Magic Bus (35 page)

Five minutes later, he returns without a smile. He's thrown a
cotton shift over his torso and suggests a walk to buy food for the evening.

Beyond the gate, Kimdol, once the domain of tigers, reveals itself as a neighbourhood of cobbled lanes and old Tibetan burial grounds. A grocer sells cauliflowers from his bicycle. Housewives look up from grinding lentils to smile.

In Roddy's eyes is a new, sober look.

‘I'll tell you a story,' he says. ‘No one ever spent winters in Kathmandu; it was too damn cold. Everyone went south to Goato catch some rays. The first year, Penny, Orrin and I sat together in a circle on the beach playing guitars. The second year, some new guy brought a cassette deck and rigged it up to a car battery. The third year, another guy came with bigger speakers, then with amplifiers. In the fifth year, a stage was set up and some kid asked me for my backstage pass. My backstage pass! What happened to our sacred beach, man? It was time to move on.'

‘And now from Nepal?' I ask.

‘Kathmandu's full of people reading the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam. They sit in internet cafés sending each other text mes-sages. I mean, at their age we wanted to get into each other and society, not to live in a meltdown world. We didn't have guidebooks, we didn't even know the
name
of the next country. “What's this place called? Bhutan? Where the hell is Bhutan?”' he shouts, his voice filled with angry energy. ‘We'd see a new city from the back of a truck. We'd see the lights. We'd think, “Behind one of those lights is a little room, and a bed, and maybe, if I get lucky, a warm body.” We were dropped off. We trusted in fate. We were blowing in the wind. Now, a big jumbo jet dumps you at the corner.'

We reach the foot of Swayambhu's conical hill and climb the stone steps of the great Buddhist temple, past deities smeared with vermilion and rice, to the platform and sweeping view of the city. Before us, a broad valley of terracotta roofs and bone-white concrete spreads in every direction toward the ring of hazy mountains, visible through the leaden veil of polluted air. Red-robed monks pad around the alms bowl dome which contains nothing.
Above it, the spire rises through thirteen gilded rings representing Buddhism's thirteen steps to enlightenment and nirvana.

‘They say you come to Nepal for the mountains and stay for the people. When I arrived, I fell in love with those peaks,' Roddy says, nodding in the direction of the Himalayas. ‘I wanted to know the name of every one, and the names of the gods who live there. Way over there somewhere…' he gestures towards Tibet ‘… is Mount Kailasa, the spiritual centre of the universe. Man, it's from there that the gods descend from heaven. A stairway
from
heaven to my doorstep.'

Roddy drops his gaze away from the horizon and fixes his eyes on me.

‘I've lived a life of genteel poverty. I write poems. I sing songs. As for checking out of Nepal, there's no way I'm going back to the West. In Ireland today you need a supply of mobile phones to throw at muggers. And those guys who stayed behind to change the system from within? “Thanks, buddy. You did a great job.” No, I'm staying on the edge of the abyss with the Nepalese.'

‘At the End of the Road.'

‘I'll die here, man. They'll take me to the Kali temple burning ghat and watch my toes curl. Or I'll go like the Tibetans, cut up and fed to the birds. “I can fly at last! LSD didn't do it but death sure does…”' His laughter has a suggestion of tears. ‘Nirvana is a Buddhist concept. Idealism is part of life here. The Nepalese speak of hunger while they dream bright dreams. But this isn't nirvana and maybe Penny has forgotten that. In nirvana, there's no loss or regret or misery because there are no more journeys to make. And who wants to be stuck on their butt in paradise with no stories to tell?'

Roddy lowers his eyes and turns away without uttering another word.

We leave the faithful spinning banks of prayer wheels and return to his sanctuary of birds and bamboo, the terrace suspended between the stupa and the city, between the sacred and the profane. The shadows have crossed the garden, casting all but the patio into shade. A single candle burns in an upper window of the tall white house.

Penny is awake again, sitting back in a cane armchair, at home.

‘I remember the first time Orrin and I flew back to the States for his mother's funeral,' she says, freeing us from the clutches of silence, restoring our good humour. She's wearing moccasins sewn together with string and there's a flower in her hair. ‘At LAX we were shoved into a little room with a dozen long-hairs and fellow undesirables. This button-down guy in uniform calls us to his desk, ready to give us the third degree. “You been out of the country for
nine
years,” he said, like it was a crime. I halfexpected him to send us to Alcatraz. “Nine years,” he repeated, flicking through our passports, looking at the visas. “You've been living in…” then he stopped and this weirdness came over him. “… Kathmandu,” he said under his breath, over and over again. “Kathmandu.” I don't know if it was the name, or if he'd been here, or if he just dreamt about Nepal during his tour of Vietnam, but he looked up at us like there was some sort of holy light shining out of our backsides. He closed our passports really slowly, handed them back to us and just said, “Wow.”'

Roddy sits down beside her and strokes her hair. Her purple bangles ring as she reaches for his hand. I notice once more the beauty of her high cheekbones and her seal-grey hair.

‘What a long, strange trip it's been,' she says. Then she's quiet for a long minute. ‘Jack,' she adds, turning to face me, ‘Roddy and I are going to talk about our retirement plans.'

‘We are?'

One by one, Penny takes hold of Roddy's guitar-picking fingers.

‘My old mother from Guernica had a saying. “
La esperanza muere última
.” Hope dies last. Lose hope and you've lost everything.'

‘Just split for a couple of hours, will you?' Roddy asks me, the light flashing again in his eyes. ‘There's a bicycle under the banyan tree.'

I freewheel downhill into the fading light, laughing until my shoulders shake, almost colliding with a passing Sherpa.

The sixties marked a shift of consciousness. Ordinary people did
extraordinary things. A generation rejected old, unfeeling ways, questioned established practices, searched for new values. Then, in the seventies, the oil crisis and later Reagan economics forced on them a financial reality-check. Jobs became scarce. Time grew expensive. Borders closed. Hippie chicks swelled into earth mothers and their children needed new shoes. Lonely Planet, Greenpeace, Apple and MTV went from alternative to main stream. Revolutionaries reinvented themselves as CEOs. Some kids couldn't adapt, of course, retreating to log cabins in the Sierras or making a last stand as ecowarriors in mid-Wales. But most of them – like Penny and Roddy – found peace in themselves, even as the rainbow bridges were brought down by bombs and rueful self-interest; and the New Conservatives, born of the alliance between big business and ‘hard-hat' working-class Americans, unpicked the liberal legacy.

Around me, the sprawling, modern suburbs bring to mind a dozen other Asian capitals rather than a one-time idea of paradise. I'm on a footbridge over the meandering Vishumati when the street lights flicker and fade. The city's electricity fails, due to a Maoist grenade or an overdue bribe, and Kathmandu is plunged into darkness. I swing off the bike to get my bearings. The flashing billboard for Virgin Blended Scotch (‘There is nothing like a virgin') no longer lights my way. The road back to Swayambhu is equally dark. So I push into the disorienting press of bodies, listening to the mixed languages of old Nepal – Tamang, Magar, Gurung, Hindi – following my nose toward the heart of the old city.

In the twilight, bicycle rickshaws clatter through the maze of cobbled streets, their drivers hissing a path between the faceless crowds. Tilting wooden houses rise above half-seen holy men and dogs. The calls of pedlars echo off crumbling buildings. Great weeping stands of bamboo loom over the red walls of the Royal Palace.

I reach Durbar – or Palace – Square as the oil-lamps are lit. A dozen extraordinary, time-worn temples, some dating back to the twelfth century, appear to dance in the glimmering flames. They
rise on tiered brick steps, their asymmetrical position heightening the sense of movement. Shiva and his consort, Parvati, gaze out from high windows, their faces turning in the shifting shadows. Stone lions paw the ground outside the House of the Living Goddess. The erotic carvings on Maju Deval's roof struts seem to rock together in eternal copulation.

In the flickering half-light, it's easy to wish away the present. I hear no English spoken. All the hotel signs are blacked out. No cars pollute the alleyways. The jumbled medieval city seems remote from modernity again, ready to be discovered anew.

In the sixties, the magic buses used to park along Basantapur Square. Their drivers – Chattanooga Bob, Jon Benyon and Blossom – drank Guinness on the upper decks. Rudy and Speedy Eddie smoked Mustang and Manali downstairs at the Eden Hash Centre, lighting their pipes with Flying Horse matches which exploded and burnt holes in their trousers. Their passengers let go of time at the Dupo Dope (‘Your Old and Favourite Joint'). Cat Stevens wrote songs in a chai shop in Asantol. Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who had introduced Timothy Leary to LSD, swept along Freak Street pontificating on the aspirations of the great psychedelic revolution. In the Cabin, Roddy tuned his guitar and sang about the first social movement in history propelled by students. Orrin took in travellers' problems and rucksacks at Dreamweaver. Rama Tiwari arrived in town with his trunk to build a ‘Himalaya' of books.

Kids checked into the Inn Eden, the Hotchpotch and the Matchbox, dirty warrens of cell-like rooms with low, ornamental, head-cracking doorways, and debated how best to heal the world. At the Bakery (with its sacred
dhuni
fire, mosaics of the zodiac and
I Ching
hexagrams, as well as the best record-player in Nepal), many newcomers sold their jeans for strings of amber and red-felt boots embroidered with flowers. On their first night in town, Tony and Maureen Wheeler splurged on a two-dollar hotel. Their second night was in a budget one-dollar room next door. Newari snake-charmers played their flutes outside the central post office from where travellers sent home traditional wooden statues,
hollowed out and filled with ‘temple balls' of hash. Crows squabbled in the old palace trees, their black wings sweeping over the terracotta rooftops, Union Jacks, Stars and Stripes and hand-drawn ‘Kathmandu or Bust' signs. Beneath them, the Intrepids tripped out of smoky black rooms, popped into the mud-floored market to buy bananas, paused to meet friends at a curd shop to hear the news from home, then returned to the Tibetan Blue to refill their pipes and ask in a tone of rising panic, ‘Where to now, man? Where to now?'

The lights come on. I'm in Thamel, the concrete-and-brass-Bhudda centre of tourist Nepal. Around me I see no lotus ponds. White faces blink at the false neon dawn. Sound systems and shop radios crackle back to life. The DJ on a local station drops English words into her Nepali patter: ‘cool, slipping back, combat dress, Magnum rifle'. Then she spins a Bob Seger track. A song which my father used to play. A song about the ever-enthusing, forever deluding dream of a better place.

My hair stands on end as party people at Paddy Foley's Irish Pub sing along to ‘Katmandu'. In the Himalayan Java coffee lounge, laidback Japanese tap their feet while ordering American-style hash browns. Intoxicated Russian tourists sway to the music outside the Moon Stay Lodge and Monumental Paradise. No one takes much notice of the distant crack of a rifle shot.

From 20,000 feet, I can follow the frothy, palm-fringed arc of India's western seaboard to the horizon. Then, with a lift of the imagination, I can see further up the coast to Gujarat and dust-red Rajasthan. I can reach back over the Khyber, along the trail through Afghanistan, around sacred Bamiyan and beyond the shadow of the lost Buddhas. I can follow the arrow-straight pipelines across sad Middle Eastern borders, catch sight of turquoise Isfahan sparkling in the sun, sense Khomeini raging in his black tomb, even hear glass chimes tinkling in Cappadocia's ashen valleys. The Anatolian steppe rises across my path, raw and timeless, leading me down to the blue Mediterranean and the gates of Europe. Beyond them, back thousands of miles and a good generation, I can just glimpse (if I squint against the glare of the setting sun) Penny at Dover, straggle-haired Ginsberg at JFK and Ken Kesey firing up
Furthur
at Big Sur.

A scimitar of golden sand shimmers beneath the silver belly of the Airbus. We descend over Goa, the first Portuguese possession in Asia. When the Old Conquest colonists left in 1961, the Intrepids established the trippy winter retreat here beside the calm waters of the Arabian Sea. Over a generation its full-moon beach parties morphed from guitar-picking singsongs and psychedelic happenings to the Goa Trance scene. Ravers took over the northern shore. Thousands copulated on Calingute Beach. Local Indians found themselves unwelcome in the waterside cafés. Wasted lowlifers, off their heads and with no ‘philosophical flowers' in their hair, bartered away their passports and dignity at the Wednesday
flea market. I'm about to face the man who set in train the chain of events which helped to bring them all here. My aircraft banks over the ocean. The landing gear grinds down and locks.

The evening light is plump and golden outside the terminal, perhaps because of the smog of hash smoke. I catch a taxi north from Dabolim through lush green fields surrounded by hamlets with white-painted churches. At Mapusa we turn west toward the string of former fishing villages which line the coast. In Anjuna's back lanes low-built houses are tucked beneath overhanging coconut groves. Orchids grow in husks lashed to tree trunks. The barking of wild dogs rises above the singing of the tree frogs. Every second porch displays a ‘To Let' sign. Fireflies glow under the satellite dishes. I knock at a screen door. Its cement frame is encrusted with sea shells. Alice opens the door.