She peered back into the loupe, then slid it toward me. “Wow. Here’s my favorite so far.”
The image showed an ash-smeared sadhu, positioned near the entrance of the temple complex. The holy man sat cross-legged on a small mat spread out on the pavement. Heavy dreadlocks hung to his thin knees. He gripped a trident—the emblem of Lord Shiva—in his right hand. The mendicant’s ganja-reddened eyes stared dead ahead, as wide as headlights. But what made the shot was the line of riot police, out of focus but clear, assembled behind him.
“It’s a great picture,” I said. “I hope this isn’t insulting, but I saw a postcard that was similar, taken in Sri Lanka. Army troops marching in front of a big Buddha statue. I mean it wasn’t the same at all, really, but the contrast . . .”
“I know.” Grace slid another slide under the loupe. “There are only, like, ten great compositions you can come up with during a revolution. People tearing down a statue, mothers screaming over their fallen husbands, lines of soldiers with hippies putting flowers in their guns; it’s like anything. There’s a formula that sells.
“The problem is, I’m not a news photographer. I’m not even that interested in politics. But while I’m here, the People’s Movement changes everything. It guarantees, more or less, that almost anything a photographer does in Nepal right now is marketable. Careers are made at times like this. You just need to be in the right place at the right time. All it takes is good timing and dumb luck.”
Walking through Asan, Grace had told me of her real passions. She wanted to document Kathmandu’s sacred cows, and the secret plan to relocate them in the parched Terai. She wanted to shoot long time-exposures, in the early evening, showing how everyone—coming from every direction—circled the Annapurna temple on the way home from work. She wanted to photograph the hand-painted bicycle rickshaws, the umbrella repairmen and disposable lighter refillers, the ragtag kids thrashing like Labradors in the funky public pool across from Nag Pokhari.
“But every time I walk out the door there’s another demonstration, and I can’t afford to ignore it. I mean, Shivaratri was a perfect example. I’d hoped to get some shots for a series about cremations, and we ended up in the middle of a riot.”
A moment after she took the shot with the sadhu, the soldiers had charged. Grace had gotten that on film, too: the flurry of loose flyers, the wide-eyed terror of the student, his bashed head and bloodstained shirt.
“I’ll tell you something. I really wondered what the hell I was doing. I should have yelled at the army guy, or even yanked him off that kid. My God, they were the same age!”
“But what could you have done, without getting clubbed yourself? The instant we get involved, we’re a fair target.”
“I don’t know. Something. Anything. I’ve always found it bizarre, the idea that photojournalists don’t get involved. That we don’t even think about getting involved.”
“I agree,” I said. “But it’s the old argument. Our job is to witness events, record them, provide images. How else will anyone know what’s going on here? Or anywhere?”
“I know. I’m just telling you how I feel. The fact is I didn’t do anything. And I wish I had.” She studied a new slide. “Oh, my God.” She laughed nervously. “Okay. I hope this isn’t insulting. Actually, I hope you don’t hate me for it. You might.” I looked at her quizzically. “You have to see it, though. Come on.”
I squinted into the loupe. It took a few seconds for me to understand what I was seeing. At first all I saw was a slightly blurry mob, caught in the moment of stampede, the brick walls of the Pashupati shrines behind them. Then I made out the dark figure, curled in fetal position beneath their feet.
“No.”
“I swear, I didn’t know it was you. The second I realized, I ran over. Lou also. Actually I sort of panicked. You’d been kicked in the head, but you were only out for maybe a few seconds. Seriously, though,” she said. “Ignoring the fact that it’s kind of tasteless. It’s a pretty priceless souvenir of Nepal.”
“A souvenir of an outing with Grace, apparently.”
This had not been an especially sensitive thing to say, though I felt within my rights saying it. But Grace stood up, left the slide table, and walked into her bedroom, instantly in tears. They were automatic tears: the kind that come when a button is pushed and a pain center lights up.
I hesitated a minute then followed her in, a bit flabbergasted. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You should be.” She was sitting on the bed. “Come here.” I sat next to her, put my arm around her waist. The glare of a sodium streetlamp shone directly through the bedroom window. “Did you ever feel,” she asked, “like one of those characters in a movie who just gets, like, used? Like, whenever they need something absurd or tragic to happen, it happens to that character. Except, it’s never me. It’s whoever’s standing next to me.”
“Listen,” I said. “No one died. And it was my own choice, to be in the middle of that scene.”
Grace stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard a pop. She came back a minute later with two glass tumblers and a bottle of Jekel wine.
“Wow.” Good wine was as rare as good cheese, or good chocolate, in this frill-challenged country. “You found this at Bhat-Bhateni?”
“Are you kidding? I brought it here. A year and a half ago.”
“Really?” I was floored. “Well, thank you.”
“Thank me later,” she said. “I have to tell you something.” She filled my glass, and hers. “To the Jana Andolan,” she said.
“Within our lifetimes.” We clinked. There was a brief silence.
“My lab accident,” she said. “We talked about it at the Ras Rang.”
“Actually we didn’t talk about it.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one.” Grace took a long drink. “It was something else. And by the time we finish this bottle, you’ll be the only person I’ve told. Ever, anywhere. Promise me you’ll keep it that way.”
I set down my glass, took her hands, and promised. She squeezed mine, released them, and told me.
IT WAS DURING Grace’s senior year in high school, shortly after her mother entered the alcohol treatment center, that her career plans shifted. Stability suddenly became very important. Grace considered psychology, but it seemed too sketchy. She preferred definite answers. Her father suggested neurology. He’d showed her around the university bio labs, and made neuroscience sound like an adventure: a field where—like astronomy—known facts were still scarcer than mystery.
Grace had always been mishap-prone, attracting random calamities. As far back as eighth grade—when a stolen butane lighter had exploded in her locker, immolating her books, purse, and boyfriend’s letter jacket—her classmates had joked about the Modena Curse.
She’d taken possession of it. She’d turned it into a pet. And it really was funny how, when you nourished a character sketch of yourself, everything conspired to prove it true; how every disaster, large and small, found in her its inevitable cause. The pyramid of marinara sauce jars that fell from the supermarket shelf as her cart rumbled by; the skunk that turned up at Betina’s baby shower; the time she’d been at Maxim’s for Sally’s graduation, and her purse catch had snagged on the tablecloth.
Or the crisp January morning three years ago, when Grace had dropped by Vanessa’s. They’d turned on the TV to watch the Challenger liftoff. She remembered Vanessa’s joke—you sure this is a good idea, Grace?—and their bantering laughter, which lasted all of seventy-three seconds, at which point the space shuttle exploded in a medusa of smoke. Holy shit, people whispered to Vanessa afterward. How could you let Grace watch that? By this point, they were only half-joking.
Still, until her last year of neuro, nothing truly morbid had befallen her personally. Then, abruptly, the Curse had matured.
Dean was her confidant, and hero, during the two years she spent at school. Smart guy, very funny, a good study partner. A serious bicyclist. They’d been lovers for one semester, but that wasn’t where
they’d belonged. Miraculously their friendship had remained intact, to the point where she’d set him up with Vanessa, her best friend. They’d hit it off—and though Dean was initially reluctant, it had looked like they were moving in together the following fall.
The three of them were in her tangerine orange VW that night, on their way home from a Michael Dukakis event. She could see Dean’s face so clearly, could remember exactly what they were talking about: Ronald Reagan’s hair. Dean had just seen the president up close, during a speech in Kansas City, and was convinced that Reagan’s hair was a plastic headpiece. He’d seen the little square patch, right on the back, with “Made in China” stamped onto the mold.
“It’s not just his hair,” Vanessa had yelled from the back, looking up from the Journal of Neurology that served as her cutting board. “I saw it stamped on his ass.” Grace had started laughing, a quick breathless bray, and looked at Dean, who still had a tiny frost of coke on his septum. She wiped her own nose. Vanessa was scrambling around behind her, knocking into her seat. Grace looked into the rearview mirror—“What?”—but her friend was on the floor. “I dropped the bill.”
“Forget it.”
“It was a twenty!”
Grace craned around for a glance. “Better find it.” When she looked back at the road there was something big and dark, looming up in front of her. She jerked the wheel to the right, the car spun, and for a split second the names of all the hormones she’d memorized, from adrenaline to vasopressin, leaped through her mind. Her bug hit the guardrail and flipped.
Grace wore two white scars, high on her left shoulder, from where they’d rebuilt her shattered collarbone. Dean had a wheelchair, and the feeble hope that, if he worked harder at it than he’d ever worked in his life, he could someday walk himself to the toilet.
Vanessa? Nothing. She’d escaped unscathed, but had changed nonetheless. Dean’s convalescence obsessed her. She dropped her scholarship and started taking classes in physical therapy, waitressing to pay the fees. It was bizarre, in a way, how she’d reacted to the situation—and awkward, that she’d expected Grace to do the same. For though she never said it directly—no one did—the cause of the crash was clear. It wasn’t the deer, or Vanessa, or the packet of coke in Dean’s wallet. It was the Modena Curse.
Three months after the accident, as Grace weighed a tray of rat brains in the Behavioral Sciences Lab, it caught up with her. She saw her reflection in a paper towel dispenser—white coat, blue surgical mask, latex gloves—and decided to take the rest of the day off. On the way home—another impulse—she stopped to have her nails done. While she was waiting, she picked up a copy of Condé Nast Traveler from the seat beside her. Inside was a feature about Nepal, and the restoration of the Bhaktapur durbar. Halfway through, the girl called her in. Grace slipped the magazine into her daypack and finished the story that afternoon.
She’d never thought about visiting Nepal, much less living in Kathmandu, until that day. But something had dropped, and with a nearly atrophied sense of excitement she glimpsed an alternate future for herself: a chance to reclaim the dream she’d had as a teenager, before a pall of guilt and formaldehyde descended over her life. She had wanted to travel the world and make pictures. Suddenly, she wanted that again.
A week later, Grace flew to Europe. She wrote a short note to her father, saying she needed to be on her own for a while and think things through. At the time, she hadn’t thought of it as running away. But the days turned to weeks, and she could not find the words to write to Vanessa, or to Dean. She had stood in a hundred phone booths, but could not lift the receiver. After a certain point, the weight of her silence became heavier than her absence. Dean and Vanessa could only think the worst of her: Their concern must have long ago turned to resentment, their resentment to contempt. Not for a moment did she blame them for this.
More than two years had passed since her departure—sixteen months of them in Nepal—but Dean and Vanessa still existed. Did they still wonder where she was, or what had become of her? Did they ever, in their dreams, envision her wandering through ancient temples, sleeping beneath ice-capped peaks, saddling yaks with Khampa nomads? What would Vanessa make of the sadhus, or the sacred cows? How would Dean react to the sight of human bodies, aflame on the cremation pyres?
But there was no point thinking about that now. She only hoped, when she could bear to think about it, that they had stopped wondering about her at all.
I SAID NOTHING. We were holding hands again, had been since she told me about the accident. Grace tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling. The texture was gritty, with shiny little dots. Cobwebs littered the corners.
I followed her gaze. “It’s a ceiling that could be anywhere,” I said. “Las Vegas, Little Rock, Paris . . .”
“But it isn’t anywhere.” Grace looked at me, her eyes swollen. “It’s here, in Asia. It’s the ceiling of my bedroom, in Kathmandu. Kathmandu. Sometimes just saying the word amazes me. It thrills me. I’ll look at a globe and put my finger on Nepal and say ‘Kathmandu,’ trying to understand how far away it is. From everything I knew.”
“Is it? Do you?”
She shook her head.
I’d never thought of Grace as someone who, like me, had developed an attraction to Tibetan art. But hanging above her bed was a colorful thangka that she’d probably bought at Boudha. Framed in silk brocade, it portrayed the Kalachakra mandala: the Wheel of Time.
Of all the mandalas (and there were endless varieties, covering the walls of every gallery and curio shop in Kathmandu), I found Kalachakra the most intriguing. Tibetan scholars said it represented a kind of “time machine.” Not an actual machine, in the H. G. Wells sense, but a device for domesticating time and turning it into an ally. Meditating on the Kalachakra helped you visualize a perfect universe: a place where all sounds are mantras and every being is a buddha. In such a universe Time itself is a benevolent engine that, fueled by wisdom and compassion, drives humanity along the road to liberation.
Grace had heard it another way. “The lama who blessed this told me that just looking at it,” she said, “with the right attitude, of course—is enough to guarantee a rebirth in Shambala.”
“Is that the same as Shangri-la?”
“Shangri-la’s made-up, I think. Shambala is an earthly paradise that exists now. But it’s not going to open up for most of us until a few centuries from now.”
“Kind of like an exclusive country club.”
“I guess so. It’s a secret utopia, somewhere in the polar regions, concealed by a cloak of invisibility. Once war and greed are eliminated, and everyone in the world is united, Shambala will be the new world capital.”
“I hope they have good heaters.”
Grace poured the last bit of wine. It was past ten. “There’s something else you should know. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend,” she said. “Since I’ve been here I’ve avoided any kind of relationship. A week ago I was totally focused, happily riding my bike to the Teaching Hospital, with no obligation to anyone but myself. I don’t know why I’m doing this. Or even if it’s what I want.”
“Maybe you want what everyone wants from a relationship. A kind of redemption. The chance to reinvent yourself in a new place, whatever you had to live through to get there.”
“Is that what you want?”
“It’s attractive to me, too.” I lifted her hair to her earlobes and kissed the tip of her nose. “And so are you. Very.” We lay down together, on our sides.
Grace had opened up to me; at least it seemed so. Now it was my turn. I felt a knot of tension grow in my stomach. This was the worst possible moment to create more space between us. But if I was serious about leaving Nepal, I had to tell her. I had to let her know. “I have to tell you something,” I heard myself saying.
She propped herself on her elbow. “What?”
“I got a letter from my brother. Two letters, actually.”
She’d heard enough about our relationship to know this w
as significant. “That must make you happy. How is he doing?”
I shook my head. “Not good. He’s totally depressed. He was depressed when I saw him, when he stayed with me those two weeks in Oakland, but this is something else. He really seems to be in a very bad place. I’m worried about him.”
“What can you do? Can you do anything?”
“I have to try,” I said. “But that means going home, at least for a few weeks. And I have to do it soon.”
“How soon?”
“Very soon. In six days. March 5. The day before my birthday.”
Grace sat up and looked ahead. “I didn’t even know your birthday was coming. How long have you known you were leaving?”
“I’ll tell you the truth—I’m still making the decision. By telling you, I’m making the decision.”
She shook her head. “Well, thanks for telling me, at least.”
“Are you okay?”
“What do you think? I’m fine. I mean, yes, I’m sad. What can I say? It’s your brother. You have to do what you have to do.” She swung her legs off the bed. “We all have to do what we have to do.”
A rogue rhythm intruded on our conversation. Grace looked toward the window. Something was happening outside. Through the stillness of midnight, we could hear it: chanting, or yelling. It didn’t sound like an organized mob, more like a pack of hooligans.
Grace looked panicked. “What is that?”
“A wedding, maybe? I can’t make out what they’re saying.”
The chorus grew louder. A group of twenty, maybe thirty guys were coming from Hadigaon, just above Grace’s street. They were on some political mission, shouting about democracy. But though they could mouth the phrase, they perverted its meaning. For many young Nepalis—whose material urges had been aroused by the influx of Western tourists and films—the concept carried no burden of responsibility. It meant only freedom, without limits or accountability. It included the right to prowl the streets, accosting foreign women and throwing empty beer bottles: an uncontrolled ejaculation.
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