by Smith, Skye
"I will walk with you," Nawang said immediately.
"No you won't. You will drive back to the wedding, now, so you can party some more tonight. I will be fine. They seem to be nice people, and they will walk at the same speed as I do because they are not Nepali."
He sighed and gave her a quick smile. She was right. He felt responsible for her, but that had to end sometime, and now was as good a time as any. "You know that you are welcome in my village at any time."
"I know that. All the women told me so, though I think they are all looking at me as possible bride material."
He translated to the driver, and all three of them had a good laugh, which eventually turned into goodbye hugs and tears. It was hard to leave this young girl, fragile-looking but fearless, standing there alone with her pack.
* * * * *
She stood in the road with her gear waving good-bye to the taxi as it inched forward between groups of tourists. The driver was offering the groups rides back to Pokhara. Then she turned and shouldered her pack, and skipped along quickly to catch up to her hiking group.
They were an international mix. A tall Israeli man, about thirty, who's unruly hair and beard made him look more like a Viking. A dark round woman from New York who was about twenty five. An athletic woman from Toronto, who looked thirty but was probably forty. A dark haired and handsome young man from Melbourne who had already been claimed by both women. The only thing they all had in common was that they were all Jewish.
Maya caught up and fell into step at the end and walked with the New Yorker, Leona. It soon became apparent that Leona was at the end, because she was the slowest of the group. In the lead was the Israeli, and she rethought her description of him as a Viking. The way he tried to be the leader of the group, he was channeling Moses.
They had just turned the corner in the road that hid them from the village, when they heard a whistle. Pulled off the road ahead was a dump truck. A man was walking towards them whistling and yelling in broken English, "You Maya," over and over.
Maya hurried her pace and side stepped in front of Moses and went to talk to the man. His English was bad but his meaning was clear. His cousin had arranged a ride for them all up to the first slide that was blocking the road, but he could not load them in sight of the bus drivers which is why he had waited her around the bend and out of sight.
The hour long drive, though slow and bumpy and dusty standing in the back of a dump truck, saved them a day of walking. Along the way, Maya, riding shotgun in the cab, had the driver pick up everyone they passed. Not just Nepali men, women and children, but Brits, and Canucks, and Aussies, and Japs, and Frenchies, in fact everyone who had decided not to believe the lying bus drivers and instead start hoofing it through the gorge.
This meant that where the road suddenly ended under a million tons of rock and rubble at the slide, their group of five trekkers, had become twenty-five. They were all dusty and bruised, but already a day ahead of where they thought they would be, and in good spirits.
The way across the slide was tricky footing on sliding scree at first, but then it joined the old salt trail that the road had replaced, and which hadn't been blocked by the slide. Moses kept yelling that they should stay up on the road bed, because once the slide ended they would find the buses that had been blocked on the other side.
The Nepali man walking in front of Maya shook his head and made the international sign of ringing his finger around his ear to claim that Moses was crazy. After listening to his English phrases three times, she finally figured out that there had been three slides from the same storm, and that the buses would be waiting in Tukuche or Marpha, which she assumed were the first villages on the other side of this, the narrowest section of the gorge.
She overtook the line of trekkers to reach Moses and tell him. He seemed to be in a foot race with two Aussie surfers who refused to stay in line behind him. After getting breathless from trying to catch them, she smartened up and instead called to the surfers. Being good surfers and good Aussies, they did the natural thing when a pretty girl called to them. They turned around to see what was up, fully hoping that she was one of these nymphomaniac Yanks that all their friends in Oz were always bragging about.
Moses sat on a rock and was so winded and red in the face, that he looked like he was going to pass out. Maya told all three men the news, and then continued walking with the young and handsome surfers at an easier pace. She really enjoyed the company of these young Aussies. They took wonder in everything they saw around them. They looked at the bright side of everything. Their glass was always half full. They laughed at the slightest provocation.
As the valley became a canyon, and the canyon a gorge, she stuck with them. As the ancient path became narrower, sometimes hewn in a cut into the cliffside, she sometimes lost her nerve. In places she was walking a few feet from a drop straight down thousands of feet. Lance, the tallest surfer, and built like his name, walked in front of her, and his best mate, Bruce, walked behind her.
To take her mind off the path, Lance was telling her joke after joke. It was working. He would yell out the story over his shoulder and then turn and look at her whenever he reached the punchline. The jokes got more and more lewd and he was just turning around to tell her the punch line to the elevator joke, when the trail turned a sharp corner, and he, unseeing, walked off the cliff.
One second Lance was beaming at her watching her take in the punchline, and the next second he was gone. She screamed and despite her fears of the cliff edge she crept closer and peered over. Bruce pulled her back from the loose stones of the edge, and then crept forward himself. Maya got on her hands and knees, like Bruce and crept forward again.
They couldn't see anything, but they could hear laugher from below them. They inched out further, and there was Lance, with his pack hung up in a juniper bush that had been scratching a life from the cliffside, and there was Lance, hung from his pack.
"Crikey Lance," Bruce called down, "You're the luckiest bugger I've ever met." All this through fits of laughter.
"You mean because this bush was here," Lance called up.
"No mate, because it was my turn to carry the rope." With that, Bruce flung his pack against the cliffside and loosened a web strap so he could release a coil of climbing rope. He tied a knot to put a loop in it and then lowered the loop down to his friend. "Put a foot in the loop and we will pull you up."
"Naw, not yet, Bruce. I dropped my water bottle. I'm going to have to climb down to the river and pick it up." His laughter echoed off the gorge walls.
Luckily for everyone, two Quebecois men, hockey players with legs and arms of steel, were next on the scene and with their help they hauled the surfer back up to the trail. Lance looked at his rescuers, pulled his camera out of his pack, and said. "Lower me down again. I want to get a snap of me new best friend, the juniper bush."
That was the last straw for Maya. She put her pack back on, grabbed the camera from Lance, just in case he wasn't joking, and stormed off along the trail. The sooner she got to a safer part of the trail, the better. Especially since the guys she was walking with seem to be totally insane.
When the guys all caught up with her, she ignored the Aussies and walked with the Quebecois. She was puffing and huffing trying to keep her breathing under control, and meanwhile they were singing and swapping turns on a harmonica. They knew more songs, folk songs, songs to work to, and songs to walk to. Their entire life seemed to be accompanied by home made, spur of the moment, music.
She would be willing her legs to lift her step by step up a staircase made out of uneven stones, all of which were knee height, and they would by slapping their packs, slapping their legs, clicking their heels and banging their walking sticks as they sang and hummed and played harmonica.
They lost daylight at a place called Ghasa, which wasn't a village so much as a rest station for porters and the herds of mules and ponies that made their living on this trail, or rather, used to make their living on this t
rail before the road was built.
The accommodation was bleak. One long dormitory room with straw mattresses. The kitchen was primitive, charcoal fired brick stoves and ovens. Still, the family that ran it was friendly and happy for the windfall business that the blocked road had brought them. There really was no choice but to stay there. Not with the evening gloom and sprinkles of rain warning of a storm.
The five of them used their packs to claim the beds closest to the pot-belly wood stove, for if there was a storm, the temperature would drop like a surfer off a rogue wave. Lance inspected the kitchen and reported back about what would be fast and healthy to order and eat. He took all their individual orders, combined them into one list of needs, and then reeled them off to the eldest daughter.
"She didn't write anything down," he told them. "Probably can't write, so that kitchen runs from memory. Don't confuse them." He went back to the kitchen to ferry out all the things they had ordered as they were ready. "Pretty good setup in there," he pointed out as he balanced five glasses of steaming milk chai to their table. "They've got a couple of old pressure cookers. Solves the problem of boilin' stuff at this altitude. I doubt anyone'll get sick in this joint."
They were already chowing down on boiled new potatoes (Inca style), boiled eggs, lentil stew, chapattis, and fried rice when disaster hit, in the form of Moses and his followers.
First there was the bitching and bellyaching about the beds, then it started again about the smell of horse. Then each one made individual orders to eldest daughter, changing their minds loudly as others ordered, and adding to their orders as food trickled out of the kitchen.
Lance and Maya tried to help eldest daughter out, but there was no pleasing some people, except of course for the two Japanese men who sat patiently and quietly in the back of the dining hall until eldest daughter got so frustrated with the Moses crew that she went and sat with them. They were served their dhal bhat before any of the rest even got their chai.
With the help of Lance and Maya, everyone eventually was fed. It got really confusing when the hungriest started to claim food that they hadn't even ordered. Maya was so disgusted by the scene that she started to get angry, until she looked over at Lance, who was laughing his head off as he tore a chapatti in half to settle an argument between two diners.
He was right, of course. The pettiness of this group was trivial compared to dangling from a juniper with nothing under your feet but two thousand feet of wind. Don't worry, be happy. Meanwhile Bruce was teaching the Quebecois an Aussie surf song, the filthy version, and they were all laughing.
Leona finally wised up to why Lance and Maya were helping, and started to side dirty dishes, only to have eldest daughter scream at her. "Leave the dishes, love," Lance told her. "That is how she will tally what you owe." They still didn't get it. This was all being done from memory.
The worst was yet to come. Whereas Maya's group had pooled their money to pay for their food and bed, Moses' group all wanted to pay separately and argued about every charge. Finally Maya totally lost it after watching Moses argue with eldest daughter to the point where the poor girl was almost in tears.
"You effing prick!" she yelled. "This family have worked their asses off trying to please you, and now you are trying to stiff them out of, out of .... out of what it costs you for an effing cup of effing coffee where you live."
"It is called bargaining," Moses defended himself. "These people expect it."
Lance had to grab Maya by both elbows to stop her from launching her fingernails at his face. He let her go once she had calmed a bit, but then she pushed the disputed pile of Moses' money back towards him, pulled out a wad of Nepali bills from her own pocket and gave them politely to eldest daughter. "There," she seethed at him, "it is my pleasure to buy your supper."
"You are a fool." Moses retorted, now angered by his own embarrassment. "These people will cheat you."
"Then I will be cheated. At least I will not be an asshole." She turned to go back to the kitchen. Old mama was standing in the doorway wiping her hands and watching the argument. Her look suddenly turned from one of worry to one of panic. Maya turned around and saw Moses moving towards her in a rage with his hand stretched out towards her throat, to hurt her.
There were two Aussies and two Quebecois in that room who, if they had been standing closer would have made Moses eat his own hand. They were too far away, and yet Moses' hand and arm suddenly dropped limp to his side and he howled in pain and spun around.
One of the Japanese men was standing behind him with two fingers still outstretched. The two fingers that he had just stabbed into a pressure point beneath Moses' shoulder. "Calm yourself," he told Moses in heavily accented English, "She is Dakini. Men must not touch her."
Eldest daughter and old mama chattered to each other, and the word Dakini was repeated many times. They rushed away and returned and bowed their heads low to Maya and offer her silk prayer scarves. She had manners enough to accept them graciously, kiss them, and then drape them over the women's bent necks.
Once the women were satisfied that her blessing was finished, Maya turned to the Japanese men and asked, "What is Dakini?"
The Japanese men discussed the question. "In English I cannot say. But these Nepali women seem to know the word. In old Japan Dakini was a white fox made from light that rode in the sky. You have the white light. I saw it surround you many times when you walked on the trail."
Maya ignored Moses and moved around him to stand between the two Japanese. "You see my aura?"
"White light, around you. Is that aura? Yes, I can see it. Make it now for these women to see."
Maya took off her ski jacket and her cardigan and loosened the buttons of her blouse, and shivered. Leona was sitting on a bench close to a pot-bellied stove, the only heat in the dining hall. She made room and patted the bench to invite her to sit.
Sitting on the bench with her back to the radiant warmth of the stove, she clasped her hands together and raised her aura. The Japanese man walked slowly forward and hovered his hand gently around her neck and shoulders. "Ahh, you see, you see the white light," he said to his friend. The two Nepali women also came forward and moved their hands through the light, chattering to each other in whispers. Everyone else in the room just looked on, unseeing.
"I don't see anything," said Leona staring hard.
"That is because you are looking with your eyes," replied the Japanese man.
Leona looked confused, so Maya told her to open her various zippers and buttons down to her cleavage. Then she raised her right hand and hovered it over Leona's chest. "Now, close your eyes and think of nothing."
While Leona did as she had been told, all the while thinking about how you think about nothing, the two Nepali women undid their aprons, and zippers, and buttons and waited for their turn.
* * * * *
As soon as Maya had put her head on her pillow, a pillow made from her laundry bag for she did not trust the ones on the bed not to be crawling with lice, she fell into a deep sleep. The dormitory was full because a couple of strings of pack mules had arrived with their drovers. As the night progressed and the stove spent its heat, people from the edges of the dormitory moved in closer and filled in the spaces between other sleeping bodies.
She only woke once, when the Japanese man half walked, half hopped in his sleeping bag into the space behind her and curled into her back. As she fell asleep again, she heard the sound of the mules on the other side of the log wall, and the sound of one of them taking a long piss.
The Japanese man's breath tickled her ear as he recited a Haiku poem in a whisper.
Fleas and lice
And a horse pissing
Next to my pillow.
She smiled to herself and then she was asleep again.
* * * * *
* * * * *
MAYA'S AURA - Goa to Nepal by Skye Smith
Chapter 20 - Kaagbeni, Mustang, Nepal
To believe in something, and not to live it, i
s dishonest. - Mahatma Gandhi
Everyone woke early the next morning. It was too cold to sleep. No one had sleeping bags equal to the overnight winds that swept down off the glaciers and through this gorge. Of course, then there was that hour just before dawn when everyone plays the morning game. The game that all cold weather campers play.
How long and how tightly can you keep your legs crossed hoping for the day to warm up before you have to wriggle out of your sleeping bag and into the cold air to go and pee.
Maya was not very good at the morning game. She had to pee, badly, and her violent shivering, despite having worn her ski jacket inside the sleeping bag, was making it worse. Already being fully dressed made it difficult to wriggle out of the sleeping bag, and icy fingers meant that she didn't bother tying the shoe laces of her trainers.
The husband of eldest daughter had just finished pouring boiling water down the hole in the floor that served, along with a high brick for each foot, as the toilet. He had also used boiling water to melt the skim of ice on the water barrel that you flushed with, using a small bucket. Though not luxurious, she had a toilet that worked, and did not smell too badly .... yet ... because the smelly stuff was all still frozen.
The man cleared out of her way, but pointed to her shoelaces dragging and the ground, and tut tut tutted, as he pointed to a weathered sign on the outhouse door. It was in six languages. "Cholera is being spread by the shoelaces of trekkers."
She couldn't get her fingers to work well enough to make bunny bows, so she just shoved the laces into her shoes. Inside there was another sign in six languages. "Rubbish and toilet paper in the bin." That was normal in many primitive places she had traveled to. They were reliant on septic fields.