“The pilots don’t fly through the clouds here, because the clouds have rocks in them,” the Nepalese businessman beside me confided.
The Kathmandu airport was a tiny, burnt orange stucco building with yellow flowers draped over its roof. The customs officers examined my backpack with Boy Scout efficiency, then ushered me through the door.
Outside, I was immediately swallowed by a sea of gleeful, shouting taxi drivers. I chose one and directed him to the Hotel Everest, Cam’s last known address. This turned out to be a two-story brick building with tiled floors and thin, damp mattresses on wooden platforms. The family who managed it included three underfed boys with the mournful look of abandoned kittens.
Cam had already been to the hotel and gone, the owner said, showing me the guest register. “Maybe he changed hotels?” he said. “Many tourists, they change. You want a room?”
I booked a room and saw at once why tourists might switch hotels after arriving here: the rooms were cold and damp, with cement floors and pitiful lumpy mattresses on string beds. I had bought a Nepal Telecom SIM card at the airport for my cell phone; now I used it to call my mother and tell her I’d arrived safely. Then, exhausted by the journey, I fell onto the mattress and slept.
It was still dark outside when I opened my eyes. I looked automatically to my left to see if Paris was asleep in her crib. It was all I could do not to cry out when I saw that the room was empty except for a white cardboard bureau and my own dusty backpack, which bulged with clothing that my mother had insisted on ironing. My mother had issued warnings with each stroke of the iron, making me promise not to walk through dark alleys; eat in empty restaurants; or take any drugs other than the malaria, cholera, worm, sulfa, and antibiotic pills David had gathered for me in a drawstring nylon bag that weighed as much as a bowling ball.
Now I felt out of synch and sore besides. David had insisted on giving me multiple immunizations. He had promised to protect me against Hepatitis A, meningitis, tetanus, and typhoid, wincing himself as he pressed each needle against my skin.
A rooster crowed in the courtyard below. Someone in the communal bathroom across the hall started the shower and sang in German. I swatted mosquitoes and lay there, paralyzed by anxiety as I listened to the rumble of Australian, German, English, and French voices. Travelers were emerging from their rooms and waiting in line for one of the toilets down the hall. Horns were already blaring in the darkness and a cow lowed on the street between a rooster’s hoarse calls.
I was in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. Thamel seemed to translate from Nepali as “Tacky Tourist Central,” given my brief glimpse of it yesterday as I hurtled down the streets in a taxi with no muffler. The driver pointed out sights, but of course I couldn’t hear anything he said over the ear-splitting grind of the engine, a sound that even now seemed trapped inside my own skull. There were guest houses, lodges, and hotels every twenty feet in this part of Kathmandu, along with ethnic restaurants, souvenir shops, t-shirt stands, English bookstores, and backpacking resale shops.
I could venture just half a block to the next lodge, I decided now. Then I’d check the next hotel, the next, and so forth, until I’d combed Kathmandu’s maze of streets on foot and found Cam.
On the street below my hotel window, a processional band began to play a loud, tinny march punctuated by flailing cymbals as it proceeded along the road. I climbed out of bed and knelt at the window to watch. The robes of the musicians gleamed ghostly white against the final edge of night.
I dressed and plunged into air that was steamy from last night’s rain. The streets were dotted with metallic silver puddles. My head throbbed. I felt hung over just from being surrounded by such a din.
Barely wide enough for two cars to pass, the street was clogged with wheels: rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, cars. The motorcycles carried entire families; I saw a small boy fly off the back of one as his father careened around a corner. Horns blared but nobody stopped, only swerved to miss him. Cows and dogs did their bit to confuse the traffic as well. There were no sidewalks; I pressed against the stone walls of the ancient buildings, thinking that I was more likely to get run over than find my brother in all this mess.
I stumbled into the first open restaurant and ordered Tibetan yak cheese, honey bread, and tea from a menu written in five languages. I wolfed down the thick bread, licking honey off my fingers and relishing every bite in the relative quiet of the restaurant until the woman at the table next to mine–the only other customer–launched into a coughing fit that caused her ceramic tea cup to rattle in its saucer.
She was a stringy blonde with a dancer’s muscles and pretty features, her eyes so light gray that they had the silver cast of the street puddles. She wore a short denim skirt and a skimpy black t-shirt. She coughed for several minutes, finally spitting up into a napkin.
The woman glanced at me, then crumpled the napkin onto her untouched plate of eggs, and apologized in a prim British schoolmistress’s accent as she lit a brown clove cigarette. She wore a dozen or so noisy silver bangles on each arm and a silver dot in her nose.
“Sorry,” she said, beginning to cough again, but this time managing to stifle it with a pull on her cigarette. “Too much bloody time in India. This cough and the bloody trots, those are my souvenirs. I’ll never have a normal stomach again. I’m Leslie Gallant, by the way.”
I told her my name. “India must be fascinating. How long were you there?”
“Seven, maybe eight months. Long enough to know I’d skip the whole mess next time ‘round the world. Bloody hell!” Leslie waved the entire Indian subcontinent away with the sweep of one hand, jangling her bracelets.
“What made you go to India in the first place?” Despite seeing the international stew of lodgers crowding my own hotel, it was still difficult for me to grasp the idea that people voluntarily boarded planes and flew dozens of hours to wander unfamiliar countries.
Most of these wanderers seemed short on money and common sense. It seemed like traveling through Asia with a backpack was less about taking a vacation than about plunging into your own personal underworld. That’s probably why Cam was here.
“Why does anyone go anywhere?” Leslie was saying. “In my case, the reason was a man, a Swedish Buddhist I met on a beach in Thailand. A really yummy man child. I couldn’t resist. We lived in an Indian Ashram where a guru performed our spiritual marriage. Then my spiritual husband broke my spiritual nose during one of our very spiritual knock-down fights, and I hopped on the next train out of Nirvana.” She coughed again, the sound rattling in her chest like dice in a cup.
“So why did you come to Nepal? Instead of going home, I mean. Or at least resting somewhere until you’re well.” Somewhere with clean water and fewer mosquitoes, I nearly added.
“Too many places left to see. I’m on my way to Australia, where I’ll find work someplace. I’m a software engineer, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“But why Nepal?” I asked again.
She shrugged. “I’m on a sort of women’s odyssey,” she explained, “since I’m off men at the moment. Nepal is one of the safer countries for women going it solo. Nothing like the Muslim countries. My plan now is to score a Sherpani to carry my gear into the mountains.”
I couldn’t imagine this woman reaching the summit of a staircase, never mind trekking the Himalayas. “Maybe you should stay in bed for a while and eat bland foods before you go,” I said. “You know. Bananas and rice. That sort of thing might settle your stomach.”
Leslie snorted. “My, you’re a right little mother, aren’t you?”
“Nearly,” I agreed, digging around in my pocket for rupees to leave on the table. This took some time; I still wasn’t used to the currency, and both of my arms felt like they were on fire from the immunizations.
Leslie helped me count out the money. “What d’you mean?” She fixed her pale eyes on my face. “Not pregnant, are you?”
“No, but I’m thinking of adopting my niece.”
So I told Leslie about my breakup with Peter, my sudden move to San Francisco, my discovery of Cam’s baby, and now my search for him. Leslie listened without comment, then generously offered to search the city with me.
“I know every traveler’s favorite pit stop in Thamel,” she said.
I was glad for her company, since being in Kathmandu was like being inside a kaleidoscope. I took a deep breath as we stepped outside into the flow. Rickshaws rattled past, tugged along by spry men whose muscles ran like ropes along the lengths of their thighs. Most of the rickshaws carried foreign tourists or recently butchered, bloody animal torsos.
From every alley, shadowy figures hissed temptations: “Change money? Good massage? Good fuck? Clean hashish?”
The tempo and clamor were terrifying. I kept turning my head away, looking at the sky, at the buildings, even at my feet–anywhere but at the people living their lives so openly on the street. In my New England neighborhood of white clapboard houses, we had curtains and fences to ensure privacy, and San Francisco secrets were often guarded behind walled gardens. In Kathmandu, though, there were few secrets. I saw people haggling with vendors, men shaving and urinating, a naked child vomiting. In one shadowy alley, next to one of several Net Cafes offering free WiFi to travelers, a man defecated into a trash pile.
Everywhere we went, children followed, demanding pens, sweets, and rupees. Some were no older than six, yet carried skinny babies with fly-infested eyes. The babies looked hungry, but how would you know? They dangled placidly from the arms of their brothers and sisters, occasionally grinning toothlessly in my direction.
I thought of Paris, of her lusty howls for food and of how she had been nearly as skinny as these babies when Nadine first left her at my door. Now her limbs had the plumpness of newly risen dough. Paris was a fighter, I’d always thought, but perhaps that was only because I’d gotten her soon enough. If Nadine had taken her to Oregon, would Paris have been as listless as the poor infants living here?
Depending on where they’d come from, the women of Nepal wore heavy cotton Tibetan striped aprons over dark skirts or bright silk saris, colors blazing against the dusty streets. The Hindu women had rings in their noses and the third eye, the red dot on their foreheads, while the Tibetan women from the mountain villages wore long, heavy necklaces of turquoise, some with stones as big as robins’ eggs. They smoked cigarettes in a protective way, cupping their hands over pungent brown stalks. I felt big-footed and clumsy, striding past them in my clownish pants and hiking boots.
Leslie and I stopped at over two dozen budget and medium-priced tourist lodges and hotels over the next three hours. The desk clerks greeted us with wide grins and that sideways head shake that could mean yes, no, or maybe so.
A few tried to prolong the conversations, glad to have a diversion from the bookkeeping they did in huge clothbound ledgers behind tall dusty counters. I studied each guest book for my brother’s name and showed clerks a photograph my mother had given me out of her wallet.
The clerks were happy to try their English with us. One elderly man with black hair short and stiff as a carpet told us that he was happy to help tourists. “I learn many things from tourists.” He grinned, examining the photo of Cam, the corners of which were beginning to melt in the steamy heat. “But I have not seen your man.”
“What kinds of things do you learn?” I asked.
“Oh,” he bobbed his head, “I learned all about the AIDS. I am not borrowing any more t-shirts from people now, oh no.” He grinned. “I know Lady Gaga, yes? And Britney Spears. She is hot. Someday I will buy an iPad and watch videos here.” He gestured at his scarred desk.
The guests in these shoestring Kathmandu hotels were mostly under thirty, all of them information traders: the best beach in Thailand, the cheapest hostel in Jakarta, a German woman’s mugging in Delhi. None of them remembered seeing Cam.
“He must not be on the regular tourist trail,” Leslie said finally. She suggested taking a break, then trying the American Express Office after one o’clock, when the daily mail arrived. If Jon was getting mail in Nepal, that’s when he would show up to collect it, she said.
“Let’s go to the Monkey Temple,” she said. “It’s a nice walk, and you want to see something of Kathmandu other than all this bloody tourist rigamarole while you’re here, right?” She hung a skinny arm around my shoulders.
I agreed. I was worn out and eager to escape the clamor of Kathmandu’s tourist center.
As we started walking toward a hill that rose above the city, I wondered what combination of fate and choice had brought Leslie to this point in her life. With her posh accent and pert features, she could scrub herself up, slip into a little black dress and pearls, and take over as director of an art gallery or pose as some business mogul’s trophy wife. Yet she had mentioned no family, no apartment or house.
All around us, though, were people like Leslie. Europeans, Australians, Americans, and a smattering of Japanese wandered the streets of Kathmandu, many teetering like ants beneath sugar cubes as they lugged oversized backpacks from one budget hotel to another in search of exotica at bargain rates.
“Cam must feel right at home here,” I told Leslie, watching the cotton-clad, sandaled men and women who seemed to be roving through Asia on a few dollars and a lot of hope, searching for enlightenment the way surfers scan the horizon for the next wave.
“Everyone does,” Leslie said. “That’s the wonderful thing about Kathmandu.”
The small temples we passed on every corner of Kathmandu acted as bustling business establishments. Barbers, shoe shine boys, masseuses, and even nose hair trimmers offered services on the temple steps. The secular and the divine rubbed shoulders on the streets. Even I felt like I could pray here, to the gods and mountains, to the rivers and women: to all that made up the precarious existence of humans on earth.
The street funneled us onto a rickety footbridge over a river. The water was murky with stinking sludge, yet most Nepalese ignored the bridge and waded through the turgid goo with enormous bundles balanced on their heads and shoulders. Two men even carried a brass bed, its frame strapped to their backs.
On the other side, along a road where dust rose in plumes around our faces, we arrived at the foot of Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple. As Leslie and I hiked up its steep slopes, the clouds began to roll in. Scruffy monkeys snatched at our cameras and purses, startling me not with their gestures, but with the way their little faces crumpled in greed. We hurried past a long line of women whose voices were joined in nasal prayer just as it started to rain.
Far below, Kathmandu’s red brick buildings spread across the steeply terraced green fields below the mountains like a storybook kingdom as monks in saffron robes turned prayer wheels at the temple. The painted eyes of Buddha observed us from the central stupa, where Nepalese women sat passively waiting for the rains, turning their handheld prayer wheels and facing the sky.
Watching them, I felt like a dodo bird among finches, big and awkward and scrambling to fly. What would I pray for here, if I could?
I put my hand out and turned the prayer wheel slowly, picturing Paris in her knitted strawberry hat playing on the floor with my mother, and prayed for my family to be healthy and whole.
Leslie walked me back to the Hotel Everest in the drenching rain and cast a horrified glance at my room. “You can’t stay in this hell hole,” she proclaimed, studying the cracked plaster walls and mossy tiled floor. “This is dreadful, and you’re paying twice as much. Come share my room at Earth House Lodge.”
I agreed, and left a note for Jon and Cam in case they returned. I was still planning to check the American Express office this afternoon. L
ater, Leslie was going to take me to Durbar Square to visit another slew of lodges before dinner.
With its rounded doors, heavy dark beams, wooden shutters, and bamboo furniture, the Earth House looked as though it had been designed by Druids. It was crammed with travelers with iPods, paperbacks, or electronic readers in the lounge; I might as well have been in one of San Francisco’s cafes.
Leslie napped that afternoon while I showered and took a taxi through the rain to the American Express office. I wore my best teacher’s outfit–a black skirt and pink cotton blouse, with black wedge sandals–to give an impression of authority. I wanted to look trustworthy, as though I deserved information.
The Nepalese women in the office spoke English with a British accent. Each wore a silk sari but was made up like a Dallas cheerleader. When it was my turn at the counter, I gave Jon’s name, rather than Cam’s, since I thought Jon was more likely to receive mail. The youngest woman in the office, a shy girl with the sleepy eyes of a child, said that Jon had collected his mail there regularly.
“Until four days ago,” she added, turning around with a stack of letters between her long fingernails to wave at me across the counter. “Then he is coming no more.”
My heart sank. Where could Cam and Jon have gone? I didn’t think they’d go south to India, because of the heat, but they might have decided to trek to cooler elevations.
Just as I turned towards the door, another office clerk–this one in a pistachio green sari who had powdered the part in her black hair a bright red– rapped on the counter with her knuckles. “He will be returning tomorrow,” she said.
“What?” I wheeled around. “How do you know?”
She shrugged her shoulders which, tightly encased in the orange fabric of her sari shirt, looked as round and shiny as waxed Christmas oranges. “Your brother’s friend, he has asked us to hold the mail in his box until he can come tomorrow,” she said. “He was here with your brother, that boy in the picture, and he told me that himself.”
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