by Rory Maclean
‘What was their mistake?’ I say, taking hold of his hand to pull him into his seat. ‘You searched and were not broken.’
‘They imagined peace of mind was not with their families or in their home countries,’ says Rama Tiwari. ‘They didn’t see we can only live in happiness if we conquer the restless dream that paradise is in a world other than our own.’
As the waiter clears away our dishes, Rama calls – yells – for the bill. He is known at the cafeteria and indulged like an ebullient, much-loved boy.
‘I believe books need to be about truth, the truth of experience,’ he goes on. ‘Writing shouldn’t be about ego or money or fame but about selfless sharing and helping others. We all live under one sky so, when we do something positive for others, we are in fact doing it for ourselves. The diamond is made from the clay, all comes from Mother Earth, all belongs to the One.’
Rama snatches the bill when it arrives and, as I try to pay, he tells me, ‘Every day I pray to Lord Tourist, “You have given to me and now I give back to you. Thank you for sharing with me.”’
On the street, India assaults us in temple bells, mounds of turmeric and blaring Hindu-pop. Countless shoving bodies compress our personal space. Crows pick at the rust-red soil. Street musicians pound drums and ring cymbals.
As we walk, Rama says, ‘No people have time any more to listen to a little music, to go to dance room, to have sex and go to sleep. No time to get up early, at sunrise, and go for a little stroll. People now work, take a short holiday, have such poor dreams.’ We turn a corner, and he asks, ‘After your travel book, you next should write about what people all over the world do with their hands: wash babies, cook dinner, pet the dog.’
‘Not hands,’ I say. ‘Hearts.’
‘That is even better,’ he roars, the laughter rippling out of him again. ‘Write to help people find their way back home.’
I don’t think it’s that simple.
‘Do you know the poet Tagore?’ Rama goes on. ‘“The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.”’
Rabindranath Tagore’s poem is called ‘Journey Home’.
It is time for me to leave India. There remains one last border I have to cross. A part of me still believes that my destination lies in the pure, clean Himalayas, or at least in a world other than my own. Earlier, I told my host that I will leave for Nepal at the end of the week. In his hand he carries a suitcase for me to deliver to his Pokhara shop.
‘Inside are only books and clothes and old things. No bombs,’ he laughs. ‘Not from this old hippie.’
‘Nepal has enough bombs of its own,’ I point out.
‘Now,’ he cheers, hailing a passing rickshaw and wiggling his hips like a teenager, ‘we will go dancing!’
Nepal
27. Flowers in the Rain
Nepal. Divine home of the gods. Snow-capped mountain kingdom. Spiritual centre of the universe where – in some districts – mortal life expectancy hovers around forty-seven years. Rocky strip of land that brothers have squabbled over for centuries. Nepotistic apartheid state of spectacular inequality. Last battleground of Maoist guerrillas. The End of the Road.
I brush away Gorakhpur’s touts and mosquitoes to catch an overloaded bus to the border. The tattered rattletrap judders forward, collecting another dozen dusty-faced passengers, bedding rolls and baskets. Inside, it is impossible to move, even to fall down and, beyond the cracked windows, India appears to be almost as airless and chaotic, with overheated lorries and swaying tongas jamming the road and suffocating progress. Our teenage ticket collector spits betel, calls out destinations, swings out of a window and over the roof like an acrobat to chide his captives into giving up their coins.
In the aisle, a woman peels an orange in strips, removing the pips, placing the segments one by one in her son’s mouth. The child, then, is sick on my knees.
At least there is space onboard to think. As we cross an ashen flatland of thatched villages and stagnant ponds, I realize that my role – as Rama suggested – isn’t to help people to find their way back home. Home doesn’t lie at the end of my road, it remains years and miles behind me. I have no desire to return to beginnings, to geographical familiarity, to complacency. I want to move forward, to reach for the unknown, even in a world where every corner is known.
Old Nepali farmers have a saying to discourage people from leaving their land: ‘To those who stay, the soil. To those who leave, the pathway.’ A farming culture naturally prizes the soil over the open road. But modernity has transformed not only Nepal into a land of migrants – of people moving out of the countryside or out of the country, leaving behind the settled culture, the soil. Perhaps it’s my last illusion, but the new horizon rouses my joy of life. I can’t turn back now.
The border runs through the middle of squalid Sunauli. I have to wake up the dozing official to stamp me out of India. One hundred yards on, I join the queue at the Nepalese immigration post. An inspector asks me to open Rama’s suitcase. I’ve already flipped through its contents: dog-eared copies of Ian Macdonald’s Revolution in the Head, World Without Borders and The Great Rock and Roll Trivia Quiz, as well as six pairs of yellow shoes and a white kaftan. He considers the dated contents and, with a sceptical lift of the eyebrow, asks me, ‘Sir, you are having no Beatles LPs?’
I’m happy to be on the threshold of Nepal. In the sixties, the Intrepids pushed the frontier of the exotic back to this line. Here, their search for an individual paradise must have seemed a real possibility, away from India’s crowds, in the clear mountain air, among a people of legendary hospitality.
‘Your old road is rapidly agein’,’ sings the woman ahead of me in the queue. In English. Not under her breath. ‘Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand…’
I recognize the slim, skittle-shaped body, the seal-grey hair, the wide feline eyes. My heart skips a beat.
‘Penny!’
‘Hey, Jack,’ says Penny.
I give her a huge hug, her bangles ringing against my ears.
‘I can’t believe it,’ I tell her.
‘Good karma,’ she says with an indulgent, complicit smile. ‘Like I said, there’s a connection between us.’
‘Penny, you look great.’
‘Jack, this guy says I don’t have enough money to come into Nepal,’ she says, turning back to the immigration officer. ‘I mean,
I lived in Kathmandu before he was even born.’
‘We’re fellow travellers,’ I tell the official, laughing, showing my passport and wallet. Three months have passed since I left her in her cave. ‘What happened in Turkey?’
‘All sorts of weirdness,’ she says as our visas are stamped. ‘The police kicked me out of Cappadocia. Even though it’s a World Heritage Site and I’m an ancient relic. I grabbed a bus to Tehran, but it was so damn hot I flew to Delhi. No way I could walk around Iran inside a tent. Been chilling out in Pune ever since.’
‘And now?’
‘Going for a swim,’ she says, ‘in Pokhara.’
‘That’s my first stop too,’ I laugh.
Penny fixes me with her jade-green eyes and squeezes my hand. Her moonstone and I Ching rings flash in the mid-morning sun. ‘Jack, did I ever tell you,’ she says, ‘you’re a typical Scorpio.’
Ten minutes later, our clattering Tata coach groans into gear.
Nepal immediately looks different from India. There are fewer people and the land seems softer, a pleasing patchwork of family banana plantations, dappled forests and low-lying floodplains thick with weed. Its neat brick houses are covered in yellow-flowered creepers and surrounded by picket fences. A sleek black water buffalo wades in a fast, clear river. A strip of luminous cloud marks the northern horizon. Penny holds her head out the window, gazing forward at the sky, happy and humming to herself.
‘I first reached Shangri La La La in 1970,’ she says, picking up her eas
y monologue, unfazed by the time that’s passed. ‘Sixty-eight had been a bad year, a very bad year. Things improved with Woodstock but, other than that, man, those days were the pits.’
1968. The year the sixties soured. The single most turbulent year since the end of the Second World War. The year when vague ideals of a better world, of more participatory democracy, of liberation, met with sharp realities.
That glad, confident year had dawned in colours psychedelic. Women went bra-less, tank tops were tie-dyed, ‘Everlasting Love’ boomed out of transistors from Littleworth to Big Sur. Berkeley professors came to class barefoot with flowers in their hair. The peace symbol replaced the crucifix and Star of David for millions of young believers. People power aspired to stop the draft, to legalize grass and to levitate the Pentagon on the collective will of a generation.
Then, Martin Luther King, civil-rights activist and an apostle of non-violence, was murdered in Memphis, touching off a wave of rioting in US cities. Two months later in Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy, the one leader whose appeal crossed America’s racial divide, was killed. The bombing of North Vietnam after the Tet offensive inflamed hatred of the establishment, uniting world youth in revulsion and rebellion. In May, in Paris, ten of thousands of students took to the streets. Their graffiti proclaimed, ‘We will invent a new original world.’ But their optimism was perverted by political extremists and the dogma of Sartre and Foucault. In August, Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia. Anti-war protesters were beaten and maced during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In November, Richard Nixon was elected US president.
By year end, 1,200 students had been arrested on American campuses. Tokyo University was occupied for three months and the LSE shut down. The embittered New Left splintered into the Weathermen, the Red Brigade and Baader-Meinhof. The flower children’s innocent spiritual trip was hijacked by Timothy Leary, whose half-baked chemical theories contributed to heroin’s ruinous ascendancy over mescaline and LSD. Jefferson Airplane sold out to commercialism, singing ‘White Levi’s’ to the tune of ‘White Rabbit’. The Monkees hit number one with ‘Daydream Believer’.
‘Hope was the casualty,’ says Penny.
In August 1969, she was at Woodstock. She helped to set up the music festival’s main stage, laid in stocks of muesli, collected bread and milk from Max Yasgur. She watched the Hindu swami Satchidananda, seated in white robes on the big stage, give the opening prayer invocation. She listened to John Sebastian sing ‘I Had a Dream’ and Jimi Hendrix play ‘Star-Spangled Banner’. She sang along to ‘Marrakech Express’ with half a million other kids. She slipped on the mud while taking Janis Joplin to the stage and played out the rest of the supreme sixties feelgood celebration with a broken toe.
Within months, Hendrix, Joplin and Jim Morrison of The Doors were dead. Alcohol abuse finally caught up with Jack Kerouac, killing him in Florida. Ken Kesey ‘left literature behind’ to move to a blueberry farm in Oregon. The hippie vibe was knocked off key and many heard its requiem.
That bitter winter, Penny and Orrin – pop painter, performance artist and her ‘final and best husband’ – picked up sticks and split the States to join the thousands following the trail across Asia.
‘I remember the sun shining on the water paddies and the mountains reflected in the lake,’ Penny says to me, her voice full of emotion. ‘The houses had peacock windows and pumpkin roofs. At night when the oil-lamps were lit, the mountains were clear and sharp against the sky. I’d read my Hobbit. I felt I’d arrived in Middle Earth. Nepal was paradise on earth.’
She continues both holding my hand and staring at the ice-white clouds. Only then do I realize that the clouds haven’t moved, that they are the Himalayas rising above the road ahead of us.
‘Our days passed in a haze of beauty,’ she sighs.
Their first stop in Nepal was Pokhara. An image of cool alpine fastness had sustained them along the dusty 6,000-mile journey from disillusionment and Istanbul (by way of the Auroville ashram in Pondicherry). Penny and Orrin wanted to swim in Pokhara’s highland lake.
‘We rowed a dungaa out into the middle of Phewa Tal,’ she tells me, intoxicated by the memory. Dungaas are leaky, flat-bottomed, barge-like rowing boats. ‘Another boat was returning to the village full of wildflowers. I was wearing a pair of ridiculous little white sockettes. I’d saved them in the bottom of my pack for this special occasion. The boatman saw them and called out in English, “Flowers! Flowers for the lady!” In exchange for my socks, he filled our boat with blooms.’ Penny is laughing but there are tears in her eyes. ‘Later, when we were alone, we lay down on our floating floral bed and popped our corks.’
The road rises above the Indian plain and into dense, subtropical foothills. Our Magic Bus shudders to a stop at a village on the lip of a steep ravine backed by grey stone cliffs. The passengers step down to buy paper cones of peanuts and cheeseballs from a huddle of bamboo stalls. A flock of bulbuls wheel above their tin roofs and the setting sun. I smell fried cumin, coriander and woodsmoke, each aroma caught in a separate layer of cool air. I adjust my focus from India’s heat and crush, reach for clarity. Angular men lash to our roof rack heavy hands of tiny green bananas and a goat. I buy Penny a cup of fragrant milk tea.
As evening falls, the bus edges around steep hillsides of terraced fields. We turn north at Narayangadh and climb high above the Trisuli, a tributary of the Ganges. Nepal’s main north–south road – a twenty-mile dirt ribbon between plain and plateau – is knotted with heavy traffic. The monsoon rains have washed away much of the embankment and, in the half-light, trucks inch around cavernous pot-holes and cottage-sized boulders which have crashed down from the upper slopes. Drivers stretch out beneath their stranded lorries, repairing gearboxes by torchlight. Mechanics drag jacks and tools between the breakdowns. Penny and I lean together against the bus’s violent motion like drunken sailors, trying to keep ourselves on an even keel, numbed by the tortuous ride, transfixed by the glacial blue river churning hundreds of feet beneath us. Here and there, the twisted remains of the crash barrier poke above the current. The goat bleats in terror.
Around midnight, we shudder into Mugling, a daal bhaat-and-prostitute stop for long-distance drivers. The Nepali passengers file off the bus for another security check. Our six-hour drive has already doubled in duration. Now it stops altogether because of the curfew.
The night is black and moonless. Headlights sweep across sleeping faces in dozens of trucks and buses. A tea shop owner snores behind his refrigerator. A slender teenager in a modest pleated fariya draws near to my side, brushing her back against me. When I step away, she moves on, accosting two young drivers for a cigarette. Dogs bark at every new vehicle that squeals into town. Penny groans, ‘I don’t remember this place.’
Dawn reveals himal peaks above us. Our promised 4 a.m. departure slips away, the driver sleeping on across the front seats. Two hours later, the conductors manage to wake him. He pushes back his bandanna and waves a stick of incense over the steering wheel. A minute later, we are off, horn blaring, music wailing, the patient passengers stretching themselves awake. The boys run forward to pay tolls, call out to girls, hammer on the metal body to stop and collect more fares. Only at army checkpoints do they snap off the tape player and fall silent.
The bus turns west to follow the deep valleys of the Trisuli and fast-flowing Marsyangdi rivers. Curved terraces of rice step up to hilltops of gum and bottlebrush trees spun in fine morning mist. Ears of corn dry on the balconies of three-storey Baahun and Chhetri farmhouses. Women draw water in humble thatched Tamang and Magar hamlets. Spacious new houses made of Chinese bricks belong to Gurkhas retired from the British or Indian armies. Into this landscape of sixty different ethnic and caste groups tripped the Intrepids, too many of them disregarding the proprieties of class and race in sheer stoned incomprehension.
An hour later, the road lifts into the broad Seti valley. Beyond an upland of tree-lined mustard fields rise the Annapurnas. Nowhere else on
earth do mountains climb to such a height in such a short distance. Machhapuchare, the razor-edged ‘Fishtail’, seems to erupt from the plateau, only twenty miles to the north and filling the skyline. I don’t want to drop my eyes back to earth, especially in the dirty expanse of chaos at Pokhara’s public bus park.
We catch a taxi to Lakeside and, as Penny did almost forty years before, walk down to the shore. The morning is sparkling clear. The altitude magnifies the mountains, exaggerating their size and colour: the frost-white of the snow, the vast grey flanks, the luminous light and stainless sky.
‘This way,’ she says, leading me around Phewa Tal, between the trees and away from the houses.
In a forest of oaks and evergreens, she lays down her cane, then strips off her purple embroidered shift and sarong. I avert my eyes but, when I glance back, she’s smiling at me, striking a carefree pose, lacing a marigold into her hair. She slips naked into the water, gasps at the shocking cold, paddles away from the shore. I find a stone chautara resting platform under a gnarled banyan tree. In the distance I hear the tinkling of temple bells.
As I watch, Penny’s loose, white skin seems to tighten and shimmer beneath the surface. The years slip away with each stroke. The ripples ruffle the reflection of the Himalayas as they must have when she and Orrin first swam together in their new-found paradise. At once I understand Hesse’s words that the East ‘was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul’.
Penny is about one hundred yards out when she starts to laugh.
‘It still tastes of ice,’ she calls back to me. ‘Of new ice and old, old earth. What a gas.’
28. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Nepal was closed to foreigners until 1951. The wheel wasn’t seen in Pokhara until the first DC-3 landed in 1952. No road linked Kathmandu to the outside world until 1956. Before then, VIPs had to be carried to the capital by palanquin. The king’s cars were portered from India by teams of coolies. In 1962, the US Peace Corps arrived in the medieval kingdom, digging tube wells, dispensing smallpox vaccine and opening Aunt Jane’s, the first restaurant in the Himalayas serving milkshakes and apple pie. About the same time, the first tourists dropped into nirvana, and changed it for ever. Every morning, a ten-year-old boy named Ranji met new arrivals at Kathmandu’s Royal Hotel – one of only four in the country – and offered to be their guide. As payment, he asked for an English dictionary, which the tourists bought for him at the capital’s only foreign book shop. Each evening, Ranji then sold the same dictionary back to the store. Six years later, Ranji – the country’s original independent travel guide – fell in with a stoned band of space cadets and became the first Nepali to die from a hallucinogen overdose.