Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  My friend was an expatriate Brit who had lived there since shortly after the visit by the Beatles in 1968 that turned Nepal into a mecca for seekers of Nirvana and fine hashish. She said she knew just the woman to see. Her rates were reasonable, and I could always write about it.

  She lived across the Bagmati River in Lalitpur, not far from the home of the Nepalese family who hosted me in 1975 during my Nepali language lessons. We sat in her flat on cushions on a floor the color of café au lait, plastered with mud and cow dung mixed with rice straw. She lowered her kohl-rimmed eyes to a steaming glass of milky tea. She skimmed the surface with a deckle-edged Nebico biscuit. As she rushed it to her lips, her varnished nails caught the light, a lurid flash of shocking pink.

  A pink very close to that of Jagdalak rubies, and also those of the Ganesh Himal.

  She was a seeress, a medium, a witch. Nepali is a pithy tongue. One word—bokshi—covers them all. But if I needed an exorcist, it was news to me.

  I told her that I must have misspoken. I required information, not intervention. This was not a personal matter.

  Not personal at all.

  There was no misunderstanding, she insisted, and disposed of my qualms about exorcism with the same vigorous flick of varnished nails that banished biscuit crumbs from the table between us.

  Like any professional, she had made her diagnosis. In her judgment, the matter of this man Nigel-sahib was more personal than I was letting on.

  Her eyes searched mine.

  “You feel no torment?” she asked. “All these many years?”

  Torment?

  “From your ancestor, alive in your thoughts? Making them—like his own?”

  No, I said.

  “Sometimes?”

  No torment.

  “Many times?”

  Never.

  Just—

  She pressed her glossed lips together and leaned forward expectantly. I started to say “Confusion,” then caught myself from owning up to something a demon might sow.

  “Curiosity.”

  It was only the truth. Talking with Boris had piqued it anew, and when I gave my British friend the go-ahead to arrange a session with the seeress, it wasn’t just for the novelty. When I lived in Kathmandu myself, I had twice experienced what seemed to be paranormal phenomena. The first time I was alone. The second time I had company, and my companions were as sure as I was that something strange and inexplicable had occurred as we made our way down a narrow walled lane one night on our way home from the Yak and Yeti. Not to put too fine a point on it—we saw a ghost.

  A faceless—but not soundless—being.

  Saw and felt and heard, independently, without speaking of it until it had passed.

  And disappeared, in a place where nothing could hide.

  I was skeptical that a seeress could tell me more about Nigel. But my friend was right: if there was any place where such a one might, it was Nepal.

  The bokshi regarded me in silence. She looked genuinely puzzled. Then, after hinting again that I was holding back, she relaxed a little. She dipped another biscuit. She permitted herself a small smile and said that she was satisfied, at any rate, that torment was wanting.

  Nothing so drastic as an exorcism was on the cards after all.

  We would proceed.

  She left the room and returned with a school exercise book. After she opened the pasteboard cover, she asked me to write down the years of Nigel’s birth and death. I dashed off the numerals 1822 and 1878 with a flourish, anxious for her to start.

  She gave me a look.

  “By the Nepalese reckoning, Sahib.”

  I shot back a look of my own. The conversion was no trivial affair. The Bikram Sambat calendar is 56.7 years ahead of the Gregorian and begins each year with a date that usually corresponds to the thirteenth or fourteenth of April.

  Usually.

  She shrugged.

  “In this world, Sahib, we can only walk one step at a time.”

  After I finished laboring over the figures, she examined my work with the stern absorption of a ninth-grade algebra teacher, thumbing through the wide-ruled pages and hmming to herself. Then she handed back the book and asked me to convert my own birthdate.

  “Why?”

  “It is necessary, Sahib.”

  She ushered me into a stifling windowless kitchen, where sparks leaped randomly from banked coals in a pit recessed in the floor. Resting on the hearth was the flask-shaped shoulder bone of a recently slaughtered goat.

  It would serve, she murmured, as a link between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

  Despite the heat, I felt a chill. The apparition I had seen with my friends seven years before had later seemed to us exactly that: an omen of a disaster in the mountains that came close to taking some of our lives.

  She squatted on her hams in the firelight and carefully copied the vital dates for Nigel onto a small square of rice paper, block-printed with a crudely drawn image. I moved closer and gazed down upon the three-eyed Lord of Death.

  His hair stood on end. He was haloed in flames. His upraised right hand brandished a club surmounted with a human skull. His left hand held a lasso at his waist. His legs were extended in a striding posture. He was naked from the waist up; below he wore a skirt of tiger skin.

  Another chill.

  “There was a story that Nigel was carried off by a tiger,” I whispered. “That was how he might have died.”

  To this intelligence she responded with the deftest of role reversals.

  “Coincidence only, Sahib.”

  From an adjoining pantry she fetched a clay pot of paste and affixed the baleful image to the shoulder blade, flicking away bits of sinew as she pressed it into place. All the while I fretted over her penciled notation of my birthdate.

  Would necessity demand its last-minute inscription on the Lord of Death?

  Were we not perhaps playing too literally with fire?

  Was it too late to back out?

  There was no breathing easy until she reached for blackened fire tongs and thrust the bone deeply into the shimmering coals, muttering incantations.

  The features of the image contorted hideously as they flamed, then swiftly burned to whitest ash. Soon the bone began to crack. Each sharp report she greeted with a satisfied “La!”

  When the fusillade died down, she withdrew the bone and dropped it on a copper tray. I followed her to an altar at the base of a tall wooden grain storage container that formed a partition between the kitchen and what she called “the house gods room.” There, she lit a twist of braided incense and made an offering of rice grains and rose petals to two divinities.

  The first, represented by a flat human-shaped figure made of leather, hung from a hook on the storage bin high above the altar. She explained that he was Guru Babà, the first human being in the world.

  He lived in the mountains to the north, with all our ancestors.

  Directly below him, in the center of the altar, sculpted in bronze, was the mother goddess Devi.

  She lived on the great plain to the south, in her temple at Patna, the navel of the world.

  The plain, said the seeress, was the land of the living.

  The mountains were the land of the dead.

  She knelt before the altar, holding out the bone on the tray in her hands. After a moment of silence, she addressed the mother goddess in a monotone.

  I stood a step behind her, comprehending nothing, wondering at the common residence of Devi and Nigel in the navel of the world.

  Did it signify?

  Or was it like the tiger skin, coincidence only?

  When she rose, she motioned toward the doorway of the room with the cushions.

  “Please, Sahib,” she said softly. “Now is the waiting.”

  I ducked beneath a lintel the height of a pillar-box and settled down with my back to the locus dei. Of the esoteric goings-on there, I heard only murmuring now and again, faintly beseeching, with the cadence of pray
er. The time passed neither quickly nor slowly, simply without tension, without further contemplation of my personal relationship with the fearsome Lord of Death.

  When she rejoined me, she carried steaming glasses of tea. She placed them on the table without speaking, left the room, and returned with the fire-cracked bone, covered with a scrap of calico. Gathering her sari with one hand, she sank to the cushion.

  “You know the place already,” she announced with an air of satisfaction.

  “The place of his grave?”

  “Place of this man Nigel-sahib’s death.”

  She said that whether he was buried or not remained unclear.

  She took a sip of tea.

  “But I think—no grave.”

  “I have been there myself? In person?”

  “Yes.”

  She unveiled the shoulder blade, reviewed its fissures with a critical eye. “Not self only. With one other.”

  “Do you know who?”

  “One man,” she said confidently.

  It was the same with Nigel, she said, when he was there.

  “Exact same, sahib with other man. Two men only. Two men going to this place. No tiger is coming. This man Nigel-sahib, he died. Other man died other place. Far place. Nigel-sahib’s death place, no jungle.”

  I asked if she could judge the direction, from Kathmandu.

  “Not north,” she said quickly.

  “South?” I asked. “Patna?”

  Her eyes widened.

  “You have looked for this man in Patna?”

  I explained that he had lived there before he came to Kathmandu.

  “And that decision, it was made in Patna?”

  There was no way of knowing, I said. He had come from Patna, and he could have changed his mind there and stayed in India. But he didn’t. So I supposed it was likely that he did make his decision there, the final one.

  “A large decision,” she replied.

  “Yes.”

  For such a large decision, she observed, there would be a large explanation.

  “Large explanation?”

  “Nothing was said? Nothing written?”

  “No.”

  She assayed the bone thoughtfully. It was a type of divination, I later learned, that dated back to the Neolithic Longshan culture. The bones used by its practitioners were incised by markings that constitute the earliest known form of Chinese writing.

  She raised her eyes.

  “These men, very much friends.”

  And there was one more thing.

  I stared.

  Only one?

  “You are not his reincarnation.”

  That was all.

  34

  * * *

  Stars of Tears

  1996

  “THESE MEN, very much friends.”

  Looking back, it seems that the seeress had made the connection that finally explained what happened to Nigel. But it was one that would continue to elude me—somehow—for many years to come.

  Somehow, because during my first stay in Nepal I had become “very much friends” with another man myself. One brisk fall evening in 1975, in a village a few days’ walk from the base of Mount Everest, I joined a raucous crowd gathered round a tipsy, beaming Sherpa couple. (What I took for a lively wedding turned out to be a devil-may-care divorce.) When I noticed another onlooker staring at me, I thought I knew why—we were the only Europeans present. He was tall, bearded, and muscular, a little older than me, with eyes of pale cornflower blue.

  But he turned out to be a Sherpa, and after an awkward encounter I wondered whether his father had been one of the first white men to pass through the area, with the 1953 British Everest expedition. A few days afterwards, in another village, there he was again, staring, and we talked again, just as awkwardly, and then, weeks later, when the cold weather came and the hill people came down to Kathmandu for the winter, I saw him in a barley beer shop by the great stupa at Bauddha.

  Somehow, because finally, over chang, the unresolved tension between us vanished. We understood each other perfectly, and my increasing fluency in conversational Nepali had nothing to do with it. One weekend we took a bus up the Chinese road to the Tibetan border. We got off in the only town it passed through, hiked for several hours to the shrine at Namobuddha, and braved the arctic chill of a tumbledown lodge to spend the night—one of the warmest, I have to say, that I ever spent.

  Somehow, because I had looked him up again on my return to Nepal in 1982, not long before my session with the seeress. He ran his own lodge catering to foreigners on one of the newly opened trekking routes. After he greeted me, he said that he already had enough business to employ his whole family.

  “Splendid!” I said in Nepali.

  He considered this longer than he ought to have, eyeing me gravely. Then he flashed the smile I remembered, bright as sun on snow.

  “Sisters!” he said in English. “Brothers!”

  His blue eyes pierced mine.

  “No wife! No kids! Never!”

  He hugged me fiercely, then said he was taking off time for a trek he had planned for the two of us, the destination a surprise. He kept me guessing for four or five days, choosing tracks that were sure to confuse, until finally I recognized the only path up the Mukti Kshetra (Salvation Valley). It led to a shrine in the heart of the Himalayas called Muktinath, sacred for millennia to Hindus and long regarded as a “wish-fulfilling jewel” by Buddhists too. There we bathed beneath each of 108 faucets, cast in the shape of a bull’s head, closely arranged in a semicircle. Gasping—and shriveling—in the icy water, we joked of dire consequences later. (As pilgrims in a state of grace, of course, we suffered none at all.)

  Somehow, because what, after all, had my companion said in Lahore in 1975 when I showed her Nigel’s letters that mentioned John Nicholson?

  “They sound like love letters.”

  By the time I returned to Nepal in 1996, I knew that historians had begun to speculate about John Nicholson’s supposed homosexual attachments. I had stopped writing for magazines and taken a job writing speeches for the chancellor of a university. It called for long days in the research library, which I habitually broke up with trips to the stacks concerned with British India and its luminaries. I had long since abandoned hope of finding out anything more about Nigel. But I was curious about the documented lives of people he had known. And when I thought about it, the most striking thing about Nigel’s regard for Nicholson—apart from its fervor—was how little the two men had in common.

  Unlike Nigel—and the officers at Barrackpore who befriended him when he lived in Calcutta—Nicholson cared nothing for Persian poetry or Mughal architecture. Apart from the Holy Bible, the only book he ever mentioned reading in his letters was a tome on military tactics. And while Nigel came across in his correspondence as outgoing and sociable, Nicholson, according to an ensign who served with him, “was reserved almost to moroseness.” Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to wonder if what drew the two men together was mutual attraction rather than shared interests and compatible temperaments, if the bond between them was identical to the one that Nicholson might have forged with Herbert Edwardes and Muhammad Hayat Khan.

  Who could say? No one living, certainly. The closest thing I found to supporting evidence when I reread Nigel’s correspondence was a letter he wrote in 1846 that described a Hindu festival. It began with the ritual slaughter of livestock in a public square, followed by a raucous parade in which a young girl costumed as a goddess was borne through the streets to a temple on a riverbank, where feasting and drinking continued long into the night and reflections of bonfires danced on the water. It reminded him, he wrote, of the festivities of “low-born Egyptians,” harvesters of dates and olives, who on “periodic occasions” enjoyed the “freedom of the town.” Consumption of palm wine worked to the detriment of their singing and dancing, but seemed not to compromise the “sweet melodies of their flutes,” which he found “strangely pleasing.”


  The passage drew my attention because I was trying to fill in the gap in Nigel’s letters after he met with Louis Linant about visiting the oasis of Siwa, in the Western Desert; whether he made it there or not was one of the enduring mysteries about his life after he left England. In reading up on Egyptian cultural observances, I discovered that the Egyptian “festivities” he described did not correspond with any holiday celebrated in Cairo or Alexandria. But Nigel’s description—and his comparison to the Indian festival—evokes the character of one unique to Siwa, called moulid. Émile Laoust, who helped organize schooling for native Berbers there, published an account of it in 1924:

  “The fellahin go into the gardens where they feast upon a sheep, whose throat has been cut the evening before in the citadel, and get drunk on palm wine. They gather in groups to the sound of flutes, and pay court to a young boy whom they have dressed in women’s clothing. They return by the light of torches in the evening after having visited Tmussi spring for ritual ablutions.”

  Until the mid-twentieth century, Siwa’s agricultural laborers practiced another observance. When Nigel wrote home about calling on Egyptian civil servants shortly after arriving in Alexandria, he provided no details of the “immoderate” habits they attributed to Siwans. But Siwa, I learned, was notorious for “dubious morals,” with special reference to the homosexual inclinations of its male inhabitants. Single men and adolescents, barred from residing within the walls of the town, lived a communal life in the gardens surrounding it. Most were landless peasants, who were not permitted to take wives until the age of forty. They passed their evenings playing music and drinking fermented palm sap. It was anything but a chaste existence. When enduring attachments formed, genuine wedding contracts were drawn up, awarding dowries to the families of the younger partners. The wedding itself was the occasion of a large public celebration—so outwardly similar to Laoust’s description of moulid that Nigel, if indeed he visited the oasis, might have attended not a harvest festival but a male marriage.

  Male matrimony was not the sort of local color he would have shared with his parents. Even if his correspondence was intact, I doubted it would provide further insight into the nature of the oasis’ appeal for him. What is certain is that he knew of its reputation for “immoderate” goings-on, a reputation that did not deter him from the prospect of a taxing journey there. It was tempting to speculate that Siwa’s reputation might actually have served to entice him.