Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  “I am not very rich,” a young boy told me as the early morning sunlight flooded the rooftop dining room of the Eden. “I do not want big job in the U.S. Small job okay.” Wanting what the East had, the West, I thought, saddled the East with awareness of what it did not have. Trading dollars for dreams, the West brought notions of profit and loss to the levelheaded areas in the world. Rich enough to go native, the West came East to shed all its belongings, and the East scrambled in the dust to pick them up as they fell.

  Yet still, I did not worry very much about Nepal. The Nepalis seemed to have a keen sense of how to endure the assaults of tourism, and even of how to gain from foreigners without seeming grasping. The country had contrived to receive foreign aid from America, Russia, China and just about everyone else. King Birendra, graduate of Eton, alumnus of Harvard and reincarnation of Vishnu, had reportedly become fabulously rich thanks to a variety of concerns, most notably a pharmaceuticals firm that rejoiced in the inspired name of Royal Drugs. And if not exactly sagacious, the Nepalis certainly seemed savvy. An American friend who had joined a team traveling to the remote monasteries of Nepal in order to microfilm sacred texts before they could be sold told me that the Nepalese government had actually tried to charge the expedition for its charity. Even Edmund Hillary, the country’s most famous foreign champion, had been forced to pay customs duties on the emergency medical supplies he brought in for the hospital he founded in Nepal.

  Thus things remained in a fairly happy state of equilibrium. The Nepalese were not hard-sell hucksters, and the Westerners here were not hard-core hustlers. And though it knew how to live off the West, Nepal had none of the glossy seductiveness of Bangkok, the sometime worldliness of Bali or the wistful desperation of Manila. Kathmandu seemed a Shantih-town. The place still had an endearing wonkiness to it, a ragamuffin charm best exemplified by the schoolboy sages in brown pullovers and scholarly airs who operated most of its stores and cafés. The restaurants in Nepal offered every kind of national cuisine, and yet, by all accounts, every dish was pretty much the same. And every dish, so it was said, had pretty much the same effect. “The thing about the Nepalese,” a New Zealander told me, “is that they’re so friendly, and they’re so keen to adapt to Western tastes, that they make dishes they don’t have a clue how to cook. That’s why everyone gets sick there.”

  Certainly the cuisine, though fantastically cosmopolitan, did not infallibly inspire confidence. At Suraha, a village with a population of less than 100, the guesthouses bravely attempted Western menus and promised “The gienic Food and Beverage.” Yet Western heads turned, and so did stomachs, at the choice among “Noddle,” “Plane Toast” and “Custurd.” I never saw a single customer order “Vegetable Plow.” El Parador in Kathmandu had a whole section of its menu entitled “Iodine-Soaked Salad” and including such items as “Fruit Salad in Wheaped Cream.” Its “Bout of Plain Curd,” I always suspected, might lead to a bout of something even worse. And just about every café offered Buffburgers, Buff Steak, Buff Tacos (everything, in fact, but Bufferin). I left Nepal assuming this to be a widespread misspelling of “beef.” It was only later, in India, that I learned that I could not have been more wrong: “buff,” in fact, stood for water buffalo, and beef was available in Nepal only in a couple of five-star hotels that flew it in from India.

  All this, however, only added to the place’s raggedy charm. El Parador was typical. I liked it most not for its improbable Spanish name (in the Tibetan quarter of the Nepalese capital!), or for its four-course Mexican breakfasts, or even for its routinely scrumptious apple pies, but most of all for its management: a pair of eager and soft-eyed little boys, as irrepressible as they were irresistible. As soon as I sat down on one of the restaurant’s divans, the nine-year-old maître d’ came up to me and smiled expectantly. I ordered and he bundled off to the kitchen and shouted something out. Once, he returned a few seconds later bearing, not the expected pot of tea, but an eighteen-month-old sibling, whom he bounced up and down in his arms, tenderly nuzzled, and proudly displayed to his startled customers. Another time, the twelve-year-old proprietor emerged solemnly from the back, placed an Eagles tape in the restaurant’s cassette recorder and, closing his eyes as he danced, broke into note-perfect harmonies on “Lying Eyes.”

  Both parties seemed more than eager to accommodate each and every Western demand, however strange. One dusky afternoon, a Scottish fellow, apparently fresh (or something other) from a Freak Street transaction, lurched into the café. One of the boys greeted him with a smile. Did they have anything with bananas in it, asked the newcomer with a weird intensity.

  “Banana pie,” piped the manager. “Banana omelette. Banana pancake …”

  At this, the customer suddenly swerved off in another direction. “You got some girls here?” he demanded.

  The small salesman was unprepared for this, but nonetheless undaunted. “We have Mexican breakfast. Cappuccino. Pies.”

  “Yeah, but have you got Some Girls?”

  The host looked perplexed. They had tacos, he explained, and tea and also Tibetan pizza.

  With that, the Scotsman angrily stalked out, and the boy returned cheerfully to his task, never suspecting that the customer had wanted nothing more exotic than a Rolling Stones cassette.

  EL PARADOR, THOUGH, was only typical of an air—unworldly, if not exactly spiritual—that seemed to suffuse the faraway land-locked kingdom. Flying to Kathmandu from India, one had to turn one’s watch forward by exactly ten minutes (Kathmandu, quite crazily, was five hours and forty minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time), and the entire country seemed equivalently, and endearingly, out of sync. At Pokhara Airport, a suami tree served passengers in place of a waiting lounge. “His Majesty Felicitates King Bedouin I” was a front-page headline in Nepal’s English-language newspaper, The Rising Nepal, one day in November. Its other headlines were “His Majesty Receives Tika,” “Nepalese Cultural Night in London” and “Blood Donations” (about blood given on the occasion of Her Majesty’s thirty-seventh auspicious birthday). Buried on page 5 of the six-page edition was the headline “Gorbachev-Reagan Meet: Most Important for Mankind’s History.”

  The same newspaper also did a roaring trade in largely unintelligible ads, or notices that would have been better off unintelligible: “Avail golden chance. Learn or improve your English under the most unique. Method. Get register your self immediately.” In a similar vein, the museum in the old Royal Palace proudly displayed the Royal Aquarium and several other personal effects of a profoundly unregal nature. On the wall were photos of the king as a bewildered-looking toddler (“The Royal Babyhood,” announced the caption below) and of the king as a bewildered-looking child atop a bewildered-looking horse (“His Majesty Approaching the Full Bloom of Youth”). “Entertainment! It never stops at Casino Nepal!” cried the country’s only center for gambling. Next to it was a sign denying entry to all Nepalis.

  V

  One sunny afternoon, I made my final attempt to conquer what was proving to be an even tougher peak than the southwestern face of Everest—the “Dreamland Nepal” of the travel agents. I happened to be walking along a sidewalk when a young roadside soothsayer, dressed in red-and-orange fez and heavy brown overcoat, looked up at me brightly. Then he extended his palm. I might, I thought, be looking at my future.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “As you wish.”

  “Okay, um …”

  “Five hundred rupees.”

  “What did you say?”

  “One hundred rupees.”

  “Ten.”

  “Okay.”

  I was convinced already of the diviner’s shrewdness. With a lofty flutter of his hand, he sent off a minion to fetch a translator. Then he picked up my hand and, eyes closed, began sight-reading its lines. We remained in this unlikely position for many minutes, while a crowd gathered around us. Finally, a man appeared, in rags, with lank black hair falling to his shoulders and a king-size, straggly beard. This character’s principal q
ualification for the translating job, I gathered, was that he spoke almost no English, and what English he did speak sounded very close to gibberish.

  All systems go, the soothsayer went back into his trance and began rocking back and forth where he sat. Each of his staccato Delphic utterances the translator deftly rendered meaningless. “You need an anti-person,” he said. And my domestic future? “You have two wives, three children.” And my health? “Wear a copper bracelet.” Gnomic outbursts kept on shooting out of the palmist’s mouth, but the rest of my life was lost in transmission.

  The episode was not the eye-opening illumination I had expected. But it was a happy enough fiasco. And the same was true of much in Nepal. The longer I remained, the more I settled into its cheery rhythms, the more I came to recognize the unlikelihood of finding any real magic here. The Eden Hash House calendar was only a decoration, I was told, a quaint curiosity from an age long gone. Pie Alley had been rechristened, by visitors more fastidious than the earliest Western settlers, Pig Alley. Boris, the White Russian who had been a dancer with the Ballet Russe, friend to Stravinsky and Cocteau, caterer to heads of state and, for thirty years Kathmandu’s principal tourist attraction, had died just one month before I arrived. And these days, when a Nepali led tourists up into an unlit second-floor room, the transaction that ensued usually revolved around dollars, not drugs.

  The door to the Kathmandu of dreams was finally slammed shut on me one evening when I went to the Up and Down, the capital’s solitary disco (the only other night life in town, residents said darkly, was the Marine Bar at the U.S. embassy on Friday nights). At the bar, I met an Irish academic who had lived in Kathmandu on and off for years, studying its caste system. When he heard that I was staying on Freak Street, on the other side of town, he reacted as if I had said I was just off with some groovy cats to a love-in where the Electric Prunes were performing. Freak Street, he said, was history; the place where foreigners hung out these days was Thamel.

  Chastened, I looked around Thamel. Certainly, the area was as full of life, even late at night, as Freak Street was dead, and in place of the handful of lesser-spotted derelicts to be found at the center of town, there seemed to be brigades of bright, clean-cut foreigners, in thick sweaters and sensible skirts, marching from the Zen Restaurant to the Third Eye boutique and back again. In contrast to the windblown, dusty refuse of the area around the Eden, these streets were clean almost; with their wood-walled coffeehouses and the Old Vienna Inn, they conveyed a spanking briskness reminiscent of Martha’s Vineyard or Carmel.

  Around the corner from the Up and Down, I came upon the Pilgrim Book Shop, a beautiful, brightly lit store that had coffee and tables and books on one side of a blond-wood partition and, on the other, coffee-table books. The place was a smarter version of the Harvard Book Store Café, or Kramerbooks in Washington, or any of the other chic confectioners serving food for body and mind in renovated malls from Ghirardelli Square to Covent Garden. It stayed open till midnight and played classical music on its system and provided the latest issues of Interview, Connoisseur and The New Yorker for patrons to leaf through over their Celestial Seasonings tea. “Are you American?” I asked the distinctly New Yawkish waitress. “Nah. I’m a little Japanese. A little Indian. A little Nepali.” Very much Nepali, I would have said.

  Not far from the Pilgrim was one of the area’s most fashionable dining spots, packed with cheerful, well-dressed health freaks drinking beers to the sound of Billy Joel. Eavesdropping, I caught just enough to get a sense of great means and narrow ends. Software, I heard, and Tacoma. Volvo. Manhattan law practice. Jimmy Carter had been on the same trekking route two weeks earlier. Everest was booked until 1990. “The mountains were real awesome. Like, we were wowed.”

  Uppers and Downers, indeed. These guys hadn’t left their heads in San Francisco, I thought unkindly. They weren’t interested in communing with Nature, they just wanted to do lunch with it sometime. Having hoped to find myself in a Grateful Dead song, I had ended up instead in an Ann Beattie story.

  And as surely as the eighties had eclipsed the sixties, so trekking seemed mostly to have usurped questing. These days, more people came to Nepal to improve their muscles than to expand their minds; the career path was held in much higher esteem than the spiritual path. “Food for Thought” was chalked up every day on a blackboard at the Lost Horizon Tibetan restaurant, I noted with excitement. But on the day I ate there, the message, from Herbert Spencer, said: “The preservation of Health is a duty. Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.”

  So where were all the freaks? I finally asked the Irishman with some plaintiveness. The freaks? he howled. Where had I been for the last ten years? The freaks had been flushed out of Nepal long ago. First the government had made drugs illegal. Then they had begun making occasional raids on the Freak Street crash pads. Finally, they had called upon an instrument even more powerful than simple morality or muscle: economics. A one-month Nepalese visa now cost $16. A one-month extension cost another $23, and a third-month extension $35. Thus a three-month stay in Nepal now cost no less than an apartment in a fairly nice house here (or five hundred pounds of hashish, whichever came first). The only freaks still hanging out in Nepal, said the Irishman, were second-rate leftovers dressed in uniform costumes of individuation: jeans, earrings, baggy pants and “Jesus boots.” But drugs were still available, I noted. “Sure,” said the Irishman. “Anything drug-related is possible here. But it’s a business now, not a trip.”

  The absence of drugs was itself no bad thing, what I mourned was the absence of the sensibility that drove some people to drugs and the searching that others undertook instead of drugs. The Peace Corps had left a few traces of its presence—in the apple pies and health-food stores—but even they seemed to have faded into the woodwork. Where, I wondered, were the idealists? Had they too disappeared? “Of course,” said Tomas, a thoughtful former Magic Bus driver from Amsterdam who now worked here for CARE. “That was ten years ago. That age is past.”

  It seemed to be true. “Attention Travelers,” said the sign posted on most of the Freak Street restaurant walls. “Ashramed out, Caféd Out, Caked Out, Biscuit’d out, Chai’d out, Gompa’d out, Chicall’d out, Tea’d out? Bored to Tears? Then why not volunteer to help out at the local clinic run by Mother Teresa’s sister?” Only, it seemed, after every single other option had been tried and every pleasure exhausted might the time come for a little social conscience.

  It served me right, I suppose: prosaic justice. I had come to Kathmandu hoping to find a refuge from the trends of Santa Barbara, Cambridge and Manhattan. But that, I realized, was like going to Newcastle if one were allergic to coal. For Nepal’s great skill lay in mirroring Western ways and keeping up with the Western times. It was hardly surprising, then, that it had followed the example of any American dropout from the sixties: shedding its ragged threads, cleaning up its act, going through business school and settling down to a good steady income as a law-abiding, upwardly mobile member of the eighties. Its livelihood depended on it.

  These days, indeed, the facts of Kew were the facts of Kathmandu. Communications had sent the world spinning around so fast that every wheel came around full circle. Travel far enough East and you’d quickly end up in the West; go across the globe and you’d find that you had never left home at all.

  “Excuse me, sister,” said a Nepali man to my friend when we visited Bodnath Temple. “You want to go to trekking?” It seemed a request as Nepali as apple pie.

  CHINA

  The Door Swings Both Ways

  The beautiful young girl lies on a grassy knoll

  daydreaming about her future price charming.

  —Opening line of a review of the movie

  The Bordertown in the Beijing Review, July 29, 1985

  THE NEW China—the China that has opened its door to the outside world and is beckoning it inside with a smile—deals with its suitors in Hong Kong. The New China is well aware that her longtime s
eclusion has only inflamed the romantic illusions of the West, adding the lure of the long-forbidden to the appeal of the mysterious. The New China also knows that many a dreamy admirer will spare no expense at all to catch a long-denied glimpse of her mist-wreathed pagodas and jade mountains; a courtesan’s expensiveness is, after all, part of her seduction.

  So it is that the China Travel Service in Hong Kong, the New China’s official overseas agent, offers its visitor as many positions and permutations as a panderer, catering to every fantasy with a variety of tours that range from the most basic, in-and-out package ($1,000) to a host of more exotic options ($2,500 or more). The China Travel Service will procure for a tourist hotels, guides, flights and trains. For $17, it will get him a visa; for $25, a visa overnight. “The Chinese are masters of supply and demand,” a British financier who did business in Beijing advised me. “They know exactly how to hit the right level.”

  The New China also prefers to keep its rendezvous with the West strictly organized and closely chaperoned, a series of blind dates on which the two parties may inspect one another from a safe distance, swap reassuring smiles and then go their separate ways, separately enriched. Nearly all the country’s modern facilities are therefore confined to the well-roped trail of the Imitation Silk Route, along which groups of tourists are led as through some special museum exhibition. Traveling in China alone, especially without any Chinese language, was still in 1985 an act of folly. I, however, was willing to put up with any amount of inconvenience in order to be spared the red-carpet rituals of the guided tour—the picture-perfect vistas, the routine exchange of pleasantries with well-trained hosts and, above all, the infamous climax of every New China visit, the group of adorable schoolchildren welcoming Westerners with an impromptu chorus of “Jingle Bells.” (Even a nine-hour day trip across the border included a “visit to a kindergarten where children will greet you warmly with laughter, hand-clapping, singing and dancing.”) I therefore asked for nothing more from the China Travel Service than a $30 train ticket to Guangzhou, spurning even the extra $20 service that would ensure someone to greet me on arrival and see me safely onto the next train to Beijing.