Special Lassi

by Amrita Chatterjee

  “It looks like a rainstorm is on the way.” River noticed the sudden appearance of clouds, to which the waiter added, “oh yes, it is. He usually comes from there.” He pointed to a very specific hill that towered over the others. I liked how he had referred to the rainstorm as ‘he’ as though it were a mighty warrior, recklessly rushing down the hills with his sinewy all-encompassing hands stretched out into the sky.

  Within the next few seconds, the outer corner of Fewa went from green to a blurry canvas of grey. The hills that had looked so imposing just minutes ago were now dissolving into vapours, they really were. Nothing could be seen of them, their heads were swallowed by the storm’s shadow. Wild winds gushed towards us, chilling our toes. We could see the raindrops gradually inching forward, one segment of the lake at a time, teasing playfully, ‘okay, here we come’. Boats rushed back to the shore, their bright colours clearly visible in the surrounding fog. The first half of the lake was still calm, but the other distant half was turbulent and furrowed with energy. Women ran back to their homes with huge bundles of hay on their heads. Their saris billowed out to the side like parachutes about to take off.

  When the rain finally hit our shack, we felt the wetness seep deep into our bones. The storm continued relentlessly for the next four hours and we continued to watch spellbound. River’s electric ice tea came to our table in the longest glass ever with layers of deep blue, green and teal carefully poured on top of each other. It was genuinely loaded with charge and topped with a glowing, star-shaped stirrer. We waited till midnight for the rain to stop, but when it didn’t, we had no choice but to walk back to the hotel in complete darkness. A few Tibetan curio shops were in the process of closing down, so what little yellow light there was on the streets also faded as we got closer.

  “So, I guess the shrooms were a waste of money,” River said to me quietly as though he cared; I knew he didn’t. This evening had been beyond intoxicating, shrooms or no shrooms.

  “It’s okay, at least they weren’t poisonous or we would’ve never lived to see the rainstorm.”

  “True, very true. Well, thank God for small mercies!”

  Whistling Windows

  In Pokhara, there was a hair salon right next to our hotel and everyday, as we walked to the German bakery for breakfast, the man from the barbershop insisted on waving at River and offering him a very good haircut.

  And River would call back saying, “Someday, my friend, someday!”

  “You say that to him every time; you’re getting his hopes up.” “Well, I do mean to get an Indian haircut, I’m just waiting for the right time.”

  “What do you mean by ‘Indian haircut’?”

  “Well, you know… all the men here seem to have the same hair – short and clean. Everything in India has its own special character, like Indian-flavoured ice cream, Indian-smelling incense, even the pizzas here are so Indian.”

  “But we are in Nepal right now.”

  “Oh yeah, shit. Thank fuck I didn’t get a haircut.”

  Our time in this lake city came to an end much sooner than we wanted it to because Lumbini was waiting for us. We had to endure another torturous bus journey to get there. This time our seats were in the front and River was relieved to have adequate legroom. But it was naïve of us to assume that we could stake a claim over all that space. A few minutes later, three benches were stowed into the coveted area between the bulkhead and our seats. Then came the people, at least a dozen of them, in all their emaciated glory. An old man flashed us a toothless grin as he squeezed himself between our legs.

  “Fuck! I can’t do this. I’m going to ask these men if I can sit on the roof.” River surrendered before we had even started moving. Obviously, he was not allowed to go up. Loud music blared through the speakers and rain lashed furiously at the windows. The thin glass was useless against the torrential downpour and I kept worrying about our bags, which were tied to the roof.

  Three hours into the journey, we were suddenly told to get off and switch buses. We asked about our luggage and they said that they had already transferred it. There was no way for us to confirm that and we gloomily hopped from one hell to another. In this bus, our seats were somewhere in the middle, which was slightly better. However, after another three hours, we were shipped onto a third bus, where a man was travelling with his pet goat. A family had taken over the entire back row and filled it with straw stools, mattresses, a wooden table and chairs.

  “Are these people actually moving their stuff on a local bus? That’s commendable!” River took a quick picture of the mess.

  “I think the man with the goat is the real winner here.”

  “Oh, of course. Shit! I think the goat just farted.”

  It had and it continued to do so till we were rudely dumped in Bhairawa, still a few kilometres away from Lumbini. It was already nine at night.

  “What do you mean by ‘this is it’? We paid you to take us all the way to Lumbini,” I argued with the conductor, but he slammed the door in my face, saying, “Just take a bus from here tomorrow. It’s too late to go to Lumbini now.” And with this, he went away.

  The two of us stood in the rain for a while, looking up and down the road for any signs of life. There were no streetlights, no signboards, no shops; where the hell were we going to sleep? Bhairawa was certainly not a tourist hotspot and for once I really missed the screaming touts.

  “Let’s just keep walking.”

  River was exhausted but he rolled up his sleeves and marched forward with determination.

  “You know, I was expecting to get stranded in a desolate village ever since I came to India. Can’t believe it took so long for this to happen.”

  “What? Why would you expect that? There are a billion people on this subcontinent.”

  “I don’t know, it’s just this notion that we have in England. I’d also been warned that I won’t get to eat meat anywhere. That was ridiculous. But look there, that building has a hotel sign on top.”

  I quickly turned towards the building that River had spotted and unfortunately, it was not a pretty sight. Besides being a horrible crummy dump, it also had drunkards stumbling outside the front gate.

  “Oh no! No, no, no. Just NO.”

  “Come on! It’s just for one night, or do you want to keep walking in the rain?”

  “Argh, fine.”

  The hotel’s interior was even worse. I might have thrown up a little when I saw the room and the common bathroom on the side that stank like a pair of sweaty balls. Men in checked lungis were roaming all over the floor and they kept going into the bathroom to spit out the red fluid from their paans.

  I had no appetite but we had to catch an early bus the next day, which would leave us no time for breakfast, so we had to go downstairs and swallow whatever abomination we could find. The hotel had stopped serving dinner a few minutes ago, but they directed us to a roadside dhaba a few metres ahead. The glow of naked yellow bulbs in the absolute darkness led us to the creaky benches quickly and a boy came around with a washcloth to wipe our table. The set meal consisted of all-you-can-eat portions of mutton curry, dal, a mixture of vegetables and rice. We got some beer and were getting ready to eat when the boy, who had just wiped our table, dipped his hand into the huge vat of rice to transfer it to a smaller serving tray.

  “Okay, I’m a bit paranoid about eating here.” River rubbed his belly, looking very worried. I was so tired that I couldn’t care less. Besides, I was fascinated by the boy who was serving us. Even in the dim light, I could see that he had a remarkable face; thin straight nose, a dignified jaw and big baleful eyes with long eyelashes. I wondered what he was doing at a place like this; he definitely looked like he was made for better things in life.

  Thankfully, the food turned out to be great. The preparation was simple and the dal was as comforting as my grandmother’s ladle. After eating at fancy restaurants for the past two weeks, this meal was a reminder of why one longs for the warmth of a familiar hearth. The dinner and the
refreshing beer took away the edge from Bhairawa. The truck drivers and rickshaw wallahs sitting next to us kept glancing at River, who was licking his fingers by now.

  This night, in a lot of ways, was a true test of our backpacking spirit. Our room was unbearably hot and infested with mosquitoes. We didn’t even bother changing our clothes and as soon as daylight appeared at the window, we ran out to the bus stand. By eight, we were finally standing in Lumbini.

  To our everlasting relief, the lodging facilities at Lumbini were infinitely better than Bhairawa. And they ought to be, since pilgrims from all over the world come here to pay their respects. I remember being a little apprehensive about taking up a dorm room on the sixth floor, but all my reservations were put to rest as soon as we stepped in. The room was huge and filled with several low-lying beds. And because we were the only two people staying there, it was practically all ours. Big French windows surrounded the beds; there was hardly any wall in between the hinges. Sunshine was flooding in from every direction, there was also a spacious terrace outside that offered a panoramic view of the whole of Lumbini. I felt as though we had flown into our nest, as two weary birds must do after a long flight.

  A few minutes later, while I was taking a long cold shower to scrub off the grime from yesterday’s travels, I heard some sounds that closely resembled a deep woodwind instrument, perhaps an oboe. I cut short my bath to find out where this music was coming from.

  “Who is playing this oboe or whatever it is?”

  River looked up at me from his notebook and started laughing.

  “No one.”

  “What do you mean? I can still hear it!”

  He laughed some more, “By ‘no one’ I mean ‘no person’; it’s the wind.”

  “The wind?”

  “Yeah, as it goes through one window to the other, it whistles.”

  I couldn’t believe River. Was it really the wind? If it had just been a swish here and a swoosh there, I would’ve considered it plausible, but these weren’t random sounds, this was a song! It had a specific melody and rhythm.

  “Are you sure it’s the wind?”

  “Yes, I am. Try closing the windows, you’ll see.”

  I did and the music immediately died down. Then I opened them again and the tune was back. I was speechless. All I could do was lay down on the bed in wonder and let the pink curtains dance over my face. What is it that man can do that Mother Nature can’t do 20 times better? She can turn the most hard-hearted realists into slobbering sentimental idiots at the drop of a hat. Even now, when I think about where I’d like to live eventually, I always come back to this dorm – almost empty except for a bed and a thick wooden desk in the corner, with all the windows I can afford. What a glorious existence it would be!

  While I was thinking about my future, River asked if I wanted to get high and I said, “I think I already am. Let’s save the dope for a shitty day.”

  The Sal Tree

  Till the final decade of the last millennium, Lumbini was a small village, sequestered from the rest of the world, surrounded by wilderness and dusty roads. But after acquiring the status of a World Heritage Site in 1997, the village was turned into the Lumbini Development Zone, a sort of walled museum for all things Buddha. The only two means to explore the compound are rickshaws or hired bicycles. Considering River’s aversion to rickshaws, we chose the latter. The day was pleasantly sunny when we hired the bicycles, but the moment we sat on them, thunderclouds galloped across the sky and ensured that we were drenched from head to toe. Then as soon as we took cover under a shed, the clouds vanished into whatever hell they’d come from, leaving us with suffocating humidity and slushy trails. This hide-and-seek went on throughout the day and we spent every other hour either getting wet or getting fried under the sun.

  The map that we were handed with our entry tickets showed a big circular blob at one corner. It was labelled as the Sacred Garden. Several brightly coloured veins spread out from it towards the west.

  “What’s all this?” we asked the lady at the counter.

  “Why! These are the monasteries built by countries across the world to honour Buddha.” She was shocked by our ignorance, but we weren’t done embarrassing ourselves.

  “And the Sacred Garden?”

  “Oh you two! It’s the Maya Devi Temple, the place where Buddha was born.”

  This seemed like the obvious starting point and soon we were soon parking our bicycles outside the garden. A few Asian tourists were walking out of the gate, but they were completely silent and lost in thought. Several men were working in the garden, but even they remained quiet and only acknowledged us with smiles. The two of us stopped talking immediately as though we’d received a subliminal command to do so. The temple stood in front of us like a warehouse with naked iron pillars and a solid concrete roof that cut off all sunlight. I understood why it was so when I looked below at the sunken remains of a building that dated back to the 3rd century BC. It’s hard to explain how one feels in the presence of something so old. Suddenly, time becomes very real; you can touch it and see it in each and every mark on the crumbling stone blocks.

  I foolishly took a few steps towards the right but was promptly reminded by the guard to move in the clockwise direction only. Of course! How could I forget that this was a stupa, in fact, the most important stupa in the world! At the heart of the temple, encased in a modern glass box, was the stone nativity sculpture of Maya Devi. She was shown holding on to a nearby sal tree while giving birth to Buddha. Below this sculpture was a dark hollow space, where another glass box held the marker stone placed by King Asoka at the exact spot where Buddha was born. Some of the bricks still had remnants of gold paint and vermillion on them; it was amazing to see that they’d survived for 2,000 years. The temple’s austere and unadorned structure embodied the true spirit of Buddha’s teachings. And the marker stone, despite being a simple crooked slab, appeared holier than all the gold statues we had seen so far.

  After circumambulating the sculpture and paying our respects to Buddha, we spent another few minutes at the sacred pond outside, which is also known as the Pushkarani. Next to the pond stood the rustic Ashoka pillar, which carried a very interesting quote in the ancient language of Pali: Sakyamuni Buddha, was born here… the tax of Lumbini village is reduced to the eighth part (only). It was amusing to see that despite being a keen devotee, Ashoka still had taxes on his mind when he discovered Lumbini.

  We then roamed willy-nilly all over the village on the bumpy, gravelled pathways. Of the dozen or so monasteries we visited in that single day, my favourites, architecturally, were the ones built by Myanmar and Thailand. Some of them were still under construction, but most were up and running with ponds full of blooming lotus plants outside the entrance. The German monastery had some great murals of Swayambhunath, which depicted pilgrims chanting in a trance-like state, their eyes stoned to oblivion. There were also tons of horrifying torture scenes – a demon drilling holes into a girl’s back or boiling her in a cauldron full of hot oil. The building was surrounded by a meticulously kept garden, but its loveliness was somewhat ruined by the vulgar statues placed in every corner and the silly plastic frog floating in the pond. The Burmese monastery had a tall golden spire that extended into the sky like a lightning rod. On the circumference of the white circular dome underneath the spire were seven doors, which were marked with the seven days of the week. I didn’t understand why that was so.

  Tired and thirsty, we decided to take a break when we saw a sign next to the exit gate saying Pilgrim’s Resting Hut. The hut’s thatched roof let the sun in but not the heat. Nobody was at the counter and we had to knock at a door behind the cash counter to find out if we could get something to drink. A thin grey-haired man slowly emerged from the room within; we seemed to have woken him up from a siesta. But he attended to us quickly and I swear, the fizzy sound of popping soda bottles had never sounded so good to me before. He sat down beside us and began the usual round of questions. Where are you fr
om? Where are you going? As he spoke, his Adam’s apple quivered like a fig stuffed into a sack.

  I’ve lost count of the number of times we had to answer these same questions over and over during this trip. A new day, a new person, a new setting, but the questions remained the same. At least this man spoke excellent English, which was unexpected considering his simple rural getup.

  “It’s very hot today.” We resorted to talking about the weather after all the preliminary queries had been satisfied.

  “Yes, very hot. This is the plains, so it’s only going to get worse.”

  “Oh God! Do you live here in Lumbini?”

  “Of course, this Pilgrim’s Hut is my home now. My wife and I moved here some ten years ago to help the Burmese build this monastery.”

  “You helped them build this? How?”

  “Well, actually I am Nepali by birth but I grew up in Burma. In 1964, while I was studying to be an engineer, the junta took over the country and we were all forced to leave. When we came back to Nepal, I don’t know why, but I felt this intense desire to visit the birthplace of our lord. In the 60s, this whole village was a mess. I almost cried when I saw how badly the holy place had been kept. People were killing animals here, burning the trees, it was very sad.”

  “Really? That’s unbelievable.”

  “No, no, it’s true. Lumbini has a long history of getting buried under the earth and then being dug out by devotees who refuse to let Buddha’s legacy die. Do you know the whole story of Buddha’s birth and King Ashoka?”

  I had read about it in the brochure, but this man was so eager to keep talking that I pretended to not know the details.

  “I know a little bit. Buddha was the prince of Lumbini right?”

  “No! He was the prince of Kapilavastu, which is a few kilometres away from here. You can still see the remains of the old palace in Tilaurakot. In Buddha’s time, there was nothing in Lumbini except thick groves of sal trees. So on the first full moon of the year, as queen Maya Devi was going back to her parents’ house to give birth – this was the custom in those days – she saw a small pond on the way. Nobody knows what came over her in that moment, but she suddenly stopped her palanquin and decided to take a dip in the water.