by Kate Harris
We set off a week later with the sun at our backs. After pedalling east across the Caucasus and Central Asia, and then south across Tibet, we would head west now across the Indo-Gangetic Plain of Nepal only to veer north again in India, back toward the Himalaya, spiralling in on the Siachen Glacier like a spaceship wooed into orbit by a planet’s gravity. As we left the basin of the city, that same weak force worked against us. We struggled up Kathmandu’s steep outskirts, and the valley seemed a lake still: our faces and clothes looked soaked, as though we were back on the Black Sea, only here it rained hot and from the inside out.
According to Buddhist lore, it wasn’t tectonics or erosion that drained the Kathmandu Valley but the bodhisattva Manjushri, who saw a lotus growing in the centre of the lake and cut a gorge to let the water out, so that people could farm the fertile land below. Manjushri is typically associated with insight, but this wasn’t such a bright move, for the former lake bed cradles seismically unstable clays and soils in one of the most tectonically volatile swaths of the planet. We left Kathmandu shortly before a small but still deadly earthquake rattled the place, though we didn’t even learn about it until a week later, when we checked email and saw dozens of worried messages from friends and family. Four years later a 7.8-magnitude earthquake would shudder across the country, killing nearly ten thousand people and injuring tens of thousands more.
Even in the brief moment of relative stability that we biked in, the city seemed on the verge of falling apart. We pedalled past rickety apartment buildings out of which ganglia of rebar broke off like unfinished thoughts. Flimsy balconies looked structurally reliant on the lines of laundry strung across them, colourful T-shirts and saris flapping like urban prayer flags. The roads were just as vibrant and precarious, for traffic consisted mostly of Tata trucks painted with orange, red, and green patterns and exuberant slogans: “Road King,” “Big Boss,” and “One Mistake Game Over!” The trucks grunted out black clouds of exhaust as they heaved up the road, looking dangerous but also slightly comical, the vehicular equivalent of hippos. When their drivers saw us they honked their horns, a shrill, surprisingly girlish giggle of notes. I could tell how far ahead or behind me Mel was on her bike by the sound, the way you predict the distance of a storm from the seconds elapsed between lightning strikes and thunder.
At the turnoff to Pokhara, a popular trekking town, vehicles were backed up in both lanes for three miles. The atmosphere was remarkably calm for a traffic jam, even festive. Drivers napped on bamboo mats in the shade cast by their truck engines, and enterprising vendors wandered among the stalled vehicles selling fresh coconut slices and vanilla ice cream in neon orange cones. We weaved our bicycles through the jam, removing panniers when necessary to squeeze past vehicles parked too close, including a bus on which a kohl-eyed child stared at us out a window. When Mel smiled and waved, the girl looked terrified. “I’m really great with children,” acknowledged my friend.
We didn’t see any kids in Narayangarh a few days later, or anyone at all. The city was eerily deserted when we arrived, with steel garage doors pulled down on all the shops. The sidewalks were empty but for a lone woman whose bare, bony legs twitched sporadically, as if electrified. She stared nowhere in particular, a frantic look on her face. A metal begging bowl beside her collected nothing but sunlight. We continued toward the main intersection, where a massive crowd was chanting something we couldn’t understand. Police in riot gear shuffled nervously around them.
“Politics,” said the owner of the guest house we found, when I asked what was going on. Someone had been murdered, he explained, and his supporters were calling for the killer’s execution. Maybe the pervasive unease in the city kept me awake that night, the sense that we stood on so many kinds of shaky ground, but the heat and humidity didn’t help, and neither did the unsteady hum of a fan stirring the sludge of the air around the room. At some point I got up for water and glanced at the window just as a gecko walked up the far side, its tiny digits gripping the screen, its belly pearled in the beam of my headlamp. Outside, the mob was long gone but the woman was still there, a pile of sticks on the sidewalk. I could only make her out indirectly, by looking at the slightly lighter darkness surrounding her, the way you see stars best if you stare at the black sky between them. She didn’t move, not even twitch, in all the time I studied the emptiness around her. I took a shower fully dressed and managed to fall asleep before the dampness fled my clothes.
Relief in Nepal is a rainy day. A day without shadows, a day of storms. It was drizzling when we arrived in Lumbini, a flat yawn of fields and forests unremarkable in every respect but one: Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, first cried for his mother’s milk here. According to legend, Siddhartha was born a prince in Lumbini more than two millennia ago. He was raised in opulence and shielded from all forms of sadness and despair. Only at the age of twenty-nine did he venture outside the palace gates, into the real world, where he was so shaken by the suffering he saw that he renounced his wealth and royalty and went wandering in search of a universal cure. After five years he found enlightenment somewhere between severe asceticism and sensual indulgence, by recognizing desire as the source of all suffering and devising a systematic way to appease it. Although the Buddha only became the Buddha because he fled this place and the life of privileged ease it represented, Lumbini is now a World Heritage site, its ruins and shrines and gardens all places of pilgrimage.
When we arrived, a group of Indian women in bright saris were huddling beneath umbrellas as they burned offerings of incense, the smoke rising between lines of rain. Several monks in saffron robes sat beneath a Bodhi tree, whose massive branches reached out for a dozen feet in all directions, then reached farther still thanks to the prayer flags unfurling from their leafy tips like feelers. One of the monks ushered me over and wrapped red string around my wrist, a blessing for the road. Nearby a few rickshaw drivers napped in the shelter of their back seats, waiting for passengers. When one of them importuned us to take a ride, Mel pointed out that we’d biked there. “So you must rest now!” the man exclaimed.
Water sprayed up between the wheels like jet streams. Being the baggage on a bike for once, rather than its engine, was rather enjoyable, plus the rickshaw came with a roof. We drove past a giant statue of the Buddha sitting in meditation, glowing a dim gold through the rain. I idly wondered how deep the precious element went on the statue. Was it solid gold, like the paiza Marco Polo reportedly carried, a tablet that served as a diplomatic passport within Kublai Khan’s empire? Or just thinly glazed with the metal, like the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft, which is mostly copper? The cover of the record is aluminum, and it is etched with clues for making sense of its contents and origins: renderings of a phonograph record and the stylus needed to play it, a map showing the location of our solar system in relation to fourteen pulsars with distinct periods, and more. Electroplated over this is an invisible veneer of uranium, a radioactive element that would naturally decay into daughter isotopes over time, giving whatever scientifically literate extraterrestrial civilization that discovered the Voyager probe a sense of the eons elapsed since its launch.
Maybe the stories we tell ourselves, our cherished slant on things, is similarly vulnerable to slow decay. The farther I travelled along the Silk Road, the more the Golden Record seemed a lie, and not just because its surface didn’t reflect its depths. Far more revealing than what was included in that cosmic-message-in-a-bottle, I’d come to realize, is what Sagan and his committee left out, namely details like women twitching alone on sidewalks. In fact, the record doesn’t contain any hint of war or greed or death or cruelty. The closest it comes to acknowledging the existence of sadness is the sound of a baby crying, and its most squeamish inclusion is a picture of an ichneumon wasp, which was selected to illustrate the natural phenomenon of flight. An odd choice, given this parasitic insect burrows inside other insects to deposit its eggs, which hatch into larvae that gnaw their way out. “Other insects, like bees,
have lives more in keeping with our moral and social sense,” admitted Sagan, “but this creature is an inhabitant of Earth too, and who were we to pass judgement on its way of life?”
Yet Sagan’s committee passed countless judgments on what was meaningful about life on Earth, and ultimately decided to present, with few exceptions, our best and brightest side to the cosmos. As a result, the Golden Record reads like a sanitized encyclopedia of earthly existence, the equivalent of the abridged version of Marco Polo’s travels that I read as a kid. To their credit, Sagan’s committee did include Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting blues rendition of “Dark Was the Night,” an old hymn about facing nightfall with no place to sleep but the cold, hard ground. Not that you can glean this from the lyrics, for there are none in this version: Johnson plays the bottleneck slide guitar and hums wordlessly through the three-minute track. All the wonder and heartbreak in the world brims over what he doesn’t say, but I doubted alien beings would pick up on such subtleties. As such, the record effectively portrays the Earth as a planet whose peaceful denizens are devoted to music, flight, the art of possibility. The sort of cozy, blinkered world into which Siddhartha Gautama was born. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he left it behind.
The rain left snail-traces of slime everywhere it fell, including on the snails. When the tour was over, the rickshaw driver dropped us at a café to wait out the downpour. An ox had a similar idea and shuffled beneath the awning of the neighbouring fruit and vegetable market. Huge bones poked at the taut tarp of the creature’s skin. A hump the size and shape of a human head stared out of its back, keeping watch while the ox nuzzled at limes stacked in neat green pyramids. The shopkeeper appeared with a pail and tried to shoo the creature away by flicking drops of water at its face—the real face, not the hump, but either way it was more a baptism than a deterrent. Finally the ox ambled off, a slow, unhurried swaying that set its hump nodding in all directions, from side to side and up and down in that manner so distinctive of the Indian subcontinent, as if saying yes and no to everything at once.
After Lumbini I saw Siddhartha everywhere I looked in Nepal, the way you learn a new word and suddenly notice it all the time. There was Siddhartha Bank, where the fat paunch of the teller sweated a dark halo through his shirt as he counted out rupees. There was Siddhartha Highway, paved in speed and ambition and occasionally flattened cobras, which looked from a distance like cracks in the road. Advertising in Nepal seemed universally energized by the belief that branding could redeem any enterprise, make it sacred by association or at least draw in devout customers. What would the real Buddha say, I wondered as I biked past Siddhartha Internet Café, if he could see such monuments in his name? Perhaps he’d remind us that the slower you travel on the Siddhartha Highway, the more meaningful the trip. Maybe he’d stress that money is a false idol, a mirage induced by the heat differential between our heads and hearts. Or perhaps he’d giggle and say, No problem, as the Dalai Lama reportedly did when asked what he thought of the bars and nightclubs the Chinese had built near the Potala Palace. I suppose spiritual life, like any kind of travel, hinges on the everyday even as it taunts the trivial: the material world matters, the Dalai Lama implied by his answer, but only so much.
Farther west the roads were flat and full of bicycles, many as burdened or more burdened than ours. Some carried racks of live chickens swinging upside down by their feet, others hauled mountains of half-ripe bananas. The single-speeds popular in Nepal had high handlebars that forced their riders into extreme upright postures, lending a regal dignity to the pelotons. These bicycles were not just a means of transport but also of self-expression, whether in the form of bouquets of flowers fastened to handlebars or bright fabrics fluttering from hubs. Other cyclists stood out by their creative riding styles, like the little girl who was too small for her bike so she rode it through the frame, with one leg threaded between the top and bottom bars, standing in the pedals and hustling along as though bicycles were designed to be ridden that way.
White butterflies drafted off us as we biked toward Bardia National Park. At one point I pedalled through a cluster of them, and my wheels seemed to rise in the release of wings and dust from the road. We took a few days off at the park in hopes of seeing Nepali wildlife that wasn’t roadkill. Despite the heat and humidity I wished I’d worn long pants and sleeves as we followed two guides into the Babai valley, an ecosystem evolved to impale: tall grasses so sharp it was like strolling through knives, and crocodiles lazing along rivers with sawblades for smiles. I kept mistaking water buffalo for rhinos, but we didn’t see the latter until the next day, when a mother and her baby materialized on the far bank of a river. I don’t know how long we watched them, but it was long enough for the fresh mud on their hides to go from shiny to a dull plaster. This species of rhino—the greater one-horned, or Rhinoceros unicornis—only survives in a few isolated nature reserves due to habitat loss, sport hunting (now banned), and poaching throughout its former range in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Because of their use in traditional Asian medicines, rhino horns fetch high prices on the black market despite the fact that they are composed of pure keratin. Sickly people would benefit just as much, therapeutically speaking, from gnawing on their own fingernails. I could barely make out the mother rhino’s miniscule horn, and the baby didn’t have one, just a pair of eyes like wet pebbles, staring at us across galaxies. We spend millions of dollars trying to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations, I marvelled to myself, but we still don’t know what a rhino says when it snorts and sidles away in the grass. At least I didn’t, though our local guide certainly did. “Time to go,” he said, motioning for us to backtrack.
Reeds razored my bare legs as we hiked back to the lodge. On the way, the guide explained how monkeys sound alarms when they spot a Bengal tiger, which warns away the deer those tigers like to hunt. In return, however unconsciously, the deer nurture lice that monkeys harvest from their fur. We heard monkey alarms, but they were probably triggered by us, because we didn’t see deer or tigers. What we did see was a hole the shape and size of a large fence post, dimensions I didn’t even recognize as a possible footprint until our guide explained who made it. Elephants are among the smartest, most empathetic creatures on Earth, with brains as neurally complex as humans’; they use tools, bury their dead, shed tears, and occasionally go on furious rampages. The guide described how elephants sometimes ransack the rice fields near Bardia, ruining the harvest and crushing whatever mud-and-thatch houses stand in their way. And who could blame them, with humans encroaching on their territory on all sides? An electric fence had been set up around the perimeter of the park to protect local villagers, but the fence only worked when there was power, and the power went out often, as we learned that night after dinner.
When the lights went out Mel retired to our room, but I lingered in the dining hall, reading by headlamp and a candle that sizzled brighter whenever bugs flew into the flame. In the lodge’s small library, among the usual mysteries and thrillers and romance novels that pile up in places frequented by budget travellers, I’d been surprised to find a book about Milarepa, the Tibetan Buddhist monk and poet who lived in a cave and subsisted on a diet of nettles, which seemed less a path to awakening than to madness and starvation. I wanted badly to understand Buddhism but couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around its most basic precepts. Didn’t a desire for enlightenment still count as desire, meaning the goal is undone by the longing to achieve it? And what was so compelling about nirvana anyway? Wasn’t permanent departure from the cycles of rebirth just a glorified way of checking out, effectively a one-way mission to Mars? The wish to flee samsara, the phenomenal world with all its flaws and illusions, smacked to me of escapism. Give me this beautiful, broken planet over any kind of blank slate. Then again, I suppose our own flaws and illusions are the hardest to see, never mind flee.
Outside, cicadas clattered metallically in the dark, a chorus of spilled cutlery. I made my way to the room by headlamp and thought
about Siddhartha’s mad wish to end the suffering of all beings: you couldn’t accuse the guy of aiming low, settling for the possible. And why not err on the side of audacity when it comes to this one and only life? Of course, Buddhists beg to differ about the one and only part, but still, taking no chances, exploration seemed the most rational possible response to finding yourself alive. You wake up suddenly in a strange land: What else is there to do but look around? Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation, but exploring still exists, will always exist: In the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here. In the sort of “absolutely unmixed attention” the philosopher Simone Weil called prayer. In any small, useless, searching gesture—a pilgrimage, a poem—that admits suffering even as it tips the balance of the world, however briefly and immeasurably, toward wildness.
Mel was fast asleep and the room was dark. I brushed my teeth by headlamp and lay down on a mattress that still held the heat of day. When I dozed off I dreamed of rhinos with distant nebulas in their stare, and tigers padding through the forest with full-moon eyes—lives flawed and restless and full of desire, which is another way of saying full of stars.
The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.