Back of Beyond Read online

  Prior to the flight I’d planned to stay overnight in New Delhi, but I’d forgotten the travails of travel in India. There was some kind of film festival going on in the city, and I couldn’t find a room anywhere. Even the $3.00 a night variety were crammed with Indian movie maniacs. So I thought, “When in Delhi…” and went to see a movie instead. An Indian movie.

  The film was an enlightening experience. After two hours it showed no sign of ending. We’d gone through the full repertoire of the producer’s art—five murders, gory mayhem, fallings in love, fallings out of love, family retribution, a stickup, a punchup, three songs (they came out of nowhere for no apparent reason; the action just stopped, the fat lady sang, the action started up again), jealous wives, jealous husbands, faithful lovers, unfaithful lovers, a car chase, a car crash, a suicide, an odd little Arabian Nights dream-fantasy, two sex scenes (very delicately handled—the softest of soft porn), a comic character who kept falling down and pretending he was a dog, three gaudy sunsets, a fabulous banquet—in fact, a bit of everything for everybody, and still the damned thing kept going! The audience didn’t seem to mind at all. They laughed, applauded, wept, went out for sticky snacks, came back…

  I’d had it and left.

  I should have remembered a joke told me by an Indian businessman on a train between Varanasi and Jodhpur. (This came well after the traditional greeting: “Hello and how are you today and would you be so kind of telling me the country of which you are from and of which good name you are having and your special qualifications as a professional person and I hope you are well, thankyouverymuch.”)

  “At a conference for press,” he began, “a pressman asked from a film producer, ‘Can you be telling the story of your latest film?’ Producer looks very surprised. ‘What are you meaning by “story”? Having you ever seen me make a film with any story? I have a special formula—a recipe for the success of my films.’

  “‘And what is your recipe?’ said the pressman.

  “‘It is very simple,’ says the producer. ‘One hundred grams of love affairs, two hundred grams of weeping and screaming, three hundred grams of violence, and four hundred grams of sex. I mix together well and my film is complete.’”

  They make hundreds of these “recipe” films every year in India. Same characters, same basic variants of plot, running the same gamut of emotional highlights—and the same audiences. “Just keep ’em coming” seems to be the motto (usually at an average rate of eight hundred films a year).

  The flight was on time and uneventful. A very odd circumstance in India. It was clouds, clouds, and more clouds—impressive formations, beautiful—but only clouds nonetheless. I’d hoped to see a bit of India from the air. This might be my only chance. But all I got was clouds.

  An hour or so later something appeared on the horizon that looked like clouds but was too hard-edged. The color was the same, but the shadows were complex and striated.

  Mountains! Glorious panoplies of snow-capped peaks towering above the clouds. The Himalayas. A vast white wall broken into sky-scratching diamond peaks, stretching across my window and all the way as far as I could see across the window on the other side of the aisle. Magnificent! Real lump-in-the-throat stuff.

  At last—I was coming in to Nepal, until a few decades ago one of the remotest kingdoms on earth, closed to outsiders. And now, since the hap-hippie days of the sixties, a definite must-see for all true adventurers.

  The energy of the place slams like a shock wave. I had no idea what to expect. Everyone I’d talked to who’d been to Kathmandu went sort of sloppy-eyed when asked to describe the place, rhapsodizing about its “special magic,” its justified reputation as “hippie heaven,” the way the city “just sort of hooks you.” They almost always ended sounding like born-again religious converts with phrases like “You’ll understand when you get there.” But they were right. Kathmandu is so overwhelming, so packed with images, that succinct summaries seem almost impossible—certainly inadequate. Like them, I’m tempted to say “You’ll understand when you get there,” but I suppose the role I’ve given myself requires a little more than that. Carefully measured prose wouldn’t do it though—at least not my prose—so all I’ve got left are my tape-recorded notes…shards of googly-eyed wonderments:

  A green valley couched in hills and behind those hills, that line of bride-white peaks in the bluest of blue skies, not a cloud anywhere; tight-packed villages among the high terraces, perched like rock piles on the ridges…then sinking into the city, filigreed with spires and the tiered roofs of temples…you can feel it closing in…streets wriggling and narrowing the deeper you go, bound by houses and lopsided stores of raw sun-baked bricks…getting tighter now, old men sucking hookah pipes in shadowy doorways, women in black skirts with red-embroidered edgings, a child’s eyes, full of wonder, watching me from behind the ornately carved latticework of a wooden window screen; thick wooden doors into the houses, scratched and worn, with locks the size of jewelry boxes…smells of hot oil and baking pauroti bread…sudden pyramids of bright color—a spice seller on a corner, half hidden by his minimountains of turmeric, cardamom, cumin, and coriander…a swath of formal tree-shaded spaces as we pass the palace of Nepal’s King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev (the young Harvard-educated incarnation of Hindu Lord Vishnu) and past the fancy hotels and restaurants of Durbar Magh.

  Then back into a medieval tangle of alleys, muddy, unpaved…temples everywhere—cramped candled caves splashed with blood-red paint, shadowy gods inside, all glinting fangs and wheelspoke arms…noise—so much noise—crowds pressing against the cab as we drive deeper, past the flute sellers and the tanka shops and wood-carvers’ workshops and trinket carts sparkling with polished Gurkha knives, bracelets, heavy Newar jewelry…rickshaw cycles, winging like angry wasps through the throng…howled greetings from the peddlers—“Namaste!” (“I salute the God within you,” “Namaste—to you too.”) The gods are everywhere, holding up cornices, carved on the ends of protruding beams, peering from gaudy posters in store windows—scowling, smiling, fighting, snarling, or caught in the middle of erotic acrobatics…holy lingham shrines in dark courtyards, lit by smoky strands of light and wrapped in blood-red cotton sheets…more peddlers selling the skulls of long-dead monks decorated in silver, brass prayer wheels crammed with written prayers that you spin like a child’s toy and “make-merit” (tamboon) with Buddha all day long…fruit stalls piled high with apples, pomegranates, green oranges, grapes…a street of side-by-side dentists’ parlors overlooked by Vaisha Dev, the god of toothache, his shrine a mass of hammered nails (each nail a plea for pain relief)…bookshops galore—vast repositories of guidebooks and used books from the backpacks of trekkies and the social hubs of world-wanderer gossip…yak-wool jackets, very de rigueur with the “only-got-three-days” trippies…past the Rum Doodle restaurant (ah—Rum Doodle, the world’s highest fictitious mountain, ten thousand feet higher than Everest and subject of a wonderful travel book!)…

  We’re really stuck in the crowd now, hardly moving; I can read the notes and flyers pinned to every available post and door: “See the live sacrifices of animals for Kali—every Tuesday” “ENLIGHTENMENT NOW! Retreats in Buddhism, Massage, and Meditation. One day to three weeks…” “BUFFALO STEVE AND TERRY—I’m at the White Lotus Guesthouse. Leave note where I can find you guys for a few beers” “WE NEED URGENTLY—unwanted trekking equipment for staff to make follow-up visits to children living in remote areas of Nepal.”

  We pass old hippies in dingy cafés sipping fruit-filled lassi and mugwort tea, playing with graying strands of matted hair, coddling their neuroses…a hundred brightly painted mandalas on laurel bark paper fluttering like summer butterflies…we’re really approaching something special, you can sense it, everything’s getting frantic—jugglers and boys banging on little tabla drums, saffron-cloaked monks with dye-daubed faces, ancient Hindu wanderers in dhotis carrying only wooden poles and mud-stained cotton bags, the spacy faces of old-young hash-heads…all cramm
ed in this alley of Hobbit houses piled high on one another, leaning and cracked, beehived with tiny rooms, ladder staircases, encrusted with carved-wood images of tiny gods and peacocks and Byzantine tracery…surely it can’t get any more claustrophobic than this—a sweaty tangle of bodies, trishaws, street markets, hooting cabs, howling peddlers, and grimacing gods…this is too much…I’m suffocating…

  Then, like a torrent tumbling off a precipice, we’re all suddenly spewed out into the living heart of this crazy place, a great sprawl of spaces and shrines and palaces and monasteries and pagoda-roofed temples, soaring into the sunlight with bells and gongs and cymbals and all the wonderful clamorous cacophony of Kathmandu’s throbbing center—the great Durbar Square itself—ending place of pilgrimages, center of enlightenment; the most wondersome place in the world!

  It’s a dream. I’ve never seen anything like it. I leave my cab and wander across the stone-paved plazas like a gawking child, openmouthed and oggle-eyed. Everywhere are the encrustations of excess—expressions of the tangled complexity of Nepal’s Buddhist-Hindu heritage—great sculptured orgasms of carved stone and wood and gold-spired stupas and chedis and arched doorways buckling with the weight of swirling decorations—and everything splattered with red sindur (red dye mixed with mustard oil) or betel nut juice stains and the piled detritus of rice offerings and ashy incense sticks and melted candles, all in a soaring forest of tiered buildings, swooped by flights of white doves, sparkling against a high blue sky.

  It’s too much. You need days to begin to understand all the riches and symbols and intracacies of this place where everything has a meaning, a significance (no empty Rococo decoration-for-decoration’s sake here). The images just keep piling up like the carved layers of the shrines. I caught a glimpse of the tiny living goddess—the Kumari—peeping out of the ornate wooden windows of her chamber in the Kumari Bahal. Selected as a child, she is considered to be the incarnation of the virgin goddess, Kanya Kumari (just one of the sixty-three various names given to Shiva’s shakti, Parvati), and maintains her status until her first period, at which time she becomes mortal and is replaced by another god-child whose horoscope aligns with that of the king. Official forays from her palace are limited to religious festivals when she travels in an elaborate chariot and is carried everywhere to prevent her feet from touching the ground.

  White, red, and gold temples are everywhere—the soaring extravaganzas of the Taleju, the Degu Taleju, the octagonal Krishna Mandir (the ferocious black figure of Kal Bhairav, holding a skull as an offering bowl, lurks here behind a huge lattice screen), Narayan, Shiva-Parvati, Jagannath. And beyond, in all the teeming alleys leading to Durbar, are hundreds more temples and shrines.

  In the misty distance, on a hill at the edge of the city, I can just make out the great white stupa of Swayambhunath, topped by a golden spire and the all-seeing eyes of Buddha. Here, among the incense and gongs and bells and spinning prayer wheels and bowls of burning oil and pushy peddlers, scores of monkeys frolic while Tibetan Buddhists transact precise rituals on this sacred site, more than 2,500 years old.

  And there’s more. Kathmandu has two sister cities close by—Patan and Bhaktapur—each with its own mysteries and medieval charm and its own equivalent of Durbar Square.

  Wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment—all hang like thick incense in Durbar Square. It’s a spiritual nexus attracting crowds of fluttery devotees, swarming like moths around the stupas and temples lit by a million flickering oil lamps. Some are harmless, gentle people, moist-eyed and moist-minded, floating somewhere slightly above the dusty plazas and murmuring to one another in free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness, ganja-laced sentences—always half finished, left dangling in the air like wisps of hashish smoke.

  And then come the instant Buddhists and Krishna-cultists prattling on endlessly in caterpillar watta-batta-mutta sentences about the incarnations of Vishnu and the eight-fold path and the colors of Hindu deities with a facile familiarity that seems to have come from intensive spring break crash courses in “got-it” enlightenment at some hip ashram, paid for by poor unenlightened Mum and Dad back in old Satanland. Their transformations are often short-lived and when the rigors of meditation and abstinence begin to pall, they return home, leaving little and taking little of value back to the old familiarity of their own cultures.

  A few remain though—die-hard stalwarts, long-term converts, moving in slow gurulike movements, eyes fixed on some infinite place, immersed in their Karmic devotions. These are the ones you remember most, wisping like wraiths through the great square, past the remnants of the old psychedelic “pie shops” and hash-houses with their age-stained posters of The Doors and the Jefferson Airplane, past the cracked honeycomb windows of the Hobbit houses and the ragged alleys and the lopsided guesthouses and the gaudy signs for Star beer and “genuine Buffburgers.” They move tirelessly, endlessly, floating through the Jackson Pollock canvas of Kathmandu, part of the splash, daub, and trickle of the place.

  I was hungry for something sweet.

  Alas—the famous cakes and cookies of Kathmandu no longer contain the mind-expanding ingredients of the seventies when weary trekkers and wannabe gurus would fill the pie-shops along “Pig Alley”—gorging on ganja-laced confections and rejoicing in the liberated attitudes of the Nepalese. Today’s ingredients are a little more on the conservative side, but KC’s restaurant, up in the northern part of the city, still attracts some of the old loyalists and has kept its appeal with the mystic in-crowd.

  “She’s going to do it. She’s going to do it.” A young girl who said she was from Manchester, England (“But that was ages ago—I mean absolutely ages.”), bounced excitedly on her seat next to an older woman, also from England, who had spent the last half hour or so firing barbed darts of philosophical epigrams at her companions. She seemed very aloof. Her wiry hair was drawn tightly back over her scalp into a bun, her face had a gaunt profile, and her eyes seemed a long way away, somewhere in a cold dark place. I’ve seen that look before in the faces of long-time world travelers. But there was something not quite convincing here—she was like a queen under seige, peering down imperiously from high battlements atop loosely mortared walls. There’s undoubtedly safety—even occasional serenity in such heights—but unresolved fears can eventually eat like acid through the cracks and bring the whole elaborate fortification crumbling down. And that’s what I sensed: someone feigning enlightenment in that arrogant way peculiar to Western truth seekers, and yet still fragile, vulnerable, incomplete.

  The tiny room of cake eaters became very quiet. The woman closed her eyes and performed a little ritual of breathing exercises. No one spoke. She took one last long breath and began to recite a kind of blank verse in a slow raspy voice (in transcribing from the tape I’ve tried to give it the poetic form I think she intended):

  “We are

  but shards of a great whole

  bits of eternity, spewed out briefly

  to traipse, and wobble, and bungle and bravado our way

  (in a state of induced forgetfulness called consciousness)

  through the ritual three score and ten

  (and hopefully less),

  trying to know the already known

  to fight the unfightable,

  play games with our devils,

  fool with our so-called minds,

  praying for personal peace,

  sighing for spiritual bliss in the crypts of crises,

  appealing for perfection

  and hopelessly longing to love ourselves and others—

  unquestioningly, unconfused, complete and eternal—

  so that we may return to the whirling wheel—

  the endless in and out—and lose our “me’s”

  in the great whole again.

  So why?

  Why all the ballyhoo and bullshit

  and the braggadocio and the bombast

  when we already know—down deep in our deepest—

  that there’s no “me” in me�
�that all is dross—

  mere bagatelles—that help to pass the days

  until there are no more days left

  and we return from where we came

  having relearned (and maybe not—for what it matters)

  some of what we knew we knew.

  So why?!”

  Her eyes were still closed and she sat very still as the murmurs of her admirers filled the room. Heavy stuff. Wagnerian gloom and doom. Outside in the muddy street there it was all laughter and noise and sunshine. I left the rest of my cake and rejoined the hullabaloo.

  Surely it needn’t be that ponderous or pointless. I know that Buddhism has its downside, “All life is suffering,” etc. etc., but up here in Nepal, with the sparkling white peaks soaring above the temples and the crowded streets and the emerald green rice paddies and the tight little mud-walled villages perched on terraced hillsides, surely here there’s also rejoicing and joy in the fun of life itself.

  I decided I had to dream up a response to her rather woeful litany. So I sat on the steps of a temple and scribbled away merrily to a spritely tune that ran through my head:

  Life’s just a vacation—