The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  ‘Okay, then, so how should I live right now?’

  ‘Cling to the truth. It’s not just you who’ll benefit from this, but everyone. Our bodies are just material, some beautiful, some not, some fat, some thin. But the soul is eternal. Our inner eyes see well. Open them, take a good look, and then decide for yourself, do it from your innermost being.’

  ‘But then all I’ll be doing is focusing on myself the whole time!’

  ‘If you do it as I’ve told you, it’ll work out fine for you and for others. Not everyone should lead the kind of life I do, but if you’re not close to God, then the soul is blind, and you won’t be able to come to the right decision.’

  Where should I direct my gaze? Up over the grey stelae of the temple complex, the sight of which was echoed yet simultaneously curtailed by the anthracite colour of the sheer wall of the Himalayas rising up in the distance? At the grotesque facial expression of the inspired, jolly old man opposite? Or at the smoke billowing over towards us from the cremations in clouds tinted as delicately as mallows?

  ‘Your hair’s over two metres long – do you wear it like that for religious reasons?’

  ‘No, it’s more like a hobby of mine, letting it grow.’

  Saying this, he takes hold of the long, felt-like tress that looks as though it’s being held together internally by microorganisms and yet slowly decomposing from the inside, and throws it round my shoulders. I find myself in the embrace, in the clutches, of some perfumed constrictor snake, and perhaps already infected by the plague of the teeming inhabitants of his pigtail.

  ‘Are you healthy?’

  ‘Fit as a flea,’ he crows, ‘I’ve never been ill my entire life. If ever I feel weak, I just go out and find the right herbs.’

  ‘Have you any idea where the soul goes when the body no longer exists?’

  ‘It goes nowhere. It stays here. The body gets cremated. But the soul doesn’t burn. The soul remains the soul, whatever creature it happens to inhabit.’

  Away from the centre of Kathmandu, on the canal, a dead boy is lying under a red hand towel. Three women are standing beside him, crying. As they clutch at the hand towel in their grief, it slips, revealing the face of a sleeping youth, as elegiac as a Pre-Raphaelite poster boy.

  Prayer doesn’t call the shots here, death does. There are stories of people who have woken up on the way to their cremation. Their relatives refused to take these seemingly dead people back, and so they had to remain up at the temple complex. As revenants, they are obliged to live the rest of their lives in the caves above the river. They even marry one another. We look up at their dwellings, which are little more than starlings’ nesting boxes in the rock wall, with their little tilled allotments by the side, and their tools under tarpaulins, and sheds made of wooden planking and crates. Today, they’d withdrawn inside their burrows, but there was clear evidence that people lived there, on the margins of the temple district, but still within its precincts.

  Here, it’s not uncommon for old people who are approaching death to say: I’ll take my leave of you now and go and die. They take one last meal in the company of their family. At these occasions, custom demands that their daughters or their daughters-in-law pour water for them as they eat. If this isn’t observed, guilt will take on tangible form and come back to haunt them in the shape of demons or other visitations – or traumata, as we might put it. One old woman who was possessed by spirits kept wandering around the temple grounds, incessantly screaming: ‘You didn’t pass me any water while I was dying!’

  Passers-by lower their eyes at the sight of this apparition, which is both woman and spirit, person and demon. Can she be helped? According to prevailing beliefs hereabouts, through its cremation on the banks of the river, the abandoned body ascends to a higher plane of existence. Everything is good. In a lovely, peaceful ceremony the bereaved then prepare a final meal. What reason is there to despair? Even people who die on the street, but who are then given a decent burial, have a good chance of being reborn under favourable circumstances.

  Monika, the German founder of ‘Shanti Griha’, an aid organization for young Nepalese, has also seen the flipside of this detached attitude to death, for instance with regard to the kind of problems that can arise at the scene of an accident. Here, the question of who was to blame is often the quickest to be resolved: basically, the stronger party is always the guilty one. If the person who caused the accident tries to do a runner, the residents of a neighbourhood block the highway until the person responsible is apprehended. The guilty party then pays for the fatality according to a scale of charges that can be haggled over, but which are broadly fixed.

  The more tricky cases are when people have been run over and maimed. Because they have a claim to lifelong support, they tend to theatrically dress up their injuries to improve their negotiating position. In these circumstances, then, you’ve got to prepare yourself for a good deal of play-acting and tiresome argybargy. Even then, survivors still often barely receive enough to live on.

  One time, Monika was driving along the highway and stopped at the scene of a crash, where a child was lying in a pool of its own blood. Already, the street was thronged with residents all rushing around trying to identify the culprit, but Monika insisted that the child be taken to hospital without delay. That was quite impossible, she was told in no uncertain terms, until it was clear who would stump up for the damage – and, what’s more, it still hadn’t been resolved who would pay in the awkward instance of the child dying while it was being transported to the clinic.

  ‘Who’s responsible in that case, then?’ they berated her, ‘Bet you haven’t thought about that, have you?’

  It sometimes happens that the kid is lying there dying while those involved in the accident haggle with the parents over compensation, and it’s not unheard of for a lorry to deliberately reverse and run a person over for a second time just in order to make the question of who’s liable to pay damages crystal clear.

  ‘Look, if we invite you to dinner,’ a bystander explained to her, ‘you come. Same applies here: if God invites you to die, you’ve got no option but to obey.’

  Monika still finds herself having to battle against these sorts of convictions, but at the same time, she’s also well aware of the fact that in this part of the world the whole reason why children are born in the first place often has to do with the parents’ wish for financial security and care in old age.

  The next day, we set off in Monika’s small, beaten-up car and as we ascend we get a panorama down over the sea of clouds and a view of the outline of the Himalayas – the steeply soaring Machapuchare with its pyramidal profile, an almost perfectly regular isosceles triangle, and to the side of it Annapurna, and then the highest peak of all in the group, Dhaulagiri. But my favourite mountain – here, everyone’s instantly required to name their favourite mountain – is Ama Dablam, because it has a face. When God was standing in the shower, he modelled this crag out of soap.

  We follow the riverine landscape through the more densely wooded mountains. The current here is ochre-yellow, and fishermen using bow nets line the banks, lethargically scanning the swollen river, while boys wash themselves in the water. All faces have their national characteristics: the Nepalese face, it appears, emerges from darkness and quickly prepares to sink back into it.

  So here it is, then, the fearsome Prithvi Highway, a narrow strip of tarmac that snakes its way westwards, in the shadow of the Himalayan mountain chain, threatened on one side by rockfalls and on the other by the yawning abyss just beyond the soft verge of the metalled road. The massive lorries that drive it have names like Road King, Road Hero, Road Tiger, Night Sleeper, Broken Heart, or Slum Star, and their bumpers sport stickers with slogans such as ‘Follow Me’, ‘My Life is Journey’, ‘Slow Drive, Long Life’, and ‘Hey God – Save Me’. Perched high up in their cabs, the drivers gaze down stony-faced on the traffic; they’re the mightiest presences on the road, for sure, but also by common assent invariably the ones at
fault, too. But ever since the Maoist rebels summarily started blocking the highway some years ago – just because they could, and also to demonstrate the Delhi government’s impotence – the lorry drivers have become everyone’s last hope in the interminable traffic jams. At least you can shelter safely under their trucks at night, and if you tip a driver twenty rupees, he’ll even cook for you and take you under his wing.

  Only when it’s jammed like this does the stream of traffic bring to light all the organisms that teem within it. There are men in uniforms, shabby-looking types, people wearing kaftans or union suits and weathered veterans; lively-looking youths clamber down from their vehicles, mingling, trading, haggling, arguing, tugging on ropes to test how secure their loads are, sizing up their own or their neighbour’s cargoes, and swapping news on impending strikes.

  But in the end the road itself is really just an allegory, and certain elements stand out from the general flow of traffic. It’s an introduction to deprivation and to the opulence of observation: A child crosses the road, carefully balancing a blue mug; in a dried-up river bed, a woman chops a lump of wood into faggots; in front of a billboard bearing the legend ‘Playboy-Whiskey’, a girl sits combing her long, dark hair; a boy tweaks another’s ear in passing; an old man carries a goat kid slung over his shoulder; a child shows his mother the only fruit on a tree; a girl shoves a trickling water hose into her mouth; a young woman in a red dress squats down and chips away at a stone, her knees banging together with every blow; women carrying their loads in panniers on their backs, with all the weight supported by a band around their foreheads – to relieve the strain this places on their neck muscles – walk for kilometres with their arms folded above their heads; cattle trucks trundle past, a dull mooing emerging from their interior, and gravel lorries with water streaming out of their tipper trailers; a woman washes her child’s feet in the river; tarmac-layers with blackened faces sit huddled round an open fire, boiling pitch; children lug panniers full of rocks, transporting them from one side of the river to the other across a bascule bridge; every roadside kiosk is a shrine full of bright, shiny bags, colourful bottles, and gaudy packaging; the bossy old man sitting in a rickshaw hits the runner with a stick; young men play cards on the roof of a minibus; a group of pilgrims have fixed a red flag on the bonnet of their car to placate the Maoists; calves are fitted with muzzles to stop them suckling their mothers’ milk; a man weighs down the roof of his hut with bricks; an old man pushes an old woman along in a wheelbarrow; an unconscious boy is carried to hospital in a basket; an elderly man rubs ointment into the stump of his severed leg; another has one arm in plaster; a stunted little guy pisses great lasso-loops of urine into a ditch; a man carries stacks of grey-looking laundry.

  Above, there are vultures and paragliders; a loudspeaker van speeds by, making a public announcement, the man’s voice sounding threatening and a woman’s ingratiating. A largeeared old woman racked by a coughing fit. Five girls all wearing their hair in a bun. The buses have barred windows like prison vehicles; a lorry graveyard; a large family sitting amid aluminium canisters; farm labourers with plough harnesses slung over their shoulders; an old woman picking her way through the puddles and holding up the hem of her skirt; the goddess at the tomato seller’s stall; an overturned hay lorry; women in red lying on wet straw; the inhabitants of an unfinished house; the old ladies bent under panniers full of dry leaves; men in pink pyjamas on the street; the van with ‘Finest Butter Caramel’ written on the side; the dribble of water in the riverbed.

  The road is a route, and the route is an end in itself. Everything flows along, carrying goods and stories alike. Every image is only briefly captured in one’s gaze and then swallowed up by the stream once more. This road is a bloodstream, an aorta. And yet, at the same time, it is a stretch of road on which people pay daily with their lives for joining the traffic flow. A Japanese researcher, it’s said, once counted all the accidents in one day here. He arrived at the figure of twenty-seven for this bit of road alone, and when he told all his friends in the hotel about it, they promptly decided to take a plane from Pokhara to Kathmandu. The aircraft crashed.

  You can’t skirt the Prithvi Highway, all byways eventually lead you back onto it, and in the same way so do the symbols of life’s journey coalesce here as well. The road-killed animals on the tarmac are as flattened as dried flowers pressed between the pages of a book. In some areas, as a reminder of a serious smash that took place, you can find lakes of shattered green glass, overshadowed by the roadside hibiscus bushes. Gawpers are everywhere, and nowhere do they go unrewarded – vultures swoop down from on high where a crashed car has come to rest, hyenas forage round accident sites for any trophies left behind and spirits drift among the mementoes of all the accidents – the splintered tree, the black skid mark on the tarmac, the innards of a bus, pieces of wreckage hanging from branches, and keeledover minibuses. The trails of collisions, disasters and ascents to heaven. The survival of the majority of those who drive in Nepal, and also those whom we see living alongside the roads, hangs by a silken thread – or rather by several such threads. Why else would the Nepalese have a pantheon of three million gods?

  Now the rainclouds are puffing up like dust balls over the ridge of the mountains. The trees there are only saplings, of varying sizes. A cloud of dense, sultry air seems trapped in a curve of the road. There a group is sitting, crouched in front of a cube-shaped building that is their home; they squat there on a plot measuring just twelve square metres, yet they’re full of grace. They’re constantly making movements that have been filtered through their unconscious; weightless, routine gestures that have always been there, which arise from their preconscious state and are called up as though from their cellular memory: the absent-minded action of stirring a pot, say, or straightening clothes that have slipped out of place, or cutting up a piece of fruit, combing a child’s hair, or sweeping up ash. All mute reflex actions that are performed automatically, while the person’s eyes scan the section of road in their purview.

  Nor do these people build their houses, shops, sheds, or offices into large edifices all in one go, either. They start by building small, and then add on until they’ve created a whole complex of boxes. All these dwellings have a little loggia outside, with one or more tables under it. That’s the way we do things, they say, and sit there and receive guests. And every stranger who pitches up in these refuges is handed sweet tea and a bowl of sugar with ants ploughing through it.

  The mountain we’re approaching generates its own climate. In photos, it always appears bare. But in reality it keeps itself almost constantly shrouded. However clear the day might be, the summit remains hidden in cloud, which only heightens its mystery. One of the drivers says:

  ‘I’ve been living here for ages now, and I’ve never seen it without its cloud cover.’

  If you ever do see an image of the mountain when it’s bare, it’s like looking at some piece of topographical erotica, with its bulky body and its snowy peak appearing grey-blue and white. Compared with the clouds, a mountain peak such as this is pent-up energy in another kind of material. And when we look at these mountain ranges, we also think of the people who live up there and struggle to survive: the Thakali, Gurung, Sherpa, Raute, Chepand, Kirat, Dolpo, Magar, Rai, Dhanuwar, Tharu, Satar, Limbu, Gine, Mugal, and Lhomi. The names of these peoples resonate like chords played on an unfamiliar instrument.

  These mountain peoples share their environment with the Mikado pheasant and the Formosa macaque, species which when displayed in a museum look like they’ve only just died in the glass cabinet, while the plants in these parts boast names of Linnean elegance: Anemone vitifolia, Bergenia eiliata, Lagotis kunawurensis, Inula, Selinum and Taraxacum. And finally, the habitat at this altitude is also home to the mysterious Cordyceps sinensis, a creature that is an insect for six months of the year and a plant for the rest, and which is only found at heights of 4,500 metres above sea level or more. It is prized for its supposed aphrodisiac qualities and
commands high prices.

  But why should human morphology be any less complex? There was one occasion when I was sitting up there at a refuge, well above 2,000 metres. The careworn proprietress, who usually lived at an altitude of 5,000 metres, but who came down here for two months each year to cook soup and sell her woven fabrics, anxiously watched every mouthful that I swallowed; she was wearing gold jewellery in her dirty earlobes and, as the owner of three plastic tables on the Sarankot Ridge, was a poor, rich woman.

  If she hoped for anything for the future, then it would surely be for the past to return, at least that’s what the demeanour of a woman who hadn’t really got to grips with the present was telling me. She immediately put me in mind of the Chepang headman who, before he was driven from the mountains, told me the bees were dying up there, and the native languages, too, and that a semi-nomadic lifestyle just wasn’t possible any longer in a place which the young were already leaving to try their luck down on the plains, where their sort really didn’t want to live for cultural reasons, and really shouldn’t have to. When the Nepalese king once asked the Chepang headman what he wanted – a car or a house, maybe – the latter replied that all he really wanted was his forest back.

  We pull over at a bend in the Prithvi Highway under a lowering sky, amid a cacophony of bleating goats and scowling faces. One young girl, wilfully modern, is sporting a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Stars and Straps’. Does she know what it says? In this area, several young girls have recently been abducted by their teachers. Their parents then generally received a ransom note. But though they met the kidnappers’ terms and paid up, the children were long since dead. The police reported that when the bodies were recovered, they were found to be dissected into ten parts, stripped out for the illegal trade in organs. The old man who told me about this ended his story by saying:

  ‘And so they unwittingly helped solve the problem.’

  ‘What problem?’ I asked him, as he propped himself upright in the slush with his stick.