“Why would I want to see a dead body?”
“It’s meant to be good luck. To see one.” She sneezed, twice. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s something to do with the Buddha seeing a dead person before he went off to get enlightened. I don’t know. It’s quite bizarre, though.”
“Highly recommended.” Coal wore his droll Brit look. “Not to be missed.”
“Just a dead body?”
“That’s all. Nothing fancy. You can go as you are, old chap.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I think not,” said Coal. “You know how it is. You’ve seen one corpse, you’ve seen them all.”
“See it and come back,” Clarice offered. “We’ll be right here.”
I FOUND THE corpse along the kora, near the wall of the lowest plinth. It lay on its back, covered by a white sheet, face exposed. The body had belonged to a light-skinned man, in his late thirties or early forties. Hundreds of rupee notes and coins had been tossed onto the shroud: contributions, I guessed, toward the man’s cremation or sky burial. A policeman stood nearby, charged with the monotonous task of guarding the cadaver and its booty.
“How did he die?”
“Malai tha chhaina.” The officer shrugged. “Everyone thought he was sleeping, but he was dead. No one knows.”
I regarded the figure. The man’s face looked calm, yet pained, as if he had been making a profound effort at concentration as the life ebbed out of him. Although I hadn’t known him, it was astonishing to realize that the spirit was gone, and the body an abandoned shell. Left alone, it would certainly be discovered by vultures, or torn apart by dogs. Such a fate, gruesome as it sounds, is the dying wish of many Tibetans. The body, having consumed its share, might now serve to nourish other creatures. One’s karma could only be improved by such a selfless act.
My mind swam back to an incident that had occurred nine years ago. I was visiting the East Coast. My brother and I, with four of his friends, had gone rock climbing on the Shawangunk Ridge. The cliffs were black, and vertical, but not very high. Jordan and I had climbed very little. I’d scaled a few walls in the Santa Cruz Quarry; he’d been out with his friends once or twice. We enjoyed it, but didn’t have a lot invested in the sport.
We’d dropped our gear at the foot of a small cliff, maybe forty feet high. As I knelt down to get a sandwich out of my daypack I heard a cry, something between a hawk and a seagull. I looked up. A human figure plummeted toward us, clawing the air, and slammed into the ground at our feet. It was a man in his early twenties. He’d fallen off the cliff, landing flat on his back. His body was jerking, and blood leaked from his mouth and ears.
The six of us had stood immobilized, terrified, paralyzed. Even Jordan was in a state of shock. But time was critical. We tore off our T-shirts and slipped them under the climber’s shoulders, back, and knees. Using them as slings, we carried him nearly a mile, to the ranger station. An hour later, the ambulance arrived. The climber was loaded in, still unconscious, still convulsing.
The six of us hiked back to our ropes and packs, all of us shaking. It was surreal to see our abandoned gear, heaped casually in the flattened grass. Everyone was silent. We stuffed our jackets and snacks back into our packs, eager to get away, to leave that unlucky place as quickly as possible.
Everyone except Jordan. He’d put on a fresh T-shirt and was coiling a rope around his arm. He looked at me evenly.
“Will you belay me,” he asked, “or shall I fix my own rope?”
“You’re climbing? Now?”
“If I don’t climb now,” Jordan said, “I’ll never climb again.”
We climbed together. Later that evening, after we returned home, I called the hospital in Cragsmoor. The climber hadn’t survived.
MY ATTENTION REMAINED on the anonymous corpse, stiff and still on the Boudha flagstones. I imagined the eyes drying up, the teeth falling out. What if this was someone I had loved?
A wave of aversion, or pure despair, rippled through me. I turned to walk away, to reunite with Coal and Clarice, but my breath seemed to catch in my chest. A clammy sweat broke across my forehead, and my heart began to pound. It was like pulling a muscle. Before I knew what hit me I was caught in a full-blown anxiety attack. I started to jog, then to run, bumping people aside. My peripheral vision seemed to blur, and I stumbled into someone smaller than me, a woman shouted, a motorcycle footrest clipped my leg and drew blood. I started sprinting, gasping in pain and panic. I knew where I was going, where I had to go, and I raced ahead with dumb conviction, giving my heart a reason to race, burying my gasps beneath an alibi of physical exertion. And then I was indoors, bolting up the monastery steps, tearing off my shoes and lunging toward the heavy curtain that hung like a hide across the familiar doorway.
Chokyi Nyima sat on the long, carpeted couch, chatting with a family of Khampas. They wore dark woolen cloaks, and the men had long, red plaits woven into their ponytails. A dozen Westerners sat on the floor, cradling glass cups. The Rinpoche looked up in surprise as I burst into the room.
“Oh! The giraffe has come!” The Rinpoche turned to the students with a mock-earnest mien. “A good man, the giraffe . . .” He smiled and raised his chin at me. “So, some chang . . . ?”
I shook my head, approached, and sank to my knees. I had no kata, no tangerines, nothing to offer but my breathless agitation. Chokyi Nyima looked at me, and his expression transformed.
“Rinpoche.” My voice was a dry croak. “Something’s wrong, something crazy’s got a hold of me, I think I’m . . .”
“NO!” Chokyi Nyima barked, cutting me off. He leaned forward, seized my shoulders, and yanked me toward his chest, throwing an arm around my back. He launched into a rapid, melodic prayer. Every few seconds he would reach an exclamation point, and slap my skull with almost stunning force. I felt the cold tip of his amulet box press against my forehead, followed by a tap from his cloth-wrapped vajra.
After a full minute he pushed me away to arm’s length. He peered into my left eye, then into my right.
“Okay? Better?” I tried to talk, but my sense of relief was so great that I burst out laughing. The Rinpoche, unsmiling, placed his right hand on my head. “You don’t worry, okay?” He looked into my eyes again, carefully, one after the other. “You don’t worry anything. I take care of you.”
17
Water Music
A FEROCIOUS TORRENT OF urine, loud as a snare drum, startled me awake. I lay in bed, fuming. Putting the upper flat’s toilet directly above the lower flat’s bedroom could not have been an oversight. The architect must have fallen off his bench, breathless with laughter as he anticipated the impact of his droll floor plan.
It was 6 a.m. on Friday, the second of March. Four days until my departure. A second bandh, or general strike, had been called by the Democracy Party. Most businesses would be closed. Shops would be tightly shuttered. Driving was forbidden; according to the political flyers handed out on Shivaratri, “no wheels shall turn” (bicycles were exempt from the order, a cute populist touch). Regardless, it seemed, Captain Shrestha was reporting for duty as usual. Come rain, snow, or revolution by the malcontent proletariat, my upstairs neighbor’s Boeing would fly to Hong Kong as scheduled.
The strike was good news for Grace: She’d definitely picked something up at the UNESCO dinner on Tuesday. It had taken a few days to hit her, but she was down for the count. The bandh meant a quiet morning, horn-free. I’d dropped by her place last night with a ceramic dish of dahi and a course of norfloxacin, but it would be a good thirty-six hours before she could get a full meal down. Laxmi would walk over to Hadigaon around lunchtime, and bring Grace some mild soup. I’d learned through experience that bacterial dysentery didn’t reward a lot of socializing.
The upstairs toilet flushed. There followed a scrabble of scratches as Shrestha’s Doberman pinwheeled for traction on the smooth upstairs floor. This was a daily routine. In exactly ten minutes Arati, the captain’s elfin wife, would enter her kitchen
and begin a regimen of spice-pounding that would make my flat shake like the Cotton Club. I remembered the first time I’d seen Arati outside our compound, buying dog chow at the Bluebird Supermarket. She’d been squeezed into a pair of Levi’s, her narrow thighs precisely fitting the preshrunk denim. The other shoppers adjusted their chiffon saris and regarded her with suspicion. They couldn’t bear the idea that, in this well-to-do, thirty-something pilot’s wife, they were seeing the future. Would their daughters dare dress this way? But there was no holding back the new age of fashion. On New Road, teenage boys were already piercing their ears and shaving their hair into absurd mohawks.
My final professional commitment in Kathmandu was scheduled for 10:30 this morning: an interview with Ganesh Man Singh, the gravelthroated patriarch who’d been leading Nepal’s banned Democracy Party for three decades. Hopefully, he wouldn’t keep me waiting. I had agreed to meet Coal and Clarice for a rather unusual picnic, at one.
The interview with Singh was an unknown. He had a huge stake in this revolution and could not afford to see it written off as a public display of bad manners. Singh would be inclined to inflate recent events, to insist that the recent protests were proof of energetic momentum, rather than episodes of impotent barking.
I wanted to agree. I honestly wanted the Nepali people to demand reform and win their rights by any means necessary. And when they did, when things reached a flash point, I’d fly back to Kathmandu, pencils sharpened, to see that “Revolt in Shangri-la” found its column inches in the sun.
I pulled on a pair of socks and walked, otherwise naked, into the living room. At 6 a.m. it was still dark outside. I lifted the curtain and stared into the swirling fog. There was a sheet of paper on the coffee table, and although I knew what it said, I picked it up again and studied the plain blue ink.
Jordan’s third letter had arrived yesterday.
Good God am I in trouble. I feel it today, how there is nothing in me, and how I lack either the strength or the will—and have not the knowledge—to address my problem.
What ails me most about my injury is that because of it I am removed from the human drama. To the subtle soul who would urge that this separation, this enforced distance, might make me a writer, I reply: Yes, except that this injury has robbed me of any desire to write. In fact, it has robbed me of any desire to live. It is as if the Earth itself has turned against me, casting me into exile for the sins I have committed against it.
I do not fear death. I fear the empty hours of life that otherwise lie ahead—a life that seems to me the worst fate for a being on this Earth.
I thought about trying my brother again. Over the past week I’d made a dozen attempts to call him. It wasn’t easy, as he probably didn’t spend more than twenty minutes a day in his apartment. He came home and went to bed when the university library closed and was up and about by dawn. I’d tried to call him during his sleeping hours, but the international circuits had been overloaded every time. On three other occasions a connection had been made, only to end in unrequited ringing. Jordan had no answering machine.
It was about 7 p.m. in Philadelphia. I dialed Jordan’s number, edgy as a high school senior phoning for a prom date, and waited. The satellite link was an oceanic experience: a rich, infinite roar, like the sigh of an enormous seashell, followed by a series of dolphinlike beeps and clicks. My attempt was again terminated by the perky recording, in English and Nepali: “Sorry, but all international circuits are busy. Please try your call later.”
“Fuck you,” I replied. Busy at 6:15 in the morning? I was dubious, but who knew? Nepalis kept odd hours. At any rate, there was nothing I could do.
The upstairs door opened and shut: Captain Shrestha leaving for the airport. On an impulse I threw on my sweats and ran outside. I found him standing in the car park, smoking. He offered the pack as I approached. I declined, but we shook hands, as if we had some understood business together.
“Good morning. Off to Hong Kong?”
“That’s right. Business as usual. My copilot’s on his way to pick me up. He wants to show off his new Maruti. It’s a crap car.” Shrestha pulled on the Marlboro and glanced suspiciously at the crows on the wires above us. “Do you have an early deadline?” He knew I worked for the Examiner; he and Arati had twice been to San Francisco.
“Actually, I was hoping to talk to you. If you’ve got a minute.”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Tell me something.” I tried to sound casual, hoping Shrestha would respond in kind. “For the past two months there have been all kinds of protests here in the valley. A dozen people killed, doctors on strike, the whole city closed down for days at a time. Just last week they arrested the mayor of Kathmandu and beat up an editor. I saw it; I was there.”
Shrestha grinned slightly. He was well aware that, like most Westerners, I hoped to see the monarchy toppled. I suspected he felt the same way.
“You pilots know what’s going on,” I continued. “But you’re in an odd position. On the one hand, you work for Royal Nepal Airlines: the royal family, essentially. On the other hand, you’ve got a broader perspective than most Nepalis. And you know as well as I do that if the people get their act together and support Jana Andolan, the government will be helpless. They’ll have to give in, or risk losing everything: trade agreements, foreign aid, tourism, you name it.”
Shrestha dropped his cigarette and ground it into the gravel. “So what’s your point?”
“That winning democracy will never be easier than it is right now,” I said. “But let’s face it: Nepal has a thing for authority figures. The only way anything’s going to change is when people like you—with high-status jobs and important connections—throw your weight behind the movement.”
Shrestha’s lips formed a straight line, and his eyes seemed tired. “Here’s the situation,” he said. “The king is a clown. He and that bitch in the palace have been robbing us blind for years. And what you say is absolutely correct: This is the time. But you know what? The people won’t do anything.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you. You know how Birendra likes to call Nepal the ‘Zone of Peace’? Well, the rest of us call it the ‘Zone of Passivity.’ That’s the problem: We’re too bloody passive.”
“Passive, or scared?” I pressed him. “Let me ask you this. If Ganesh Man Singh himself called for a strike—a total strike, meaning everyone—would you fly?”
Shrestha shook another cigarette out his pack. He took a few draws of smoke before replying. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “Not if I was the only one taking the risk. You’re right. I don’t have the guts. I don’t want to lose my job, or go to jail. Who does?” He looked at his shoes, then back to me. “But things won’t reach that point. The king will make some noise about free press, free lunch, whatever. The India problem will stabilize somehow. People will moan and groan, but they’ll accept it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait and see. This is Nepal.”
I wondered. Shrestha might be right. In some ways, Nepal was a lot like America. The economy might be a mess, the poor might be falling through the cracks, but there were enough comforts and distractions to satisfy the majority. Fruit and sugar were expensive, but they were available. Kerosene was in short supply, but a black market was in place. Yes, the police had arrested and even killed some protesters; homes were being demolished, without compensation, to widen roads; about a nickel of every foreign aid dollar went to the project for which it was intended. But the cinemas and shops were still open. Life could be worse.
“How long are you here for?” asked Shrestha.
“Not much longer. Not even a week.”
“Well, call me when you come back. We’ll have a beer. Maybe the shit will hit the fan by then. You never know. The Romanians did it.”
“And the Americans.”
A boxy subcompact pulled in through the gate of our compound. Shrestha slapped my shoulder and dropped his half-finished ci
garette to the ground. “Have a safe flight,” I said.
“Thanks.” He buttoned up his jacket and reached for the door handle of the running car. “So are you going to write about this?”
“I might.”
“I figured. Please don’t use my name.” He jumped into the car, waving briefly as it backed away.
THE MORNING HAD brightened to lavender. I could hear the clomp of cattle crossing the roadway toward the soccer field where they grazed. A bell rang through the fog. I returned inside and switched on the lights, wondering what to do with myself. The logistics attending my departure were settled. Laxmi was paid through March, and the flat’s subletters would hire her through April. I’d completed my shopping, picking up everything I’d need for a prolonged stay in America: a dozen packages of Tibetan incense, four block-printed tablecloths, a pair of ceramic candleholders shaped like elephants, a stack of paper prayer flags, and a couple of tubes of Vajradanti (literally, “lightning tooth”) toothpaste.
Coffee is something to do. I brewed a pot and carried it into the living room. A cane bookshelf leaned against the far wall, filled with familiar titles. I could read their spines from my seat. It was comforting. The flat felt utterly like home. It was home. What was unimaginably strange was the idea of returning to California. After four months in Nepal, the streets of Oakland seemed as distant as the Borneo rainforest.
It suddenly seemed of utmost importance to spend the morning immersed in the sacred ambience of Kathmandu. I picked up my Walkman, pulled a scarf off my coat rack, and set off for our neighborhood shrine.
A THICK MIST clung to the surface of Nag Pokhari. Droplets fell off the golden cobra’s snout, plinking into the water beside the square column that served as its support. A single lotus bloomed upon the lake, popcorn yellow in the pale chrome light. By the look of things, the strike was off to a good start. There were no taxis in the plaza, no men in pressed darwa-surwals and black topis bicycling down Naxal to work.
Snake Lake Page 17
