Maya's Aura: Goa to Nepal

by Smith, Skye

  Her head went dizzy as she ducked it, and she almost lost her balance. Definitely no more to drink. Something white caught her eye, but under the truck, not on the other side. It was a running shoe. It was attached to a leg. Was someone sleeping under the truck? A noise came from the cab.

  In her tiny purse was her LED headlamp and now she fished it out and turned it on and opened the cab door. In the cold blue light of her LEDs she could see two men working away with wires under the dash. She had grown up in rural California where farm boys learned to hot wire the old farm trucks before they were ten. She knew hot wiring when she saw it.

  One of the men yelled a warning and lurched at her. Between the steering column and the seat, his reach was blocked and she pulled back and without thinking, shut the door on his fingers. There was a howl of rage as the door bounced open again, but now blocked her way back to the reception.

  This is fishy. Something is very wrong here. Run, she told herself. Unfortunately she was in a pair of delightfully bright green Nepali high heel sandals and running was not one of their functions. At least not in the dark on broken ground. The sound of running feet came from behind her, and she tried to hurry.

  What she should have done was to have kicked off the heels. She had to get to the end of this row of buildings and around the corner where the elephant was chained to the shade tree, and up a tight alley to the street where she could raise an alarm. Now she was afraid to slow her pace long enough to kick off the heels.

  The sound of heavy breathing came through her panic. Was the man chasing her that close? Down she went, tripped by branches, face first into a pile of leaves. While rolling over getting ready to kick out at her pursuer she lost her heels. Great, just when the heels would have done some good against a crotch or a shin.

  There was that sound of heavy breathing again. Above her the man stopped, but he wasn't looking down at her. He was looking beyond her. She flashed her light in his eyes hoping to blind him. Then there was a wet and whooshing noise like a giant sneeze.

  If you have ever taken care of a child sick with a runny cold, and had to clean up the green slimy snot rags such colds produce, then you have some idea of the color and consistency of what hit her pursuer’s face. What you could not imagine is the quantity. Think of a bucket full of sick kiddy snot.

  A heavy snake waved above her head. No, not a snake, an elephant trunk. The man should have run, as in backed away from her and run back to the truck. Instead he wiped the elephant snot from his face and yelled in fury and reached down for her.

  Back in Mendocino she had many times sat with school boys and watched the WWF wrestling craze on TV, and had seen those giant men throw each other around a ring. Those giants could throw a man a few feet through the air. The trunk that hit this man lifted him from the ground and threw him fifteen feet through the air and into an old wooden fence which crumpled under the force.

  Such power was beyond belief and this wasn't even a big elephant. We mortals are such weaklings without our weapons and tools, she thought as she tried to decide whether she should rise or stay down on the pile of leaves. Should she fear such monstrous strength? Should she crawl out of range of the trunk? It was too late to decide. The trunk pushed itself under her left shoulder and lifted her to her feet. She patted it softly and spoke softly to the large dark eyes and then she walked slowly away, very slowly away from the monstrous beast, out of range, and then ran for the street.

  "The truck, the gas," she yelled at the first men she saw. They looked back at her with confusion and drunken smiles. No English, at least not tonight after so much rakshi moonshine. There was only one thing she could do. She screamed a high girly scream. The street full of drunken men stopped in mid movement and all looked towards her.

  "What's de matter girly?" a grizzled old man in a worn brown suit asked.

  "The truck. Men are stealing the truck."

  The old man translated as much as he could understand to the men around him. It was enough. A dozen men staggered hurriedly towards the narrow alley where she was standing. "No, no," she waved them away and pointed the other way. "Elephant mad, Elephant mad." she yelled waving her hands for them not to go down the alley.

  They all paused, someone yelled out something that they understood and then they surged as one up the street and away from her. She paddled barefoot behind them on her way back to the reception while trying not to think about what was oozing between her toes.

  Inside, she made directly for Nawang and told him what had happened. He called out to the other men, and in an instant they were heading out the door. He was retelling her story to them as they moved. Two women beside the door heard most of it and came swirling, all colors and faux silk, towards her.

  All the women dropped what they were doing and crowded in around them wanting to know what was happening. They were still gossiping and speculating when the Nawang came running in yelling, "No woman is to leave this building! The truck thieves are most likely to be lynched."

  Women screamed or spoke loudly. Maya pushed through them to Nawang's side and cried out in a panic, "We must stop them!"

  "How? How would we stop a whole village of drunken angry men? The thieves are not from this village, not even from a Gurkha village."

  "But someone must have the power to stop them. A mayor or a sheriff."

  An old woman pointed to the vision of lovely youth in red and gold and called out, "The bride is queen today. She can stop them."

  Maya looked in dismay as everyone just stood still, doing nothing. She danced to the side of the bride, took her hand and dragged her towards the door. Until this moment she hadn't realized how young the bride was. Perhaps not even fifteen. It didn't matter. They had to try. She yelled to Nawang, "Come and translate."

  They and the bride pushed through the women at the door, and every woman in the hall without infants pushed out of the door in their wake. A mob of women marched behind the bride around the corner of the building and towards the truck. There were already three nooses dangling, drawn over a solid tree branch.

  As she broke away from Nawang's arms Maya yelled back at him. "Translate for me!" and with that she ran to the closest noose and put it over her head. She now had the attention of the entire mob of men and the smaller mob of women. The three captive thieves even stopped their struggling to watch her, the ferengi in the willow green sari, with a noose around her neck.

  "If you are hanging people for stealing this petrol lorry then you must start with me, for I stole it first!" she called out and folded her arms in front of her to show that she meant it.

  Nawang translated her words in a booming voice, and then he stepped up beside her and also put a rope around his neck. His taxi pilot cousin came out of the crowd and used up the third noose. Nawang repeated Maya's words. The initial silence of the mob turned into soft gossip punctuated by a few laughs.

  The bride then spoke out. Nawang translated for Maya. "How dare you soil my wedding with violence. Shame on you for breaking my peace. Let these men go with our forgiveness, and with food in their hand and a beaker of strong drink." She said it twice. First timidly, so only those beside her could hear, but when they cheered her good sense, she spoke out strongly to all around.

  Her new husband, a young man perhaps twenty-five, but no more than thirty, came out of the crowd and stood beside her and took her hand in his and said, "Would you deny my bride's wishes on her wedding day? Bring food and drink for these men and cheer them as they leave the village."

  Maya did not stay to see more. She had spotted the mahout staggering in the crowd and she yelled to him to come close. He did so with pleasure and was honored to be selected by this strong woman who had stopped mob violence. Nawang translated for her.

  "I fear for your elephant. She protected me from these thieves when they chased me, but they may have hurt her afterwards. We must see to her."

  Her fears were for naught. The burly beast had chaffed her leg pulling at her chain, but was no more dama
ged than that, though there was a fence nearby that needed rebuilding. "It was lucky for that thief that he hit that fence and not the stone wall of the house beyond. He is lucky to be walking away from this adventure," the Mahout pointed out.

  Maya was allowed to tend the chaffed leg with a salve that the mahout produced from his kit. The whole time she was crouched beside the thick rear leg, the trunk rubbed gently at her side.

  They took the narrow alley and the main street to regain the reception. The street was strangely empty except for old men. The old men soon told them why. Since another village would soon know that there would by gas for sale at the gas station in the morning, everyone from this village with a car, bike, tractor, or jerry can was claiming their spot in the queue now, right now. They would sleep in the queue.

  "Gee, and it isn't even Black Friday," Maya remarked but nobody got it.

  * * * * *

  * * * * *

  MAYA'S AURA - Goa to Nepal by Skye Smith

  Chapter 19 - The Kaligandaki Gorge, Nepal

  There is more to life than increasing its speed. - Mahatma Gandhi.

  Seeing as everyone was hungover, and it was the day after a wedding party, and it was a holiday, the entire village slept in until after 7 am. Maya woke up in a room filled with women, and did not remember how she got there, or where the room actually was. This was understandable since it wasn't every day that she had stood with a noose around her neck, so she had celebrated her un-hanging with twice as much rakshi as she should have had.

  She tried to stand, but found herself a bit legless. A kind woman passed her a water bottle and a salt shaker and she consumed a lot of each. There was no sign of the bride, duh, but there was a sheet with some blood stains hung on the wall. She smiled to herself. Yeah, right. She had watched the bride and groom together during the party. He had already had her, and more than once.

  Nawang found her eating breakfast with the village women. He had his cousin the taxi driver with him, and the beat-up taxi. "We got priority in the petrol queue because we needed gas to drive you to Kaagbeni. We should go soon. It's a hard road.

  * * * * *

  The road was not that bad, and was fabulously scenic with the back drop of the seven sisters of the Annapurna range of high Himalayas, with their debutant sister, the horn of Machapuchare. She reached up like a finger to scratch the underside of the sky.

  The road was twisty but paved, that is, until they got to the Beni Kusma turnoff and began bumping north to follow the Kaligandaki river. The pavement became gravel, and then the gravel became rock and dust. They started to climb through a series of dusty towns into a valley with steep sides. After some discussion between the men, they pulled off the road and parked behind a tea house that was perched beside a precarious-looking suspension bridge.

  The bridge was narrow, and its bed was rickety boards. It was meant for foot traffic only, including the herd of pack mules now coming across it. Nawang told her "This is where the old trekking path from Pokhara joins in. No one uses it much since they started building the road." He grabbed some water bottles from behind the passenger seat and pointed up the steep slope on the other side of the bridge.

  "That is the trail up to Poon Hill. That is a long way up, but from that first house on the ridge you get a good view of the Kaligandaki gorge. Come. It is just a twenty minute walk up."

  Maya got out and stretched and then laced up her trainers and grabbed her ski jacket. She saw that both men were doing the same thing. "I'm game. What about the taxi and our stuff?"

  "No problem. The family that runs this tea house are cousins."

  Of course, she thought, more cousins. Everyone she met in this country seemed to be related. She followed the men out onto the plank deck of the suspension bridge, and froze. Looking down between her feet, and between the gaping cracks in the half-rotted boards, was a river boiling between giant boulders. It took all her willpower to take the next step, and then the next.

  The men laughed at her and yelled that this was one of the best bridges in the gorge. She took another few steps but stopped at a gaping hole where there were no planks in the center, just on the outside edges. They yelled at her that if it would take the weight of pack mules, it would take her weight. She looked down to where there was a skeleton of a mule laying rotting on a boulder far below.

  She wanted to close her eyes, but that was impossible, not with this footing. She took a deep breath, held onto the braided steel rope with her right hand and danced across the boards. Now the men were yelling to her to hurry up and were pointing behind her. She looked around. There were a half dozen mules following her. The bridge started to sway and rock and jiggle.

  "Dance!" she yelled at herself, and then hummed a Michael Jackson song and started to dance along the bridge deck, timing her steps to the sway of the bridge and the stronger looking planks. And then she was across.

  A half hour later and half way up to the ridge, Maya stopped and gasped for breath. "Twenty minutes, yeah, right, for a local, maybe." She took a swig of water and started to walk again. She was glad she did. From the house, which at one time had been an Inn before the trekking trail had fallen onto bad times because of the new road, the view was spectacular.

  The two men were sitting on a porter's bench already drinking steaming chai from glasses, and Nawang passed her one. "They always made good tea here. I miss the old days before the road. It used to take three days to walk this far from Pokhara. Three days of trekkers spending money in a hundred family businesses along the way. Now only the bus driver makes a living. "

  He pointed down to the bridge they had just crossed. "That next village is Tatopani. It means 'hot water' because there is a hot spring there. After that the valley becomes a gorge."

  She wasn't listening. She was completely entranced by the view of the gorge he was speaking about. It was a steep valley between two massive Himalaya ranges.

  "That is the Dhauligiri range on that side," he pointed. "almost 27,000 feet. On this side is the Annapurna range, over 26,000 feet. Tatopani is about 5,000 feet. That means that this gorge is over twenty thousand feet deep. That is like four of your Grand Canyons."

  "Where does it go, the gorge?"

  The men laughed in glee, so happy to be turning someone on to such a sight. "To the back side of the Himalayas, and then onto the Tibetan plateau. It has been a trading route between Tibet and India for five thousand years. It was always the easiest way through the Himalaya. It is one of the reasons that Nepal even exists as a separate country, that and the other pass near to Katmandu."

  "Trade route. I thought Tibet was a wasteland. What do they have to trade?"

  "In ancient times the Tibetans traded salt and tea in return for Indian spices. Since Tibet is now China, it will soon be a busy highway connecting India and China. Maybe they will even connect their railways, the two biggest rail systems in the world, connected through this gorge.

  There was a crack like thunder and she looked up at Dhauligiri. Way up on the top there was a snow avalanche plummeting down. It seemed to be moving in slow motion, endlessly, endlessly, down the slope.

  "Avalanche season," said the Gurkha. "That one was going maybe 300 miles an hour."

  "But it seemed like it was in slow motion."

  "That is how big that mountain is. It may look like one of your Rocky Mountains, but a Rocky is like a baby compared to that one."

  "No, the Rockies are big."

  "Ha! That is over twice the height of a Rocky. That means it is over twice as wide and over twice as long. If that mountain sits on a hundred square miles of land, then your Rocky would sit on less than twenty square miles."

  The very scale of what she was looking at suddenly hit home. She sipped her tea and stared in awe. Eventually her eyes could not focus, so she took turns staring at the view, and then staring at the children who were playing with a skipping rope near to the house. From this ridge it was all down hill to the river. From this ridge, it was all uphill to the next ridg
e higher, and then the next ridge even higher. She guessed that playing with balls was not an option for these kids. They would soon be lost.

  * * * * *

  In the village of Tatopani there was bad news and a lot of tourist trekkers were gathered wondering what to do. The brand new road up the gorge was impassable because of slides. Maya went to talk to some of the calmer tourists who were paddling around in a crude swimming pool. Of course, the hot springs.

  The taxi driver wandered into the center of the bus drivers that were all talking at once and waving their hands about. Nawang went to talk to a man leaning calmly against a battered dump truck.

  The two men had to go and find Maya when they had finished gathering intelligence. The found her floating quite immodestly in the hot springs. Nawang held her ski jacket out for her so she could exit the pool with some decorum, and then led her into the closest Inn to talk. He had to go back and drag the taxi driver away from the pool where other tourist women were also being immodest.

  Maya had taken a seat in front of a stone fireplace where big logs crackled with flame. She had her jacket open and was heating and drying herself. They sat on either side of her, facing the room, so as to preserve her modesty.

  "The bus drivers and the inn keepers are trying to convince the tourists to wait here until the road is open again," Nawang translated for the taxi driver. "They are lying, hoping the tourists will stay here and spend money. The man with the dump truck told me that it will take weeks to reopen the road. He is a..."

  "I know," Maya replied, "a cousin."

  "How did you know? Anyway, he says that you should start hiking now. The Inns along the way will fill up soon enough once the bus passengers realize that the buses can't whiz them back and forth to Jomsom."

  Maya laughed at the thought of the ramshackle buses whizzing anywhere, especially along these twisting cliff roads chewed out of rocks and potholes. "I have already found a group of tourists to hike with. They were in the pool with me. They are leaving as soon as they get dried off and have something to eat. Uh, so I guess this is goodbye."