In Bhaktapur, 10 miles east of Kathmandu, under a sheer blue sky, amidst stiff red flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), a man with a blood-red scarf round his throat and a booming delivery is telling us that the hour has come, and that we must hasten back to our villages to announce that this is a ‘golden opportunity’. His voice dies down to a hoarse grumble, then strengthens again to a full-throated roar, accompanied by fist-pumping as though he’s a won a point at tennis. The stone lions that guard the great five-roofed Nyatapola mandir look on unimpressed. Not that they can express anything very much through the undergrowth of limbs and craning necks. The temples of Nepal, with their steps and terraces, function as spectator stands, even on days when very little is going on. ‘They say about fifty per cent of Nepalis are supporters of the Maoists?’ ‘No! Much more!’ my interpreter yells. He is unable to tell me how much more. I suspect his excitement has more to do with loathing of the king and government than with support for the CPN-M’s revolutionary appeals. If you look around you can see that this is a day out, a kind of holiday, rather than a rally. Someone is selling ice-cream. Girls saunter under umbrellas. There’s a screechily amplified song by the Pussycat Dolls in the lulls between speakers. Half the crowd is made up of uniformed school kids.
Religion is promiscuous. It is heavily scented and shameless, a romance of death. The route down to the ghats at Pashupatinath is lined with amputees, grubby urchins and saddhus, some of whom are genuine. The fat man from the Jaganath temple is offering a rasta plait to a harassed-looking redhead. Another fraud, face like a Halloween mask, thrusts a tika-daubed finger into the foreheads of the unwary. The hillside above the river is densely forested. Langur monkeys with oestrogen-swollen arses loiter in the branches. Little humans pass beneath laden with immense packs of firewood, the bundles piled on their backs and secured by head-straps. All I can see of one is a pair of stick-thin legs with long spatulate toes like a kiwi. The tourists are lined up, in imitation of the mendicants at the entrance, against a wall overlooking the crematoria. We have digital cameras instead of begging-bowls.
On the other side of the Bagmati, where only devotees may go, fires gutter on stone plinths, smoke drifting upwards. A corpse in its winding-sheet has been placed on the steps down to the water. The remains of another are being raked out and shovelled into the stream. Two naked boys sift the riverbed, feeling through sludgy ash for gold teeth. A third corpse is brought out and laid on a pile of firewood. A woman attempts to throw herself on the flames, not in hopes of immolation. She flails about between two burly men, nimble and showy as wrestlers. A man in Y-fronts approaches the first corpse, which has now been placed on its pyre. Aided by an official in a sooty shirt, he applies a taper to a bundle of hay. Smoke moves over the river towards us. Crows shuffle along the temple eaves, heads cocked. Black kites circle in the sky. A skull pops like the sound of a greeting arriving on Yahoo Messenger. Our pictures taken, checked, cropped, we move off, fanning the smoke away, holding our breath. Fingering my head, I find bird shit in my hair.
Boudhanath, just up the road, is where 16,000 or so Tibetan refugees have made their home. With its rimpoches and monasteries, this place has become a world centre of Tibetan Buddhism, my guidebook monstrates, in brisk bold print, amidst the glossy scenic views. The stupa is a white egglike dome, surrounded on all sides by shops and restaurants. There are two heavy-lidded blue eyes peering over the dome just below the golden finial. Scarlet corneas add a vampiric intensity to the Buddha’s all-seeing stare. Tangled lines of prayer-flags, the latter whirling in the breeze, stretch from the stupa’s summit to the corners. A rider on a white elephant guards the steps. You walk round, remembering to go clockwise, inhaling juniper incense and the astringent sour-sweet odour of human excrement, listening to the throb of audio-taped chanting, Oum mani padme hum, swigging your bottled water, sidestepping the orange effluent. Somewhere to the north, hidden away behind pearly monsoonal cloud, is the glittering icing-sugar of the Himalayan cake.
You become aware of this as of a presence, more awful than Shiva, or the divinities of Islam and the Old Testament. But it isn’t here, now, and you are not interdicted. You can wander where you will. This is just a place of paper kites, giggles and sunburn. You can drink a chilled Everest beer or a Tibetan hot one. You can go into the shadows to look at gesturing gods or teenagers necking, or discover a prayer-wheel the size of an industrial boiler, hidden away, overlooked, like a relic of the Victorian age. Ah. You explain everything to your daughter. The wheel and the beer. Sun and sewage. The smacking sound of prayer-flags in the breeze. The Buddha’s bloodthirsty gaze. Terror and uplift, and a little warmly phrased eschatology. Your daughter listens patiently.
On the 7th September, the Kumari, the Living Goddess, incarnation of Taleju, will be carted around Durbar Square. Tucked away in the back, she will wave to her cheering fans. When we arrive we find that the two closest temples have been designated viewing platforms—one for the Press, one for Tourists—and the others, the ones behind with the least advantageous views, for the people of Nepal. We take up positions on the dais just below the steps of the Tourists temple, which is already congested with tour groups, Swedes, Germans and Italians conspicuous in braids and fishermen’s pants. A drunk lies sprawled in front of the Palace, on the steps to the dais. The Press temple, which is nearest the Kumari’s cloister and the Palace balcony (from which the king will exchange charged greetings with the Living Goddess), has the best view.
Our platform fills up. The cops jump in dragging out the local kids who’ve wormed their way in from the back. An Italian woman on my right links arms with me to form a barricade against the swarming masses in the street below. The officials turn their attention to the drunken eyesore. He has huge bare limbs and a majestic profile. He lies on his back, arms flung out, quite stiff, as if allegorising torment and loss like one of those iron sculptures you find in colonial heritage zones. A pick-up nudges through the crowds. Three men take hold of our man, thrusting him precipitately into the pick-up, as if handling junk. Marchers appear, some dressed in tigerskins and hula skirts. Mercs and Japanese SUVs draw up at the Palace, disberthing Norwegian ambassadors and Nepali ministers. An imposing gent in a grey dara-sarwal and topi shakes a few hands. ‘Is that the king?’ There is a surge towards us, and we tense to take the strain. A scuffle breaks out at the base of one of the temples. Angry young men are tangling with the cops.
While the Italian and I are refusing to yield to a wiry man with betel-reddened teeth and an agile knee, a German with a single reflex Leica held above his head wades to the front. ‘Hang on, mate!’ bawls an old Australian hippy. ‘You’ve taken our place! That’s bad manners where I come from!’ ‘This is Nepal, this is not your country, it has its own rules', the German states, over his shoulder. He has the advantage of a broad ursine back. ‘That’s not on, mate! You can’t take a fellow’s place!’ ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand English’, the German pronounces conclusively, adding, ‘And I’m glad I don’t, in your case’. ‘This bloke is a grade A arsehole', the Australian informs his snorting companion. He has curly white hair spilling out of a red beret. His blue denim jacket is open, disclosing a bony washboard chest. One of his arms holds back a fresh surge from behind. I’m impressed by its strength. Despite its lack of flesh, the arm’s as hard and unyielding as steel cable. ‘No, you don’t! This is for tourists! I’ll call a policeman!’ There is no hint of humour in his words. He is not having the best of times, on the whole. 'Cat Stevens wrote "Wild World" somewhere over there', I tell his friend.
A young woman appears at my feet. She is wearing a nose-ring and Newari costume. She has a baby strapped to her back. An older woman pushes the baby’s head out of its broken-necked loll. The young woman tries to sell me some beads. A dragon skips past. Bead-seller and lolling baby are swept away by the crowd. An arm waves above the heads then submerges. Another group of interlopers is ejected from our platform. Someone surfs over our heads. There are loud cheers and a scattering of applause from the temples. Two dancers in fright-masks stumble by. Three startlingly beautiful women appear at a window. They withdraw into the dark when I try to photograph them. Courtesans? They look like older versions of the Kumari, the same black eyeliner and hair, the same abrupt disconcerting gaze. Then the Kumari herself trundles into view. She’s inside a covered wagon which has only two wheels like a hansom cab. The king steps out on to his balcony. He is a stout man with the head of an Easter Island statue. He has the exaggerated grandeur of a usurper. The Kumari, who is about 12 but is decked out like a prostitute, peers out between two minders. She has a tiny whitened face. Her eyes, two pissholes in snow, search for Gyanendra's, and lock with them. Both lean forward as if magnetised. The rest of us look on like peeping-toms. No one shoots the king.
Tribhuvan University is south of Kathmandu. It’s just below the town of Kirtipur where, my guidebook enthuses, a marauding Gorkha ruler once sliced off the noses and lips of the menfolk in revenge for some earlier setback; the residents still refuse entry to any members of the monarchy. Tribhuvan doesn’t look like a university from the road. Hidden away amongst severe enclosing hills, it suggests an institution for the socially marginalised. It is surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence. The sports fields and grassy areas are all overgrown. The administrative buildings have an abandoned mournful look, like a Scottish fishery. Young men walk about burdened by weighty tomes. They have the white shirts, blow-dried hair and reptilian eyes of tele-evangelists. The women are not so creepy. They carry copies of fashionable handbags, and one or two check out my daughter’s jeans. We pass through an atrium that opens onto a courtyard, also overgrown. There are a lot more students here, seated on walls, or standing in architectural groups. Time passes. No one moves. Three evangelicals snore under a peepul tree. ‘Worry not’, I say confidently. ‘Someone will talk to us’. I’m about to accost a promising-looking individual (he looks like a medical student in a Russian novel), when a lurker under the arches makes his move. He has a deranged smile.
Vinod tells us that the Vice-Chancellor has resigned. (King Gyanendra is the Chancellor. Obviously, he hasn't resigned.) He also tells us that there are no lectures, as the instructors are all on strike and have been on strike for weeks. This is a pity, as the students have to pay for their classes, and have, it seems, already parted with the fees. It cost Vinod 4,500 rupees to snore under the peepul tree. He wants to complete his Masters, which, he informs us, is in the field of Education. ‘What’s it about?’ Vinod waves this question aside. ‘I intend to become a teacher of the Nepali youth. It is an honourable profession, sir’. He is pleased to discover what I do. He repeats the word, sucking on it as if it is a sweet. ‘Lecherer’, he says, 'lecherer'. My daughter titters. ‘Will you show us around?’ I say. ‘I would be delighted to be your guide, by all means’. Vinod speaks with a language learner’s painstaking inaccuracy, a ghostly parade of grammarians, increasingly bearded and frock-coated as the years unfold, revealing their hard Anglo-Saxon centres, lining up behind each sentence to frown keenly. He takes us to a classroom, which is packed with students seated in rows. ‘They are awaiting an instructor who will never come’, I say waggishly. ‘One might, you never know’, says Vinod, lapsing into an unguarded colloquialism, as he attempts to shove me through the door. But I’m quick on my feet.
The library, the finest in Nepal according to my gleeful guidebook, is also packed. The literature section consists of Joseph Conrad’s Victory. This text is sandwiched between some paperbound books on karst mining. ‘I am the world come to pay you a visit’, I tell the security man on the door. When we leave, which is rather more quickly than I had anticipated, Vinod remains in the middle of the road waving through the dust our taxi raises. I feel like a disreputable uncle relieved of an irksome duty.
On the other side of Kathmandu, near the town of Sainbu, also to the south, is a proper orphanage. It too depends on charitable donations. ‘The Orphans Homes’ is run by Rita Rai and Nirmal Chandra Rai. The place was Rita’s idea. She got used to taking in street kids whenever people brought them to her. Nirmal was an engineer, but didn’t see much point in carrying on with that sort of work in a country with adulterated petroleum and poisonous water, intermittent electricity and telephones which didn’t work. He felt he’d be better employed helping out his wife, so he built an annex to the house, comprising a schoolroom and three dormitories, one for boys, one for girls, and one for infants. We take off our shoes at the door. There are twenty one kids, twelve infants, including one baby, and nine teenagers. The teenagers aren’t around. They are at school. The infants are watching TV together in the schoolroom at the back. Most of them are orphans of war and prostitution. There are, I have learnt, a large number of orphanages in Nepal.
Rita is jolly and sociable, but can’t speak English. She cradles the baby and points out the group photographs that hang on the living room’s cramped walls. Nirmal tells us that Rita is a Hindu, while he is a Buddhist and his eldest son is a Muslim. ‘Multicultural household’, he giggles. He tells us a long complicated story about twin girls who’ve run away twice, each time back to the city and its seductions. He says they prefer to work as ‘pot sellers’ rather than go to school. I’m not sure what he means by pot seller, but ‘pot’ doesn’t seem to mean dope. He shrugs and giggles. It’s hard to deal with children who see nothing particularly unattractive in street-life. He says the other kids understand the virtues of an education. Education is the key to a better life. His tone seems to contradict this platitude. It chases after him like a neurotic dog.
The infants are brought in for us to view. They crowd in through the doorway, smiling and chanting greetings. I feel like a celebrity bestowing on dark benighted souls the lustre of my origins. The previous day, on my way into the upmarket Gar-e Kebab to enjoy North Indian food and Urdu ghazals, I’d told one such urchin to ‘Fuck off’, thrusting him to one side as one might a shrub’s trailing frond. (Those who say Orwell's fear and anger at the wretched was hypocritical or patrician have led sheltered lives.) Nirmal takes us to look at the kitchen. He is very proud of a British-made water filter, recently donated by a Norwegian trekker. Nirmal fills up my daughter’s water-bottle. Outside there is a chicken coop and a papaya tree bearing a single fruit like an elongated green breast. Nirmal points down the valley. ‘That’s where my land used to be’. ‘You don’t have it anymore?’ ‘No’. Nirmal’s giggle is not nervous. It is a small stone dropped into nothingness.We'd planned to go to Gokyo, below Everest Base Camp, where Bruce Chatwin claimed to have sensed the presence of an abominable snowman. (Chatwin was always sensing the presence of unusual beings, in the manner of Pliny the Elder and David Icke.) I discover that the world has been created for my inconvenience. Flights only go to Lukla or Namche Bazar, and from either town it’s a four or five day trek to Gokyo or Everest. We don’t have time. Hanuman, our Guest House manager, advises us to take the Everest flight instead. Only an hour long, honourable sir, and you will get to see Sagarmatha himself, in all his frosty glory, as well as Gauri Shankar (23,405 feet), Melungtse (23,560 feet) and Gyachungkang (26,089 feet). We opt for Buddha Air, whose twin-engine Beechcraft airplanes are pressurised—so they can go higher and get closer to Everest’s cut-glass ridges than the other lines. We have to go at sunrise, otherwise the monsoon clouds will blot out the views and endanger our lives.
I am terrified, and don’t dare look out of the porthole. I concentrate on the view across the aisle, where a woman fidgets over her purse strings. Her straw hat prevents my seeing anything through her porthole. One at a time, we are invited to visit the cockpit, where the co-pilot points out the various landmarks. ‘Where’s the Holy Mountain?’ I gibber. ‘The Holy Mountain?’ the co-pilot politely wonders. ‘The one Hindus and Buddhists venerate above all others?’ ‘Ah, Mount Kailash. That’s in Tibet. In the other direction, I’m afraid’. ‘Oh’. I return on shaky legs. The woman in the straw hat rushes across the aisle (I swear the plane tilts under her weight) and leans across me to photograph the line of advancing peaks. Her knee drives into my groin. A fat man thunders down the aisle for a second look out of the cockpit. ‘You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself’, the steward will say, when she pauses by me and points out Gauri Shankar on the return trip. When I finally look out, the Himalaya look like a toyshop version of themselves, reduced, dusted, backlit; the snow of the caps is a newly applied emulsion. I cannot believe that the bones and boots of George Mallory (Why would anyone want to climb Everest? ‘Because it’s there’) had lain for 40 years on the steps of the north-east ridge of that broken little bowl. Where is Base Camp? I can't see it, nor, from this height, detect the heaped garbage of 50 years of male posturing and TV crews.
When we land, I notice the tall grass between the runways, feathery stems twirling like tops in the wind. It is all rather marvellous and uncanny, like a long shot in an Antonioni film or the moment of strange calm before the slaughter begins. The road back into Kathmandu is blocked with burning tyres and soldiers hopping on and off trucks.
The son of the owner of the Guest House has a confidential manner and the habit of glancing round the garden when he spreads out his brochures and itineraries. He could be selling pornography or doubtful properties in India. He says that the official story that Dipendra, the son of Birendra, the previous king, had killed his father and immediate family out of unrequited love for the daughter of a rival to the throne is a transparent lie. The Palace Massacre involved hundreds of relatives and bodyguards, not just a few siblings. It occurred during a family gathering, when all the relatives, including Gyanendra, the king’s brother, and his branch of the family, were visiting. How could Dipendra have done all that, even with a machine-gun? Gimme a break. How come only Gyanendra’s branch survived? He speaks out of the corner of his mouth with bored insinuation
Hanuman, the manager, is the sort of person who looks quite neat and clean from a distance. He says ‘nameste’ a lot. Nameste means ‘I salute all divine qualities in you’. He likes to invite me into his office and ask what sort of salaries people earn in my part of the world. He cracks sunflower seeds between his teeth. He says he earns 25 US dollars a month. This is hardly enough to pay for his shoes. I find him in the lounge, every day, inclined forward at the hips. ‘I salute all divine qualities in you’, he says. He sometimes has fresh pee stains around his fly. He always has a taxi available for me, whether I want one or not.
A French photographer called Gilles Deray (I still have his card) inhabits one of the lounge chairs. He never leaves the hotel. He wears the same cargo pants each day. There is a glass of Everest beer on the table beside him. He is short and frail. He has a shiny almost polished-looking face, suggestive of skin grafts, and vivid peeled-looking lips. He spends a lot of time staring into the middle distance, evincing regal distaste; sometimes he raises a hand to his ear as if attending to an angelic embassy. He introduces himself to me at breakfast. ‘May I photograph your companion? I will be very discreet’. Phlegm rattles in his throat when he speaks.
The 1970s was a dreadful period in literary history.
It was the time when Paul Theroux wrote The Great Railway Bazaar and Bruce Chatwin In Patagonia, thereby igniting a firestorm of competing encomia in the Sundays, causing English Literature departments to re-write their syllabi, and poisoning the ink wells of every aspirant travel writer to follow. From now on, you couldn’t write about anywhere without comparing Iranian men contemplating a woman to starved dogs, or including ornately stripped down, planed and counter-sunk information on woolly sloths. Travel writing had lost its innocence. Fortunately, the period also saw the publication of Patrick Marnham’s The Road to Kathmandu.In this thoroughly uninteresting book, Marnham sets out to immortalise the hippy trail and the young Etonian's dream of ending up in Kathmandu, though his narrating persona seems to spend most of its time shivering on a roadside in Anatolia or ingesting vast quantities of weed in a clothes shop in Kabul. It is a book famous for being famous, the contents sheltering shyly behind the title, which King’s Road derelicts, snickering to themselves like Bill Nighie in Love Actually or Keith Richard anywhere else, will always thrill to. Who recalls anything in it? Are the characters as ‘colourful and eclectic’ as the blurb insists? Do you remember them? Have you even read the book? The blurb concludes breathlessly, ‘a travel classic’.
Marnham devotes only the last six pages to Kathmandu, leaving his nondescript characters staggering about in a mire of cowpats and opiates. Ten years later, Pico Iyer (fashionably hybrid and cosmopolitan for the new culturally differentiated readership of the 80s) includes a good thirty pages on his visit to the Nepalese capital in his book on Westernised Asia.
He seems to think Kathmandu is on the point of transmuting from an age-old spiritual crossroads, noted for its Hindu and Buddhist retrenchments and mild-mannered yogis, into a page in GQ magazine: ‘This … was the perfect location: at the intersection of hippiedom and Hinduism, where Haight-Ashbury meets the Himalayas’.
Bristling with alliterative brio and other artificially induced highs, this, one could remark, is also a late modern return to what Chaucer (or his Parson) once referred to as ‘Rum-Ram-Ruf by lettre’. In Iyer’s eyes, Kathmandu is, or was, where it’s at, or on, man, though he quickly tempers this extremism with the wise and necessary qualification (nudged by that ideal reader—God—or the extra-gallactic Archimedean pencil-point of a copy-editor) ‘as I came to know Kathmandu better, I came to see that the swarming city I had seen at first was as much in the eye of the beholder as in the heart of the beheld’. The rest is literature.
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