Video Night in Kathmandu (12 page)

A little later, our conversation turned, inevitably, to the inevitable corruption of Tibet. Already, we lamented, two luxury hotels were under construction on the far side of town (one of
them, a $30 million monstrosity, soon to be bought by Holiday Inn), and already there was talk of direct flights from Nepal and Hong Kong. A privately owned taxi firm had already set up business. Already, too, local children were beginning to ask for ballpoint pens, and greeting foreigners with shouts of “Hello!” There was already a copy of “Best Disco 84 Vol. 2” in the marketplace, next to the folk dentists and daggers and curled, yak-hide shoes, as well as a Junior League cap, and even a T-shirt stamped with the curious legend “Los Angeles 1985 Olympics.”

Soon, the foreigners said, the place would be swarming with corrupting foreigners. Soon, we agreed, it would be full of people just like us. “Tibet is going to get real spoilt real fast,” said a Canadian, between tokes of his Great Wall Grass. With that, he turned up his tape of “Born in the U.S.A.” and prepared to let more fireworks off into the night.

ONE MORNING IN LHASA
, I awoke to find snow blanketing the mountains, and a fine rain misting the town. As if in a dream, I made the long ascent up to the Potala Palace, whose thirteen white and brown and golden stories preside over the town with silent majesty. Inside, the secret rooms were heavy with the chanting of holy texts. The smell of butter lamps was everywhere, and flashes of a sky, now brilliant blue, outside. Banners fluttered in the wind, prayer bells sounded. Sunlight and silence and high air.

In some rooms, ruddy-cheeked girls and women in many-colored aprons bowed before monks who poured blessings of water in their hands; in others, ancient men placed coins and bank notes on the altar. And into the empty spaces, the slanted sunlight came softly, filtered through red or golden curtains. Uplifted by the chants, the smiles, the holy hush, I felt myself to be a clean and empty room, thrown open to the breeze.

And then came the golden afternoon. Then lightning over distant purple mountains. Then nightfall, and silence, and the stars.

YET THE GREATEST
of all the sights in the Holy City, according to the wisdom of the Banak Shol, was the sacred rite known as the Celestial Burial. Each morning, at dawn, on a hillside five miles out of town, the bodies of the newly dead were placed on a
huge, flat rock. There a sturdy local man, dressed in a white apron and armed with a large cleaver, would set about hacking them into small pieces. Assistants would grind the bones. When at last the corpses had been reduced to strips of bloody flesh, they were left on the Promethean stone for the vultures.

For Tibetan Buddhists, the ritual was a sacrament, a way of sending corpses back into the cycle of Nature, of removing all traces of the departed. For the visitors who had begun to congregate in larger and still larger numbers to watch the man they called “the Butcher,” the rite was the last word in picturesque exoticism.

I was no different, and so one morning, I got up at four o’clock and walked for more than an hour through the night, crossing a field full of bones and wading through an icy stream that left my thighs stinging with the cold. By the time I arrived on the sacrificial rock, three Westerners were already seated, cross-legged, around a fire, murmuring Buddhist chants and fingering their rosaries. Twenty others stood around them on the darkened hillside, faces lit up by the flames. As the sky began to change color, three Tibetans picked up a body, wrapped it from head to toe in bandages, and gave it to the flames. Then, as the body burned, they handed some of us sticks of incense to hold, while the chanting continued. Afterward, with customary good humor, they brought us glasses of butter tea and chunks of bread the color of red meat.

Then they marched back to the rock, where the corpses of two more affluent citizens had been placed. One of the Tibetans tied an apron around his waist, picked up his ax and set about his work. As he did so, a gaggle of onlookers—most of them Chinese tourists from Hong Kong—started to inch closer to the sacred ground, chattering as they went. The man muttered something to himself, but continued about his task. Still, however, the visitors edged closer, giggling and whispering at the sight. The Tibetan stopped what he was doing, the gossip continued. And then, of a sudden, with a bloodcurdling shriek, the man whirled around and shouted again and, waving a piece of reddened flesh, he came after the visitors like a demon, slicing the air with his knife and screaming curses at their blasphemy. The tourists turned on their heels; still the Tibetan gave chase,
reviling them for their irreverence. Terrified, the Chinese retreated to a safe position. The man stood before them, glowering.

After a long silence, the Tibetan turned around slowly and trudged back to his task. Chastened, we gathered on a hillside above the rock, a safe distance away. Before long, however, we were edging forward again, jostling to get a better glimpse of the dissection, urgently asking one another for binoculars and zoom lenses to get a close-up of the blood.

“Sometimes I think that we are the vultures,” said a Yugoslav girl who had come to Tibet in search of an image glimpsed in a dream a decade before.

“Oh no,” said a Danish girl. “It’s always wild on Mondays. The butcher takes Sundays off, so Monday’s always the best day to come here.” She turned around with a smile. “On Mondays, it’s great: there are always plenty of corpses.”

W
ITHIN MINUTES
of landing in Kathmandu, I found myself in Eden.

The Hotel Eden, that is, not to be confused with the Paradise Restaurant around the corner or the Hotel Shangri-La. The Eden was on the intersection of Freak Street and the Dharmapath, which was, I thought, the perfect location: at the intersection of hippiedom and Hinduism, where Haight-Ashbury meets the Himalayas. This, in fact, was exactly the kind of cross-cultural crossroads that I had hoped to find. For legend had it that Kathmandu was quite a trip—at once a time machine and a magic carpet—and I had come here to be transported. Not, however, to a dusty Himalayan kingdom, or even to a medieval community unchanged for many centuries. I wished to travel back no more than twenty years, and to be deposited in nowhere more exotic than a city of the spirit where people still regarded money as immaterial and youth as something more than a preparation for middle age. In Kathmandu I hoped to find the last stronghold of the sixties. And in the sixties I hoped to find a
reflection of a younger and more innocent America, the land of idealism I was born too late to know.

At home, the sixties had long been the subject of embarrassed revisionism and packaged nostalgia. And where the counterculture had not been demolished, it had—worse still—been domesticated. Berkeley was now the province of born-again Christians and evangelical Reaganauts, the Haight had become a model of elegant gentrification. And all three of the cities in which I had recently made my home—Cambridge, Santa Barbara and Manhattan—had spent much of the last decade trading in their dreams for securities. The coffeehouses of Cambridge had been turned into croissanteries, Santa Barbara had shed its idiosyncrasies to become nothing more than a bright young thing for bright young things, the setting for a national soap opera; and whatever rebellion against fashion had once been found in Manhattan was now a fashionable rebellion and a rebellious fashion in a metropolis that had consolidated its status as the world capital of greed. As riches had been made, imaginations seemed to have been impoverished. Nonetheless, I had great expectations for Kathmandu—subject of Cat Stevens songs, longtime mecca of the hippies, sometime colony of the professional idealists of the Peace Corps. “When you are in Nepal,” said the magazine ad for the Jhwalakhel Distillery, “the land of the spirited people, keep your spirit high with Ruslan vodka.” The double pun on “high” and “spirit” struck me as exceedingly auspicious.

My hopes had been further excited just three weeks before my arrival in Nepal in, of all unlikely places, the Schwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon. Going there for the Buddhist Festival of Lights, I found myself in a state of holy enchantment. A great full moon rose behind the temple’s soaring gold-leaf stupa; local families, all in their brightest silks, gathered for photographs by the side of golden Buddhas, tinseled shrines were lit up with halos of flickering candles. A local man waved at me from an antechamber, and I hurried over. Inside, a group of women was busily preparing dishes of vegetables and rice in one corner, while, at the center of the shrine, a Western couple sat smiling back their greetings. The girl was dressed in an earth mother’s uniform of bandanna, thick sweater and jeans, her friend in dropout jumper and jeans. “This is a holy day for Buddha,” explained our host, handing each of us some food. “And this,
you see, is a custom of our religion.” “We have a religion too,” offered the foreign girl brightly. “It’s called the Grateful Dead.”

The pious Burmese gentleman did not seem delighted to hear of this worship of anti-Boddhisattvas, but I quickly warmed to the earnest, friendly pair. They seemed to be eminently gentle souls, and I could not help being impressed when they informed me that they had given up their jobs in Vancouver, their homes, even their proprietorship of a local Dead-head fanzine, in order to come to Asia for a year. Just to travel? No, they replied, they planned to work in an eye clinic sponsored by the Dead. Where exactly? Nepal. Perfect, I thought. Hessean journeyers to the East, propelled by a social conscience, a lifetime of Dead-mania, a kind of improvised innocence—this was exactly what I dreamed of finding in Kathmandu.

MY FIRST IMPRESSION
of the city was delirious. I felt as if I had tumbled into the jangled and kaleidoscoped subconscious of an opium freak. Sweet incense wafted out of stores crushed raggedly together along dusty, crooked streets, and out from their walls hung horror-eyed masks, spinning prayer wheels, druggy thanka scrolls and revolving lanterns. Mirrors caught the light on shoulder bags, long dresses streamed from carved wooden balconies, scarves fluttered in the breeze, demons stared out of rice-paper calendars. On every side, irregular, nine-storied temples jutted up, and then were obscured by a flutter of pigeons. Squeaky-voiced elves chattered around the shrines where they peddled Bhutanese stamps, Niwari paintings, English chocolate. A ramshackle hut advertised the “Unique Typing Institute” and its only customer, standing patiently outside, was a cow. Everywhere, the dusty streets spun and whirled and revolved like a mandala. Freaks and flute sellers wandered in circles around a main square where long-haired men from East and West, hipsters and hawkers, hustlers and heretics, ricocheted counters off the sides of Carom boards. Snakelike icons wriggled from cardboard signs and elephant-headed gods sat in the middle of yellow-wreathed shrines and everywhere, staring down from walls and homes and streamers, were eyes, eyes, narrow, painted pairs of eyes.

Senses reeling, I caught glimpses, or glimpses of glimpses, of the freewheeling psychedelic fun house I had imagined from
afar. A ponytailed Italian in a thick red waistcoat and silken Kashmiri cravat sat on a jewelry-store stool, studiously rolling a joint; when a girl asked him where she could get some hash, he looked up blearily, smiled and trudged off down the street on her behalf. He did not need to look far. Glassy-eyed vendors patrolled the length and breadth of Freak Street, walking in circles, talking in circles, muttering a steady litany: “Buy hashish. Buy hash. Buy hashish!” One dazed fellow sat in a dusty doorway intoning a steady monklike chant: “Hash. Hashish. Change dollars. Traveler’s checks.” Another entrepreneur, hands thrust into his pockets against the winter chill, fast-talked his way through his own unorthodox rosary: “Brown sugar, white sugar, coke, smack, or dope.”

And Dylan was crooning “Isis” from the second floor of a dusty, red brick café and a few longhairs were shuffling down dark passageways into 50-cent-a-night flophouses. “Optic Nerve,” said one shop; “Humor,” said another. A crew-cut Western woman shuffled past in yellow-and-burgundy Buddhist raiment and sunglasses, while a man with a full-blown Maharishi beard stared over his pot of tea at anyone who would return his gaze. The shelves of the disheveled bookstalls were packed with
The Directory of Dreams, A Guide to the Tarot
and
Man’s Eternal Quest
, and flapping against one of the clothes stores was a calendar put out by the “Eden Hashish House” (“the Oldest and Favorite Shop in Town serving you the Best Nepali Hashish and Ganja”). “Let us Take you Higher,” offered the friendly ad. “Come visit us any time for all your hashish needs.” Edens and hash houses had never, I imagined, been far apart in Kathmandu.

And peering out at me from every one of the open-fronted stores, the local shopkeepers were smiling back with warmth, but unsurrendered dignity. The Nepalis were said to be capable of great and penetrating intuitiveness. In Kathmandu, a friend from New York told me how she had been walking through Manhattan just two months earlier when a voice from behind her called out, “Are you an artist?” However did this stranger know that she was indeed an aspiring writer with a weakness for artists? Turning around, she had found herself staring at a man from the East. He came from Nepal, he said, and she should look him up there. With that, the mysterious character had vanished once more into the shadows.

My friend had indeed come to Nepal. And as soon as we met up, I assured her that the wisdom of the East would not be hard to find here. From the rooftop of the Eden, we could see the mountains bright in the clear distance, and, presiding over us from a nearby hill, shining in the clean winter light, the gleaming white stupa of Swayambhunath Temple. This, we decided, must be the site of our maiden pilgrimage. And so we headed off through a warren of dust-filled streets, past squawking, bright-eyed urchins, under lion-headed banners wishing everyone an auspicious New Year, and past the Jubilant Pre-Primary School. Soon, the noise of the city began to subside, and the air picked up an invigorating sharpness. We walked through an avenue of trees, past fields smothered with wildflowers. We passed a few local men going about their business, small but sturdy-looking fellows in the rough tunics and fezzes of the High Atlas Mountains. We walked over narrow bridges and across fields of yellow flowers and then, in the bright and cloudless winter afternoon, we began our ascent of the hill.