Next day Colonel John drafted us to make a firewood run, which meant rounding up a string of yaks and driving them downvalley all morning, to the upper end of the gorge that snaked down into Tibet. Yaks are big hairy delinquents, sullen and prone to bursts of rebellion and noncooperation, and the colonel drove them like they were inductees at boot camp, beating them fiercely with his walking stick and getting nothing but looks from their big round bilious eyes.
Midday we left the yaks on the meadow and climbed the steep south slope of the valley wall until we reached a stand of pine. Colonel John took three small axes out of his backpack, Iron Age things with no heft at all, and we set to work cutting down the trees he pointed to. “Man,” George said unhappily as he chopped, “this is horrible! This is what they call deforestation, isn’t it?”
The colonel and I paused to give him a look.
“No choice,” the colonel said. “Yak dung doesn’t burn without some wood in the fire.”
“But the erosion—”
“I know about erosion!” the colonel shouted, nearly throwing his axe at George. “We leave the stump and roots to hold what they can, and replant with seedlings.” He hacked angrily at the tree he was working on. “Three thousand years this valley had a stable population, but with Tibet enslaved what can the Dalai Lama do? This is one of the only escapes.”
George asked hesitantly if some of the refugees couldn’t be transferred to the Tibetan villages and settlements in India.
“Who would you send?” the colonel demanded. “Send away from the last free and whole place on earth? Send down to some farm in Madras where they die of low altitude sickness? I’ve seen them down there, take them to a mountain like we did when we brought the resistance to Colorado and they run right out and jump in the snow! We had a yak from a zoo there and they ran up and hugged it!” He brought a tree down with a fierce chop. “I wouldn’t want to choose who goes away from here.”
“Tell George about your Khampa guerrillas,” I suggested.
John sighed. “Got those fellas to Colorado back in the days when you could count on the American government to fight the communists, and I asked a room full of them, How many of you boys would jump out of an airplane to fight the Chinese, and they didn’t know a damn thing about parachutes and every one of them raised his hand. And I said these are my kind of boys. This was what the Marine Corps used to be before it went soft! Came over here and wreaked havoc on those killers! Till Birendra betrayed us!”
With that he attacked another tree, chopping as if he were working on the King of Nepal’s knees, and muttering in disconnected phrases that I could see meant little to George. “Soup and coffee out of tin cans, running till their hearts popped!” Chop chop chop. “Hans on one side and Gurkhas on the other! Scattered to the twelve winds!” Chop chop chop. “Dalai Lama said quit but who could surrender to Birendra! Pachen cut his throat instead and I don’t blame him! Should have done it myself!” And he brought the tree down, swinging wildly.
Hoping to distract him, I suggested in Tibetan that we had cut as much wood as the yaks could carry.
“We’ll carry too,” he snarled at me in English, and kept on cutting like a chain saw.
So it was late afternoon before we dragged back upvalley in a cold rain, loaded down with small pines. I let the colonel get ahead of us so I could answer the questions George was eyeballing me. The colonel and some Khampas, I told him, had continued to fight after King Birendra had buckled to Mao and told the Nepali Army to help the Chinese destroy the Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang. After this disaster the colonel and some Khampas had worked out of the mountains in Tibet until they were ambushed or something—the colonel remembered it poorly because that was when he was wounded in the head, and he wandered out of his mind in the wilds of Tibet for an unknown time until he came as if homing to roost up the gorge to Shambhala. There Dr. Choendrak had cured him and brought back his memory, at least to a certain extent. “He’s still a bit mixed up,” I said.
“I noticed that.”
“Depending on which language you speak to him he acts completely different.”
George looked at the little tree-backed figure driving the yaks ahead of us. “I bet he had his language center damaged, and if he learned most of his Tibetan after the injury, it would have to be stored on the other side of his brain. So depending what language you use with him, a different half of his brain is dominant.”
“Here they figure it’s a matter of incarnations.”
“He thinks he’s a Tibetan monk whose spirit was most recently in a Marine?”
“Some of the time.”
We climbed the ancient terminal moraine and caught sight of the village above us. A shaft of sunlight cut through the clouds and lit the walls of stone and sod, the slate-roofed buildings all smoking, the yaks standing like furry black boulders here and there in the brown potato fields, and it looked like the Middle Ages on some colder planet. We had spent all day gathering wood that would barely keep the village through the night, and every day folks had to go out and do the same, farther and farther away each time. “Man,” George said, dropping his trees on the stone-flagged stable yard outside Lhamo’s place. He didn’t know what else to say.
Lhamo had a big meal ready for us, and we were beat and starving, and helplessly George spooned it in. He didn’t have to deal with dhal baat, but the soup was crowded with a vegetable they managed to grow in the lower valley, a vegetable I’d never caught the name of but which on the vine looked like an okra the size of a football, with long flexible tines growing out all over it. Chopped up and floating in the soup it was unappealing to the eye, though the texture was okay and it had little taste. As a side dish they had a curry so hot you could warm your hands by it, and after a couple tries at that George returned sweating to his soup and even tried drinking his butter tea, which is an acquired taste and seemed to give him some trouble. It was the Scylla and Charybdis of foodland for George, but bravely he swam on and finished the meal.
And so of necessity he abandoned his prophylactic eating. At the same time he watched cousin Sindu trying to feed her sick child that night, with little success. And in the morning he dug in his backpack and came up with his antibiotics, a five-gallon Ziploc bag jam-packed with pills. “Freds, we gotta help these folks,” he says. “I don’t really have enough here to help everybody, but if we just help a few of them, you know.”
“We’ll have to tell Dr. Choendrak about it,” I told him. So we took the antibiotics to the monastery and George told Dr. Choendrak about them, and he examined the pills and went into a consultation with the Manjushri Rimpoche, the leader of Shambhala, and the Rimpoche decided that every sick child would get an equal share of the pills, which when they figured it out came to about four pills per kid. When George heard that he cried “No! That’s too little to do any good, none of them’ll be helped by that!”
Dr. Choendrak explained to him that they knew about that aspect of antibiotics, but they figured that in conjunction with the plant medicines they were able to grow it would go better, and it was important to make sure everyone sick got some of the Western medicine.
George was disgusted, but I tried to reassure him. “They’re going on the placebo theory, George, and you can’t be at all sure they aren’t right. Those antibiotics are mostly placebo anyway.”
He just gave me that squint.
So all his antibiotics were gone, and he was eating the valley’s food, which was clean but certainly had different bugs in it than he was used to. And so he got sick. The usual thing—runs, fever, no appetite, generally feeling shitty. Also bored, fractious, and depressed. Three or four days of that and he was going crazy in the house, so I suggested he go with Lhamo and Sindu to the river to wash clothes.
Now I’ve been concentrating on the problems Shambhala was having and they were considerable, but still it was Shambhala, mystic capital of the world, and there were some special things about it aside from Kalapa monastery and the lamas and t
he history of the place. Up in the courtyard of the monastery, for instance, was an eternal holy flame shooting out of the side of the mountain, a strange and impressive sight at dawn or dusk, or in the middle of a ceremony. And down at the bottom of the valley, near the gorge, one whole bank of the river was pure turquoise, sticking out of the mountainside like a hill of solidified sky, littering the river downstream with blue pebbles and boulders.
And most important of all for daily life there, the valley’s river began with a hot springs, which like the eternal flame poured out of solid rock mountainside. The hole the water came out of had been carved into a perfect circle, and as it emerged the water steamed and kept the whole area damp, so that brilliant green ferns and mosses grew all over. Chortens and mani stones and prayer flags stood around it, and prayer wheels spun in the stream, wood and tin cylinders painted with bright mandalas, squeaking as they milled out prayers. Moss had covered all the curvy Sanskrit lettering carved into the mani stones and the rockface, so that it always seemed to me like the moss itself was spelling out Om mani padme hum. All in all, a spacy place.
They used it for their laundry, by diverting some of the water down a carved runnel which fell into a shallow pool that had a stone-flagged bottom and squared-off sides. Here on sunny mornings people washed clothes, mostly women, though monks and other men often joined them. The women came in their long wraparound black dresses with colorful smock fronts, babies wrapped to their backs or let loose to wander around. The air would be steamy and the sun radiant on your skin, but it was cold in the shadows so the warm water was a blessing. The women wore their black hair pulled back smooth and flat. They mostly had the flat faces of Tibetans, but there were touches of India and elsewhere in women like Sindu, because this was a crossroads even if it was hidden. Bare brown feet in the water, dresses hitched up around the thighs revealing brown calves harder than baseball bats, smell of milktea and smoke and herb soap rising from the wet clothes as they wrung them out steaming and beat them against the flat smooth black stone flagging to each side of the pool—yes, the laundry pool was a fine place.
And George appeared to like it. At least he came back from mornings there a little less disgruntled. He took to walking there with cousin Sindu and her little boy, and he looked after the kid while she washed, which was easy work as the kid was still sick. And she would talk to the kid in Tibetan and George would nod, saying “Uh huh, yeah, that’s exactly what I think,” which made her and the other women laugh.
I had asked Lhamo about Sindu, and found out that her husband was alive, off to the west of Nepal on a trading expedition. This kind of thing happens a lot in the transHimal villages, and as a result marriages up there tend to have quite a bit of flex in them. So when I saw George fooling with the kid, and Sindu laughing at him, I thought, Ho boy. Look at this.
It was odd to watch them together. Sometimes they seemed to understand one another perfectly and to be quite a match—an attractive couple, laughing at something they had seen, and I would think What do you know George has got him a Sherpani girlfriend. His dakini, one of the female deities who guide you to wisdom, perhaps. Then just seconds later, for no reason I could pin, there would seem to open a gap between them bigger even than language. Suddenly they would look like creatures from different planets, aliens trying out gestures to see if they would work. But even those moments didn’t look awkward—if there was a gap, neither of them seemed especially worried about bridging it. They looked content to stand on opposite banks and wave at each other.
So that was cute to watch, and Lhamo and I and the other gals at the pool got quite a laugh out of it. But meanwhile George was still sick, and so were the kids. He might as well have tossed his pills in the river for all the good they appeared to have done. He himself got thinner and thinner, and I know most nights he had to rush out and stumble around in the dark outhouse, freezing outside and burning inside, crouching over the little hole in the floor. It’s amazing what you can get used to, I’ve gone through times like that myself and know that you can get so used to it that you can do the whole operation almost in your sleep, navigating medieval buildings and doors and locks without ever even waking up—sometimes—while other nights are so uncomfortable and strange that they etch themselves on your mind, and you hang out there in the freezing dark feeling it is some sort of negative bodhi and that you are far from home. I’m sure that George suffered more than one night like that.
And the kids bawled, and lay in their beds looking dry-skinned and hot and listless, and shitting watery shit. “Damn it,” George said, “diarrhea is serious for little tykes like these, they get so dehydrated they die.”
In fact Sindu’s boy didn’t look good, and a lot of infants in the village were the same. Such a crowded place! Several times folks dropped by to ask George if he had any antibiotics left, and all he could do was throw up his hands. “All gone! All gone! Freds, tell them I’m sorry, all I’ve got now is Lomotil but that just blocks you up, I shouldn’t give them that should I?”
I didn’t think he should.
Then he got an inspiration. “Freds, what about that formula you’re supposed to give kids with diarrhea, the one the UN wants to spread all over the third world, it’s made of simple stuff that everyone has, and it prevents the dehydration. Come on, man, what is it?”
“Never heard of it,” I told him.
This drove him crazy. “It’s something really obvious.” But he couldn’t think of it.
Then one morning swirling a glass of milktea he says, “Wasn’t it basically salt water? Salt water with maybe a little sugar in it?”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to drink salt water?”
“Normally no, but when you’ve got the runs it helps get the water into your cells.”
“I thought that’s just what it prevented.”
“Normally yes, but in this case no.”
“Are you sure enough to try it?”
Long silence. Finally he said “Damn, I wish I had more tetracycline.”
But in the days that followed Sindu’s son got weaker and weaker, and a lot of the rest of the kids did too. George decided he had the formula right, and he got me to take him to the monastery to see Dr. Choendrak.
In Kalapa’s big courtyard George stood staring at the eternal flame, his mouth hanging open. “Just what the hell is that?” he says.
“That is the holy eternal Kalacakra flame,” I told him. “Religious shrine since the earliest times here.”
“It’s gas, Freds. They’ve got a natural gas supply right here in the valley!”
“So they do.”
“Well—” He seized his head in both hands to keep it from blowing up on him. “Why don’t they use it? They’ve got deforestation, they could pipe this gas down into stoves and solve the problem!”
“I guess since it’s a holy shrine and a sign from one of their deities it never occurred to them,” I said.
George couldn’t believe it. “Here they are cutting down all their trees and watching their soil wash away and this big fucking fire is burning right in their face! What are you all thinking here, Freds? What kind of paradise is this anyway?”
“Religious.”
“My Lord.”
Then Dr. Choendrak joined us, and George got me to act as translator. “There’s a lot of flu in the kids here,” he told the doctor.
I repeated that to Dr. Choendrak and he nodded. “Their blood has mixed with their bile, and we need to separate it.”
“He knows,” I said to George.
“Ask him what he’s doing about it.”
Dr. Choendrak shook his head. They were making medicines as fast as they could, medicines made of plants that I couldn’t translate for George.
“Ask him if there are any salts in the medicine.”
The doctor said there were.
“How much?” George demanded.
Eventually Dr. Choendrak had to take us to the dispensary and show him. Turned out there was a goo
d heaping tablespoon of pure ground-up Tibetan rock salt in every canister of the water the doctor was feeding the kids.
“Oh,” George said, nodding. “Well, tell him he should add a little sugar too.”
I translated that for the doctor and he nodded. Turned out they put in about a tablespoon of honey as well.
“Oh!” George said, nonplussed. “Well! Good for him! Tell him the World Health Organization recommends that very same thing!”
Dr. Choendrak nodded, and said that was good.
Suddenly the doctor seemed a really reasonable guy to George. “Maybe their drugs do have some antibacterial action, and the salt and sugar water will give more time for their immune systems to kick in. The little kids need that.”
Before we left George made me tell Dr. Choendrak about his plan for the eternal flame—he described ceramic pipes, a big central stove in the village or in the monastery itself, a whole seat-of-the-pants exercise in civil engineering. And in the days after that he started accompanying Dr. Choendrak on his rounds, entertaining the kids while they were checked out, or holding them while the more bitter medicines were administered. And he made all of them drink lots of the water that had generous doses of salt and sugar in it. A sort of language of action grew between him and the doctor, and they got to be buddies even though they didn’t understand a word the other said. In fact given the state of their medical theories, that was probably a help.
And in the next couple of weeks the flu epidemic waned, for what reason no one could say—but no one had died of it, and so everyone was happy with Dr. Choendrak and with the appropriate deities, and with George as well. George was real happy too, although his own digestion never did get quite right and he was prone to going cross-eyed and running off in a panic to the outhouse.
* * *
Escape From Kathmandu Page 18
