Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  The pious Burmese gentleman did not seem delighted to hear of this worship of anti-Boddhisattvas, but I quickly warmed to the earnest, friendly pair. They seemed to be eminently gentle souls, and I could not help being impressed when they informed me that they had given up their jobs in Vancouver, their homes, even their proprietorship of a local Dead-head fanzine, in order to come to Asia for a year. Just to travel? No, they replied, they planned to work in an eye clinic sponsored by the Dead. Where exactly? Nepal. Perfect, I thought. Hessean journeyers to the East, propelled by a social conscience, a lifetime of Dead-mania, a kind of improvised innocence—this was exactly what I dreamed of finding in Kathmandu.

  MY FIRST IMPRESSION of the city was delirious. I felt as if I had tumbled into the jangled and kaleidoscoped subconscious of an opium freak. Sweet incense wafted out of stores crushed raggedly together along dusty, crooked streets, and out from their walls hung horror-eyed masks, spinning prayer wheels, druggy thanka scrolls and revolving lanterns. Mirrors caught the light on shoulder bags, long dresses streamed from carved wooden balconies, scarves fluttered in the breeze, demons stared out of rice-paper calendars. On every side, irregular, nine-storied temples jutted up, and then were obscured by a flutter of pigeons. Squeaky-voiced elves chattered around the shrines where they peddled Bhutanese stamps, Niwari paintings, English chocolate. A ramshackle hut advertised the “Unique Typing Institute” and its only customer, standing patiently outside, was a cow. Everywhere, the dusty streets spun and whirled and revolved like a mandala. Freaks and flute sellers wandered in circles around a main square where long-haired men from East and West, hipsters and hawkers, hustlers and heretics, ricocheted counters off the sides of Carom boards. Snakelike icons wriggled from cardboard signs and elephant-headed gods sat in the middle of yellow-wreathed shrines and everywhere, staring down from walls and homes and streamers, were eyes, eyes, narrow, painted pairs of eyes.

  Senses reeling, I caught glimpses, or glimpses of glimpses, of the freewheeling psychedelic fun house I had imagined from afar. A ponytailed Italian in a thick red waistcoat and silken Kashmiri cravat sat on a jewelry-store stool, studiously rolling a joint; when a girl asked him where she could get some hash, he looked up blearily, smiled and trudged off down the street on her behalf. He did not need to look far. Glassy-eyed vendors patrolled the length and breadth of Freak Street, walking in circles, talking in circles, muttering a steady litany: “Buy hashish. Buy hash. Buy hashish!” One dazed fellow sat in a dusty doorway intoning a steady monklike chant: “Hash. Hashish. Change dollars. Traveler’s checks.” Another entrepreneur, hands thrust into his pockets against the winter chill, fast-talked his way through his own unorthodox rosary: “Brown sugar, white sugar, coke, smack, or dope.”

  And Dylan was crooning “Isis” from the second floor of a dusty, red brick café and a few longhairs were shuffling down dark passageways into 50-cent-a-night flophouses. “Optic Nerve,” said one shop; “Humor,” said another. A crew-cut Western woman shuffled past in yellow-and-burgundy Buddhist raiment and sunglasses, while a man with a full-blown Maharishi beard stared over his pot of tea at anyone who would return his gaze. The shelves of the disheveled bookstalls were packed with The Directory of Dreams, A Guide to the Tarot and Man’s Eternal Quest, and flapping against one of the clothes stores was a calendar put out by the “Eden Hashish House” (“the Oldest and Favorite Shop in Town serving you the Best Nepali Hashish and Ganja”). “Let us Take you Higher,” offered the friendly ad. “Come visit us any time for all your hashish needs.” Edens and hash houses had never, I imagined, been far apart in Kathmandu.

  And peering out at me from every one of the open-fronted stores, the local shopkeepers were smiling back with warmth, but unsurrendered dignity. The Nepalis were said to be capable of great and penetrating intuitiveness. In Kathmandu, a friend from New York told me how she had been walking through Manhattan just two months earlier when a voice from behind her called out, “Are you an artist?” However did this stranger know that she was indeed an aspiring writer with a weakness for artists? Turning around, she had found herself staring at a man from the East. He came from Nepal, he said, and she should look him up there. With that, the mysterious character had vanished once more into the shadows.

  My friend had indeed come to Nepal. And as soon as we met up, I assured her that the wisdom of the East would not be hard to find here. From the rooftop of the Eden, we could see the mountains bright in the clear distance, and, presiding over us from a nearby hill, shining in the clean winter light, the gleaming white stupa of Swayambhunath Temple. This, we decided, must be the site of our maiden pilgrimage. And so we headed off through a warren of dust-filled streets, past squawking, bright-eyed urchins, under lion-headed banners wishing everyone an auspicious New Year, and past the Jubilant Pre-Primary School. Soon, the noise of the city began to subside, and the air picked up an invigorating sharpness. We walked through an avenue of trees, past fields smothered with wildflowers. We passed a few local men going about their business, small but sturdy-looking fellows in the rough tunics and fezzes of the High Atlas Mountains. We walked over narrow bridges and across fields of yellow flowers and then, in the bright and cloudless winter afternoon, we began our ascent of the hill.

  Just short of the top, we came to a Tibetan monastery, its sunlit white terrace empty under the brilliant blue. Calmness filled the place, and distant chanting from a prayer hall. We decided to rest on the terrace, and as we sat there, reading and writing in the sun, a monk came out and engaged us gently in conversation. He had been here many years, he said, but still he missed his home in Tibet. He much looked forward to hearing His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Bodh Gaya later this year. Would we care to follow him inside?

  Slipping off our shoes, we tiptoed into the central chamber. The hall was dark, and along its two main benches two rows of monks kneeled in their thick red robes. Their faces were lit by candles as they bowed above their scriptures. The smell of butter lamps mixed sweetly with the scent of incense. The deep-voiced chants rolled around and around the hall, broken at moments by the tolling of a gong and the sudden low growl of the head abbot.

  Quite a few of the monks, I noticed, were mischief-eyed little characters, scarcely nine years old, whose vigor in shouting out the chants owed more, it seemed, to schoolboy zest than to spiritual zeal. Often, in fact, they forgot themselves in furtive, impish smiles—only to be briskly brought back to the matter at hand by an elder’s gentle, but decisive, slap. And as the muttered chants went on, I began to lose myself in wistful reverie. The strange smells, the hypnotic repetitions, the flutter of candles transported me. I felt myself carried away to distant lamaseries, whisked off to snowy mountain passes. I almost imagined myself back in Tibet. And then, without a warning, I felt my friend tugging urgently at my sleeve. “Look over there,” she whispered. I did, and there, to my astonishment, one of the young monks was happily bouncing a startled-looking Pekingese puppy up and down on his lap. As soon as he saw us watching him, he giggled at his broad-faced neighbor. This jovial character responded by flashing us a huge and gleeful smile. His mouth was filled with Dracula fangs purchased at some local novelty store.

  Through it all, the chanting continued like a spell.

  II

  The best deal in Kathmandu, I soon discovered, was Paradise. “Nepal, the Fantasting Country, has become a Promised Land,” began the book of national facts and figures put out by the Ministry of Tourism and written by U. S. Thappa. Another of U.S.’s volumes was called, simply, Paradise Nepal. Little boys wore Paradise T-shirts, and Paradise Tours and Travels had to compete against both Shangri-La Tours and Shangri-La Treks.

  Nepal was not, however, selling Paradise in the sense of Arcadia—a Balinese tropical playground filled with Unfallen fruit and Unfallen souls. Rather, it was offering Paradise in its highest, and most rigorous, form: Nirvana. The greatest bargains in town were spiritual accessories. Sweatshirts that said “Adidas,” or even “Ddidas,” cost a small fortune in
Kathmandu, but thankas, prayer wheels and Buddhist calendars could always be found on sale. Day-trippers could take their pick between Nirvana Tours and Lama Excursions. Bargain hunters could try the Temple of Trade Pvt. Ltd.

  Nepal, in fact, had cornered this side of paradise. For twenty years now, it had cashed in on being the closest place on earth to the remotest place on earth, a country just around the corner from Shangri-La. And if Tibet’s charm lay in its remoteness, Nepal’s lay in its availability; a veteran of the mystic market, it knew exactly how to sell itself as a wholesale, secondhand Tibet. Thus the magic title of the Forbidden Land found its way into every single brand name: local stores were stocked not just with handicrafts, but with Tibetan handicrafts, Tibetan paintings, Tibetan bells, Tibetan scarves, Tibetan pizzas.

  Nepal had the additional advantage of being on the fringes of India, and where India was still the biggest spiritual department store in the East, Nepal offered an economy-sized convenience store with many of the same goods at even better prices. And the country’s hybrid mix of Buddhism and Hinduism, with bits of animism thrown in, allowed it to offer not just lamas, and not just yogis, but lamas and yogis thrown together in every kind of combination. Billboards all across town offered enough Thanka Painting courses, Himalayan Buddhist Meditation classes, sessions at the Himalayan Yogi Institute and yoga/massage double-headers to keep every resident of Santa Cruz out of mischief for a decade.

  “Shining Enlightened Mastery,” proclaimed the poster to be found in nearly every bookstore. Underneath, the ad announced: “Sri Swami Prem Paramahansa will be sharing his wisdom. Intoxicated in the love of God and the Supreme Ancient Knowledge since childhood, Sri Swamiji will share the fruits of his most elevated life in 900 discourses on The History of Mankind and the Planet Earth.” Enlightenment on the installment plan! Nine hundred lectures sounded like a long haul, but the Swami’s subject was, after all, a big one (an earlier work in his canon had been entitled “Biography of a Tough Yogi”). And the Swami’s “intoxication” would, I suspected, have no trouble in finding a responsive audience.

  For the second-best deal in Kathmandu was still instant mind expansion, a stairway to heaven even easier to mount than religion: twenty-five pounds of hash could be purchased in parts of the country for all of 30 cents (four hundred pounds cost the same as a small tube of suntan oil). Religion and drugs had been the country’s two great cash crops for so long now that nobody really seemed to care which one was sedative and which one stimulant. Religion was a drug to some and drugs were a religion to others. In Kathmandu some people lapsed into a narcotic haze and called it Buddhist serenity, while others had opiate dreams and called them visions. “Drugs” and “gurus,” they told themselves, were almost anagrams; the high and the holy were virtual synonyms.

  Indeed, the very fact that spiritual and secular trips could hardly be distinguished had itself become a major selling point. In New York, the Simone Travel Bureau advertised trips to the “magical land where deities mingle with common people and legends merge with Hindu and Buddhist spiritualism.” “There is a place halfway between here and heaven,” said the ads for Royal Nepal Airlines, where “Legends are Real.” Even the airline’s magazine sported the distinctly ambiguous title of “Yeti: Flight Tales.” Within the pages of The Nepal Traveler (“which combines fantasy with very practical tips to trekking”), the same theme was struck again and again, as reverberatingly as a temple gong.

  That same division was no less ubiquitous within the “Fabled Kingdom.” The most cherished sight here was the Kumari, or Living Goddess, a prepubescent girl who was consigned to an upper-floor temple room where she served as a flesh-and-blood incarnation of a divinity; the most famous line about the place was Kipling’s claim that “the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu.” Even the two national symbols, which had given their names to the capital’s five-star hotel and restaurant, turned on this same ambiguity: Yak and Yeti, most earth-bound of creatures and most mythical. Nepal seemed to have one eye on the heavens and the other close to the ground.

  This double perspective made, of course, for some double-edged blessings. Where sacred met profane, the result was often confusion. Earth’s Heaven, the name of one local restaurant, was a case in point. Even the location of the Eden, which had so delighted me at first, was not so far from limbo: where the Dharmapath meets Freak Street was not only where East meets West, but also where self-sacrifice runs into self-indulgence. The next road along was the Ganga Path (or was it the Ganja Path?). Even so, I decided, all this was simply part and parcel of the sixties, a spirit that had claimed as many casualties as visionaries. Some doubtless came to Kathmandu to learn how to turn their experiences into epiphanies, but plenty of others planned to enjoy their vices more by learning how to call them virtues.

  Yet what began to surprise me as I looked more closely at the town was not that religion or drugs were being abused, but rather that both of them seemed largely absent. Neither casualties nor visionaries were very much in evidence around Freak Street; neither wasted druggies nor starry-eyed dreamers flocked through the streets. Here and there, of course, I caught flashes of the spirit that had hit me so forcibly on arrival: dancing skeletons—icons of the Grateful Dead!—hung from the dark walls of some Tibetan temples and, in the abject darkness of the State Bank, I spied an arresting character in a ponytail with kohl around his green eyes, clad in an emerald Chinese jacket and a red coolie’s hat. The Jasmine Restaurant did, as expectation dictated, have some old King Crimson anthems on its system, while a nearby health-food joint was selling Reality Soup. One salesman in Durbar Square kept up an impressively loud pitch of “A kilo of smack, a kilo of smack.” Yet I could as easily have found all this in Washington Square.

  Still, I assured my friend, we would at least find some strangeness in the “Tantric” restaurant in Durbar Square. Here at least was a Yin-Yang symbol hanging from the facade; here at least we would see dead-eyed hippies sprawled across cushions and munching hash brownies while they listened to Pink Floyd. As we entered the place, we shed our shoes, and as we sat down, we prepared to shed our inhibitions. The small round room was filled with smoke, and country-and-Eastern music wafted out of its sound system. On its floors were scattered pillows and divans; its walls swarmed with mandalas and thankas. This, I thought, must be an opium den, and my friend likened it to a womb. But there were no lamps and pipes beside every cushion, and no creative spasms rent the air. Yin was not in evidence; nor, to be frank, was Yang. Nothing, in fact, but a few well-heeled Italian tourists in their late thirties. We had traveled 8,000 miles only to end up, so it seemed, in a facsimile of the East Village.

  Somewhat disappointed, I went back to the Eden to sleep. My friend, however, decided to stroll through the dreaming town. As she was wandering along Freak Street, a voice called out to her from behind. “Are you an artist?”

  Amazed, she turned around. There stood the same man she had met in Manhattan just two months before! Noting that her smiling recognition of him was unreciprocated (an American girl was not often accosted in the streets by Nepali boys, but who knows how often a Nepali boy might accost American girls?), my friend pointed out that they had met only a few weeks before and half a world away. Her questioner recovered quickly. “Yes indeed,” he replied, without missing a beat. “I feel that you and I have the same kind of power. I feel a strange kind of affinity with you. Tonight is a holy night. Come and see my apartment.”

  The circumstances were too remarkable not to agree. Fascinated, my friend assented, following the leather-jacketed young man through the darkened, empty streets. “I come from Tibet,” he told her as they walked, “and my name is Lobsang. But you can call me Lobby.”

  They arrived at the flat, and Lobby turned on the light to reveal two large posters: one of the Dalai Lama, the other of Rocky. His family, he explained, were all Tibetan holy men, but the medallion he wore around his neck had been given him by Sly Stallone. He had, he said, sort of one foot in New York
and the other in Nepal. Lobby got up for a minute to put on a Dire Straits tape, then edged a little closer on the sofa. He was an artist himself, he went on, and an actor and a writer. But he knew all about the mysteries of Tibet. He put a hand on his visitor’s arm. Lobby certainly lived up to his name. His uncle, he said, was a professor at Columbia University, and Richard Gere was about to come and stay in this very flat. “I feel this great chi coming from you,” he continued, warming to his theme. “I feel this great spiritual force. The only trouble is, your chakras are blocked.” What could she do? asked my friend. Well, said Lobby, as it happened, he did know of a cure: an ancient form of Tibetan massage passed down to him by his forefathers from the secret Land of Snows. Would she like to give it a try?

  III

  In time, as I came to know Kathmandu better, I began to recognize that the swarming city I had seen at first was as much in the eye of the beholder as in the heart of the beheld. The whirling surfaces existed, no doubt, but they seemed to be no more than surfaces. Revelations both mind-boggling and earth-shattering did not in fact lie around every corner. But still, when it came to modest, modish pleasures, the place was not to be surpassed. I had the best enchilada of my life on Freak Street, and the chocolates in the stores seemed to have been sent special delivery from the heavens. As for the pies for which Nepal was famous, they exceeded even their reputation. Soon I established my own sacramental ritual: disappearing several times each day into the dark entrances of cafés—not just Mom’s Health Food Restaurant and Aunt Jane’s, but also Tibetan, Chinese and stateless restaurants—in order to devour extraordinary apple pies, almond layer pies, orange cakes, fruit cakes, lemon pies and more apple pies.