by Boyd Varty
The boys were demonstrating their prowess for me, Bron, and Kate at our makeshift rifle range, which was really just a strip of flat land with a huge deserted termite mound at one end. After firing off a few rounds, one of the boys turned to Kate and said from a mouth that seemed to have a hot potato stuck in it, “So, Kate, do you shoot?” I thought I detected a bit of a pompous challenge in his voice.
Kate held out an empty soda can. “Go put this Coke can up,” she told him.
When the boy had balanced the Coke can on the termite mound, Kate stepped up to the line drawn in the sand and, without batting an eye, threw the rifle up to her shoulder and almost instantaneously pulled the trigger: a classic snapshot. The can exploded off the mound.
“Good God,” said one of the lads next to her. “That was fast.”
Another boy ran to retrieve the can. When he brought it back, there was a stunned silence. Kate had managed to drill a hole perfectly into the hyphen between the words “Coca” and “Cola.”
Kate positioned herself protectively in front of Bron, whom the boys had been circling all afternoon. “Right, who’s next?” she asked, quick as a flash.
For the rest of their visit, the boys maintained a respectful distance from my beautiful sister—which might not have entirely pleased her.
“It was a total fluke shot,” Kate confided to me later. To this day, she remains a legend among the members of the Etonian Shooting Club.
Kate taught us the culture of every place we visited, assigning us books to read. We would settle in a particular place for two or three months at a time, absorbing as much of the atmosphere as possible. Kate also handled the budget. “Your job is to be security, Boydie,” Dad told me—helping us avoid pickpockets and bad areas, keeping up a general level of awareness.
In Australia, we visited lodges leading the ecological revolution and studied Aboriginal Australian culture. Kate and Bron were obsessed with Uluru, or Ayers Rock, a sacred site located in the Northern Territory. Kate had been reading Mutant Message Down Under to us so we could understand the Aboriginal Australians’ plea to save the planet. She had a postcard that showed Uluru at seven or eight times throughout the day, bathed in glowing yellows, ochers, reds, browns; her mission was to photograph each of those shades.
We could feel the energy of the great rock as soon as we approached; it was hauntingly beautiful. It was also horrifically commercialized, with knickknacks for sale, displays everywhere, and crowds of people pushing and shoving. Signs invited visitors to walk up a “sacred path”; we instinctively knew it wasn’t our path to walk.
A guide’s job at Londolozi was simply to facilitate and interpret what was already happening around people in nature—to listen for animals’ alarm calls, for example, and other language of the bush. The guides in the cities we traveled to had a much harder job of trying to make something interesting happen. Guiding isn’t about giving information; it’s about creating experiences. The guides at Uluru were guiding by rote, pushing visitors from point to point.
Instead, we sought out someone with an authentic connection to the desert to hike with us around the rock’s base. He was an Aboriginal Australian man with a broad, square face, a wrinkled brow, and a gangly gait. His skin, a rich, rusty brown, matched the color of the desert.
He taught us about traditional “tucker”—which medicinal roots to use, what foods to forage, how to track the land through its songlines, the earth singing its own story through the bones, sinew, and veins of its hills and valleys. “Our culture is based on the relationship between the people and the plants, animals, and physical features on the land,” our guide said. He described the Dream-Song, the universe’s vibrations. “Your destiny sings to you,” he told us. I wanted my destiny to sing to me too. He explained how all Aboriginal Australian art, often done entirely in dots, springs from the Dream-Time, the sacred, liminal space we all visit while we’re asleep, where we can fetch the wisdom to guide our days and the medicine for healing.
In our two months in Australia, we often encountered racism against the Aboriginal Australian people. The man who ran our hotel in Alice Springs leaned across the counter and told us, “Be careful walking around at night. These Abos get drunk, and then no one knows what they’ll do.” Kate explained the “stolen generation” phenomenon to us, how Aboriginal Australian children were taken from their parents and trained to be domestic workers. We learned how alcoholism had pervaded the Aboriginal Australian culture as these people were herded onto marginal land, just like Native Americans. We saw Aboriginal Australian people outside the bottle stores, looking down and out.
We flew out of the area in a helicopter. As we gazed down, we saw that the entire landscape was composed of the same dots we’d seen in the artists’ paintings. “Spiritually, they had to have flown to make them,” Bron said.
I loved the Aboriginal Australians’ concept of Dream-Time, the people’s amazing capacity for storytelling, and their ability to live in tune with the wild desert. It was crushing to see how the culture had been smashed. As with the Masai, Western culture had come in and wiped out the ways of an ancient people. We of the Western world have lost our connection to the last people who could teach us those ways.
The rest of Australia seemed a bit prosaic after that. Kate helped Bron over her first major disappointment in life: her encounter with a platypus in the Melbourne Zoo. My sister had forced me and Kate there to see yet more koala bears. Bron loved their squashed faces and cuddly tufted ears. She loved the way eucalyptus leaves appeared to stone them out. She kept a running total in her journal: “Number of koalas seen to date: 32.” We’d been to every park in Australia that had a koala. The Melbourne Zoo also advertised an aquatic terrarium with a platypus, and Bron was breathless to see this oddity. She was gutted to discover that the duck-billed peculiarity was perhaps fifteen inches long. “It’s like a swimming rat with a duck’s face glued on,” she said, sulking. (Bron’s second major life disappointment was when Kate took us to Paris to see the Mona Lisa. Both the platypus and Leonardo’s masterpiece were supposed to be grand and amazing sights. Both were about the size of my foot.)
When the three of us set out for India, Mom and Dad’s sole concession to civility—and probably safety—was to hire a car and driver for us. As a result, we saw much of the country from the backseat of a vehicle that looked as if it had driven in with the first British colonists. It was in fact closer to a go-cart than a car. Our driver, a stern mustached Indian named Rajesh, was a wonderful man, but as a driver he left a great deal to be desired. He drove using India’s unwritten rule that the bigger car has the right of way. He liked to accelerate into oncoming traffic, swerving around other cars while shouting, “Chello, chello. Let’s go!”
“Oh my soul,” said Kate, clapping her hands in front of her eyes. “This is too much for me.”
We traveled to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan—also known as the Pink City because the palace and most of the buildings were built of pink sandstone. The roads were congested with old taxis, rickshaws, cows, camels, and the odd elephant. Every single person had a stall of some kind, it seemed. Vendors would aggressively try to get our attention, in sharp contrast to African shopkeepers. “Yes, just have a look at this,” one said, handing me a small sandalwood chessboard. “Fifty rupees.” “No thank you, I don’t want it,” I told him, trying to hand it back. The seller quickly hid his hands behind his back. “Fifty rupees,” he insisted. Finally, I simply had to put the set down and walk away. Another tried to fix my shoes while I was still walking in them, trying to charge me for the glue he’d used.
Rich, poor, beautiful, ugly. People with no legs. People living in mansions next to people living in cardboard boxes. I was completely dazzled in Rajasthan. When you have smashed into so many different lifestyles, you can no longer claim that yours is the only right one. It was a good lesson for a sixteen-year-old.
Outside the Pink Palace, Kate decided she wanted a picture with a snake charmer, a gentleman
with exactly one tooth and a crafty-looking mustache.
“How much for a photo?” she asked.
“You give ten rupee,” said the snake charmer, while tapping his sleepy cobra on the head until it reared up, strengthening his negotiating position.
“Okay, deal,” said Kate.
No sooner had Bron snapped the photo of Kate crouching near the snake than the charmer, in a very uncharming manner, began the hustle.
“Now you pay me my twenty rupee!” he shouted.
“No, you said ten.” Kate stood her ground.
“No no no no, you steal from me! Snake was sleeping, I had to wake him, so twenty rupee!” screamed the evil charmer.
“You’re only getting ten,” Kate said, resolved not to be taken advantage of. By now Bron and I had moved in close behind her; we weren’t sure whether we wanted to back her up or hide behind her. The charmer started to brandish his cobra as a weapon, holding it up to Kate’s face and advancing while bellowing, “Twenty! Twenty! Twenty!” in a deep Rajasthani accent.
Kate drew a twenty-rupee bill out of her wallet and threw it at the madman. “Let’s get out of here!” she said, hurrying me and Bron away.
At a safe distance, she stopped, panting. “Bloody snake charmer just ripped me off! He took us! He actually took us!” Kate, with her natural inclination to see the good in people, was shocked.
“He hustled us for ten rupees,” said Bron.
“I know! A whole extra ten! Poor snake, to have to live with a man like that.” It was just like Kate to throw in her lot with the reptile.
“Kate, you do realize ten rupees is, like, four cents,” I chimed in.
With this, Bron started to laugh hysterically. “You got ripped off for four cents! Wow, you really got hustled!” she cackled.
Kate and I were soon doubled over with laughter, too. “In our first week in India, we’ve been had for four cents!” she hooted.
After our run-in with the snake charmer, we got back into our trusty go-cart and flew past an endless display of camels, goats, and elephants, all strolling along the road wrapped in beautiful fabrics. Against the desert, colors in Rajasthan stood out like great swaths of neon graffiti in a dull subway tunnel.
We became such a tight unit, Kate, Bron, and I. Kate was constantly pushing us. We called her “Koo-Koo,” “Teach,” and the “Toddler on Tartrazine”—for the food dye some believed made kids hyperactive—because she never seemed to sleep. Bron and I, on the other hand, were teenagers who sometimes wanted to loll. Kate would have none of it. “First we’re going to go to the maritime museum,” she’d announce. “Then … then … then …” And she’d lay out an exhausting itinerary that embraced every notable building and historical point of interest, and even a glancing intersection with the life of Gandhi, her personal hero.
“No, Koo-Koo, let’s hang out in the hotel room,” we’d beg, to no avail. Off we’d go.
We took off for a place in the desert called Pushkar, which was supposed to be a secret town with a holy lake. Kate and Bron were in the back of the car, and I was sitting next to Rajesh, so that I could force him to slow down.
Pushkar might have once been a holy city, but now it was a holy city–cum–opium den for travelers. Everyone had that shipwrecked look that is the camouflage of the traveler to India: beards, dreadlocks, necklaces, and hash-stained fingers. On every menu there were two options: chai or “special” chai. I have never been able to shake the feeling that our waiter mixed up the batches, because for two days I was either asleep or laughing. To be honest, I think all chai in Pushkar was “special” chai. Mini-tripping in an Indian opium den is a life experience you don’t get inside four classroom walls.
Kate loved photography and taught Bron a great deal about it. “This is how you collect experiences,” she told us, experiences being the most valuable things in life as far as she was concerned. She encouraged me to explore Lomography, capturing the essence of a place by snapping an unframed shot from the hip while walking through a crowded street. I was never interested in monuments or official sights; I was always drawn to the secret energy of a place contained in its teahouses or on its streets, shorelines, and forests. I wanted to spend a whole day watching a man sell vegetables so I could know a bit of his life.
India clobbered my senses: the sight of women glowing in saffron-and-orange saris, their arms sleeved with gold bangles; the smells of cumin and ganja, sweat and shit; the sounds of the muezzins calling Muslims to prayer; the tinkle of bicycle bells and the honking klaxons of overladen buses; the hiss of gas burners boiling tea. And yet it was the most spiritual place I’d ever experienced. Around every corner was someone doing puja at a tiny shrine, lighting incense, gifting altars with marigolds and smears of ocher. Every encounter came with a graceful “Namaste.” I’d seen isolated church groups in South Africa, but here religion was the engine of every person’s life.
Maybe it was the sheer competition for survival that bred belief in a higher power. I couldn’t get over the utter press of humanity, how closely we breathed one another’s air. Even in the mountains and parks, there was no place that wasn’t jammed with people, no open space anywhere. When we landed in Johannesburg, the simple little park outside the airport looked amazing to me.
In between jaunts, we’d retreat to Joburg and catch up on our more formal schoolwork. Kate would take us to the Apartheid Museum and help us study Zulu, the close relative to the tongue spoken by the local Shangaan natives. When we were at Londolozi, we’d silently let the rhythm of the place wash over us as we bashed out the school curriculum on the front porch of the house, the elephants trumpeting below us in the riverbed. Kate followed the syllabus from a school in Joburg, but we could rip through a month’s work in a week.
We never knew who might stroll into our classroom under the ebony trees. And Kate was always open to those people’s arrival. One day Karen Slater, Uncle John’s filmmaking assistant and a survivor of the helicopter crash, walked over to us. She was tall and long-haired, with a bit of India’s unique style clinging to her; she wore gauzy scarves, tops embroidered with Shiva’s eyes, and billowing pants, and she always smelled like lotuses. “I was going to make some chai. Would any of you like some?” she asked.
“Yes, we would, and we would also like to learn how to make it,” said Kate, and so math was put aside as we all trooped off to the kitchen to brew up a batch of Indian tea.
Later Karen offered to teach us how to meditate—something I longed to do because I’d once read about the powers bestowed on yogis who mastered it: being resilient to extreme cold, able to walk across burning coals, and even, for the very advanced, reports of levitation. It was this extreme control of the body through ascetic practice that fascinated me. Each day when Karen finished filming with Uncle John, we would take a break from school to go down to her cottage for meditation lessons. “Meditation is what helped me stay calm when we crashed the helicopter with your uncle,” she told me. We sat and chanted together: “Amaram hum madhuram hum. I am immortal, I am blissful.” I did not—or could not—fly, but a semblance of calm settled over me.
At the end of our fantastic voyage together, Kate, Bron, and I made a photo album of all the amazing locations we’d called our classrooms. There we were at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti. Under a giant tree by a water hole on the floor of the Ngorongoro Crater, where yellow-billed kites swooped down on unsuspecting picnickers and snatched sandwiches right out of their hands. Next to the Grumeti River. Inside a tent in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. Standing in front of Uluru. On the deck at Londolozi with an elephant plucking jackalberries from the branches above us. On the roof of a Pushkar hotel in the heart of the Rajasthan desert watching some Israeli hippies getting loaded on bhang lassis.
We had all grown up together. When Kate first joined the Varty family, she’d had a couple of bridges to cross. For a start, she hated flying in small planes; we loved flying in them and occasionally crashing them. Kate is also a very meticulous person, a re
al planner. The Varty family, on the other hand, tends to wake up one morning and decide to go to Zambia. Then on the way someone will say, “I actually think Zimbabwe could be a better option at this time of year,” and we’d point the nose of the plane a different way.
“You Vartys are loony!” Kate would exclaim.
By the end of our time together, however, she’d just laugh and say, “I don’t even care where we’re going; tell me when we land.”
Kate is pure gentleness, but she is not to be crossed. She once told me, “I’m like a lioness. Don’t mess with my cubs.” Once, when the three of us went to a rugby match, a massive drunk fan draped himself over Bronwyn and tried to kiss her. Before I had a chance to move, Kate had closed the space between herself and the giant of a man and punched him flat out in the head. The whole crowd who witnessed it went quiet. It was so incongruous, the gentlest-looking soul in the world flattening some rugger bugger. It was without a doubt one of the greatest things I have ever seen.
Kate gave me confidence in my own mind. Under her guidance, I started to realize that I had a tremendous capacity to think, even if I wasn’t the greatest technical student. I couldn’t spell, and I couldn’t do math, but I could look at something and discover what was important about it. Kate was always open to wonder; she encouraged me to let my mind stay in that state. She helped me develop interests in the things you’d often drive past, like trapdoor spiders leaping out of their hidden burrows to grab a passing beetle, or how sore-eye lilies bloom after a fire. Kate opened my mind to thinking outside the box. When Bron and I struggled with not knowing what the model was, she helped us realize that most of the time, you have to make your own model. “Guys, we don’t know how this is going to look,” she’d tell us. “We have to be the architects for our own experience.” We all felt our way along and had a great time doing it—which is a wonderful way to live life.