This might have been an opportunity for Nepal’s King Birendra, one of the world’s last absolute monarchs, to reassure Gandhi of Nepal’s political fealty. The king did nothing of the sort. In an act of stunning hubris, Nepal’s parliament refused to sign the documents. Their needs had changed; it was time for a new, improved treaty that recognized Nepal’s new power and position.
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