Kingdoms in the Air Read online

  I cross Durbar Marg, one of the city’s most Westernized boulevards, past pricey artifact outlets, the jewelry stores and gem retailers and vacation wholesalers, past Wimpy hamburgers with its coterie of hometown punks—McDonald’s execs are in town, smoothing the way for the Himalayas’ first franchise—and on up toward the royal palace, where Nepal’s constitutional monarch, King Birendra, sits brooding behind the sky-high spears of an iron fence, its most contemporary function to keep the rogue elephants of democracy at a comfortable distance. A few blocks westward I step around a woman emptying a pan of goat’s blood into a gutter drain and walk into Thamel.

  If Thamel has changed much since its halcyon days, I couldn’t know and wouldn’t care. You should have been here twenty, thirty years ago, the graying remnants of the hip community chide with dismissive smiles and the sagging body language of bittersweet loss, staring off into a Felliniesque kaleidoscope of images that compose the melancholy of their collective past. The increasingly geriatric veterans of the countercultural road trip have wearied of all that drug nonsense; they’re decamping back to the States, putting their kids into college, retooling their ambitions to be swashbucklers of the free market or heading into the foothills to become cave-dwelling mystics, reserving beds at Om’s Nursing Home on Lazimpat should they need a place to really cool out, come the millennium. Right—I should have been here a hundred years ago, I wish I could be here a hundred years hence, but I seem to be one of the few queris around unwilling to bitch unchastely about Kathmandu. Be here now, I know, works better when you’re not part of the gang responsible for popularizing a destination.

  “We discovered these places, Afghanistan, Nepal, Goa,” an old hippie named Jasmine told the writer Gita Mehta. “When we arrived everybody loved us. Now the whole damn world is on the trail we opened up, and the same people who loved us, fucking hate us. There’s too many of them. They’re not in the same class as those of us who got here first.”

  As far as life on the planet goes, we are certainly the last of the last generations to get there first. The postwar baby boomers, Kennedy’s children, heirs to the Boeing 707, presided over the deconstruction of any and all remaining frontiers and the death of myriad traditions. We are the last to see true, unboxed wilderness, the last to see life as it had been lived for centuries. Thirty years ago I was a high school junior with my first driver’s license, the roof of my thirdhand Volks­wagen stacked with surfboards, rolling down the wild empty beach from Sandbridge, Virginia, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, all but deserted except for the families of migrant fishermen who had worked the tides for three hundred years. We surfed ourselves into sweet exhaustion, strutted around bare-assed, built bonfires as big as dump trucks, grilled bluefish given to us by the migrants, and slept in World War II bomber-spotting towers in the midst of sand dunes peppered with unexploded ordnance dropped in practice runs. I have never since known such freedom, never since known such a wide-open America.

  Now the rickety wooden towers are gone, replaced by condos and private clubs and tony restaurants; you can’t drive on the beach from Virginia to Carolina; the migrant fishermen exist only in history books; and I moved out of Hatteras forever ten years ago. Be here now? You can’t, not in a place where you have a history, however short. That’s the traveler’s ace in the hole—no memories, no regrets; the irrelevance of hope. Jasmine’s more right than not; the dynamic is an internecine class issue among restless, shameless consumers. The irony is souring and self-indicting: Hatteras, the last good place on the East Coast, is ruined, for me at least, and I mourn it, but I’ll take Kathmandu almost any way it is delivered.

  So I walk, making the city my own. I turn down Tridevi Marg, deep into Thamel, one of the many neighborhoods in Kathmandu that have transformed themselves into base camps for Adventure with a capital A. Shingle after shingle of local and international companies—one for every thousand of Nepal’s visitors each year—hawking their services for trekking, rafting, climbing, mountain biking, hot-air ballooning, hang gliding; armies of guides and porters to shepherd you through wildlife parks and high-altitude death zones. Mr. Dhakal’s apathy toward the Visit Nepal ’98 campaign was a bit disingenuous. His Majesty’s government and the private sector have whipped up dozens of “tourism products” to bolster the effort: wildflower walks, snow leopard treks, angling trips, a monkey watch, honey hunting, fossil hunting, elephant polo, and thirty-four other “culture” offerings, including ethnological tours, festival tours, yoga tours, even a brewing tour that will bus you around to local moonshiners to sample chhang. The exotic as free-for-all growth industry, the global capitalization of adventure.

  But where might you start to prevent Nepal’s macrocosmic drift toward cultural decline and deracination? Is tourism the problem? Is adventure travel a form of designer imperialism? Hard to say, when tourism is just about the only industry Nepal can depend on to democratize its rural economy and spread a little of the wealth, rupee by rupee.

  “Nepal has to have tourists,” says Nirmal Chabba, manager of the famed Hotel Yak & Yeti. (If you’re the type who likes to dress elegantly and piss away money, the hotel hosts a swank casino. Richard Gere and Bernardo Bertolucci prefer to rent the luxurious fairy-tale Tibetan palace suites on the seventh floor and meditate on their private terraces overlooking the city.) As I’ve heard so many Nepalis say, thank God for Everest. No tourism would turn us into beggars.

  In Thamel, every few steps someone is hawking a khukri, a brass idol, a baseball hat embroidered with Buddha’s feminine eyes, but Nepalis are either too proud or too shy to confront you with the hard sell, and history has so far spared Nepal from a culture of resentment toward foreigners. At the end of Tridevi Marg, I veer south and arrive at the old pilgrims’ junction that leads west out of Thamel, where I am ceremoniously joined by eight-year-old Sham, merry-eyed ragamuffin, and we indulge in a not always rewarding game. “I’ll show you the way,” Sham offers when I answer his question about where I’m going, but I know the route myself and decline his service. Just in case I am bluffing, as a courtesy Sham briefs me on the route—“Down, right, over, up”—and tells me that Washington, D.C., is the capital of America. “Are you sure?” I tease. Oh yes, he read it in a book. Sham flits around me like a snot-nosed hummingbird, an adroit combination of urchin charm and beggarly boyish cunning. He’s not annoying, he’s brilliant, wonderful, yet still I want him to go away, earn his future without me.

  “When you leave,” he says, an identical silky black gleam to his eyes and hair, “will you give me your extra shirts and pants?” Sham’s head only comes up to my belt buckle, but the discrepancy doesn’t faze him. All over the mountains, porters are walking around in tattered oversize down vests and tattered undersized sneakers. He’s used to wearing big clothes, he tells me, but the thought is so absurd that we both laugh.

  “Okay, no clothes,” says Sham. “Milk.”

  He wants milk. How coldhearted do you have to be to say get lost to a kid whose final appeal in this most clichéd of Third World shantytown vignettes is for milk? Still, I’m skeptical. I insist on accompanying Sham to a nearby shop to make the purchase myself, but it’s not a twenty-cent pint carton he wants. He points behind the wooden counter to a top shelf holding a huge, family-size box of powdered milk. The little bastard probably works for the Milk Baba, I think, a local Hindu ascetic who for sixteen years has squeezed out a life for himself by refusing to put any nourishment other than milk into his body. “What are you planning to do, break it down into dime bags to sell to four-year-olds?”

  Sham doesn’t miss a beat. He has a flock of brothers and sisters who apparently do nothing but sit around wailing for him to bring milk to comfort their hungry stomachs. “It is my duty,” he says manfully.

  I balk at the price—three hundred rupees, a fortune in the shadows of Kathmandu’s kiddie economy. Sham might well grow up to become one of Central Asia’s biggest criminals, perhaps even prime minister.
“Why am I letting you talk me into this?” I wonder out loud, tugging a lump of bills from my pocket.

  “Because it’s Buddha Jayanti and you are going to the monkey temple.”

  Good answer: It’s Buddha’s birthday and I’m going to Swayambhu. Far be it for me, on such a day, on such a journey, to be the one to impede the flow of milk into the mouths of babes, innocent or otherwise.

  “Are you a Buddhist?” the expats I pal around with in Kathmandu eventually get around to asking. They are, I’m not, but the answer is never so simple. I confess I feel disconnected from the great theologies of man, abandoned to the scientist’s god, Technologia. I have no place reserved inside myself for Catholicism, the religion I was raised with, and little warmth for Christianity in general, finding nothing in its central image of crucifixion to stir my devotion. The unforgiving severity of Islam appalls me, and being a Jew is not simply something for which you sign on the dotted theological line.

  Despite Buddhism’s ubiquity, Nepal has ordained itself the world’s only Hindu kingdom, but as religions go, forget it. On my scorecard, Hinduism falls into the orbit of the biggest freak shows ever conceived, one outrageous carny act after another. I do, however, bow to one of Hinduism’s defining rituals and feel that cremation should be a spectator sport, especially for death-defying Westerners, and whenever I’m in Kathmandu I make a point of visiting its most holy Hindu shrine, Pashupatinath, on the banks of the sacred, scuzzy Bagmati River. This trip, on an early-morning pilgrimage to the temple, I sat on the Bagmati’s eastern bank along a row of stone monuments, each housing a linga, a polished marble phallus, the ancient Hindu symbol of masculine power. I was quietly appreciating Pashupati’s sobering essence as a living place of worship, its compressed cycle of life and death, when I was approached by a sassy, twentysomething sadhu, dressed flamboyantly in blue satin pajamas and a pink silk vest, who wanted to cadge a cigarette. “You want to see my dick?” he asked. He was one of those afflicted, grotesque ascetics who renounce their carnal passions by tying heavy stones around their penises to “break” the erectile tissues. As we talked, an old woman across the river lost her footing on the slippery steps leading from the cremation ghats to the main temple, cracked her white-haired head on the stone embankment, and, to the mortification of her assembled family, expired then and there. The sadhu burst into weaselish laughter. “What’s so funny?” I asked. “She’s very lucky,” he snickered. “She died in a sacred place.” To anyone who might imagine that I lack the cultural sensitivity to correctly understand the sadhu’s response, I would suggest that hip and holy are a poisonous and often reprehensible mix.

  I try to explain my feelings to the Kathmandu crowd—my relief in the presence of the Buddhist sense of humor, the lightness of the pleasure I find sometimes in a monk’s guileless grin, my appreciation for Buddhism’s spiritually generous posture of whateverness. Yet what I find most profoundly compelling about Buddhism is pre-­doctrinal, post-dogmatic, and has little to do with monasteries or myths or received wisdom. I’m in love with the exquisite Buddhist tension between the animate and the inanimate, the aesthetics of the mountains. The sight of a row of prayer flags rippling upward toward the snow peaks astounds me, penetrating deep into the marrow, a visual haiku more potent in its simplicity than the epic poetry of a cathedral. The juxtaposition of the colorful, weather-shredded flags and the floating Himalayan snowfields is the only beauty I ever witnessed that did not ultimately make me melancholy. Various white-boy Buddhists have regarded me with contempt for this minimalist perspective of the religion they drape and adorn themselves with, but that’s what Buddhism is to me: the graceful simplicity of its attempt to articulate the never-to-be-comprehended Himalayas, the mountains that fit no earthly scale of proportion and explode into the spirit with rupturing disbelief.

  “Oh!” Heads nod. “Then you’re a Buddhist.”

  Well, not so fast. An affinity is not faith, nor need it be, and there’s plenty about the religion I find disheartening. I believe in the marvelous immensity of mountains and oceans, billowy flags whispering our frailty to the void, the accrued sanctity of places like Swayambhu, and I try—an effort made both significantly easier and impossible by the Nepalese—to believe in the goodness of people. All the rest can be nicely gift-wrapped into the Hindu concept of maya—trivia and illusion and dream—­starting with the tasty Buddhist baloney about nirvana.

  At the foot of DevBhumi I cross a stone bridge and fall in step with a parade of celebrants headed up a low ridge under a leafy canopy of trees. The entrance to the shrine looks like a refugee camp on holiday. Groups of families rock on their heels, sipping tea from thermoses, munching on fried dough or snow-white crescents of coconut. Laughing children run about with no sense of direction or purpose other than to be laughing children. Through the gate, a prayer wheel the size of a wine cask creaks in perpetual motion and three enormous stone Buddhas the color of marigolds doze at the foot of the 365 breath-robbing steps that ascend the steep gradient of the hill. Mothers grip their toddlers by the shoulders as they slide down the long, scary iron handrail separating the up and down traffic. Three hundred steps to go and already I’m soaked through my shirt, but this is why I’m sold on Swayambhu, the hill and the ascent and the summit a perfect metaphor for the sweaty elation of the trail. Everything holy in Kathmandu has been built with visual cues to divert the eye upward, Dubby Bhagat suggested to me, “just mysterious enough to tempt you further.”

  And perhaps no greater proof of such temptation than the daunting approach to Swayambhu: on the steps, when you drop back your head and raise your downcast eyes, so attentive to your feet, and finally notice the pair of shikara, monolithic stone-and-brick towers like fat white rocket ships, stationed on each side of the highest landing. Shikara translates as “mountain peak,” and their forms are architectural expressions of the soaring peaks of the Himalayas. It’s hard to look at shikara without thinking ice ax, rope, oxygen. Desire. Fear. And where the steps terminate, it’s not the ready-to-launch shikara you first see, but what they frame: a gigantic gold thunderbolt, called a vajra, the Buddhist symbol for the absolute nature of reality, or, in my own rescrambled interpretation, the absolute reality of nature.

  I hump upward, my ears slowly filling with a glacial splintering of sound, the gravelly crackle of hundreds of human beings in motion. My eyes slide along the hemispheric curve of the stupa, along rising and converging lines of fluttering prayer flags, like permanently suspended confetti, toward the inevitable symmetry of the shrine’s little metaphysical joke. When you set your sights high enough, you’re looking straight on at the Buddha and the Buddha’s looking at you: the all-seeing eyes of the supreme enlightened one painted on each side of the square base of Swayambhu’s golden spire, gazing out across the Kathmandu valley toward each cardinal point on the compass, each pair of eyes like a parasol balanced on the red curling staff of a stylized question mark signifying dharma, the path to self-awareness. Today, the path is being shared by soft drink vendors doing a brisk business under a makeshift awning. Awareness, I’m forced to conclude from my own dust-parched mouth, is preceded by great thirst for the real thing, ice cold.

  I sit down on a stone ledge, my sweaty back against the wall of a tiny shop and its interior breath of coolness, trying to get a fix on how it is, amidst this chaotic swirl of humanity, that one celebrates Buddha’s birthday in the land where the historical Siddhartha himself was born. For anyone who has tied his or her piety to churches or mosques or synagogues, Swayambhu and its robust venerations probably won’t click. Round and round the pilgrims flow in clockwise circumambulations of the stupa, slapping the hundreds of copper prayer wheels that ring its base, poking their heads inside the small dark shrine rooms recessed into the dome, flinging in offerings of rice, vermilion, incense. Like a large, gaudy caterpillar, a saffron-vested monk crawls into view in the circling tide, sprawls flat on his belly, arms extended in front of him, pushes himself slowly ba
ck on his feet, takes a few steps forward, and falls again, trailed by a white man snapping pictures. The monk has flat wooden blocks strapped to his hands to protect the skin of his palms from the friction of incessant, mechanical supplication.

  From Kathmandu’s quasi-punk point of view, Swayambhu is a terrific venue for girl-watching. In the courtyard in front of the rest house the Nepali lover boys congregate, sniggering at a trio of fornicating dogs, their horny eyes tracking cliques of sensual young women. With muffled snaps, a breeze steers the prayer flags toward the north and east, toward Everest, where climbers are bottlenecked at the South Col, where they are making it or not making it. Yesterday a member of a Nepalese youth expedition made it. Last week, five others—four foreigners, one Sherpa—died trying, one of them simply blown off the peak into space.

  The wind lifts the dust and flies. Trash blows across my feet. There’s birdsong and the bumblebee buzz of throaty chanting. Bells ring always but without a pattern, bells like Sunday church bells, like fire bells, like dinner bells, like we-have-another-winner. Out of nowhere, suddenly, monkeys scamper onto the stupa, playing Tarzan on a limp rope of old prayer flags, swinging their mangy selves up to the fretted tin roofline above the prayer wheels. The prostrating monk reappears on his circuit, rising from his knees more slowly, a white-haired old man, a slowly tumbling rock in a racing streambed. Another monk, in a porkpie hat, enters the herd holding a fat bundle of burning joss sticks like a smoke bomb, and it’s this smell of junipery incense that tells me, as much as anything else, that I’ve returned to the Himalayas, a promise—perhaps the only one—I keep making to myself. The wheels never stop spinning, the flags never stop lifting, the beasts never stop fucking but stagger in a three-headed dance between the legs of the celebrants. In this holiest of shrines, it is the joy of existence, the ascendant laughter of its everydayness, that makes the loudest statement. Just as on the mountains one glimpses with the deepest and most self-questioning awe the stunning dimension of death, at Swayambhu, from this summit, one views the miraculous, astonishing expanse of life, the light within life.