by Linda Neil
I noticed he rarely stuttered when he spoke about his travels. Perhaps for his mind there was freedom in the names of the places in Asia he had been: India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia; everywhere except Malaysia and Indonesia, two countries denied to him as an Israeli citizen. The names sounded like music when he said them. Not because of his voice but, in a similar way to how I had felt seeing his photographs, because I could feel the magic in the list of his destinations – I didn’t just want to travel to those places myself, but, even more mysteriously, I felt I had already been there.
In return, I told him about the songs I had been writing in India. These were songs that I sang accompanying myself, strumming my violin like a ukulele. Some people take photographs of their travels, I explained. I make songs. I thought that Gabriel, having taken those shots in the mountains, would understand how a song could be composed out of being in a place, just as a photograph could.
He didn’t seem that interested, but I was beginning to realise that Gabriel sometimes kept his immediate response to things well hidden, almost as if he needed to ingest words, turn them over and examine them deep inside him before he could make sense of them and then respond. As we walked further on, he asked me three questions.
How do you record them?
Are they for a CD or just for your own use?
How do you write a song?
I had a MiniDisc player that I used to collect sounds from my travels. But its quality wasn’t good enough to record my songs. And, in any case, it was difficult to record myself. I was looking for a recording studio, I told him – somewhere in India, I imagined, where I was headed after I got my new Indian visa, which I had come to Kathmandu to obtain. Or perhaps in Paris, where I would go after India’s temperatures became too unbearable, before the notorious monsoons began in July.
Gabriel told me he loved music and that his latest obsession was Leonard Cohen. You could get a lot of cheap CDs in Kathmandu, and Cohen’s back catalogue featured prominently in most of the little CD shops around Freak Street and Thamel. I was a fan too, but not obsessed the way Gabriel seemed to be. I imagined that if Gabriel could sing he might sing like Leonard Cohen, a deep, sometimes twisted growl carved out from his body.
I was used to these segues in conversations about music when I brought up my own songwriting, used to how the subject of my songs often involved people making conversational detours into discussions of artists they already knew and loved. It had been a long time since this bothered me. I knew that people needed to relate to things, how new things often had to be understood in terms of old familiar things. And it would be hard, anyway, to explain without sounding like a crazy person how sometimes new songs seemed to drop onto my body like tiny fragile creatures from the sky; how at first they seemed, even to me, alien and new; how they needed patience and careful tending and sometimes extended periods of privacy and silence so my relationship with them could grow. How getting to know and understand a newly created song by singing it over and over until everyone around you was driven mad by the repetition was a process that could feel like falling in love. How taking the song into your body could be akin to taking into your flesh the shape and form of a lover; how you needed to breathe carefully and deeply in order to find the rhythm of a new song, as you would the rhythms of a new lover; how you needed to be close while still distant; how you needed to merge, yet still observe.
After an outpouring of new songs during my months in India, Kathmandu had seemed at first like a hiatus, a pause in my musical adventures. But already I had written two new songs in my hotel room, and I began each day in a ritual of song the way a religious person might begin their day in prayer. It centred me and made me feel connected. Sometimes a song was the only anchor in a traveller’s world full of change and movement. Song helped me to acknowledge what I had loved, what I had left behind and what I might love in my new environment.
I tried to tell Gabriel some of these things as we walked. Sometimes, if there was nothing to say, he would wander ahead of me looking this way and that, like an animal trying to find its way home. It wasn’t easy to get a sense of where we were in relation to where we had been or even where we were going. Kathmandu offered these discombobulations even more than hectic New Delhi did in India. The streets and alleys that were packed with human and animal traffic as we crisscrossed the city had a strangely dismantling sense of disorder, as if structures of thought and sense perceptions could crumble with each step we took. I contemplated what effect the city and its squalid dreaming must have had on the stoners of the ’70s, wandering the cities in their colourful, woven-cotton uniforms of striped, flared drawstring pants and vivid T-shirts, their long dreadlocks flicking flies out of their faces as they made their way through the maze of lights. I felt out of it while completely sober. But perhaps being out of it in Kathmandu might allow one to make more sense of everything.
The sky was dimming, so the lights of the bazaars and stores and the headlights of the motorbikes that roared through the crowd gave our surroundings a fantastical sheen. The people around us were mostly locals, but occasionally our paths would intersect with those of other travellers: young backpackers smiling broadly in the noisy chaos; or the mountain climbers from Britain or Northern Europe, stomping through the crowds in their thick-soled boots, looking like pale-skinned giants.
Gabriel suddenly spoke after one of our long silences.
On top of the world, he stammered.
Huh? I offered back, amused yet puzzled.
It really has the feeling, don’t you think, as if we are at the top of the world.
For some reason the song of the same name by The Carpenters started playing in my head. Stop it, I whispered to myself. I should be hearing something different in this place that travellers from all over the globe have called the top of the world, a tapestry of Hindu and Buddhist texts perhaps, laid over droning ragas and mantras, with a hint of techno doof to reference the encroaching technological age of the subcontinent.
The phrase was appropriate though. On top of the world. It resonated with dreams of climbers and travellers to high places. I wondered how far the phrase could be traced back through time, imagining, for instance, the shock of the words in the vocabulary of a world still believed to be flat.
I liked to imagine what explorers must have first felt like when they came upon mountains whose peaks they could not see. Further to the west, the Pamir Mountains had been called ‘the roof of the world’ by travellers who first sighted them. It had always delighted me, this image of a roof, as if the earth were a house whose layers and storeys were enclosed by a thick canopy of mist and snow.
How else could early travellers make sense of what they had seen except to fashion metaphors that related to the humble things they knew – to roofs and houses? Or the metaphor of opposites that defined their consciousness of the world and its limits – tops and bottoms, heaven and hell, good and evil, gods and angry demons? They might also have had to invent words to describe new and unfamiliar feelings: it was thrilling to imagine that sense of expanding towards language adequate to encapsulate experience, groping around in the dark for the means to communicate to another the precise nature of a thought, feeling or response. The effort it must have needed – as intense as the physical strength needed to carve a space for living out of the wilderness – to carve out words.
For fleeting seconds along the roads of Kathmandu I felt I might have physically arrived at that place where I once dreamed words might take me. And that a man who didn’t know many English words, who probably couldn’t spell the ones he could pronounce and who mangled the few he did know, was leading me there.
Everything I knew was turning upside down. Upside down at the top of the world. Would that make me right side up at the bottom of the world? I didn’t need drugs to blow my mind. That was the gift of travelling, of covering any distance by foot, by machine or with the mind – that sense of fol
lowing a person, a dream, the footsteps of others, or an idea or concept through the wilderness, until at its pure, distilled centre you could find something with which to light the way a little further through the next wild territory.
Around a corner we passed a Nepali man clothed in white and carrying a young girl on his shoulders. The child was dressed in magenta so shiny it threw off rays of rainbow colours all around the pair, making them look as if they were travelling through a kaleidoscope. As they walked, he was pointing things out along the road in what sounded like Nepali, and she squealed with delight every time he spoke. Sometimes he squealed back. In reply she sang. Then he did. Once or twice they sang together, the interweaving voices a beautiful duet. I slowed down so they could overtake me, almost embarrassed at my greed, my delight in the child’s delight. It should have been enough that I let the intersection between the father and daughter and me and Gabriel be as fleeting as it was meant to be.
I thought of my own father then. He was a great reader of books but even he was driven nuts by the questions I asked in my attempt to find connections between all manner of things: history and language, art and science, the past and the present. Don’t think about things so much, he would advise me. Accept more and question less.
Perhaps this is what he meant, I thought, not to grasp too much or too hard, to be happy with tiny moments. To let them pass by you with little remark. But I felt moved to observe and also to celebrate, to honour the relationship between a father and a curious daughter halfway across the world from where my father had tried to guide his own curious daughter, although I couldn’t remember being hoisted, literally, on my father’s shoulders. It always moved me to see fathers and daughters sharing joy in a discovery, the simple homage of the father in lifting the girl onto his shoulder.
I remembered a conversation I had with my father when I was about ten and I had first begun my restless quest to make sense of history – of the inexplicable leaps that progress seemed to make. Even though I couldn’t articulate exactly what unsettled me, I had a sense that I wasn’t being told the whole story. One day, I thought, I will have to explore the world to discover such things, but for the moment I relied on the journeys my father and I made, along with my sisters and brothers, to the Toowong library, where the books of the world I hoped to one day traverse were kept.
We were in the car on our way back home from one of these regular trips. In my lap I had my usual pile of books about seemingly disparate subjects: pirates, the history of the English monarchy, silent cinema and the history of fashion, along with Georgette Heyer detective stories and plays by Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. Dad mentioned to me that one day there would be more discovered than undiscovered things. The thought of this not only baffled me but made me sad. What would a person do, I wondered, if there were no more things to find out?
It was moving to think how a human being could be humbled by the grandeur and magnificence of what they had discovered. I craved such experience, of feeling small, dwarfed by mystery, humbled by what I was yet to know. Was that sense of awe essential to survival, I wondered? Did the fragility of unknowing bring some necessary caution and tenderness to my life – that sense of feeling one’s way, dumbly, towards a mystery?
But whatever romance a traveller might have about peak experiences at the top of the world, the reality of Kathmandu required a less poetic approach. It didn’t help at all to raise your eyes to the skies or dream of ascending. To make your way across the metropolis you needed to direct your eyes downwards, if only to avoid the piles of cow dung that decorated the footpath, the honking bikes and their mad drivers, as well as the piles of spit and phlegm that the locals hacked with rhythmic regularity on the ground in front of them. Even during the few days I had been in Kathmandu I could tell how hard it might also be to maintain your spirits in the poverty that lay beneath the exotic otherness of the city. If travelling had taught me anything, it was not to romanticise places. From the privilege of my hotel rooms it was possible to believe in any fantasy, but for the locals, without these freedoms, reality was a different story altogether.
For the moment, though, I was too occupied with finding the route back to Durbar Square to enjoy the exhilaration of metaphor that had recently lifted my spirits and opened my heart towards the man I was still following through the darkening streets.
And then all of a sudden we were in front of a side street that appeared to lead to another little square I didn’t recognise from our earlier route. Gabriel was sure we had passed it, though, on our way in from Durbar Square.
Come this way, he told me, even though my instincts told me to keep walking straight.
Why? I was growing weary and suspicious now that we might be taking another wrong turn.
Just come, he insisted.
Where are we? I asked petulantly.
How do I know?
Well, have you been here before?
He was amused, but sanguine. Of course not. But come with me anyway.
It was because I’d seen his photographs that I had begun to trust his instincts. My faith in his judgement had no logical foundation, but I had seen the beauty he had observed, and I wanted to share in the possibility he seemed to perceive in the most unpromising things. Perhaps something beautiful lay ahead of us – perhaps in the square. Perhaps it would be nothing. But I was curious to see what exactly it could be.
To get to the square, which seemed to enclose another square inside its perimeter, we had to step around the potholes piled with rotting vegetables, rubbish and old rancid food. We pressed on through the stench, making our way through the groups of young men with imitation leather jackets who sat around smoking and chatting in Nepali, oblivious to any new strangers in their midst.
Close to the entrance of the square I could glimpse inside: prayer flags were fluttering in the city’s amber twilight. As we walked through the entrance we could see the Buddhist stupa in the centre of the square, and behind it a temple doorway through which shaven-headed monks were entering and leaving. Other monks sat under the stupa quietly praying or chatting happily. To the left of the square’s entrance, a small café with red and white chequered tablecloths promised authentic noodles and dishes as well as ‘specials for foreigners’.
Gabriel and I stopped close to the stupa. We said nothing as we looked around in wonder at what we had stumbled upon.
So beauty, Gabriel whispered. So beauty.
What is this place? I asked, although Gabriel knew as little as I did about what it was or even how we had got there. Some kind of temple? I couldn’t recall seeing any mention of this square, or this temple, in any of the tourist sites about the wonders of Kathmandu.
Monks wearing saffron and scarlet robes continued to silently file through the entrance, and from inside we could hear echoes of the low chanting that was known throughout the west as the soundtrack of Tibetan Buddhism, the deep throaty om that seemed to carry within it centuries of history, both territorial and spiritual.
We sat for a while and listened. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smells of the approaching night, the scent of curries, of noodles being fried and boiled, along with the unrelenting fumes of motorbikes and cars and all the small fires that burned along the routes we had walked that day, leaving a haze of ash and embers like a smoky veil across the city.
I suddenly felt tired and wished that I was confident of how to get back to the hotel on my own. Gabriel could sense my restlessness. He cleared his throat and began to stammer.
Maybe this is a good place for you to come and sit. For your music, I mean. Just listening could inspire you.
I just want to go back to the hotel, I said. I could write a song there in peace and quiet.
Are you hungry? We could eat before we go.
No, I said impatiently. I’d like to go back now.
We fell back into silence again and listened further to the chanting. There
was something mesmerising in the open throats of the monks, the oscillation of soundwaves and resonance. I could feel it calming both of us down and making us easier with each other.
After a few moments, I got up and began to walk alone around the square. Next to the temple was a little clothes shop selling Tibetan artefacts. Beside it was a stall selling electronic equipment. And then, the most unexpected thing. In the furthest corner of the square I saw a sign above the entrance to a laneway. STUDIO ACOUSTICA, it announced in black cursive letters. For all your recording needs. The words were accompanied by a drawing of a small lotus flower. I thought I must have been dreaming it.
See, you have found what you were looking for, I heard Gabriel say as he walked up behind me. Every day is a miracle.
Wonder what kind of studio it is, I mused. It couldn’t be a recording studio. In here, in the middle of the temple square.
Gabriel walked around me and headed into the laneway. As I followed him I remembered something I’d read once about the angel Gabriel, that he was the guardian of the gates of paradise, as well as a protector of musicians.
I didn’t believe in heaven or hell, not in a religious sense anyway. But in the middle of a dirty city where monks were chanting in the hope of nirvana themselves, we had stumbled upon a place to record my songs, high up here at the top of the world. And Gabriel, whom I would one day call my Gabriel, had led me there.
The grind of electric guitars, badly played, echoed from inside the studio. There could not have been more of a contrast with the chanting monks outside. I heard a blues riff, then a familiar rock’n’roll anthem, before a tall, good-looking young Nepali man walked out from a room and stood in front of us. I thought he must be a music student. Or possibly one of the creators of the rudimentary riffs we had heard.
He smiled nervously and wiped his hands on his jeans, which looked brand new.