In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  We bound down the steps, passing little houses along the way. I’m amazed at how clean everything is.

  We pass women studiously weeding their steps. One guy is brushing his teeth on the porch of his house. There is a lot of activity going on in the way of washing pots outdoors in wide, cement sinks, clothes are being thwacked against stone and front yards are being swept.

  We start our descent down a long flight of stairs. Butterflies greet us: bright-blue and white spots, mustard yellow. One flaps past lazily on wings the colour of storm water.

  All around us are mountains, dipping and soaring into a sweep of green: fat fronds and trees necklaced in spider webs.

  Two women dressed in Khasi style – elegant sheets of sari fabric draped over them – pass us by; they are followed by a trail of scent: woodsmoke, tea and soap. Their faces are unreadable – I wonder what they think of all these tourists tramping through.

  Only 30–40 per cent of people who come here make it to the bridge – most are too out of shape to do the whole thing and some, grown soft from always being ferried around in a car or taking the escalator, require a palanquin because they grossly underestimate how much effort it takes to climb back up the stairs.

  Steady tells me that the villagers like the publicity because it creates business, but at the same time, having that many people coming through is also a pain.

  This path is used to connect Nongriat to the outside world – it can’t be accessed by car. We pass people going about their everyday jobs, carrying cement, wood – everything and anything they need to survive.

  ‘They work very hard,’ says Steady. Although there are mobile networks and Wi-Fi, when the villagers need to bring their produce to take to market, they have to shut the trail and use a special pulley system to transport the goods.

  We reach our first suspension bridge, crossing pools languid and blue in places, broken up with the rush of water teeming onwards. Soon enough, we arrive at a homestead that announces the root bridge is imminent. We stop for a rest on the side of the wall.

  Steady tells me he is studying at university; I know he doesn’t have much money, and it must take a lot for him to be able to do that. Like the rest of his people, he works very hard.

  There are a few people milling around. A little girl is placed in a hammock, her mother desperately hoping she will stay in it this time. But two minutes later, the child emancipates herself and makes a beeline for the dog half-heartedly guarding the front of a small house.

  Steady knows these people too. An elderly lady with a face like an apple collapsing in on itself takes his face in both hands and tells me he’s a ‘good boy’. Soon, we head on.

  The root bridge comes upon us quietly. I almost don’t notice it at first because we enter a clearing with a clear pool of water at its centre. The start of the bridge looks like a tree having a yawn; it spreads angular at first, then wild and covered in moss, over and over the water until it touches the other side.

  The first reaction is shock, that I’m here looking at the incredible thing I came all this way for. Feeling wonder, relief, happiness, I run my hand along the root. It took years to build this, I think. I feel the slow pulse of the trees, their life source, their lungs.

  I understand why people think the only thing that can fix a heart broken by love is another love equal or greater in magnitude.

  But that doesn’t have to come from just one other person. When you think about all of the love you will ever experience in your lifetime, including that which you have for yourself, that is still an immense foundation to build your life on.

  This feeling, under the bright Indian sky, with this sprawl of nature around me, and gladness in my heart that I did something as simple as walk down 3,000 steps to see a bridge made out of roots, this feeling trickles between the cracks to mend the damage.

  Maybe I will never again be brave enough to love someone as much as I did Rob. Maybe I will never allow my heart to be broken again.

  But I know that if I do, and if it does happen, finding the way to heal within myself and the nature that surrounds me is going to sustain me a lot longer than finding that answer in another person.

  7

  WOODSMOKE, FIRE AND ICE

  A few months ago, I was shocked to read that only around 5 per cent of our brain activity is conscious. The rest of our decision-making, how we react to things, process grief, happiness, worry, mostly takes place backstage.

  Back when the figure was estimated at around 10 per cent, newspapers jumped on it and incorrectly said, ‘We only use 10 per cent of our brain!’ What it really meant was that, when it comes to the majority of your thinking about who you are as a person, you are a covert military facility with hundreds of sub-levels.

  The vast, subterranean version of myself fascinates me. I imagine her swimming deep beneath my eyes, occasionally reminded of her existence with the gleam of a fin discernible above water before she slips down below.

  I was most conscious of her when Rob died, because she was the one who kicked my survival into gear on so many unknown levels. I’ve felt her before, of course, and it’s always marked by the same process:

  • A very firm sense of what I need to do.

  • My conscious brain kicking against the decision.

  • Not understanding it but feeling compelled to go through with it.

  • Understanding it once it has been undertaken and completed.

  I have a heavy cold, and I have temporarily left behind India for Nepal, for a much-needed dose of solitude. But subterranean me is trying to get me to leave our comfortable hotel room, and this time I feel she has gone too far.

  To go a bit further back as to why I came here, as much as I love India, and have come to know her quieter side, her frantic buzz is like a needy friend. After a while, she is cloying; she robs the oxygen from beneath my nose and I feel like I am trapped and can’t breathe.

  I knew I wanted and needed Nepal long before I came here. I wanted to be in the mountains for two weeks, and scrolling on a website I came across a trek that promised exactly that, ‘from steaming jungle to icy snow caps’, and I could do it alone. I didn’t know then that it was the Annapurna base camp trek, or the ABC circuit – one of the most famous in the world.

  When I found out, at first I thought, ‘Argh! I don’t want to go on some trek crawling with people! The whole point was to get away from the fuckers!’ But the more I read, the more I understood that young backpackers tended not to do it because of the cost. Those seeking glory did Everest base camp, and so, while busy, it tended to be a mixed bag of people who mostly couldn’t speak English.

  Since I couldn’t speak any other language, this was pretty much perfect.

  We have a couple of days in Kathmandu to acclimatise before the trek, and, so far, I had turned down all offers of sightseeing. But when the guiding company I booked asked me again if I was SURE I didn’t want to visit their biggest temple, this subconscious part of me manipulated my lips to say yes and swallowed a couple of Sudafed.

  Her insistence reminds me of a quote by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first Nobel laureate, which goes, ‘What seems to be coming at you is really coming from you.’

  The thing is, I don’t like visiting temples. Why? Because I’m angry at God. I know the logic follows that I’m an atheist and therefore I don’t believe in God, so I might as well be angry at a sock puppet, but I’m still angry.

  I’m angry at whatever idea of God I had before I became an atheist. I’m angry that I don’t believe. I’m angry that prayer and belief and God in general did nothing to save Rob’s life.

  Maybe God isn’t in the life-saving business, but I’m not interested in second-guessing on God’s behalf. I have never understood the logic of the believer trying to interpret the actions of an omnipotent being, whose existence surely is beyond the understanding of a tiny human peanut brain.

  But that could be the anger in me. After a suicide, there are casualties in the form of lost fr
iendships and family rifts. I am still angry with some people, but that pales in comparison to my anger with God. God and me are not okay.

  It takes a lot for me to enter God’s home – whether it be a temple, church, synagogue or mosque.

  Kathmandu is crowded, but it is a different kind of noise and activity to Kolkata, where I have just been.

  Kolkata, in my opinion, is a place over-romanticised in guidebooks. It used to be the capital of India during the time of the Raj, and nowhere in India is there a city of such decay yet immense learning, life and graft. People talk about decay as if it is a jaunty quirk to be admired – in the same way they talk about Palermo in Sicily – but all I see is the presence of time in its saddest form: blackened buildings, weeds snaking through pieces of stone, creaking, cracking, everything releasing a dusty sigh for days gone past.

  We saw the buildings created in our imaginations as we read them from pages of books: crumbling intricate frontages, porticos reclaimed by leaves and roots, green wooden shutters inspired by the French set in deep red-clay walls. Every inch of pavement in some places is occupied: men fixing watches, sharpening knives, recycling bits of scrap metal. Every so often we’d come across a vat of bubbling oil and stare as flattened discs of dough placed expertly in their liquid emerged reborn as the softest, flakiest breads.

  I went with Rob’s aunt Felicity who had joined me from New Zealand for two weeks, and the heat flickered uncomfortably under our skins. It was hard to reconcile this great centre of culture and creative thinking, the birthplace of Tagore and Satyajit Ray, with the random guy who blew his nose onto a wall, the constant press of people, the staring that Felicity elicited, and the women who were poured into traditional shalwar kameezes, not skinny jeans like they are in Bangalore.

  To go from that, straight into the different yet still chaotic streets of Kathmandu, where dust and traffic compete with hundreds of shops selling trekking gear, statues of Buddha and parcels of weed, my brain overloads. The city is five thousand years old and so the lanes are narrow and unprepared, groaning with cars and progress.

  To try to escape the noise, I’m receptive to getting out of the city centre. Until I hear it’s a visit to the Pashupatinath temple. I Google it and my mind recoils: they do open-air cremations.

  In Hinduism, traditionally you are cremated within a wooden pyre, but these days most people use the standard crematoriums. When I was a believer, I was a strong advocate of open-air cremations – it’s what I wanted for my own death.

  Wooden pyre, open sky and the river at my feet.

  But it seemed grisly, gruesome, that this was a place open to tourists. It seemed like the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to grieving people so that privileged Western masses could come to take pictures.

  I also didn’t know how I would handle seeing a dead body, as the last body I had seen was Rob’s.

  So when my guide Sushma comes to pick me up, I am wriggling with indecision.

  But this other me insists I should go, and I instantly like Sushma because there is something familiar about her features, her mannerisms. She reminds me of my aunts.

  On the drive there, Sushma and I chat, and the question inevitably comes: are you married? So I take a deep breath and tell her about Rob. And as is the way sometimes when I talk about Rob, our conversation grows more thoughtful, and I feel Sushma bending towards me, not away. I usually find this in people who have encountered death before.

  When we arrive at the entrance, there aren’t hordes of tourists. Pashupati, as it is shortened to, is first and foremost a working temple, not a tourist site. So the majority of people visiting are here for legitimate reasons of devotion, not just to take photographs. Foreigners aren’t allowed inside the temple either, and they have to pay 1,000NPR just to visit the outer grounds, which is a lot just to see a temple.

  Sushma wangles free entry for me because Indians have a good relationship in Nepal, and basically get all of the same rights as Nepalese tourists. So maybe the last ‘fuck you’ was being had at the West’s expense.

  The heavy, stone cremation slabs sit alongside the river on the opposite side to us, the final resting place to countless bodies. No judgement, just peace and quiet. There is a fire dying out on one, and further along we see a body garlanded in marigolds, the loved ones gathering around for a last goodbye.

  In the background is the temple, and, all along our side of the bank, it is peaceful.

  Sadhus daubed in sandalwood and vermillion lounge coquettishly asking if we want to take their picture. Other people sit under the trees near us, gazing at the process of life and death unfolding.

  Along the bank, we can see the heat of the fires rippling the air, and as we see yet another body tightly wrapped in flowers and cloth making its way to another stone slab, we sit quietly and take in the moment.

  Sushma presses my shoulder in comfort, reflective with what I have already told her about Rob. We look at the one slab where the fire has now completely died out, and a young man collects water from the river. ‘We cremated my father right there,’ she says.

  We grow quiet again, and I am not crying; I am surprised. Far from this being an upsetting place, it is incredibly healing. There is something about death being out in the open, in the same place that people are praying for love, for hope, for babies and for health, that articulates the hugeness and fullness of life in a way that words cannot.

  ‘We believe in death as being a return to the five elements,’ Sushma says. I cannot tell her about how angry I am with God, because she is religious. And that it has been creeping on me that maybe I am not an atheist after all, because how can you be angry at something that isn’t there?

  ‘It is the earth, sky, water, air and fire,’ she says. And in that moment, the young man takes his bucket of water and throws it on the ashes. The water douses fire, blowing steam into the air which evaporates into the sky. The ashes plume up and then fall into the water, and into the cracks of the earth. That person is still here, I think, but now they are part of something more ambiguous, less defined, but still part of the moving and breathing world.

  I wonder how small or big that person was. I wonder if they led a good life, if they realised that life was precious, that inevitably we all end up with our eyes closed, our time ended and our bodies emptied of purpose.

  Sushma tells me that further down the bank is the cheap and cheerful crematorium that is more environmentally friendly and only costs 300NPR. The traditional cremations are far more expensive because they require 300kg of wood, and take hours to complete.

  I was worried the air would smell of burning flesh, but actually, it is filled with incense and wood. She tells me that when a husband dies, the widow has to do various things like not eat meat or food with salt and sleep on a plank of wood – as must the sons.

  ‘And when the wife dies?’ I say, raising an eyebrow, because I think I know what’s coming. ‘Ah,’ says Sushma, ‘he doesn’t have to do any of that stuff.’

  Of course he bloody doesn’t. Widowhood always hits a nerve because, in India, you’re supposed to wear white. No chicken nuggets for you – it’s vegetarian food all the way – and back when you lived in big houses stuffed with your extended family, you slept in your own cursed wing. Away from the kids, marrieds and single folk.

  If you were really unlucky, you might be cast out. Some widows were forced to go into prostitution because they had no other means of making money. Can you imagine having to go through the intense pain of losing your husband, then go through the second, devastating blow of being ostracised and shunned?

  When Felicity and I did our walking tour of Kolkata, we came across a beautiful old mansion. Our guide Ritik showed us different wings in the courtyard and pointed at one wing saying, ‘That’s where the widows would live and eat, and they would have to use different utensils so their food wouldn’t get contaminated by the non-vegetarian pots.’

  Delightful.

  A sadhu peeps his head around a corner, waggling his ey
ebrows smeared in bright yellow, touting for money. ‘Picture?’ he asks.

  We take that as our cue to leave, and we head towards the temple. Only Hindus are allowed, and we leave the foreigners, with their SLRs and iPhones, behind, to enter into a world of marigolds and betel leaves, incense smoke and old statues that depict the playing ground of the gods.

  The temple is the opposite of the riverbank. It teems with life and colour. It tugs at a string of memory.

  When I was a kid, I used to love temples, and especially loved the elephant god Ganesh. I was given a tiny stone statue of him, and I had it for so long his face rubbed off. Ganesh stands for a lot of things, but he is also called the ‘remover of obstacles’ and Rob loved statues and depictions of him.

  When Rob went to New Zealand just after we separated, I gave it to him. I don’t know why. I think – despite being an atheist – I wanted something to look over him, protect him. When he died, I found the statue among his belongings and tucked it next to him in the coffin.

  ‘Make sure that wherever he wanted to get to, that he gets there safely,’ I murmured to Ganesh.

  In Pashupati, you can feel the sense of hope in the air. Pashupati is actually an incarnation of the blue-skinned god Shiva, who is one of the trinity of the most powerful Hindu gods, the others being Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver.

  He’s also Ganesh’s father. Shiva is especially liked by women because a) he’s got this godly yet edgy and dangerous vibe and b) he has the most gorgeous, sensual, intelligent relationship with his wife Parvati.

  Reason (c) is a bit more complicated and best explained in the words of our Kolkata walking tour guide, Ritik. He coughed and went red when Felicity and I stopped in front of the most beautiful Shiva lingam peeping out between the folds of a banyan tree.

  The lingam is a version of a Shiva statue that is a black column rounded at the end. When you’re a kid, you just think it’s a funny-looking stone. It was only when we were older that we were told what it symbolised.