by Poorna Bell
‘Ahem, so the lingam . . . ahem . . . represents the god Shiva, ahem . . .’ Ritik said.
I started sniggering because I knew what was coming; Felicity patiently listened, unaware.
‘And the lingam itself . . . ahem ahem . . . represents his . . . ahem . . . penis.’
Felicity’s eyebrows shot up. What Ritik didn’t say was that the base, or onni, actually represents a woman’s vagina, and it’s usually a circle in the ground around the lingam.
Encouraged by the fact that we hadn’t started laughing outright yet, Ritik continued: ‘Women pray to the lingam when they want to have a child or if . . . they want their future husband to have a . . . ahem . . .’
I put him out of his misery: ‘A big penis?’ Felicity’s cackle met with mine sent the crows cawing above the trees.
In Nepal, they are big on Shiva. The lingam in Pashupati is so huge, you have to descend a few stairs to see it. It is penis central. As we ascend, we pass a worn and loved statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, and then reach the central temple that holds other statues of Shiva.
Sushma takes my hand and leads me to the temple of another god, called Unmatta Bhairava. ‘This one used to scare me as a child,’ she says.
I enter the small, dark room and see a fearsome face, the style of work resembling more the statues I’ve seen in Malaysia and Bali than India. This god, I later find out, is the one people pray to for strength to be brave and bold.
Apparently, he’s also like visual Viagra – if you’re impotent or not sexually attracted to your partner any more, one look at him and bing! You get your mojo back.
Sushma points at a particular part of the statue and, in the gloom, I can see people circle the statue and give this long brass object a good old rub like it grants instant wishes. As we get closer, I see Sushma’s delicate hand reach out for it and realise, Oh, yep, that’s a massive metal wang and this lady who looks like a sweet old Indian auntie is grabbing it for good luck.
When we walk out of the temple, something in my centre of gravity has shifted.
This anger, this blame – I’m not saying that I still don’t have it.
I’m angry Rob was taken away from me. I’m angry that he died before his time and was given such a tough road to walk down. But after experiencing the confluence of those deaths on the riverbank and the striving for a better life, I also now have the realisation that there isn’t anything personal in Rob dying.
There is a soft voice, mine, that comes from a place of understanding.
It wasn’t about him, this is just how it is, how it always will be as long as we honour the living and the dead.
It doesn’t make things easier – not hugely anyway. I still feel the sadness of his death around me, but I also feel like we are part of something bigger.
I still don’t believe in God, but something in this experience has allowed me to break the earth around my anger, to start letting it go because it’s preventing me from moving on.
Finally the understanding dawns that we are connected so deeply to this world we live on – all of it – and that somewhere, somehow, there is a sense of peace and closure, and healing, in this.
I left England feeling indignant that non-traditional life choices weren’t celebrated, and that even if you follow a more traditional path, you aren’t equipped with the insight to question, think and learn about why you make the choices you do.
At the beginning, I was so sure that, to live the life I wanted, I’d have to remove myself from people. That to be free of judgement and to live in peace, I would have to surround myself with silence.
However, that led me down another warren of thinking. Was I rejecting the idea of marriage and kids because I believed it was expected of me? And, in doing so, was I allowing other people’s expectations to shape me anyway? What if I ended up bitter and lonely and realised too late that it was all a mistake? And why couldn’t people just respect the choices you made, whether that was to actively live alone or to remain single?
Someone who has written a lot about this is Eric Klinenberg, the professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He wrote a book called Going Solo, which looks at the rise and appeal of living alone. I liked what the Washington Post said about it, that it was ‘really about living better together – for all of us, single or not’.
To me, there was a distinction between making an active choice to live alone versus a default choice because I hadn’t met someone. One was empowering; the other was just waiting on the shelf like a toy waiting to be picked up.
I emailed Eric to ask him why some people had such a problem with other people living alone, and he revealed that human beings have only been living alone in large numbers, for long periods of time, in the past sixty years, which is a blink in the eye of our evolution.
He told me that we have a whole bunch of expectations for what a good life is like, and how it should be lived, developed solely in that world. And that the experience of being alone is radical and transformative, and it’s new in ways we haven’t thought of.
‘It’s new for people to understand, especially your family,’ he wrote back. ‘They have a clear idea of what a good life is, and you’re not living it. It doesn’t come from bad intentions, it’s really just that our cultural practices have not caught up with the way that we live now.’
Eric told me about what sociologists refer to as the ‘spoiled identity’, which is that there is one lens that people see you through, and they can’t see outside of that. I wonder if married people feel like that about themselves, not just single folk.
But, I replied to Eric, sometimes I felt like I would talk to certain people about my life or my choices, and was met with a certain level of incomprehension.
Well, yes, he said, because people don’t often listen.
‘They don’t take the time to appreciate the reasons you are living by yourself or not married or are single. So often they are projecting their own feelings, that is: “If I was not married, I would be really unhappy”, and there can be real misunderstanding. A lot of single people have come to resent those interactions.’
While it might take a bit longer for society to catch up with different ways of living, dealing with the irritation of it might be simpler than we think.
He advises that recognising that people are projecting their concerns onto you, and understanding that they are generally asking because they care, matters.
I spent months beating myself up because I truly believed that I wasn’t going to be happy again, because my life didn’t match the lives of other people. But perhaps I wasn’t thinking big enough. Or, perhaps, we all needed to update what we thought we knew about modern living.
Eric told me something that still plays on my mind today, which is that our ideas and values aren’t in sync with how we live our lives. That we’re pretty much going to spend about as much of our lives single as we are married, which is a new thing.
The simple act of acknowledging that there is no perfect system, and that, actually, there is no ‘them and us’ – we’re all in the same, messy jumble – can offer incredible clarity to your own life. To me, it’s oxygen. It allows for flaws, mistakes, room to fuck up and start over again.
It lances the boil filled with jealous comparisons.
I sat there on that riverbank watching a life go up in flames, and, in that fire, I saw a reconciling of my own anger. There is no set path to happiness, and even those who follow the rules may end up somewhere they hadn’t planned, because shit happens and things go wrong.
There was only so much I could blame for me not having kids, for instance, on Rob. Or being jealous of people who did have kids or a seemingly normal marriage. I had to take charge of my own narrative.
The last message I send Mum and Dad which will have to tide them over for the next two weeks is: ‘Heading out to the mountains, no reception, DON’T WORRY!! Feeling good and strong.’
They do not need to
know that I am still heavy with a cold, barely able to taste anything and that my river of snot could replenish an ailing glacier.
The set-up is this: I have my guide Suman, a young Nepalese man-child, who takes great pride in his hair. Suman has a strange combination of being young yet world-weary – he’s been doing this for a few years and thinks he knows everything, but is actually just a boy.
When we set out, I stop to peer at a bird in the tree, but can’t quite make out what species it is. Rob would have known, but he is no longer human enough to answer me; he is simply scattered cloud and wisps of air.
‘What is that?’ I ask Suman, pointing. I naively assume, being a trekking guide, that Suman will have a great knowledge of everything nature.
He looks, nods, and says sagely, ‘Yes, bird.’
Rob, I miss you.
The guides need to be fairly physically fit. They accompany people like me for two weeks at a time with not much rest, and the trek is physically demanding. There are long days, and it is up and down. The altitude takes its toll – sometimes you can clear 1,000 metres vertically, and the oxygen level is poor.
The guide isn’t there to unlock the frost-tipped mysteries of the Nepalese Himalayas; he’s there to negotiate a bed for you in one of the rustic teahouses that mark the way up. The higher you go, the fewer teahouses there are and so the demand for beds is a scuffle.
It becomes evident that you need a guide who can help get your food quickly, your bed sorted, and make sure you don’t die from altitude sickness. Bird and plant life knowledge are a surplus requirement.
We start in Pokhara, a pretty mountain town set around a lake.
Stretching ahead down the path, like wooden fingers straining to deliver a letter, the trees are caught against the cool embrace of a bright blue sky. Up ahead, casting a watchful eye on the dense undergrowth, is an eagle – or bird, as Suman would say – with white spots on its wings.
After a short drive, we start the trail.
There is a lot of literature around about self-love. One lady wrote an article saying that she tried practising it, but felt ‘guilty’ that she spent her whole weekend eating pastries and watching Netflix, while her other half ran around after her. That’s not what self-love is.
Self-love is one of the hardest things you can do. We have this idea of love being easy and effortless, and sometimes it is. But love isn’t one-dimensional; it doesn’t just operate on one plane of emotion. Love is a state of being, and operates to the full gamut of feeling, from anger to bliss, happiness to angst.
There are parts of yourself that will always be easier to love than others. Maybe it’s your kindness, your way of making people laugh. But real self-love (which, really, is self-acceptance) is also being fully conscious and aware of the darker parts of you. It’s looking at the parts of yourself you really don’t like. The parts that may cause you to self-destruct when shit gets tough and lead you to make bad decisions.
Often, these things aren’t obvious, which is why you keep doing it despite evidence to the contrary that it’s good for you. The behaviour is not black and white or good and bad, like, say, someone who throws cats into a dustbin or volunteers in soup kitchens. It’s the insidious stuff that presses down on your life, that causes you to act out in certain ways.
It might be an inability to say no to people. Always doing good deeds because you want people to think well of you, despite the steep emotional cost to yourself. It could be wanting love but finding it in the wrong places. Your darker self is a master at covering its tracks so you never realise it is even there.
Self-love is saying to yourself, ‘This thing that I am doing is ugly and it hurts, but it’s me and I need to find out what it is so I can stop making the same mistakes.’
The reason I love trekking, or rather, being around mountains, is that there is no hiding from my bullshit. I can’t get on my phone to distract me from an uncomfortable thought. There is a lot of thinking to do, and it happens at its own pace and timeline.
Some self-love revelations are forced because of a trauma. Mine certainly were after Rob died. But mountains offer a gentler path to understanding yourself, without the need for a catastrophe.
Because the life around them is slower, less accessible (and therefore much more magnificent, beautiful and rare), you feel as if you are in the presence of something divine. Not God, but something taps into the truest parts of yourself and amplifies who you are as a person, threading it into gold.
Most of us, in towns and cities, are used to close quarters. We are used to speed, accessibility – I freak out when I have no service on my phone for five minutes.
So being here, in this landscape, forces a change. In the spaces of silence we finally hear a voice that is our own. It comes unbidden, softly, willingly, not through trauma or coaxed through the words of a therapist or a friend delivering tough love.
It’s difficult, unsettling at first. An hour in, and I realise there are many, many hours, minutes and seconds between this first hour and the last one.
Unless you are with a guide who can speak perfect English and is chatty, there is a lot of walking and thinking. During a lot of the ‘thinking’ part of this trek, I think about the person I was in London.
Was I a nice person? Did I treat people right? People said I did when I left my company, but I remember meetings when the fire of a red rage blew through me and I ended up losing my temper.
Did I leave because I didn’t like the person I was becoming? Thinking about it in the silence of the jungle, with my thoughts radiating out towards the mountains, there is no one to give me the answer but myself.
I don’t think I was terrible, but perhaps I could have been better.
‘4.30am!!’ I yell at Suman. When was he going to tell me we had such an early start?
It wasn’t the point that I’d be in bed by 8pm anyway, and my night-time activity involved gumming a piece of Lindt chocolate while wearing my cosy Tibetan socks. I wanted more notice. Then I guiltily remember my promise to be nicer and more Zen and back off.
The reason for the early start is to climb up to Poon Hill, a detour up a mini mountain to see the sunrise. This is the revelatory shit you signed up for, Poorna, so suck it up.
When the alarm goes off, I don’t want to leave, even less so five minutes into the dark hike, up a set of stairs so steep they swell to fill your entire sense of physical being until all you breathe, think and see are stairs. I have a tantrum around twenty stairs in and decide, nope, I am not going to do it.
But then, I take my eyes off the ground where they have studiously been following the drag of my torchlight, and I look up. The world shifts into that other place, where co-ordinates melt and it is so otherworldly and beautiful you are scared to take your eyes off it, in case it disappears while you blink.
Because we are on a path via a small Nepalese village, and because there are no cars, no skyscrapers, everything on either side of the path cuts away and moves towards the mountains.
We find ourselves surrounded on all sides by stars, millions of them, some peppering the blackness with fire and pomp, others shyly grouping together as if not convinced they could shine brightly enough on their own. I look out at our galaxy and I feel as if I could lose myself forever in its glow.
I’ve never hiked in the dark before; everything takes on a different tone. The staircase is framed in curly branches of small rhododendrons, their limbs jerking into shadowy movement as the light hits.
The night landscape is so different to its daytime counterpart that hiking in the dark feels as if we are having a secret affair, poring over each other before the day comes to claim me. Eventually, I get to the top and catch the sun calling to the stars.
The sky dips its brush and begins in a slow dark blue, lightening into spears of red, drawing a line under the night. In the background, a legion of mountains wait silently. As the first rays of the sun hit them one by one, they move from the shadows into vision, their lines rippling acros
s a previously unformed place, now shaped by warmth and light into peaks of stone and ice.
The smallness of me, and the vastness of this, quietens my very core.
Later that day, as we move onwards and upwards to Tadapani, I notice how different a trek this is to the last one I did nearly two years ago in New Zealand.
There, I found myself wanting to melt into mist, through the veil of lace created by branches in the distance. I wanted it to claim me, for me to turn to stone and have moss growing on my legs and ferns from my fingers.
This is more conscious, more present. I’m not a spirit passing through the world with a detached gaze; I’m here, my thighs are on fucking fire and every step is working the sweat and sadness of London out of me.
We enter dense woodland and jungle, the air growing so hot that clouds evaporate into steam.
I pass across steps cut through with running water, each stream merely the idea of a waterfall, the gathering trickle sharing a collective dream of one day thundering along the mountainside.
I think of Rob, I think of taniwha, the beings and guardians from Maori mythology who liked to live in watery places, from the sea to rock pools. Sometimes they could be created from the spirit of someone who had died; he loved their stories.
We pass many streams along the way, and I place a stone near each one to say hello to him, just in case. Tell him I was here, I whisper into the water.
High up in the canopy of trees, bees are making a life; rhododendrons give them the pollen that creates a very special honey.
The waterfalls give way to thickets of trees. We pass avenues of rhododendrons, their desperation evident in the way they are clawing at the light. Here the light has shepherded sturdy beech across a wide valley so that they are all clamouring towards it. It is a sea of wood, rippling downwards.
The trunks of trees flutter with the skeletons of dead ferns. The branches are a needlework of moss.
Eventually, we hit a ridge where the clouds roll directly onto our path; they taste like the edge of something delicate and wet.