Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Nepal, of course, had long been famous for adapting to Western tastes and fashions with unparalleled swiftness and skill. In the forties, before the country was even linked to the outside world by road, Kathmandu was said to be the place in the Himalayas for cinemas and cars. The king at that time, Tribhubana (he of plucked eyebrows and scented breath), was a celebrated connoisseur of mail-order catalogues who sent porters across the mountains to bring back lounge suits and gadgets for the royal palace. In that respect, at least, little seemed to have changed. When I stepped into a local store in the ten-hut village of Tandi Bazaar in the malarial lowlands of Nepal, I found, on the counter, an issue of The New York Review of Books, nine months old, open to an article entitled “The Melancholy of Montaigne.” And whenever Westerners staying in India felt homesick, a Nepali who lived in Benares informed me, they simply hurried off to Kathmandu.

  “We Solve you all Travel Problems,” promised Pawan Travels, “and make you Journey Easy and Funny.”

  Nepal’s prodigious versatility was most apparent, however, in the smorgasbord of its menus, which could easily have put the United Nations cafeteria to shame. Every one of them, so it seemed, offered everything from borscht to quiche and sukiyaki to soyburgers. The Jamaly Restaurant served up “Mecxican food,” Italian, American, Chop Suey, Moussaka, Curry and “Viena Schnitzel.” Shiva’s Sky, in the Continental section of its menu, provided “Mexican Takos,” Vegetarian Chop Suey and Chow Mein. The Nor-Ling posted outside a twenty-six-line billboard listing its offerings, and beginning: “We offer delicious Tibetan, Italian, India, Nepal, Chinese dishes, minestrone soup, Fr. onion soup … spagetti, lasagne, mousake a ‘La’ Greece …” Everything of every nationality was available here—except things Nepalese. When I asked a man in a candy store for Nepalese chocolate, he looked distinctly put out. “We have Indian chocolate, English, American, German. You can have Thai chocolate. You can have Chinese marshmallow. But Nepalese, no. Here only international chocolate.” And when I asked another local what he served in his Kathmandu restaurant, he answered crisply, “Indian, Chinese, Continental, German, American, Mexican.” And Nepalese? “No. Nepalese, very difficult.”

  LIKEWISE, EVERY KIND of conventional wisdom seemed available here—except, of course, the Nepalese. Nonetheless, I refused to give up on what the brochures called “the land of mystic delights.” My guidebook assured me that a distinguished astrologer could be found in Patan, by the name of Mangal Raj Joshi. Little else was said about the sage, but that only added to his mystery. And so, one bright afternoon, my friend and I hailed an ailing “tempo” (the haphazard, three-wheeled vehicle that is the country’s contribution to the kamikaze art), and bumped along rutted ditches and unpaved roads into the maze of alleyways known as Patan. Deposited at a corner in the middle of this labyrinth, we looked around. No sage was in sight. No wisdom was in view. Not even any animate life was apparent. Wandering around a little, we came at last upon a German patiently trying to rev up his motorcycle in the dust. How could we get to the center of town? “Follow the paved road,” he said cryptically. “Always the paved road.”

  This we did, through serpentine passageways and lanes, past grubby courtyards and old homes, until at last we arrived at a central jumble of temples. Religious figures were on every side; wise men, however, were not. Undefeated, we trooped into the only restaurant in sight, the Café de Patan. After an apple pie or two, we asked the waiter where we might find the famous Mr. Joshi.

  He stopped to think for a moment. “Astrologer,” I prompted. He considered the matter a little longer. “Go to the Golden Temple,” he said. “Ask at the Golden Temple.”

  The Kathmandu Valley contains more temples per square foot than any other place on earth. Nearly all of them have gold on their stupas, gold in their spires, gold in some part or another. None of them has an English name.

  Nonetheless, we were disinclined to ignore instructions that had been delivered in the best Hollywood Sage manner, and so we gamely wandered around temple after temple, all of them golden, all of them empty. Beginning at last to suspect that we were in pursuit of a golden fleece, we turned down a dark side street. There was a temple almost devoid of gold! This must be the place we sought. I went up to a gatekeeper. Did he know the astrologer?

  Silently, he pointed to another guardian of the temple.

  Mr. Joshi? I presumed.

  “Ah,” said the smiling young man. “Palmist!”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “Hello, Mr. Joshi!”

  The black-jacketed man said nothing. Instead, he turned around and led us through the temple, and out into a huge sunlit square filled with urchins, and down an alleyway, and through a narrow archway, and into a tiny lane and up to a small black door. It was locked.

  “Joshi?” he asked a shopkeeper on the other side of the alley. The man motioned heavenward.

  Without a word, our leader set off again, taking us past more golden temples, into more private courtyards, through long dark lanes and then at last into what looked like a barn. We stared around the place uncertainly, while our sibylline guide vanished up a wooden ladder. A minute or so later, he poked his head down through the attic opening, and motioned us up. Scrambling up the ladder, we adjusted our eyes to the half-darkness. There, standing before us in fez and dark glasses and shoeless socks, on the second floor of what seemed to be a stable, was Mr. Joshi, the Royal Astrologer of Nepal.

  We bowed and respectfully exchanged greetings as the great man ushered us into his cell. I looked around the ill-lit, low-roofed little chamber with wonder. Its walls were covered with hieroglyphical calendars and dusty almanacs. Amidst these wizardly ephemerides hung portraits of King Birendra and his queen (clients both of the celebrated Joshi). Next to a blinding poster advertising Fujicolor film were some dusty glass cases filled with old volumes. All of them, I noticed excitedly, were about the “Soul.” And then I peered a little closer through the half-light and realized they said “Soil.”

  “I have studied sixteen years in Benares Hindi University,” began Prof. Dr. Mr. Joshi, Ph.D. (as his business card identified him). “Also I have given lectures at Reading University in England, and at Northwestern University in Chicago.” In what subject? I asked. “Astronomy,” he answered, and the silence and the darkness deepened.

  “I also was ten months in Texas.”

  “At the university there?”

  “No.” Silence. “I was an adviser at NASA.”

  The mystery around the hierophant expanded.

  “And then,” went on the sage, “I spent a month in Acapulco.” The alarm on his visitors’ faces must have been evident. “In Acapulco,” Dr. Joshi continued with some asperity, “I was doing research. Into the Mexican system of astrology. I have looked at the Chinese system, the Mexican system, the Indonesian system, the Indian system and the Nepali system.” And which had he found to be best? I asked, perhaps redundantly. “The Indian,” he said severely, “and the Nepali.”

  We sat there in silence, unsure what came next.

  “Would you have time,” I tried, “to tell our futures?”

  Silence. Dr. Joshi stared back at us. “There exist,” he said, “three different systems,” and he outlined their prices on a piece of paper.

  “Do all three types produce the same results?”

  The Royal Astrologer gave me a hard stare in the dark room. An uncomfortable pause ensued. In Nepal, I gathered, futures came in economy, business and luxury class; all three, however, transported one to the same destination. And if prudence ruled out the first-class fortune, protocol told us to spurn the cheapest.

  “Maybe we’ll try the middle type.”

  “Then it will cost two hundred fifty rupees for a chart,” proclaimed the Royal Astrologer. I blanched. That was equivalent to $14, four round-trip bus tickets to Pokhara, forty pieces of apple pie or ten nights in a guesthouse, whichever came first. Dr. Joshi saw my hesitation. “Sometimes,” he added disapprovingly, “I can give fifty-rupee student discount
.”

  Happily we agreed on the second-class fortunes and asked him when they would be ready. In ten minutes, said Dr. Joshi in a voice full of portent, he would have to go to the Royal Palace. But if we would return in three hours, he would explain to us the rest of our lives. Fortunes, it seemed, were quickly ascertained in the shadow of the Himalayas.

  Thus tantalized, the two of us wandered off into the alleyways of Patan, visited a Tibetan refugee camp, walked around Nepal’s only zoo (where a mad white-haired Swiss woman with a Nepali by her side was cross-questioning monkeys and a bear was clutching the bars of his cage and sobbing helplessly), stopped in at a German café for some apple pie and made our way back, through the failing light, down dark lanes, across courtyards and up the wooden ladder to the sage’s den.

  Several customers were sitting apprehensively in the utter darkness of the soothsayer’s waiting room. A chilling breeze came in through the open windows. Dr. Joshi, still shoeless, shuffled in and out, dealing with one life at a time. Then, at last, he motioned us up another creaking ladder into a tiny top-floor attic. “Here,” he said confidentially, “we will not be disturbed.”

  Teeth chattering in the gathering cold, we hugged ourselves with our arms as we leaned forward to hear our futures. The Royal Astrologer peered at the mass of squiggles and signs before him in the darkness. “Generally,” he began, “I have found that …” And then the door was flung open, and an old Nepali gentleman in a fez raced in and put on the brakes just a few steps away from the Royal Astrologer. Dr. Joshi turned to him, and the man poured out a series of inquiries. The two swapped sentences in staccato gunfire bursts, and then at last the supplicant fell silent and the astrologer turned back to us. Fumbling for his notes, he tried to collect his thoughts. Then he began once more to read the stars.

  “Generally, I have found that the most important principle in your life is …” But this was all too much for the be-fezzed man, who was still hovering restlessly in the darkness, his future hanging precariously in the balance. Out burst another furious stream of questions. With a deep sigh, Dr. Joshi took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then, in a calm voice, he laid bare the man’s future. His monologue complete, he turned back, a little brusquely, to us.

  “Where was I?” he wondered, putting back his glasses. “Where was I?” And then there came a fearful banging at the door, desperate and importunate. Muttering something hateful, the Royal Astrologer got up and trudged across the room to see what was the matter. Outside, in the corridor, stood a trio of wide-eyed petitioners—a woman and what I assumed to be her son and prospective daughter-in-law. The nuptials were on hold, I surmised, until some critical matters in the stars had been cleared up. The ever-patient Dr. Joshi listened to a few questions, fired off a few bulletins from the heavens and then, shutting the door, came back to us.

  “Generally, I have found,” he started up again, and peered more closely at my chart, “that every month, on the night of the full moon, you must fast.”

  I looked back at him in horror. “Okay,” he added swiftly, “you must eat only vegetarian food every month on the night of the full moon.”

  With that he consulted my destiny again. “Also,” he went on after a pause, “every month on the night of the full moon, you must meditate for one hour.”

  “One whole hour?”

  “Okay, okay. Fifteen minutes.”

  By then, alas, our time was almost up. Our futures hanging in the balance, we went back out into the dark.

  IV

  In the end, perhaps, I came closest to the real Nepal when least I sought it. One evening, I went up to the roof of the Eden, from which, each morning, I watched the city come to life through the mist, as women shook their washing clean on rooftops and children skipped rope in the dust of tiny courtyards. Now the process was reversed. The dusk began to obscure the mountains, and lights came up all around the jagged scrawl of streets below. People thronged through the main squares as they went about their evening shopping. Scamps zigzagged with wild squeals across the narrow lanes. And I, far above, felt that I had indeed been taken back in some time machine to a Dickensian London in December, with gas fires lit against the dark afternoons, and rapscallions racing through a twilight bright with the promise of a coming Christmas. I felt a pang of some mysterious homesickness.

  Drawn into the streets, now dark, I went downstairs and walked out, through the commotion of Freak Street and past the temples of Durbar Square and into the distant alleyways, now desolate and still. A few of the shrines were lit up, and occasional footfalls echoed through the crooked, cobbled streets. I felt myself again a child in Oxford. A sense of coziness emanated from the dark, of families at home amid chocolate and tea. Lights shone in second-floor windows, smells of cooking wafted out of courtyards. Yet all these rituals were shut off from me, and that, in its way, made me happier than anything. For the first time since I came to Kathmandu, I felt that the city had turned its back on foreigners and was going instead about its age-old ways.

  As I wandered absently through the quiet lanes, empty save for a few beggars sleeping in the temples, I was roused abruptly from my daydreams by a vigorous greeting from a storefront. “Hello, my friend!” called a smiling little boy, waving animatedly in my direction. I strolled over to his shop, and we shook hands. Then he scampered up a narrow flight of stairs and I went after. On the second floor were two tiny rooms decorated in every spare square inch with thankas.

  Inside this psychedelic den of visions, Pappy prepared some cushions for me on the floor and made a cup of tea. On the wall he pointed out some photos of his family celebrating Divali and then he went off to fetch a thick album of letters from all his satisfied customers around the world. He took me through the addresses and, with them, all the distant places of enchantment he hoped one day to visit. Then, in the manner peculiar to the bright-eyed, high-voiced little schoolboys who seem at times to run Kathmandu, Pappy launched into a solemn but confident disquisition on the Art of Nepal. Using the paintings on the walls, he described to me the difference between Niwari, Nepali and Tibetan thankas. He explained how Spanish tourists always went for the cheap kind of thankas, but Americans and Germans knew how to tell the sublime from the ordinary. And he told me that as soon as his English was good enough, he planned to make his fortune overseas.

  Our tea finished, Pappy offered to take me on a night tour of his city. We walked outside, and through more narrow passageways. We heard an acoustic guitar floating out of a temple, we passed an open space that had been turned for the evening into a raucous outdoor disco. A couple of other engaging schoolboys who had entertained me earlier in the day called out their hellos. These versatile characters sold not only all three kinds of thankas but also Zen paintings, Hokusai prints and Aubrey Beardsley reproductions, while handing out a ten-page homemade pamphlet explaining Buddhist iconography. Pappy glared at his rivals with less good humor than usual, and hissed, “No good boys.” Finally, we arrived at his family’s house.

  Putting a finger to his lips, Pappy guided me to a staircase. We crept up, making as little noise as possible, and then he led me through a corridor and opened a door.

  There, inside an inner sanctum, sat fifty or so men on folding chairs, absolutely silent. We slipped inside, sat down and looked toward the front of the room. On a small color TV screen, a pudgy Indian actor was shaking through a parody of Michael Jackson’s contortions in the “Thriller” video. We watched for a while, then tiptoed out again. There were fifty video clubs like that in the neighborhood, whispered Pappy. They charged 2, 3, 4 rupees. Some showed Hindi movies, some kung fu. Some offered 2-rupee admission for children. But competition was tough. And a VCR cost 50,000 rupees ($3,000), fully as much as a new house.

  The real, behind-closed-doors Nepal, if this was it, did not seem so different from the Nepal that every foreigner could see. Which should have been no surprise. Only those who have money can afford not to think about money. (“Bankers talk about transcendental meditati
on, writers talk about money,” as Erica Jong writes in another context. “Spirituality is expensive.”) Nepal, however, was far from such a position of luxury. Illiteracy here was still higher than 80 percent and, in a country where there was often only one doctor for 100,000 people, it was not surprising, perhaps, that the average Nepali did not live much past forty. Monasteries and mandalas must be the least of the nation’s concerns.

  Tourism, of course, had brought many resources to the country, and Nepal had adapted to the trade with a remarkable resourcefulness of its own. In 1955, no road connected the country with the outside world, and there was only one restaurant in the entire capital. The first international flight arrived in Kathmandu only a year before men walked on the moon, and in the early sixties, only around seven tourists arrived each day. Since then, however, the number had rocketed up to 700 a day. Were there many touts in Kathmandu, I asked an American executive who often did business there. He chuckled. “Seventy-five percent of the country’s GNP is in tourism,” he said, “and the other twenty-five percent, I think, is in drugs.”

  The sudden boom had not, of course, been without its costs. Flocking to Nepal to find drugs, Westerners had left Nepal with a sad drug problem of its own: there were now 15,000 heroin addicts in Kathmandu alone, or one in every twenty of the town’s young men. Racing to Nepal to find religion, Westerners had left Nepalis thinking of the spiritual in largely material terms: holy men nowadays demanded payment every time their picture was taken, while shrewd peasants had taken to selling pages of their sacred texts. Hurrying to Nepal for its mountain views, Westerners had left Nepalis with an expanded sense of horizon, and a diminished sense of wonder; since a tourist could offer a village bread man 2 cents for a roll, twice the local price, the bread man would reserve all his goods for foreigners. In time, the rice man and the vegetable man would likely follow suit. During the twenty years in which tourism had soared, the per capita income of Nepal had, incredibly, fallen. Today, a third of all the country’s citizens earn no more than 15 cents a day.