Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  “The locals are very distressed about you,” Sanday tells Laird. “We’ve worked very hard for four years to establish trust here with everybody, and you have a bad reputation from ten years ago.”

  “I’ve heard you have a bad reputation too,” says Laird, ambushed. A stranger to the art of discretion, he wants to mouth a counteraccusation but wisely doesn’t.

  “Who’s telling you this?” says Sanday.

  “Who’s telling you?” says Laird.

  “Well . . .” says Sanday, hesitating. And then, pushed onstage by a trickster spirit, the premier witness for the prosecution happens to walk by. “This guy,” says Sanday, motioning over the dour-faced fellow. “This guy Tashi says you owe him twelve thousand rupees from ten years ago.” Laird and Tashi fold themselves into a heated discussion. Sanday and Linda back away and leave.

  The amount is roughly $200, overpayment for some rope, six wool bags, and rental on a tent. Laird has no recollection of the debt. Tashi, as everyone knows, had worked for Laird regularly, earning many tens of thousands of rupees. There’s not much Laird can do—of course he’ll pay. “There’s plenty of room for this to have happened,” Laird tells me after the fellow storms away, “plenty of room. I’m not saying Tashi invented this. He kept saying, ‘I was like your child,’ you know, this whole feudal thing, and I was his father, and he trusted me completely. And what am I supposed to say to John when he says people are saying bad things about me from ten years ago?”

  The dispute is only the tip of the Machiavellian iceberg lodged deep in Mustang, Nepal, Third World development, cross-cultural interaction, human nature. Who’s got dibs on what? Who owes? Who controls? Standing on the street, Laird feels the anguish, as anybody would, of accusation.

  There is at least one other person besides Tashi both Laird and I know Sanday might have named: Brot Coburn, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal occasionally employed by the American Himalayan Foundation. Coburn is the embodiment of the My Village syndrome common to Western aid workers in the Third World, jealous of any incursions onto his turf, and from personal experience I know that Brot, impulsive and sanctimonious, can’t restrain himself from committing gratuitous acts of cruelty and malice. Laird and Coburn had known each other for many years and the relationship was always, from Tom’s point of view, antagonistic. Still, they were expats in the Himalayas and sometimes found themselves relying on each other’s magnanimity. The year Laird lived in Mustang, Brot and adventurer Stan Armington arrived in Lo Manthang just before Tiji; Laird allowed Brot to share his quarters, as Tom himself had stayed at Brot’s house a few years earlier in Tengboche, where Coburn was wiring the monastery for the American Himalayan Foundation.

  Falling asleep talking in Lo Manthang, Laird mentioned the trail the flood had cleared through the upper gorge. What, no Westerners have ever traveled the river route through the gorge? Brot wants to go; Laird can’t bear the thought of being one-upped by a rival so he accompanied Brot and Stan. He left them at Chele and rode back up to Lo Manthang. Brot and Stan continued down to Jomsom. That summer and at least for the next two years, until Tom confronted him, Brot began rumormongering in Kathmandu, suggesting to people that Tom Laird was up in Mustang stealing art and smuggling out animal parts (the skin of Matthiessen’s alleged yeti?). John Sanday would have had to plug his ears not to hear some version of Brot’s gossip, and it’s difficult now to believe that the temple’s generator broke down just as we entered the temple.

  “You begin to understand,” says Laird as we walk back to Sirendra’s, “the people leveling the accusations believe it, they believe it. Then what can you do, especially if you can’t have a logical conversation about it? How can you appease them?” How do you appease them and, in the end, appease the gods? The story gets better, or worse, depending on your loyalties. To quote Brot Coburn long ago quoting Dharma teachings to chasten me: Karma ripens.

  That evening a velvet couch is carried out into the square for the king to watch the ACAP-sponsored song festival, the intent of which seems to be to assert Nepali culture in Mustang. The mastiffs bark hellishly from the balcony of the palace while Thakali women perform a traditional Nepalese dance, and teenagers in the audience scribble on the appliqué thangka with laser penlights. And yet ACAP fills the void left by the central government, and the NGO’s contributions to the quality of life in Mustang are real, even as the rongbas, the people from “below,” assume an ever-greater presence in the affairs of Lo Manthang.

  The following day, when the appointed hour arrives, Tom enlists a Sherpa to help him with his gear and the three of us walk over to the Thubchen temple. The generator’s working, the floodlights burn onto the walls, the crew is on the scaffolding, and Laird, resolute, sets up his tripod. Sanday, resigned to Laird’s tenacity, engages me in an amicable discussion about the restoration. The project is in many ways a model worth replicating, a transfer of knowledge and skill into the communities: Sanday and his experts are training twenty-six young Lobas from villages throughout Mustang in wall-painting conservation. Four more trainees are carpenters; five others are being instructed in masonry repair.

  Given my first impression of him the previous day, I think I misjudged Sanday, and when I ask about the generator, I believe him when he says he was told it had broken and doesn’t know otherwise; if it was sabotaged, he doesn’t know about it. But as we talk, one of the young Loba trainees pulls the switch on the floodlights, the workers monkey down from the scaffolding—this time, nobody bothers with the ruse of a broken generator. Sanday seems genuinely surprised. These trainees, all of them teenagers, twentysomethings, are a new breed of Loba, products of the opening, of democratic verities and illusions, a generation molded by forces they have mounted but will never conquer without being conquered in return. Now an anger has stirred them, seized their emotions. They are striking because of Laird, and the charges fly. Sanday translates the gist of it to me: The kids venerate these paintings and think Tom desecrated them.

  In Lo Manthang, the central cleavage on the Tom issue was religious conservatism, exacerbated by the vestiges of feudalism—whether somebody was a noble or had been a serf—and, incredibly, the drought of 1992. And money, naturally—people were convinced he made a fortune on the Matthiessen book. When Laird first arrived in 1991, the villagers were vehemently opposed to his attempts to photograph the massive wall paintings in the temples, but the king had given his blessing, and Laird was willing to suffer social opprobrium to record the works, because he believed then, and remains firm in the belief, that artwork is protected once you photograph it. But the Lobas hold the conviction, also very strong, that photography angers the gods and invites stealing. In 1992, the year Laird photographed the temples, the rains were late, and he was blamed, forced to choke on the difference between the supernatural and the absurd, between East and West. Then one day three wandering yogis came to town, the rains followed, and Laird packed up his gear and was gone.

  Not that Laird didn’t make mistakes in Mustang. He was dumb enough to start a my-guys-don’t-like-your-guys feud, never clearly explained to me, with the Crown Prince. One day he scaled a chorten with his camera and the king himself warned Laird that this was taboo. On a trek up to the northwest highlands to photograph Chudzong, the legendary water fort, over Laird’s strong objections his liaison officer took a rifle along to shoot endangered argali sheep, which caused a great furor back in the walled city, people claiming he was terrorizing the countryside and breaking into temples. It was always rumors, and always depressing.

  Ten years ago in the temples, Laird would yell at Tashi and his other helpers: Don’t touch a ladder unless I’m there; if these paintings get damaged I’ll be blamed. Now the trainees have mobbed around Laird in the Thubchen temple to echo his words back to him: You damaged paintings with your ladders, you stood with your legs spread over deities on the floor, you’re a bad man, and nothing you can say will change our opinion. Laird is appalled,
despairing—he loved the paintings and felt compelled to show them to the world. The Lobas can’t see his heart throbbing for the art, never understood his passion; they thought it was about money. Tom came and treated us like animals, one of the young workers tells me. How old were you then? I ask him. Seven.

  Sanday won’t intercede and I can’t really fault him—he has a future here and Laird doesn’t. Laird pleads for his friend Linda to defend him and, halfheartedly, she tries, but to no avail and, overcome by the certitude of his detractors, understanding that it never mattered to them if any of his crimes were true or not, Tom weeps. Beyond embarrassment, the tableau spews forth enormous pathos. The last thing Tom Laird could ever have imagined for his life had come true—he was the Ugly American. In the eyes of the Lobas, he had caused a fucking drought. What could be uglier than that? And now ten years later he could still see it in their faces—he was the Ugly American who came and caused the drought. Symbiotic fantasies of paternalism and gratitude exploded like terrorists’ bombs and healing is not possible. In obvious pain, Tom listens to the feelings coming out of these kids, knowing that many of their fathers said the same things ten years ago. But back then it was local, a sizable difference, and now it’s spread out into the larger community of foreigners and institutes and you could see his shoulders slump under the weight, see the stress in his legs, struggling to hold himself upright.

  Yet regardless of Laird’s peccadilloes and shortcomings, I empathized deeply with his predicament, and this is why you’re hearing this story, because he is no more innocent and no more guilty than any Westerner working in the Third World, where even the purest heart becomes quickly entangled in profound and ancient conflicts that elude resolution or reconciliation. ACAP’s mantra, printed in big red letters at its Lo Manthang office on the square, is a pretty thought, a seductive lie: Nepal is here to change you, not for you to change Nepal. More true are the words of Lo Manthang’s new amji, the royal physician, who carries forward his revered father’s dream of a school for Tibetan medicine. A year after his father died, the school was built by outside sponsorship. “Only foreigners,” the amji believes, “can make real change up here.”

  A legion of Tom Lairds roams the planet’s hinterlands. They’re always out there, autodidacts, loners, freelancers, info-hustlers, image hounds, students of adventure dedicated to exotic histories and enigmatic cultures, surviving by their wits, altruistic or not, imperfect but devoted, dilettantes and professionals bearing witness, brave and arrogant, exasperating and unprotected and chronically misunderstood and underappreciated, skirting convention, working without a safety net but not without a value system, not without scruples, not without, for lack of a better word, a calling. Yes, karma ripens . . . and vindicates. The Lairds of the world are a catalyst, part of a trigger mechanism certainly; they come and they go, and then it’s up to the locals themselves, like the Lobas, to close the gap between the past and the future. Or not.

  Listen, there had been other episodes in the temples of Lo ­Manthang—film crews chased off, cameras damaged, film destroyed, liaisons intimidated, endless misunderstanding. Every great achievement comes packaged in some variety of hurt and nightmare. Sanday is not paranoid, he had to choose sides, and for the trainees, John Sanday is a gold mine. But for Laird, this is nothing but watercooler politics played out in a cultural quicksand, with no objective place to stand and fight. Tenzing, the project’s cultural liaison, steps into the fray to calm everybody down. The past is past, he tells the workers; now you have to create a new relationship with Mustang and the people, he says to Laird.

  So what should I do? Tom asks the workers. You should support the American Himalayan Foundation, they say. Next time work with the community, a young woman says, the implication being, not with the king.

  Support the American Himalayan Foundation! For Laird it was like hearing the oracle speak and telling yourself, No, that can’t be true. In a sense, their loyalty had been bought, just as when they were serfs to the king. The gods were now out of the picture, along with the raja, the mayor, the head lama, who approved of Laird’s work in Mustang. What remained was the American Himalayan Foundation, an organization that Laird felt had shunned and denigrated him. This is all Laird needs to hear to collect himself and resume his obstinacy. He looks at his wristwatch and tells John Sanday he has twenty-seven paid minutes left in the shoot. My allegiance is waning in the face of Tom’s stubbornness; I try to pull him out of there but he won’t budge.

  Go up, Sanday tells the trainees, pointing to the scaffolding. Let them do it. If they make a bad story . . . (he grabs a kid and twists a fist toward his face). Was that supposed to be sarcastic? Tom asks me later. Yes, I think, just a little joke, but I remember Tenzing had pulled me aside to say we should thank the king before we leave Lo Manthang, because if we didn’t have a connection with the king, we’d have “big trouble.” Back at his tripod, Laird squints into his camera’s viewfinder and snaps a picture. “One picture—100,000 rupees,” says one of the trainees gathered around him. The shutter clicks again. “Two pictures—200,000 rupees,” says another young Loba. “Look at how much money he’s already made,” they jeer. From atop the scaffolding, the workers pelt him with paint-soaked cotton balls.

  “John’s his own worst enemy,” Laird says when we’re back on the street. “He’s just like me.”

  On the first hot, bright, clear day since we rode out of the canyon, Laird and I ladder up through somebody’s roof to walk the eastern wall of the city. From our vantage point we can see that most of Lo Manthang’s houses have solar panels, some have solar water heaters, one has what you’re going to find anywhere in the world these days—a satellite dish. Directly below us, a field is overtaken by the construction of a new boarding school for monks. Laird is hugely melancholic. The people are gone, he says, the people who cared about you, the people who just wanted to be better. They died. The amji, the Kempo. They possessed human qualities Laird wanted to emulate. Even the fantasy of the Good King had receded into history, and with it the peasants who still believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Ah, but what exactly is Laird’s regret? The insularity, some might say the purity, of Lo Manthang has been contaminated by the modern world, by time itself, an inevitable fate, and not the tragedy that Westerners might assume. I think Laird understands that, and understands that in fundamental ways Mustang is less changeable than Death Valley, than the bottom of the ocean, than the moon.

  “The first thing people expressed ten years ago was hopelessness,” says Laird. “‘We’re living here like dung beetles, eating on the carcass. We’re so poor we can’t even take care of the things our fathers left us. Why do you want to come here? We work with dust and eat dust. You work with light and eat light. Why are you here eating all this doolah—dust?’ They were my grandparents on the farm in Mississippi.”

  The passage of those ten years has made the world of the Loba no longer simple or static, and I remember Mahendra telling me that “life wasn’t confusing until the queri came—you made it confusing.” Not just Tom Laird—everybody. Laird inhales heavily and sighs; not self-pity, I think, but grief. “I love the paintings,” he says. “I love these paintings so much, and if I had just walked away from it things would be different for me up here now, it would be so much easier.” Any role he had to play in the history of Mustang is over, kaput. His legacy here, despite the emotions, fabrications, distortions, despite his own cynicism, is positive, life-affirming. He was a forerunner of change, a not insignificant particle in the convergence of forces—democracy, tourism, economic reform in China—that lifted the veil from the Lost Kingdom of Lo. However embittering, that it’s not ending well for him is perhaps irrelevant, and the real cost to Laird is internal, he has lost the dream, the young man’s dream of hidden kingdoms. A year from now, after photographing terror and civil war and massacres, Laird will move from Kathmandu to New Orleans; after thirty years he is too tired to stay.

  The gro
an of horns in the palace square ends our conversation. Tiji, the annual cleansing ritual, has begun. As they have for centuries, the lamas in their magnificent costumes will perform their legendary slow-footed dance. The courtyard will twist with incense and dust as the good spirits, the better spirits, pull mankind back from the brink of darkness. The demon—the tattered skin of a Bengal tiger—will be symbolically stabbed and defeated. In the crush of spectators will be Mustang’s own version of mall girls, flirting unabashedly with a posse of Loba hipsters in Chinese jeans, Chinese jackets, Chinese running shoes, looking very much like any group of suave young men on any street of any city in Asia—the generation who will shape Mustang’s future, or abandon it to the wind. The new will battle the old and win at best a synthesis of tradition and opportunity, and at least this is certain: the next generation has already adapted to the process.

  The horns will wail and bleat throughout the evening. A year’s worth of malignancy will be paraded beyond the ancient walls and destroyed. The elders in their white robes will discharge their matchlocks into the air, children will bowl firecrackers at each other’s feet. Returning from a meeting where he has cleared his debt with Tashi—“I now have an enemy with twelve thousand rupees”—Laird will be accosted by townswomen, who have just finished with their civic duty, who will grab him, paw at his sleeve. “We watered the street,” they will nag. “Pay us,” they’ll demand, a more overt version of the Lo Manthang shakedown. Life will be renewed, absolution dispensed sparingly, but nothing will be forgiven, and in the morning Mahendra and Tomay will bring the horses and we will leave.

  Where are you going?

  Tula—below. What Lobas call Nepal.

  PART FOUR