Video Night in Kathmandu (13 page)

Just short of the top, we came to a Tibetan monastery, its sunlit white terrace empty under the brilliant blue. Calmness filled the place, and distant chanting from a prayer hall. We decided to rest on the terrace, and as we sat there, reading and writing in the sun, a monk came out and engaged us gently in conversation. He had been here many years, he said, but still he missed his home in Tibet. He much looked forward to hearing His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Bodh Gaya later this year. Would we care to follow him inside?

Slipping off our shoes, we tiptoed into the central chamber. The hall was dark, and along its two main benches two rows of monks kneeled in their thick red robes. Their faces were lit by candles as they bowed above their scriptures. The smell of butter lamps mixed sweetly with the scent of incense. The deep-voiced chants rolled around and around the hall, broken at moments by the tolling of a gong and the sudden low growl of the head abbot.

Quite a few of the monks, I noticed, were mischief-eyed little characters, scarcely nine years old, whose vigor in shouting out the chants owed more, it seemed, to schoolboy zest than to spiritual zeal. Often, in fact, they forgot themselves in furtive, impish smiles—only to be briskly brought back to the matter at hand by an elder’s gentle, but decisive, slap. And as the muttered
chants went on, I began to lose myself in wistful reverie. The strange smells, the hypnotic repetitions, the flutter of candles transported me. I felt myself carried away to distant lamaseries, whisked off to snowy mountain passes. I almost imagined myself back in Tibet. And then, without a warning, I felt my friend tugging urgently at my sleeve. “Look over there,” she whispered. I did, and there, to my astonishment, one of the young monks was happily bouncing a startled-looking Pekingese puppy up and down on his lap. As soon as he saw us watching him, he giggled at his broad-faced neighbor. This jovial character responded by flashing us a huge and gleeful smile. His mouth was filled with Dracula fangs purchased at some local novelty store.

Through it all, the chanting continued like a spell.

The best deal in Kathmandu, I soon discovered, was Paradise. “Nepal, the Fantasting Country, has become a Promised Land,” began the book of national facts and figures put out by the Ministry of Tourism and written by U. S. Thappa. Another of U.S.’s volumes was called, simply,
Paradise Nepal.
Little boys wore Paradise T-shirts, and Paradise Tours and Travels had to compete against both Shangri-La Tours and Shangri-La Treks.

Nepal was not, however, selling Paradise in the sense of Arcadia—a Balinese tropical playground filled with Unfallen fruit and Unfallen souls. Rather, it was offering Paradise in its highest, and most rigorous, form: Nirvana. The greatest bargains in town were spiritual accessories. Sweatshirts that said “Adidas,” or even “Ddidas,” cost a small fortune in Kathmandu, but thankas, prayer wheels and Buddhist calendars could always be found on sale. Day-trippers could take their pick between Nirvana Tours and Lama Excursions. Bargain hunters could try the Temple of Trade Pvt. Ltd.

Nepal, in fact, had cornered this side of paradise. For twenty years now, it had cashed in on being the closest place on earth to the remotest place on earth, a country just around the corner from Shangri-La. And if Tibet’s charm lay in its remoteness, Nepal’s lay in its availability; a veteran of the mystic market, it
knew exactly how to sell itself as a wholesale, secondhand Tibet. Thus the magic title of the Forbidden Land found its way into every single brand name: local stores were stocked not just with handicrafts, but with Tibetan handicrafts, Tibetan paintings, Tibetan bells, Tibetan scarves, Tibetan pizzas.

Nepal had the additional advantage of being on the fringes of India, and where India was still the biggest spiritual department store in the East, Nepal offered an economy-sized convenience store with many of the same goods at even better prices. And the country’s hybrid mix of Buddhism and Hinduism, with bits of animism thrown in, allowed it to offer not just lamas, and not just yogis, but lamas and yogis thrown together in every kind of combination. Billboards all across town offered enough Thanka Painting courses, Himalayan Buddhist Meditation classes, sessions at the Himalayan Yogi Institute and yoga/massage double-headers to keep every resident of Santa Cruz out of mischief for a decade.

“Shining Enlightened Mastery,” proclaimed the poster to be found in nearly every bookstore. Underneath, the ad announced: “Sri Swami Prem Paramahansa will be sharing his wisdom. Intoxicated in the love of God and the Supreme Ancient Knowledge since childhood, Sri Swamiji will share the fruits of his most elevated life in 900 discourses on The History of Mankind and the Planet Earth.” Enlightenment on the installment plan! Nine hundred lectures sounded like a long haul, but the Swami’s subject was, after all, a big one (an earlier work in his canon had been entitled “Biography of a Tough Yogi”). And the Swami’s “intoxication” would, I suspected, have no trouble in finding a responsive audience.

For the second-best deal in Kathmandu was still instant mind expansion, a stairway to heaven even easier to mount than religion: twenty-five pounds of hash could be purchased in parts of the country for all of 30 cents (four hundred pounds cost the same as a small tube of suntan oil). Religion and drugs had been the country’s two great cash crops for so long now that nobody really seemed to care which one was sedative and which one stimulant. Religion was a drug to some and drugs were a religion to others. In Kathmandu some people lapsed into a narcotic haze and called it Buddhist serenity, while others had opiate dreams
and called them visions. “Drugs” and “gurus,” they told themselves, were almost anagrams; the high and the holy were virtual synonyms.

Indeed, the very fact that spiritual and secular trips could hardly be distinguished had itself become a major selling point. In New York, the Simone Travel Bureau advertised trips to the “magical land where deities mingle with common people and legends merge with Hindu and Buddhist spiritualism.” “There is a place halfway between here and heaven,” said the ads for Royal Nepal Airlines, where “Legends are Real.” Even the airline’s magazine sported the distinctly ambiguous title of “Yeti: Flight Tales.” Within the pages of
The Nepal Traveler
(“which combines fantasy with very practical tips to trekking”), the same theme was struck again and again, as reverberatingly as a temple gong.

That same division was no less ubiquitous within the “Fabled Kingdom.” The most cherished sight here was the Kumari, or Living Goddess, a prepubescent girl who was consigned to an upper-floor temple room where she served as a flesh-and-blood incarnation of a divinity; the most famous line about the place was Kipling’s claim that “the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu.” Even the two national symbols, which had given their names to the capital’s five-star hotel and restaurant, turned on this same ambiguity: Yak and Yeti, most earth-bound of creatures and most mythical. Nepal seemed to have one eye on the heavens and the other close to the ground.

This double perspective made, of course, for some double-edged blessings. Where sacred met profane, the result was often confusion. Earth’s Heaven, the name of one local restaurant, was a case in point. Even the location of the Eden, which had so delighted me at first, was not so far from limbo: where the Dharmapath meets Freak Street was not only where East meets West, but also where self-sacrifice runs into self-indulgence. The next road along was the Ganga Path (or was it the Ganja Path?). Even so, I decided, all this was simply part and parcel of the sixties, a spirit that had claimed as many casualties as visionaries. Some doubtless came to Kathmandu to learn how to turn their experiences into epiphanies, but plenty of others planned to enjoy their vices more by learning how to call them virtues.

Yet what began to surprise me as I looked more closely at the
town was not that religion or drugs were being abused, but rather that both of them seemed largely absent. Neither casualties nor visionaries were very much in evidence around Freak Street; neither wasted druggies nor starry-eyed dreamers flocked through the streets. Here and there, of course, I caught flashes of the spirit that had hit me so forcibly on arrival: dancing skeletons—icons of the Grateful Dead!—hung from the dark walls of some Tibetan temples and, in the abject darkness of the State Bank, I spied an arresting character in a ponytail with kohl around his green eyes, clad in an emerald Chinese jacket and a red coolie’s hat. The Jasmine Restaurant did, as expectation dictated, have some old King Crimson anthems on its system, while a nearby health-food joint was selling Reality Soup. One salesman in Durbar Square kept up an impressively loud pitch of “A kilo of smack, a kilo of smack.” Yet I could as easily have found all this in Washington Square.

Still, I assured my friend, we would at least find some strangeness in the “Tantric” restaurant in Durbar Square. Here at least was a Yin-Yang symbol hanging from the facade; here at least we would see dead-eyed hippies sprawled across cushions and munching hash brownies while they listened to Pink Floyd. As we entered the place, we shed our shoes, and as we sat down, we prepared to shed our inhibitions. The small round room was filled with smoke, and country-and-Eastern music wafted out of its sound system. On its floors were scattered pillows and divans; its walls swarmed with mandalas and thankas. This, I thought, must be an opium den, and my friend likened it to a womb. But there were no lamps and pipes beside every cushion, and no creative spasms rent the air. Yin was not in evidence; nor, to be frank, was Yang. Nothing, in fact, but a few well-heeled Italian tourists in their late thirties. We had traveled 8,000 miles only to end up, so it seemed, in a facsimile of the East Village.

Somewhat disappointed, I went back to the Eden to sleep. My friend, however, decided to stroll through the dreaming town. As she was wandering along Freak Street, a voice called out to her from behind. “Are you an artist?”

Amazed, she turned around. There stood the same man she had met in Manhattan just two months before! Noting that her smiling recognition of him was unreciprocated (an American girl was not often accosted in the streets by Nepali boys, but who
knows how often a Nepali boy might accost American girls?), my friend pointed out that they had met only a few weeks before and half a world away. Her questioner recovered quickly. “Yes indeed,” he replied, without missing a beat. “I feel that you and I have the same kind of power. I feel a strange kind of affinity with you. Tonight is a holy night. Come and see my apartment.”

The circumstances were too remarkable not to agree. Fascinated, my friend assented, following the leather-jacketed young man through the darkened, empty streets. “I come from Tibet,” he told her as they walked, “and my name is Lobsang. But you can call me Lobby.”

They arrived at the flat, and Lobby turned on the light to reveal two large posters: one of the Dalai Lama, the other of Rocky. His family, he explained, were all Tibetan holy men, but the medallion he wore around his neck had been given him by Sly Stallone. He had, he said, sort of one foot in New York and the other in Nepal. Lobby got up for a minute to put on a Dire Straits tape, then edged a little closer on the sofa. He was an artist himself, he went on, and an actor and a writer. But he knew all about the mysteries of Tibet. He put a hand on his visitor’s arm. Lobby certainly lived up to his name. His uncle, he said, was a professor at Columbia University, and Richard Gere was about to come and stay in this very flat. “I feel this great
chi
coming from you,” he continued, warming to his theme. “I feel this great spiritual force. The only trouble is, your
chakras
are blocked.” What could she do? asked my friend. Well, said Lobby, as it happened, he did know of a cure: an ancient form of Tibetan massage passed down to him by his forefathers from the secret Land of Snows. Would she like to give it a try?

In time, as I came to know Kathmandu better, I began to recognize 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 whirling surfaces existed, no doubt, but they seemed to be no more than surfaces. Revelations both mind-boggling and earth-shattering did not in fact lie around every corner. But still, when it came to modest, modish pleasures, the place was not to be
surpassed. I had the best enchilada of my life on Freak Street, and the chocolates in the stores seemed to have been sent special delivery from the heavens. As for the pies for which Nepal was famous, they exceeded even their reputation. Soon I established my own sacramental ritual: disappearing several times each day into the dark entrances of cafés—not just Mom’s Health Food Restaurant and Aunt Jane’s, but also Tibetan, Chinese and stateless restaurants—in order to devour extraordinary apple pies, almond layer pies, orange cakes, fruit cakes, lemon pies and more apple pies.

Nepal, of course, had long been famous for adapting to Western tastes and fashions with unparalleled swiftness and skill. In the forties, before the country was even linked to the outside world by road, Kathmandu was said to be
the
place in the Himalayas for cinemas and cars. The king at that time, Tribhubana (he of plucked eyebrows and scented breath), was a celebrated connoisseur of mail-order catalogues who sent porters across the mountains to bring back lounge suits and gadgets for the royal palace. In that respect, at least, little seemed to have changed. When I stepped into a local store in the ten-hut village of Tandi Bazaar in the malarial lowlands of Nepal, I found, on the counter, an issue of
The New York Review of Books
, nine months old, open to an article entitled “The Melancholy of Montaigne.” And whenever Westerners staying in India felt homesick, a Nepali who lived in Benares informed me, they simply hurried off to Kathmandu.

“We Solve you all Travel Problems,” promised Pawan Travels, “and make you Journey Easy and Funny.”

Nepal’s prodigious versatility was most apparent, however, in the smorgasbord of its menus, which could easily have put the United Nations cafeteria to shame. Every one of them, so it seemed, offered everything from borscht to quiche and sukiyaki to soyburgers. The Jamaly Restaurant served up “Mecxican food,” Italian, American, Chop Suey, Moussaka, Curry and “Viena Schnitzel.” Shiva’s Sky, in the Continental section of its menu, provided “Mexican Takos,” Vegetarian Chop Suey and Chow Mein. The Nor-Ling posted outside a twenty-six-line billboard listing its offerings, and beginning: “We offer delicious Tibetan, Italian, India, Nepal, Chinese dishes, minestrone soup,
Fr. onion soup … spagetti, lasagne, mousake a ‘La’ Greece …” Everything of every nationality was available here—except things Nepalese. When I asked a man in a candy store for Nepalese chocolate, he looked distinctly put out. “We have Indian chocolate, English, American, German. You can have Thai chocolate. You can have Chinese marshmallow. But Nepalese, no. Here only international chocolate.” And when I asked another local what he served in his Kathmandu restaurant, he answered crisply, “Indian, Chinese, Continental, German, American, Mexican.” And Nepalese? “No. Nepalese, very difficult.”