The king’s men struggle ahead with the horses, far enough beyond us so we don’t have to fret about rocks dislodged onto our skulls or, the ultimate bad day in Mustang, slowing the impact of a horse with your body as it cartwheels into you off the equivalent of a twelve-story building. Sometimes on hands and knees, the group then claws its way up and out onto the wall but I stop, a desperate attempt to clear my vision, and Cat and I fall behind. The two-hundred-foot climb up to the traverse isn’t terribly rigorous, but the traverse itself is my wife’s worst-case fever dream, a scenario I know she has spent her entire waking life avoiding. The ledge dissolves into a scree slide of pulverized shale, billions of flecks of shale slowly tinkling downward like the sound track for a spritz of fairy dust. The slide contains not a footprint, not a hoofprint, no sign that anyone has passed this way since before Noah’s flood. I look over the side to the river straight below, to assure myself the entire expedition isn’t heaped at the bottom.
I’m comforted by the good news, that the slide is roughly three paces across and no more, but where you place/misplace your foot inevitably has dire consequences. I move out onto this geological wound, horrified that I can’t get a firm footing, step gingerly across to solid ground, and turn back for my wife, trying to focus my eyes, but I see her only in watery patches. She is understandably mortified, sick with vertigo; sinusitis has skewed her equilibrium, the wind is knocking her around, and, just looking at her, I know she’s seconds away from being immobilized by terror. I reach out my hand and feel the bones near breaking as she vises on and I pull her across. “I don’t ever want to do that again,” she says, her teeth chattering. For a second I have to hold her up because her knees want to buckle. If I knew I wouldn’t tell her: She has to do it twice more, and the slides are worse. If we were alone I would turn us back, but the fact that the group has crossed ahead of us preempts such a decision. We wait for even the slightest lull of wind and cross the second slide without incident, both of us gasping for air, as if we had been afraid to breathe, as if breathing would have put the tiny chips of shale in motion. When we reach the third and widest slide, Ang Tsering, recognizing the peril, waits for us on the other side, his hand extended, pummeled by the brutal wind.
Ang Tsering was on Everest with a team of Yugoslavians that fatal spring of 1996. At 2:00 p.m. on May 9, five hundred feet from the summit, the weather was turning, the hour was late: He made the decision to turn his climbers around, saving their lives. On May 10 . . . well, everybody on the planet knows what happened that day. At this kill-zone level of hazard on a glacier, the three of us would be roped up, and what’s awful, what’s unthinkable, is our total lack of margin, no backup, no fail-safes, the wall is bare, conditions are suicidal, maximum exposure without handholds or bracings, and no space for adjustment, an extra step to regain your balance and composure. If my wife slips, she’ll pull me over and with me Ang Tsering, unless I let go of her, or let go of him. He, I know, will not let go. Even thinking about it doesn’t matter, because even if she starts to fall, and even if I start to let her go, the velocity of disaster will suck us over the edge as one, like tightrope walkers.
I step out into the middle of the third slide, this nascent avalanche, trying to wedge and plant my feet into the scree and the whole mass, billions of shale splinters, shifts a few centimeters and buries my boots to the ankles. Below me, shale sprinkles straight down into the river. Behind me, my wife is petrified, repeating my name in a way that unnerves me, and the cruel thought zings across my mind, that I am destined to kill her, or she is destined to kill me, here on our twenty-fifth anniversary, on the Lairds’ belated, rotten honeymoon. Crouching forward, Ang Tsering leans as far over the slide as he humanly can, we link our fates together, and I remember Laird’s admonition—Sherpas put their lives in your hands for your fantasies; every other trek a Sherpa would literally be saving a client’s life. Okay. I don’t care whose is the operative fantasy here, reality has checkmated all motivations, frivolous and grand. I reach back for my wife and have to shout at her to give me her hand before a gust or another ooze in the slide makes this whole exercise moot, and when she completes the trinity Ang Tsering pulls and I pull and the shale pours over the lip ledge like jackpot nickels and the feeling is so clear and irreversible that Tsering and I have yanked my wife out of the rabbit hole, disconnected her, disconnected ourselves, from the spell of Mustang and plugged back into the lower world, which in these times was no less surreal.
Ahead I could see the rest of the group huddled into each other’s backs along the goat path, what people instinctively do when subjected to gunfire or bombardment, clutching boulders to keep the wind from blowing them off to Jerusalem. Jann is sobbing into Tom’s shoulder, and my wife would weep too, I suspect, if she wasn’t at the moment predisposed to trauma, but who among us would exchange this day for nine-to-five and an evening in front of the television? That’s what the Lobas want, newborn to modernity, but we’ve had enough of it for a while. The role reversal doesn’t have to make sense, and fairness, so much a part of the swing of every life, is not a part of this. Lucky, we are all so lucky.
Together we crawl against the howling back down to the riverbed, to our horses, and ride to the sanctuary of Kagbeni.
At the Red House Inn, Mark, Mahendra, and I send our brains dog-paddling through a pool of silky tongba—homemade millet beer—while the jolly proprietress massages Michael’s fleshy pectorals, squeezing them into the shape of pubescent breasts, a sight so absurd her daughters think this could well be the funniest thing they have ever seen. When we were similarly in our cups in Lo Manthang, administering to ourselves therapeutic doses of rakshi to ease the city’s intrigues, we somehow let slip our ability to count the calendar. At lunch in Tsarang, we suddenly discovered a missing day, an extra, and tried to figure how to spend it to our benefit. Laird and I had mulled the practicality of a forced-march side trip to the fabled cave of Luri, which our colleagues greeted with universal apathy, having met their quota of monasteries for the year. Well, Laird ventured, there’s always Marfa . . . sort of a Zen-Swiss hybrid (without the Swiss) an hour’s walk below Jomsom into the lower gorge where you can get burritos, hard apple cider, clean beds, hot showers.
This is how the journey ends, as most do in the Himalayas, with a willful embrace of comfort and debauchery, a giddy upwelling of relief. More chhang for my men and horses. The next night in Marfa, I sit with the freshly spoiled crew drinking hard cider, indulging in a mood that swings between celebration and dismay, perturbed that I could never get a tonal fix, let alone metaphysical coordinates, on our travel through Mustang. One by one, the group peels off for showers and bed until I find myself alone with the Bangkok Bachelors, abusing our constitutions with local brandy, stripping the last guarded inhibition out of our windburned, raw-assed hides. The discourse is nonstop but random, this, that, proclamations out of the blue, fragments of Thai-pussy nostalgia, jungle war stories, not really a conversation, without segue or logic. In fact, our stream of language is mostly idiotic, in equal parts, so there exists no real diplomatic line to cross when I ask the captain, snockered, beaming, ever-the-hail-fellow-well-met, our Jack, if he had worked for the CIA in Laos, directing the secret war in that country, during Vietnam.
“Not for them, with them. I worked for the air force. There’s a difference.”
“And Captain, what’s with the prolific notes? Are you filing a report with the agency on Mustang?”
“Well,” says this Cold War cowboy who had never seriously entertained the thought of abandoning the wallow of Southeast Asia for a life in the States, his moment of veritas, “probably not with the agency. It’ll probably just go to the DOD.” Oh, just the Pentagon. Why? I ask him. Why the fuck?
He plays the patriot card with a spike of sobriety; in twenty years, believes the captain, America was going to be at war with China, in twenty years boys from Kansas would be marching up the Kali Gandaki to retake Llhasa, or someth
ing like that, and his pretend mission was to recon the route. Apparently the captain doesn’t understand that his service has been rendered archaic by satellites and drones. It’s hard to shed the game when the game is so awfully fucking self-aggrandizing.
“Are you out of your mind? Jesus, Laird’s got enough troubles without the stigma of guilt by association with the likes of you.”
No one will ever know, suggests the captain, unless I told them, not even Laird. I stumbled back to my room in the Paradise Guest House and dove onto my bed, biting my pillow to keep from waking my wife, but my snickering turned to gales of laughter and the laughter wouldn’t stop, this type of laughter that was a raging fever, a demonic possession. I tried drinking water but the laughter gurgled through it, unfiltered wicked laughter, so contagious that my wife started chuckling too, saying, What is it? What is it? And what the hell was I going to tell her—that, on our charade of discovery, we had been toting along this farcical relic of the glory days of espionage, that we had unthinkingly borne, in many guises, the prodigious sins of the world with us into the lost-and-found kingdom of Mustang?
What was I going to tell anybody?
He who gathers knowledge, it is written in Ecclesiastes, gathers pain. And when you romance a dream to death, what remains is a dry residue of absurdity that will mock your passions for all eternity.
On May 29 we fly from Jomsom to Pokhara to Kathmandu and into the midst of a national strike, ferried from the terminal to our hotel in a Volkswagen bus pasted with big signs informing demonstrators we are tourists and not worth killing. Ambulance drivers have not been so fortunate. On the morning of Thursday, the thirty-first, the day we are leaving Nepal, I take my wife and Mark to Pashupatinath, where we watch a son place a torch to his father’s mouth, the shrouded corpse atop a stack of sandalwood on the cremation ghats beside the Bagmati River. History speeds up, history crackles through the present. By the weekend, the river will reflect the blaze of royal pyres, the sparks of Nepal’s past sucked away into the celestial darkness of midnight.
All readers yearn for meaning, all travelers, all pilgrims. But where is the joy in understanding? History speeds up, the future implodes into the present. Sometimes quietly, sometimes not. Kingdoms open, kingdoms close, kingdoms . . . disappear. Tongues of flame speak riddles from the lips of a monarch, the heads of dying gods radiate heat and light like a row of setting suns, a king’s heart turns to ash as cold as the dust on the moon. A prince dreams of love and wakes up bathed in hatred. A rich man dreams of revolution and justice and murders his shoeless cousin, his penniless neighbor. A husband and wife dream of a child who will come no closer to their lives than a shooting star, vanishing back into the unknowable night of nothingness. A young man dreams the most spiritually fertile of dreams; he dreams of Shangri-la and wakes up old, disillusioned. Meaning is not understanding. And for a moment, this moment, Nepal has slipped past both.
The monsoon arrives in force. Something to count on.
Afterword
The night of June 1, 2001, our flight to New Delhi was delayed and delayed again and we sat in the terminal of Kathmandu’s airport, grumbling and weary, not knowing that back inside the central city at the Narayanhiti Royal Palace, Nepal’s greatest modern tragedy was unfolding in blood and horrific carnage, and that this other journey, a kingdom’s journey and its centuries-old dynasty, was also inexorably drawing toward its end. Even as we queried the agent at the departure gate, the deranged Crown Prince Dipendra pointed his assault rifle from mother to father, from sister to cousin, methodically massacring a beloved king and queen and seven other members of the royal family. Eventually, late in the evening, he turned his regicidal fury on himself, he who would be king, were he ever able to restrain his earthly desire and transcend his rabid self-regard. Eventually, late in the evening, our plane boarded and ascended into Kathmandu’s bowl of darkness below the stars and, at that moment, we had no idea what madness we were inadvertently fleeing, the airport closing behind us for the foreseeable and unknown future, Nepal itself shutting its doors and windows, locked down and quaking in a state of emergency, and it was impossible to understand then what today, more than ten years later, still seems incomprehensible, that the forward-looking summer of 2001 was a harbinger of darker days to come, a summoning of global demons on the eve of ten continuous years of unleashed hatreds, unimaginable suffering, knee-buckling loss, and explosive change, not just for the nation of Nepal but for much of the world.
“The lost decade,” the writer Timothy Egan has called those first years, the aughts, the double zeros, of the new millennium, and it’s impossible to whisper that phrase to myself and not feel the painful truth of it sink its sorrow into my heart.
Toward the end of that summer, back home in the States, I received an e-mail from Tom Laird, attached with his censored series of photographs of the royal family’s cremation on the ghats at Pashupatinath, the pyres set ablaze at the base of Lord Shiva’s temple, Shiva regarded as the guardian deity of Nepal, fallen asleep perhaps at his post, and I could not help but stare in grim fascination at their terrible beauty. The images clearly captured and expressed a sacredness that had fallen away from grace in modernity, an event ceremonially ancient and catastrophically divine—timeless spirituality the trademark of the forces Westerners find so compelling, and seek out, in the Himalayas. The flames soared, the fires burned, the ashes cooled, and from their mound rose a new king, an existentially cold king, and not beloved, who mounted a tiger and charged to war, an absolute fool who seized absolute power in the name of gods who themselves were on the cusp of dethronement.
Along with the pictures came a note from Tom in which he mentioned his new bad journo-habit, hopping aboard helicopter gunships and riding out to the western regions with the Nepalese army to photograph the government’s merciless battles with the Maoists.
Be careful out there, I told him, as I would tell anyone, an automatic ecumenical prayer for my friends in the press or the military. Since the early 1990s, Nepal has lived with a particular stain on its soul, devolving into a nation where journalists who feel obligated to step into the political mix find themselves quickly only one more perilous misstep away from their worst nightmares. Today the danger in Nepal is even greater for the media than it was twenty years ago, a nation where “impunity seems institutionalized,” laments the Hindustan Times, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has annually judged Nepal’s malfeasance seventh-worst in the world, a country where journalists are regularly murdered and their killers go free. It seems fantastical, it defies belief in the culture of Namaste, but which nations did Nepal outrank on the committee’s Ten Most Deadly Countries list a few years ago? Ready? Mexico, Russia, and Pakistan.
Nepal’s decadelong civil war ground to a halt in 2006, the path to a shaky conditional peace littered with twelve thousand corpses, uncounted wounded, and seventy thousand displaced persons. The government and the Maoists (official name, the Communist Party of Nepal/Maoist, to distinguish itself from one of its prime adversaries, the Communist Party of Nepal/Unified Marxist-Leninist) fought themselves into a stalemate, mass pro-democracy demonstrations paralyzed the country, and cynical, if not wiser, heads prevailed. That spring of 2006, the accidental king, King Gyanendra, found himself stalemated by the rage of his people, his hapless subjects exhausted by the atrocities of war and the dignity-robbing abuses of megalomania.
The wheels of parliamentary government, chock-blocked by the royal palace for more than a year, began to turn again, and by May, a newly reinstated House of Representatives unanimously voted to sideline the king and reinvent the nation through the agency of an indelible irony, dismantling Nepal’s identity as a Hindu kingdom and proclaiming the nation a secular state, bucking one of the twenty-first century’s most volatile global trends. While Islamists pretended to accept ideology, exploiting democratic means for theocratic ends, Nepal, a state acknowledged universally for its pervasive enlightened reli
giosity, seemed to spin on its heels in the opposite direction, favoring politicians over divine representatives in order to coronate ideology as its supreme god, not an unworkable approach at all until you consider there is no such creature as an ideology in Nepal with a track record for justice, human rights, and development. Capitalist or Communist, populist or patriarchal, ideology in Nepal is a parlor trick of ruling-class elites, a ruse to accumulate power, whether for the warlord or the businessman, and all the ideologies spoken in Nepal’s governmental scrum share the same implicit vocabulary of greed and arrogance.
Which is to say, Nepal’s transition from monarchy to democratic republic has been ugly, as such transitions often prove to be, once again underscoring the maxim, It’s not the revolution that counts, it’s what you make of it. Nepal’s travails are disappointing but they are not unique (although the US government continued to designate the enfranchised Maoists as “global terrorists,” which strikes me as a singular absurdity). But reincarnation, like any elevator, cosmic or commonplace, can transport its cargo in more than one direction. Since 2008, the country and its leaders and the mobs behind those leaders have displayed a dismal talent for sliding downhill on their collective backside. Prime ministers keep resigning, a new constitution continues to elude its drafting, law and order dissemble into abstractions, the stink of burning tires from protests and strikes rivals the fragrance of incense burning from within the shrines, political unrest competes with the tranquillity of spiritual engagement in the cultural ethos—an ethos that, despite its recent gloss of democracy and its religious motifs, remains fundamentally unchanged in a society that remains fundamentally feudal.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 14