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After the recent earthquakes that have devastated the region, Richard Browner remembers a very different Nepal.
—
In February of 1976, while living in London and running a successful business as a graphic design consultant, I was contacted by the Commercial Sector of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, to co-conduct a seminar in Manila on how to effectively improve the quality of the promotion material produced to market Philippine exports. I would co-chair the seminar with my old friend Bruce Bendow, who was at the time a Senior Advisor on Trade Promotion at the U.N. in Geneva. After rescheduling other assignments already in the pipeline, I added additional time to allow me to spend a few days at ‘the top of the world’ (a bit of an exaggeration, I’m quick to admit) in Nepal and the Himalaya. Too short a visit, I realized, to see everything on my wish list, but since it was an opportunity to visit a part of the world I had dreamt about seeing since devouring everything I could read about British mountaineers Mallory and Irvine who, in 1924, before vanishing behind an opaque barrier of stratospheric fog, had last been seen trudging Everest’s uppermost ridge a few hundred feet from the summit. No evidence had ever been established to determine if either had made it to the top.
It was actually the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, which early in my life had captured my imagination. This mammoth palace, surely one of the eight wonders of the world, sits astride and crowns Red Mountain at the center of the Lhasa Valley at an altitude of 3,700 meters. Since the 7th century, it has been the winter home of the Dali Llama. Tibet, regrettably, was now off-limits to foreign visitors and time did not allow an attempt to seek a visa or whatever else it might have taken to enter this mystical country. I made arrangements instead to spend a few precious days in Kathmandu, followed by several days in the Himalaya, at a small hotel, the Everest View, at an elevation of 3,962 meters in the heart of the Everest Range. Weighed down with what I saw as sufficient film to document the whole of my voyage (and more), I was ready to go.
After an overnight flight from London, with a stop in Teheran for refueling and cabin cleaning by a crew of sullen Iranian women, we landed at dawn in New Delhi. Those of us traveling on waited in the transit lounge for our flights to be announced, in my case, three hours later. The previous year while waiting for a return flight to London in the terminal at Istanbul, I became aware of stray cats roaming about the noisy terminal. I was a regular traveler, my work taking me to numerous European cities on a semi-monthly schedule, cats in a modern air terminal? This was a first. But sure enough, there they were, a multitude of scrawny cats scavenging everywhere—rubbing against the calves of waiting passengers, myself included—in search, I quickly realized, of food, wherever it might be available. Now, in New Delhi, to my astonishment, the transit lounge was swarming with birds, alternately screeching from the rafters above or swooping down on waiting passengers. Were these signs of some existential phenomenon—a junction of feral past and a still open-ended future—or was I just exceptionally weary from lack of sleep? If nothing else, this living spectacle was downright Hitchcockian. Reality returned when finally my flight was called and I boarded my 727 Royal Nepal Airlines flight to Kathmandu.
♦◊♦
The flight across a cloudless sky from New Delhi took us high over the vast and arid plains of northern India. Gazing down at the endless miles of these inhospitable plains, I was struck by how people managed to carry on even in the most hostile physical environments.
From 38,000 feet, the Himalaya, snow-capped and still a thousand miles distant shimmered against a backdrop of opalescent stratosphere like a collar of uncut diamonds. Only as we neared the frontier of Nepal and began our descent into Kathmandu did the indescribable height of these mountains become straight away apparent. I could easily see why both the Nepalese and the Tibetans looked upon these titanic peaks as a habitat of gods. My mind raced ahead to my stay at the Everest View, where I’d awaken eagerly at dawn to the sun sending its pink light across China onto the white flanks of Makalu, Lohtse and Everest, itself, the great mountain that the Tibetans had long ago christened Chomo Lungma, The Goddess Mother of The World. Now that, to my mind, was a handle to give one pause.
As we descended lower and lower into the mountains ringing the Kathmandu Valley, the Himalayas gradually lost definition as they vanished above a layer of smog suspended over the valley. With mountains pressing in on all sides, no expanse of land looked sufficient in length or horizontal enough to accommodate a runway on which to safely set down a 727. I became convinced that we would at any moment slam into a mountainside. This bit of paranoia provoked by my lack of sleep should have told me how tired I was, but no such thought entered my head. Simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted, my head defied the experience of pilots who had most probably safely landed this plane a thousand times.
At last came the thump of rubber on concrete accompanied by the thunderous reversal of engines. I would not, after all, be a mere statistic noted in the world’s media. After a thorough immigration inspection in Kathmandu’s primitive terminal, I caught a taxi—some 1950s American junk heap minus all remains of shocks—and, on an unpaved road empty of traffic, we raced at breakneck speed toward the city. Not for one second did the palm of my driver’s hand leave off the car’s horn, despite virtually no traffic on the road. I would learn all too shortly that palm-on-the-horn driving was the universal action that bound all Asian cities into one identical cacophony, whatever the distances and nationalities separating them.
♦◊♦
My hotel, the four-story Crystal, located adjacent to Kathmandu City’s Durbar Square, the once Royal enclave of palaces, temples and pagodas in the heart of Kathmandu seemed less inviting, at first glance, than the European hotel’s I was used to. The receptionist, however, was friendly, welcoming me to Nepal like a long-departed friend. The lift, whose capacity was that of the dumbwaiter in the Bronx apartment house of my childhood, was a bit wonky, but in no time I acclimated to its wheezing—as long as there were no more than two of us in it. My room and its accoutrements were one step above those of a youth hostel, but in its austerity it was clean and the linens were fresh. All qualms vanished at the sight of my bed.
No sooner had I arrived in my room than the phone rang. On the line was the proprietor of the Everest View, an English woman, as I recall, advising me that a strike was brewing by the pilots who flew between Kathmandu and the tiny airstrip at Lukla, up in the mountains nearby to the Everest View. There would be no problem getting me to the hotel the day after next, she assured me, but knowing of my commitment to be in Manila on a specific date, she was unable to guarantee that the strike would or would not happen. My disappointment was palpable; she apologized profusely, to which I could only respond that it was hardly her fault.
“Perhaps on your next visit,” she added matter-of-factly, like a next visit to Nepal was a regular occurrence. So, instead of my long dreamed of experiencing dawn close by the summit of the world’s highest mountain, I would now remain in the Kathmandu Valley. Disappointing, yes, but the valley would have its compensations, save, perhaps for the city’s effects on my eardrums. After an eighteen-hour red-eye flight from London—and no sleep—I was indeed tired, but sleep could wait.
The Crystal’s major attraction I quickly discovered was its roof, a carpet of grass that transformed the nondescript space into an oasis, where afternoon tea was served, if not exactly high above the world, removed, nonetheless, from the din on the streets below. At the end of the day’s activities, what would be nicer than a pot of tea quietly gazing at the distant mountains? It was something to look forward to.
In May and June (I was told by my waiter upon my first visit), the roof offered a splendid view, some ninety miles distant, of the Everest Range. Regrettably, this was March, so the view couldn’t be assured, and during my short stay, the mountains remained mostly a vague apparition on the horizon. Right now, Kathmandu City, vibrant, bustling and noisy, lay just outside and below my window. I wasted no time commencing my exploration along its narrow streets and surprisingly open squares.
♦◊♦
The hustle-bustle everywhere in Kathmandu City, that first morning, with its dissident blare of car horns, more I think than my own lack of sleep, wore me down more quickly than did the constant dodging of motorbikes that streaked wantonly along the crooked streets and the imminent danger posed by vintage American junk-heaps that in their last hurrahs had found new life as taxi cabs. Pressing my body flat against the ancient buildings that seemed to lean out over the streets—sidewalks were non-existent—was my only recourse against being struck dead by protruding fenders. The streets were crowded with people scurrying and doing business everywhere I turned. Stray dogs were afforded the same leeway as people, managing, if only barely, to escape death by protruding fenders.
In the days that followed, getting into the rhythm of the city, I found this jumble of human activity, unlike anything I’d ever witnessed in either America or Europe. A kind of ramshackle grandeur loomed everywhere. Shrines of every shape and size seemed scattered along every street. Ornate, intricately etched gates and porticos, relics of another indeterminate era, existed as entries to otherwise decrepit buildings, as if the buildings were constructed around the existing porticos. Swayback balconies hung precariously from many of these buildings, seemingly ready to collapse into the street at the behest of any strong breeze. Statues abounded in every street, as well—of Buddha, of animals of ever kind, of demons, of figures—a seemingly endless collection of artifacts on every street and to a foreign eye breathtaking in their artistry. I make no claim to scholarship in recalling, or even knowing at the time, to whom all these works were dedicated.
Merchants, too, lined every street selling everything from a wide variety of vegetables, to copperware and pottery, to carved masks and brilliantly colored dyes to humble trinkets and garlands of flowers—all strung out along the narrow streets and in the busy Durbar Squares of the valley’s three major cities—Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan. Then, too, there were the cows. Impossible to ignore them, these horned beasts scared to all practicing Hindus, plopped themselves, hither and yon in the middle of the city’s busiest streets, aloof to the narrow margin that existed between remaining alive and dying a possibly painful death, their sacred status of no consequence to a jagged auto fender.
Indifferent to their surroundings, they did, nonetheless, present a quixotic charm to my foreign eyes—these bulky bovines, squatting like monuments of immutability in the middle of every street or square, wide or narrow, serenely indifferent to the frenzied animation all around them. How the devil, I asked myself, had these bovines come to such imprudent time-out in the heart of this busy city, primitive though the commercial areas of the city seemed to be? Where the hell did they come from? How did they get here? Did they simply wander into town from the countryside? That idea made little sense to me, but for the moment all was guesswork.
I was both overwhelmed and enchanted by the arcane nature of everything I saw. If these sacred beasts hosted any sense of peril, they gave no indication of it as they rested oblivious of the activity swirling around them. Under the seeming disorder there must have been some higher order at work, some unseen intelligence keeping a watch on things. Hard for me as an atheist to imagine, but the questions persisted.
♦◊♦
The most surreal assailant on my weary state on that first day, however, came less from screeching autos and motor bikes, or cows that sat, sacred though they may have been, impervious to the danger swirling around them, than from the onslaught of aggressive begging, from those who seemed too impossibly young for such activity and those too old and infirm to manage it, but who somehow did, nevertheless. My simple presence seemed to bring them forth like zombies. If I’d stop to shoot a picture that may have inadvertently included an unnoticed pedestrian or two in the frame, out would stretch hands insisting on modeling fees. That much poverty existed was unassailable. But folkways—dress, culture, the unceasing visibility of religion—I’m sure, accounted for some of my immediate reactions. But, the most undeniable evidence of the privation, without doubt, were the children, some as young as two or three years old, rags for clothing clinging to their tiny bodies, snot (or something far worse) running freely from their noses and eyes, some of them cradling in their arms what I assumed were their even younger siblings, in a relentless and unassailable coercion for alms. I, of course, in my western clothes and my Canon over my shoulder was a prime target.
After an hour on the streets, I hurried back to the Crystal. Had I expected in Kathmandu a facsimile of Shangri La, a fairytale city, a mystical garden, nested between protective mountains and bathed in a soothing sun-drenched mist? Most probably I had. If sleep was not to be the immediate relief to my exhaustion, then someplace hushed and tranquil where my senses might be soothed was the next best thing. How else to handle the awfulness of these poor children, their eyes wide with hopelessness? Obviously, I concluded brightly, that begging was a necessary and national pastime in a land riddled with this kind of endemic hardship. To survive, it was imperative to prepare myself, to fill my pockets with coins, to be armed and ready when outstretched hands pulled and poked from every direction.
The hotel’s receptionist happily took three one hundred rupee notes and weighed me down with coins of one-rupee denominations. As for a quiet retreat before an afternoon siesta, he suggested a visit to the Monkey Temple, high on a quiet hillside on the outskirts of the city. The approach to the temple by taxi was deceptively picturesque. A curved road led to the base of a hill, atop which stood the temple We climbed the hill, its slopes swathed in a forest of fichus trees. It was then that the temple revealed itself in full atop a long flight of steps, three hundred sixty-five of them, which I then climbed. In Buddhist tradition the temple took the shape of a stupa, a kind of flattened dome, from which flew hundreds and hundreds of colorful prayer flags. The temple was surrounded by a complex arrangement of what I guessed were shrines. The surfaces of the temple were incised with ornate carvings, of whose origins and meanings I of course knew nothing (or nothing that I now remember). As I approached the temple I was aware that I was alone, which surprised me—not another tourist in sight. Several benches were set out in a park-like setting.
For a few minutes I reveled in the quiet. Then the monkeys materialized—hundreds of them screeching and multiplying before my eyes like demons, swinging from trees, as jumpy as grasshoppers, scuttling over walls, from behind columns—teeth bared with feral intensity. The courtyard swarmed with the noisy devils—anything but friendly.
This was, after all, once they’d calmed somewhat, most probably their theatrical curtain raiser: descending en masse from the surrounding trees, like rain borne on the driving wind of a typhoon, their unearthly noise scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting visitors, most of whom had never been closer to this many monkeys, except on safari or behind bars at a municipal zoo. I had arrived at the temple, needless to add, with nothing to offer the seemingly enraged beasts—no bananas, no nuts, nothing—with which to put down, or at least divert, this rebellion of monkey madness, now sucking the very oxygen from the air. My pockets, sagging with the weight of three hundred rupees, would clearly be of no interest to them.
♦◊♦
Hapless in the face of this invasion, I could only hope that this display of collective hysteria was all part of a daily show performed and that no real harm was intended. Once my initial panic subsided, I did move watchfully forward, just in case my instincts, never before tested in such a manner, proved faulty. The monkeys, however, eventually chose to keep their distance, with several exceptions who actually became quite friendly. A less strident welcome (if welcome is the word), would have been preferable, but now that peace had been established, I was soon cautiously wandering among them, a unique occurrence for me, if not for the monkeys. After a few minutes, I became one among them, a trusted buddy I would dare to say. Once the calm became permanent and the monkeys went about their regular business, the first human appeared, as if on cue, at my feet. She was no more than three, perhaps four at most, and as pathetic as any of the children I’d already encountered. She sat down on a curbstone, unmoving, filthy from face to bare feet, eyes enormous, runny and diabolical in their unswerving glare, She was here, I suspected, to exact her due.
Lying in her lap, more like a doll than something human, was an infant of no more than six months. Where was the mother, I wondered? How did she get to this place on her own? Above me, and out of my view, lay a complex of more shrines and, if I remember correctly, shops and other amenities for visitors. She must be up there somewhere I remember thinking. The child whimpered aggressively, more like a mortally wounded puppy than any child I had ever known. I did not wait for her to hold out her hand. I dropped two rupees into her lap. Her eyes never left mine. It was such a feeble gesture, this petty offering, conjured from some part of own Western conscience? How had I decided that two rupees was a reasonable amount of near worthlessness to offset the enormity of this elemental neediness? I immediately added two more rupees to the donation. Once again, no acknowledgment registered on her sad little face. Clearly this child was too young to recognize the differing value between two and four. It was all the same to her; she had been trained, if that’s the word, to hold out her hand and simply accept.
No sooner had I given her the money than other children materialized, less frenzied than the monkeys had, but no less determined. They moved in on me so suddenly that I thought they must have been hiding, much like the monkeys themselves, in the branches of the fichus trees. Those vacant stares and that unstoppable animal whining soon surrounded me as if scripted for the stage. Plainly, wherever I would venture this ritual of the destitute would follow. Escape from privation, when that is all there is, would be futile. The sight and sounds of these heartbreaking children—more like lost and starving animals—was wrenching and as far removed from the purpose of my voyage to Nepal as suddenly awakening on the surface of Jupiter might have been.
♦◊♦
The moment had come, I finally accepted, if I were to survive several more days of this, to return to the Crystal and sleep. I’d been in Kathmandu less than two hours and my sensibilities were both over stimulated and overwhelmed. I made my way back to the Crystal and fell into my bed. And sleep I did, for five hours. I awoke late in the afternoon feeling somewhat renewed. I showered in tepid water, dressed and explored the hotel, minimal as it was. It was then that I discovered the grass-covered roof where afternoon tea was already in progress. What could be more welcoming than that sub-continent tradition of afternoon tea? I ordered a pot. The late afternoon sun drifted across a sky the color of honey. It progressed slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of Uttar Pradesh, the Indian plains that I’d flown over—was it only this morning? Even the noise on the streets below seemed somewhat muted as the day drew to a close. My waiter kindly pointed to where, if I had come to Nepal two months hence, a splendid view of the Everest Range would unquestionably have been mine to witness.
Only one other guest shared the rooftop garden with me, an American, as it turned out, with an outsized gray beard and wearing an open-necked shirt, safari trousers and boots. We acknowledged each other initially with nods but soon found ourselves exchanging those words that strangers in strange places do to establish common ground. He joined me at my table; I was delighted to learn that he was a photographer on assignment for the National Geographic Society. He was shooting a story in the region and had been in Nepal for several days. He was way ahead of me. We talked of our travels, his being far more extensive than mine. We had dinner together that evening and on the evenings that followed. Since each of us went his own way during the day, it was pleasant having someone to talk with over curry and cold beer each evening.
When darkness fell, the streets of the city took on a special, almost spectral, aura. The cows remained in place, but the traffic all but ceased. Since no sidewalks existed between the shop fronts and the street, the shops at night transformed into colorful stalls (few had windows in any case), lighting up the streets like Christmas crèches or colorful concessions along a carnival midway. Sold from these stall were great mounds of colorful fruits and vegetables, tinned food, multi-hued skeins of yarn, as well as native pharmaceuticals and, of course, souvenirs. Small groups of men sat cross-legged on the floors of some stalls playing sitars and singing traditional songs, or perhaps hymns, as clusters of passers-by stopped to listen; the light thrown on the street by these stalls brought gaudy vigor to the nighttime hours. As we ambled the streets, we felt both at ease and totally safe, as well, in each other’s company, very much at home. The begging had all but vanished when the earth lurched away from the sun. And I, by the time evening fell on the city, felt totally at home.
♦◊♦
Around the corner from the Crystal, the Durbar Square of Kathmandu City was the one-time home to royal palaces, pagodas and a cluster of temples, some of them dating back to the 12th century, their top-most levels attained by climbing steep, almost ceremonial, flights of steps from street level. On my second morning, climbing to the crest of one, I scanned the view through my telephoto lens. A large contingent of 1960s Western dropouts who had come to Nepal for easy access to drugs were represented by a few remaining relics from the age of Aquarius, many sporting ratty beards and dressed in scruffy dung-colored kaftans, and looking, forlornly, much the worse for wear. It would be too facile to compare these relics to remnants of 1960s Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. So I shall resist.
The following morning, camera slung over my shoulder, I climbed to the topmost level of one of the temples in the Durbar Square. Opposite me across the square, atop a particularly ornate temple, sat an old man who, by his dress, I took to be a fakir. From the far-away look on his face, sharply visible through this long lens, I assumed he was cocooned in some private nirvana of his own. He gazed unmoving into the sky. No sooner had I raised my camera to take his picture—I was at least seventy-five feet across the square from him—he spotted my intrusion into his reverie and shook a defiant forefinger at me. I continued scanning, shooting many pictures, only occasionally returning to him. He kept closed eyes to my underhanded reconnoitering. When, finally, I convinced myself that he had forgotten me, I did manage a couple of pictures. I sat back and relaxed for ten or fifteen minutes, resting the camera by my side before descending to the street. As speedily as an avalanche cascading down the slopes of one of those outlying peaks, he raced down from his perch stopping me dead in my tracks, his hand outstretched in defiance. He said nothing, letting his outstretched hand officiate. Two rupees, once again, satisfied his rapid and hazardous streak to the street.
It dawned on me—finally—that if I wished to take pictures of people close up, I would simply, and up front, offer them a couple of rupees, which they never failed to accept, and they would happily pose while I photographed them. Among these folks were elderly ladies weaving, barbers shaving clients in the street, fruit merchants squatting amidst their produce, mothers nursing children, a young boy sitting by a fountain and playing some kind of string instrument, the occasional man in uniform, among a variety of others. I wondered if my companion from the National Geographic, as well as all photographers shooting pictures of the country’s indigenous poor, went through similar routines.
♦◊♦
Through the Crystal’s concierge, I made arrangements to engage a car and driver so as to view the sunrise from a mountaintop some forty minutes or an hour out of Kathmandu. Not the stuff of boyhood dreams, I am quick to acknowledge, like emerging from my tent at dawn on the frozen slopes of Pumori as the light ascended the fearsome heights of Makalu and Lhotse, and Everest itself, but I was exhilarated nonetheless at being even this near to the fabled range. The car picked me up outside of the hotel at four a.m. and we drove out of the city. The road into Kathmandu, even in pre-dawn darkness was thronged with farmers and vendors, all on foot, heading into the city, their backs stooped with baskets of produce destined for the many bustling city marketplaces. The road we were on, constructed by the Chinese several years earlier, led directly to the Tibetan frontier, and was surely the most up-to-date road that I had seen since arriving, apparent even in the darkness of pre-dawn.
I cannot recall exactly how long it took us to arrive at the makeshift parking area near the foot of the mountain—about an hour, I guess—from whose summit I would view the sunrise. It was still dark. Immediately upon arriving, we were surrounded by young boys, dozens of them, the oldest no more than twelve, clamoring to guide me to the top. All I could do, finally, was to point a finger at one of them and say “You!” He was more like ten than twelve; he spoke English, and as I would discover as we hiked on and met others on the same path to the summit, he also greeted other early risers in French, Italian, Spanish, as well as in German.. His interrogation of me was fascinating.
“Where you from?” he asked smiling with enthusiasm.
“The United States,” I replied.
“Ah, America! Fifty states. What state you live in?”
“New York.”
“Ah, New York. Capital Albany! Population 15,000.000! Many people!” “Yes,” I answered, “the most people of any state.”
“I know, I know. Niagara Falls!”
“You know about Niagara Falls?”
“I know much about America. My parents practice birth control. Members of Planned Parenthood. I have five brothers and some sisters.”
Where was this kid coming from, I wondered? Much about America? Planned Parenthood? The population of New York State? Like a speeding bullet, he was coming at me faster than I could think. He wore a heavy patterned sweater and his head was contained in a colorful wool cap that was pulled over his ears. At this altitude, the air before dawn was more than a little chilly. Even in the dark I could see his broad smile and amazingly white teeth, an amazing contrast to the pathetic youngsters I had already encountered. I can still see the broad and friendly smile that never left his face.
“I be your guide up the mountain, yes?”
“Are you the best guide here?” I asked.
“Better than any of these,” he scoffed. “I the best.”
And so, charmed, I had found someone to lead me up the snaking path to the summit. It took a good forty minutes to reach the top. I felt every minute of it in my legs and my lungs. As we attained the summit, the faintest light tinted the sky to the east. Nothing in the valley beneath the ledge on whose rim we stood was quite visible yet.
“You be patient,” he said, as if reassuring an uncertain child. “It come soon.”
“I will be,” I said.
“You have good camera? Many F-stops for good exposures?”
I assured him that I did.
“You take my picture?” he asked.
“Yes, later, when the sun is high in the sky and the light is better.”
“Good, I wait,” he said, both assured and satisfied. We had been the first of many small groups to reach the top. After hearing the languages in which they spoke, he greeted all the arrivals in either French or Spanish or German or Italian, all with a simple bonjour, buenas dias, guten tag or buon giorno. This kid might one day be Nepal’s master diplomat. He turned toward the distant mountains.
“Here come sun. I told you.” He pointed toward the mass of jagged peaks some ninety miles away now being etched against the brightening sky.
“That Mt. Everest,” he said pointing to the east.
“Ah, yes,” I replied, uncertain as to which peak he was pointing, although I vaguely recognized by its pyramidal peak and that it stood somewhat higher in altitude than the surrounding peaks I began shooting pictures, none of which I knew would have any dramatic value at this distance, even while using my longest lens. But that was of little consequence, I was standing here at the crack of dawn (it could easily have been at the dawn of time), chilled to the bone, but actually witnessing sunrise over the tallest range of mountains in the world. It was a trekker’s dreams come true, in spite of it being merely a tourist’s dream. At that moment I thought once again of my childhood heroes, the Englishmen, Mallory and Irvine. Imagine, I thought, of being able to say a few words to them. They were who I had wanted to be after reading about them as a boy in tales by Richard Halliburton, of great adventurers and marvels of the world’s wonders.
I could see, once again in my mind’s eye, those grainy black-and-white photographs, so visually evocative to the ten-year-old boy I was, that had illustrated Halliburton’s story of the ill-fated ascent that had cast a spell over me and had remained constant over decades—and which I had examined again and again and again. They had been taken in 1924 during Mallory and Irvine’s final attempt to conquer Everest. How thrilling it would have been for me to shoot my own close-ups of Everest and Makalu, had my opportunity not been aborted by something as mundane as a pilots’ walkout.
♦◊♦
The hike down to the valley proved more appealing scenically, now that the sun was up; it certainly offered more photo opportunities. The early morning sunlight had begun shedding a golden light on the rice fields and farms perched along several nearby hillsides. It highlighted people, and huts and terraced landscapes close at hand, but soon spread its warm light across a whole valley that had quite suddenly opened at our feet with the arrival of dawn.
“I be your guide today?” he said when finally we reached the car.
“Where?”
“I take you all over valley, show you things, yes?” Well, I thought, why not? He was charming and funny company, and for someone his age he certainly knew his way around. I didn’t see him as a scholarly docent, but as a knowledgeable wayfarer who knew his way around his environs as I did, and would again, in a city I loved, New York, whenever visitors needed orientation. His recommendations of things to see—especially given the short time I would be in the valley—were interesting, as well as photographable. I had a guidebook, of course, but I had always preferred to view things on my own, garnering my own impressions, before reading in detail about them.
♦◊♦
The outlying cities of the valley shone with pagodas and temples of every size and subject. One shrine, in Patan City was inscribed from top to foundation with erotica depicting sex acts of every variation known to humankind (a major tourist attraction, I have no doubt). He couldn’t wait to show me that one.
“Very sexy, eh?” he asked, smiling. So he was aware of sex, too. Well, no surprise there, I thought, given all his siblings and most probably by living quarters short on space and maybe even conventional rooms. I tried to imagine such a temple, shrine or obelisk in the respectable West (like Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park, perhaps, or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square) occupying such public space. Pompeii was the single exception I could think of where such erotic art could be seen. All I could do was smile, perhaps more overtly than I realized..
“What funny? Not sexy?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, like he’d been inside my head. “Very sexy. Very.”
But like this relic, Pompeii, too, was a relic of another age, the only difference being that Pompeii was now a restored open-air museum, while this erotic monument stood at the center of an active city. On the outskirts of Patan stood an enormous domed Hindu temple, festooned with prayer flags that in their variety challenged the number of colors in the spectrum. I can no longer even begin to recount in detail what my eyes beheld during those few days.
“Now I take your picture,” I said as we stood at the base of the temple. He posed happily. Posted in an album, his smiling face beams at me whenever I open its pages. He is a man of middle age now. I hope he has survived, and thrived, the rigors of a tough Nepalese life. To me, of course, he will remain always that terrific kid who turned my final day in Nepal into one of sheer pleasure. We found a small restaurant for lunch—pure guesswork on both our parts—off the Durbar Square in Bhaktapur (Of the three royal cities of Nepal, it is known as the Cultural Jewel). I cannot recall what either of us had for lunch, but to my delight he at his with gusto. After lunch, it was back to Kathmandu City and the area surrounding Narayanhity, the royal palace. I do recall, it seemed free of the begging so prevalent everywhere else. The palace itself, a massive pink structure resembling (in my view anyway) in architecturally the make-believe palace of Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s 1937 film, Lost Horizon, its grounds protected by high walls and guarded by specially uniformed soldiers. It sat aloof at the center of an enormous compound, as unassailable to most as the remote pinnacles of the Himalaya themselves. Since entry to the compound was all but impossible, after we had circled it, I asked him, “Now what?”
“What you like?” he asked, but before I could answer he cocked his head and held up one finger.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “We go someplace special.”
I laughed at the self-assurance with which he declared himself.
“No laugh. I serious.”
“You lead the way,” I said. We jumped into the car that I’d kept busy all day. He spoke to the driver and we once again headed out of town. After exiting the city proper, we soon came to a stop some twenty feet above the banks of a river, the Bagmati, It was, of course, like every river I’d seen in the country, sacred. Upon its arrival in India, if I recall my river information right, it would eventually merge with the most sacred Ganges. It was not very wide at this point and I have no idea how deep it was. A temple complex surrounded it. The river flowed quite freely and with some speed. During my stay in the Valley, I crossed many rivers like it (or perhaps they were the same river); all of them shallow and fast flowing, in some local women did laundry while others bathed. This one was no exception.
Below us, at the river’s edge, low-lying man-made mounds of mud extended from bank side six or eight feet into the river, atop which lay piles of magenta-stained straw and wood: logs, planks, twigs of every shape and length. At first glance I understood nothing as I watched men—I recall it being men only—piling on more and more wood.
“You patient,” my young guide admonished me. “You see.”
Soon others arrived transporting bodies, shrouded in white fabric. Each shrouded body was laid respectfully atop the piles of wood as torches were ignited, each pyre blazing into instant flame. A mass cremation ceremony commenced, whether as part of some collective Hindu ritual or merely individual funeral services, I don’t recall. I stood unmoving as corpse after corpse was set ablaze. Countless swirls of smoke rose from the riverbank and, drawn by a light breeze, dispersed, as through a fine sieve, between the trunks of the many fichus trees along the river bank.
“You see? No such thing in New York, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, “I mean no, no such thing in New York.”
“The dead people free now. They happy. They with ancestors.”
At that moment, I could do little but shake my head at the pleasure that this young boy took in his ancient beliefs. With such a wealth of world trivia tucked so comfortably in his young brain, with more no doubt to come, I wondered if, upon further exposure to more and more stints as a guide, he would remain steadfast in his belief, or would the changes coming to Nepal alter and perhaps challenge his worldview? At the end of the day I gave him what I hoped he would consider a generous remuneration and thanked him for the pleasure his company had afforded me.
“I see you again,” he said. “I come see you in New York!”
“Good, “I answered. “I would like that,” I said, suddenly thinking that I should tell him I wasn’t at present living in New York, but I caught myself before going into a long—and absurd—monologue. He’d be a special kid wherever he lived, and I guess that’s what I was feeling at that moment. As but one of ten thousand tourists he would accompany to the mountaintop during the coming years, it did not take much prescience to see that I would soon be lost in a haze of foreign faces, if I wasn’t already. I hope his spirit and intelligence gave him an opportunity to some day voyage beyond the borders of his own country. Could he possibly ascend to an ambassadorship or was he simply a bright, street-wise kid?
♦◊♦
I had covered a lot of territory in my few short days, shot hundreds of photographs; I’d even caught a flight in an old DC-3 across the face of the Himalaya. I got a more-or-less close-up of the Everest massif—Everest, Lohtse and Makalu and the immense glaciers that covered the flanks of the three giants—shooting some very bad photographs through the plane’s ancient windows. But the sight of the mountains so close up—even through the scratchy windows of the old plane—was more than I could have ever wished for. A return trip, sadly, was not in the cards.
The following morning I left Nepal for Manila.
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Photo: Getty Images
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