Snake Lake

by Jeff Greenwald

  Reading these stories was intensely frustrating. Until now I’d kept my spirit afloat, weathering waves of regret and professional jealousy for my colleagues still in Nepal. As desperately as I wished to be in Kathmandu, I’d remained reconciled to my situation: the harsh and indefinite process of dealing with Jordan’s death. But a short dispatch in the final newspaper I opened—a Reuters dispatch in the San Jose Mercury News—capsized my raft.

  In an unprecedented protest against the killing of civilians, all 165 pilots of Royal Nepal Airlines had staged a wildcat strike.

  In just four weeks, the chain reaction I’d long awaited had taken place. Nepal had reached critical mass, and I was ten thousand miles away.

  There was no hope, I knew, of calling my travel agent and booking a seat on the next available flight to Kathmandu. I couldn’t afford it; the expenses for the New York trip had drained my account. But even if I could—even if I borrowed the money, made the necessary bookings, and got myself back to Nepal in a week—there was no way I’d get my story.

  Journalists rely on their intuition. Mine told me I was too late.

  29

  New Year’s Day

  THE REVOLUTION WAS televised. I’d followed it all, from start to finish. The April 6 Massacre; the dusk-to-dawn, shoot-on-sight curfew; and finally, on the night of April 8, the king’s capitulation. It had taken half a million weathermen, but the Palace had finally figured out which way the wind was blowing. Nepal, the world’s last divine monarchy, was a democracy at last.

  Asia Week ran Larry Prince’s spectacular photographs of the victory parades: hundreds of thousands of Nepalis dancing down Ramshah Path and Durbar Marg, banging aluminum dekshis and throwing red powder into the air. Women and children waved banners in triumph. Everyone was singing, laughing, and smiling.

  Nepal had burst into bloom. Suddenly, irrevocably, and without me. Jivan yestai chha, as the locals say. Life is like that. Our imagined personal destinies are mere inventions, myths that can be rewritten by our own hand, or anyone else’s, in an instant.

  I swung out of bed and drew my curtain for a bead on the day. It was the fourteenth of April, a fine spring morning in Oakland. At this moment, on the other side of the world, the citizens of the Kathmandu Valley were celebrating Nawabarsa: Nepali New Year. In Bhaktapur, a tinderbox town eight miles east of the capital, the festival was just warming up. The town’s citizens would be pouring into the streets, lighting candles, and whacking drums in honor of Bisket: a yearly ritual commemorating the slaughter of two demons who had taken the form of nagas and hidden themselves up the nose of a beautiful princess. Bhaktapur’s male population would soon begin their traditional game of tug-of-war, straining on heavy, hand-woven ropes in an attempt to topple a giant lingam: an eight-story-high phallus, carved from a single tree and erected the previous afternoon. Each team would pull with all its might, rocking the flower-topped pillar from side to side. When it crashed to the ground, the demons/snakes were destroyed. The year could begin anew. Tonight’s celebration would be electric, full of triumph and metaphor. The snakes had been vanquished indeed.

  It was over. And nothing could make up for the fact that I’d missed it. Every third sentence that came into my mind, it seemed, began with the words If only. If only I’d reached my brother from Kathmandu. If only he’d trusted me with his secret. If only he’d held out another month. If only I’d stayed in Nepal a few more weeks. Jordan would still be alive—and I’d have the front page of the Examiner.

  No use think this, Chokyi Nyima would say. I carried my round cushion into the living room, set the timer, and assumed the position. Since returning from New York I’d been “practicing” almost every day. I didn’t have much in the way of technique; it was simply a matter of folding my legs and giving my mind a rest. It shouldn’t be a struggle. The idea, as I understood it, was to make no effort.

  Nothing is more difficult, I was discovering, than making no effort. But no one said it was going to be easy. That’s why they call it practice, I told myself. It made sense; why should learning how to liberate your mind be any easier than learning how to play the clarinet?

  Despite its frustrations, the exercise was useful. It was the only thing that reminded me of my life back in Nepal. Meditation awakened a physical memory. As I sat on my cushion, I could imagine that I was still a traveler, away from the desperate sales pitch of Western civilization.

  Some sessions were more fruitful than others. Today’s was not. The timer’s bleep roused me not from purified awakening, but from a daydream of Carlita’s rump, bouncing like a hot pumpkin against my loins. It was a painful image; we hadn’t had sex for weeks. Like steam on the windows of an old Chevy, the passion of my first weeks home had evaporated, and the inevitable return to the Familiar Questions had not served our love life very well. Carlita was ready for a real partnership, and vocal with her opinion that Jordan’s suicide had now replaced Nepal as my open-ended excuse to avoid the issue of commitment.

  On one hand, she was right. Dealing with Jordan’s death did not create the ideal mind-set for reevaluating our relationship. I hadn’t asked her to come to New York with me, so the event didn’t serve to deepen our connection, or bring her into my family. The whole mourning process was something that had distanced me from her. On the other hand, I could hardly feel guilty about grieving, or for taking as much time as I needed for myself.

  The upshot of this was that we seemed to have broken up, more by default than intention. For one thing, I simply didn’t know how long it would take to refocus my attention on her. For another, I had no idea where I was going from here. Carlita’s intuition had been wrong: Despite any pretense at reintegration, my heart was still in Nepal.

  Which brought up the issue of Grace. Sexy, sensitive Grace. I hadn’t spoken to her, not once, since I’d been home. I’d tried—but more than a week had passed since my last attempt. Neither Carlita nor Jordan was a credible alibi. The truth was more selfish: I wanted to keep my two lives separate. I’d come to enjoy the way Nepal hovered at the back of my mind like a delicious secret, an imaginary friend. To reconnect with that world from here would break the spell and make Nepal somehow . . . ordinary. Kathmandu was my Shangri-la, not a prize to be carried home.

  But that myth had been shattered and laid to waste. Eight days ago—on the afternoon of April 6, Pacific Time—I’d been eating a bowl of vermicelli at Pho 84, a Vietnamese eatery downtown. A television was blaring CNN from the wall above the cash register. I glanced up, riveted: It was a segment from Nepal. The camera moved inside a hospital, where a few exhausted doctors tended to the wounded. The next instant, a staggering apparition appeared: Grace. It was her, absolutely. My heart bucked against my ribs. She was standing in a hospital hallway in her bra, holding a rag, her face splattered with what must have been blood. The moment was so unreal that I wondered for a split second if the entire month I’d just lived through—Jordan’s death, Carlita, California—had been itself a dream, about to shatter into wakefulness. But it was real. Grace’s lips moved. Then the camera swept sideways, panning a corridor lined with bodies.

  There was no more footage of Grace, but the point had been made. As soon as I’d gotten home I’d picked up the phone and dialed the thirteen numbers that would reconnect us. A breathless series of clicks, then static. I tried again and again. On my fifth attempt, a familiar recording chided me in singsong Nepali. “This line is not in service. Please try your call again later.”

  And I had, for a few days. But in Nepal, when they say a line is not in service, you can take them at their word. The utility pole might have been knocked down by a Tempo. The phone itself might have caught fire. Or a crow may have landed on the outdoor wires, shorting out the entire neighborhood.

  Now, as I sat on my cushion, the CNN image replayed in my brain: Grace’s eyes wide, her expression dazed and disbelieving, as if she had looked into the camera’s lens and seen me sitting there, bolt upright, staring back at her with a broccoli floret in m
y chopsticks. What had she felt at that instant?

  Six weeks away from Nepal is not a long time, by expat standards. People come and go, gone for the monsoon or the winter holidays, returning two or three months later to a community that barely remembers they’ve been away. It didn’t matter what Grace had felt in that moment. She hadn’t forgotten us, and neither had I.

  The days since my brother’s funeral had rattled by in a single instant, like a tray of surgical tools spilling down a laundry chute. A catastrophe is a gateway. It leads out of, and back into, the world. One is sucked into a vacuum, but can reenter the atmosphere wherever one chooses.

  A year and a half ago two friends of mine, a couple from L.A., drove to Venice Beach for a picnic. At midday, the quality of the sunlight changed. They looked up to see a giant cloud, tinged with gold, blackening the sky. Within minutes, they knew the cause: Granada Hills was ablaze, roaring beneath a wildfire that would deform steel, implode television screens, and reduce their neighborhood to a scorched mesa of stumps and cement. They returned to find that their house, and everything in it, had evaporated. Family photographs, an impressive record collection, six new wineglasses, two vintage guitars, their hard drives and shoes and toothbrushes, had been released as energy and reduced to their component elements. All they owned at that moment were a car, two pairs of sunglasses, and the clothes on their backs.

  The first month after the fire was a gauntlet of despair, disbelief, and logistics. But as the shock receded and the element of choice flowed back into their lives, my friends did something amazing. They climbed the crow’s nest of calamity and from that unobstructed perch viewed their entire lives with detachment. Their careers, their friendships, even their marriage, were reassessed with an unblemished eye. The inspiration was to complete what the fire had started: to annihilate the unneeded, creating their lives anew.

  My brother’s death was a similar disaster: an opportunity to reinvent myself. So far, I had not done so. Like Jordan, whose personality had penetrated mine, I had shouldered the burden of denial.

  I abandoned the cushion and rose on popping joints. A few feet away, above the fireplace, a copper Ganesh danced above a blackened oil lamp. Beneath it lay a fragile veil: a rattlesnake skin I’d found at Point Reyes, almost identical to the one that Grace and I had brought back from Pharphing. I lifted it with two fingers and carried it to the window by my desk. Catching the light, the surface was opalescent; a moiré of colors that changed and rippled, defying resolution. It looked like a mythic map: a diaphanous diagram, etched onto naga skin, that might contain my destiny.

  I stared at it intently, trying to recognize a familiar shape. Suddenly, the blinds rattled. A gust of wind flew into the room, snatching the gossamer skin from my hands. It corkscrewed upward, disintegrating into a million rainbow flakes. They snowed on my carpet and made their way up my nose. I sneezed powerfully, and my ears seemed to pop. In that moment, something was released—surrendered as powerfully as that burning corpse at Pashupati had given up its soul.

  The future was clear. I had to return to Nepal. My initial hope, of getting back in time for the revolution, was obsolete. But the pull was no less intense, and my motives no less urgent. Grace was a big part of my decision, but she was not the only part—for this would be a spiritual journey, as well.

  I needed to see Chokyi Nyima, and speak with him about my brother. The Rinpoche, I imagined, would provide the last piece in a puzzle that had begun in Jordan’s Philadelphia apartment. Suicide is a grave sin, even in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. But Jordan’s life had been a rich canvas, filled with good works, insight, and a genuine love of the planet. I needed to hear, from Chokyi Nyima himself, that this case was an exception: that Jordan’s tragic exit would not blacken his karma and condemn him to endless rebirths in the lower realms.

  These were my aspirations. Unfortunately, my financial situation stood in the way. The trip home had been expensive, and I was broke. It would take at least two months of lucky freelancing to raise enough money to return to Nepal.

  I sliced a banana into a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast while staring at my calendar. A busy weekend lay ahead, but none of it amounted to much. Since my birthday I’d been coasting, bedeviled by the notion that any sort of enthusiasm, or inspiration, was somehow blasphemous. Like Jordan, I’d become estranged from my true nature. If going to Nepal was out—for the time being—it didn’t mean my life was over. I could still cultivate the things I’d seen, the lessons I’d learned there. But how?

  Thinking this way is like rubbing a lamp. As I recalled the events of the past months, trying to see them in a larger context, the seeds of a book began to germinate at the edge of my cerebral cortex, a book that would explore the worlds I’d visited since February. They were linked, somehow; the idea hovered just beyond my consciousness, like a naga glimpsed in a murky pond.

  And then it surfaced, with the thrill of a childhood dare.

  I poured my cold coffee down the drain, boiled fresh water, and loaded a filter with fresh grounds. While the first cup was brewing I put five John Coltrane CDs on the carousel, and opened a spiral notebook.

  BY EARLY EVENING I’d filled forty pages. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to be in Kathmandu—with its crooked wooden buildings, clouds of incense, and sacred cows shitting nonchalantly in the streets; for Coal’s irreverent humor, and the foggy, cold mornings in bed with Grace. I longed for the Saturday teachings, and the view of the Great Stupa through the Boudhnath gate. That was my home. That was where I belonged. I knew it. And the size of that knowing was big, with muscled arms and cobra tattoos, and it pounded on the door of the universe while my own narrow hand sketched out a rough outline and recalled snippets of dialogue.

  There’s nothing like a beginning. It fills the bloodstream with energy, sucking away ghosts like a cosmic Dustbuster. But the body has its own demands. I threw together a turkey sandwich, opened a Sierra Nevada, and leaned against the sink, eating off a paper plate. The phone rang, an unwelcome interruption.

  “Hello?” My mouth was full.

  “Hi, I’m trying to reach Jeff Greenwald.”

  I swallowed with effort. “Speaking.”

  “Great. Hey, listen, my name is Joe Robinson, I’m an editor based down in San Diego.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, it’s kind of exciting. I’m planning to launch a new magazine this fall. The theme is adventure travel, and we’re putting together our premier issue. I like your work, and want to know if you’re available for an assignment. The downside is we can’t pay very much, aside from travel and expenses.”

  “Mmmm.” The promise of even modest income was beguiling—but between planning, travel, writing, and editing, these jobs consumed several weeks at least. “When would you need me to go?”

  “As soon as possible. Our issue has to be wrapped by mid-May. And the story’s time-sensitive.”

  “I see.” I pondered in silence. The inspiration for the day’s work felt like a gift. I’d turned away from a few such gifts in the past; they tended to sneak out the back door.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m still here,” I said. “Listen, Joe, I appreciate your call. But I’m sort of involved with another project right now. Where, exactly, do you want me to go?”

  “Here’s the deal,” Robinson said. “As you might already know, there was just a huge revolution in Nepal . . .”

  30

  Life During Wartime

  THE COOL, BRIGHT days were over. By late April, Kathmandu had lost the charms of spring. Dust and exhaust from a thousand trucks and buses rose into the atmosphere and paused, suspended between pressure and gravity. The sky wore a metallic sheen. In February, on a good day, one could see the brilliant snowcap of Langtang, forty miles to the north. Now you were lucky to make out the finial of Swayambhunath on the valley’s western edge.

  Women shopped for goat and chicken with bandanas pressed against their faces. Commuters biked to work wearing particl
e masks. The whole city had become a giant, clogged nostril. It would remain so until July, and the first of the monsoon rains.

  These seasonal doldrums did nothing to dampen Nepal’s air of liberation. The changes were subtle, but they were hard to miss. There was optimism afoot, a sense of giddy possibility. A weight had been lifted from the nation’s shoulders. In the grassy field near Snake Lake, kids played soccer with louder shouts; young couples window-shopped on Durbar Marg, holding hands. The vegetable market in Asan Tole brimmed like a cornucopia, with baskets of tomatoes, peppers, and cauliflowers spilling onto the pavement, surrounded by women in vivid purple shawls. The Nepalis walked taller. They’d made world headlines and won the prize of self-determination.

  But the situation was far from perfect. A curfew was still in effect. Random acts of violence by royalist thugs claimed several lives each week. Democracy had not made anything easier; on the contrary, it had provoked profound confusion. People had no idea what to expect. Many had believed that the word democracy itself, like an incantation, would be enough to transform their lives. When they returned to work, they were astonished to discover that nothing had changed. In fact, things were worse. Prices were rising, and His Majesty’s government, lax at the best of times, had no incentive to ease the situation. The interim prime minister, an ethereal activist named K. P. Bhattarai, seemed as shell-shocked as the next guy.

  The afternoon of my return to Kathmandu, as I rode home from the market, my taxi was temporarily blocked by a procession. Hundreds of people marched down Ramshah Path, carrying red banners and chanting in Nepali.