Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Politically, of course, the contrast seemed even more abject: seven million Tibetans, reputed to be among the most pious and peace-loving people in the world, had found themselves assaulted by the forces of a billion Chinese ideologues who seemed to derive a perverse delight from violating the monuments of their faith. Lamaseries had been bombed to smithereens, sacred texts had been used as toilet paper. Children had been made to shoot their parents. Monks had been forced to copulate in public.

  But beyond even the horrifying details of the genocide, there lay the deepest difference of all: China these days seemed to lack any semblance of a living culture or an abiding devotion to anything more than pragmatism; yet Tibet, in the face of terrible opposition, sustained a spirit more moving and uplifting than any I had ever seen.

  All across Lhasa, this faith burned with a fervor that left me shaking. From daybreak until late at night, old men and old women gathered in crowds outside the central Jokhang Monastery, joining their hands above their heads and flinging themselves down to the dust again and again and again in a ritual three-part prostration. Along the desolate plateaus, pilgrims from the farthest corners of the country could be seen tramping for days or weeks or months on end in order to visit Lhasa, crawling through the gutters to perform their ritual circumambulations of the holy places. Around the monasteries, wizened old men labored patiently up rocky mountain slopes, leading grandchildren or great-grandchildren by the hand as they brought the monks all the money they could spare. And in the lamaseries themselves, now broken and open to the wind (only a couple of hundred monks remained in the Drepung, where once 10,000 had inhabited the largest monastery in the world), the holy men went unceasingly about their prayers. If ever they chanced to see a foreign visitor, they asked for one thing, and one thing only: a photograph of their leader, exiled from Tibet more than a quarter century before. “Dalai Lama” was all they said. “Dalai Lama.”

  Instead of being dimmed by the Chinese massacres, in fact, the calm intensity of Tibetan faith seemed only to have been strengthened by them. And Tibetan Buddhism was the first religion I had ever seen more impressive in its practice than its preaching. Back home, I had always harbored suspicions about the protestations of Tibetan or Tibetan-minded friends. Nor had I ever been able to follow the abstruse cerebrations of their doctrine. Yet the Tibetans I met—gentle yet tough, devout but fun-loving, masters of magic and machinery—thoroughly disarmed me. And the devotion I saw everywhere in their country moved me beyond words. Whenever I was alone in the Tibetan sunlight and silence, I felt that these were days of heaven and I would never know such purity again.

  Almost everyone who had ever stumbled into this zone of mysterious magnetism seemed similarly stirred. When he arrived in Lhasa in 1811, disguised as a Chinese physician, the cranky British madman Thomas Manning disliked much of what he saw, nonetheless, he found himself confessing that in Tibet “everything excites the idea of something unreal.” Upon first setting eyes on Shangri-La, the token cynic in Lost Horizon had let only one word escape, and that was “magic.” Even the most jaded or strung-out of the foreigners at the Banak Shol surprised themselves, and me, by speaking of monks whose presence had left them silent.

  TIBET, WE ALL agreed, was an inspiration to visit. And yet, if we had been honest about it, it would probably have been better had we never visited it at all. For the airy elevation of its spell tempted us all to overlook the one inescapable fact of our presence here: that the Chinese, by most accounts, had decided to open up the “autonomous region” not out of charity, nor out of genuine penitence, but for purely strategic reasons, both military and economic. They knew very well that Westerners could not resist paying any amount of money to penetrate the world’s last secret, and they were hardly blind to the power of public relations. Thus, by opening up Tibet, Beijing was apparently hoping to give proof to the world of its enlightened tolerance; and by flocking to Tibet, we were in effect giving legitimacy to this show of good intentions. In our determination to be one step ahead of everyone else, we were like the vanguard of some invading army that, by racing ahead, is the first to trip the mines.

  Many of the Overlanders at the Banak Shol made pointed gestures of sympathy for the local cause. They boycotted local transportation. They refused to patronize Chinese shops. They bought local maps in Tibetan, rather than Chinese, though neither script was intelligible to them. They even, by the end of 1987, began to urge the Tibetans on in anti-Chinese demonstrations. Yet still the fact remained: all of us were here only at Chinese sufferance, and our presence aided no one but the Chinese. Our money ended up in Chinese coffers; our visas were propaganda victories for Beijing.

  In the process of making China richer, moreover, we were very likely making Tibet spiritually poorer; many observers believed that the Chinese, having failed to demolish Tibet by force, were now planning to destroy the place by exposing it to an onslaught of Western visitors. In 1984, China had tentatively allowed 1,500 foreigners into Tibet; by 1988, it was said, they would bring in more than 100,000 tourists. By now, therefore, even homesick Tibetans in exile were wary of returning to their motherland. Just before I arrived, the Dalai Lama himself had canceled his projected return to his people, in the fear that it would ultimately bring more harm than good.

  Forty years ago, Robert Byron had written: “There can be few persons of sensibility whose heart is not with the Tibetans in their effort to remain the last outpost of any racial individualism on the face of the earth.” His words were even truer now. But the Chinese invaders had begun to compromise that purity, and the newest invaders were threatening to finish it off for good. The “bitter lesson” of Tibet’s sad history, the Dalai Lama once wrote, is that “the world has grown too small for any people to live in harmless isolation.”

  OCCASIONALLY, OF COURSE, it was possible to see that foreigners could bring a little solace to the exiled land. One day in Ganden Monastery, an old monk shuffled up to an Australian girl with the familiar plea, “Dalai Lama? Dalai Lama?” To my amazement, she reached into her bag, pulled out a color photo and gave it to him. Instantly, the monk’s eyes filled with tears. He held the photo to his heart. He sat down and muttered to himself a prayer. Eyes tightly shut, he placed the picture on his heart, his head, his face. Then, drawing out a white scarf, he wrapped the photo inside it and set it down beside him with infinite care. For many moments, eyes still closed, he simply sat there, too grateful, or too rapt, to speak.

  Yet as I looked on, the spell was abruptly broken. Please could she have, the girl demanded, two prayer scrolls in exchange. The monk, still moved, was happy to oblige. And at that moment, as so often in Tibet, what made me fear most deeply for the place was nothing but the openness of its people. After years of isolation, the Tibetans, for all their entrepreneurial skills, seemed achingly ready to welcome the world on any terms at all. As I sat on a local bus one day, wrinkled yak-herds in filthy cloaks bundled up and clapped their arms around my shoulders. At famous Sera Monastery, aging monks taught me how to say their chants, while novices asked, through smiles, if they could take my picture. And as I waited for the bus that would take me out of Lhasa, three jovial matrons bustled up to me and draped a traditional white scarf around my neck, then proffered a glass of Tibetan barley beer to send me on my way with happy memories of their land.

  Such unqualified trust, however, was unlikely to be reciprocated. By now, even the most sympathetic pilgrims of the Overland Trail had grown so used to cutting corners that they could scarcely distinguish any longer between experience and expedience. They wanted to “live free” in every sense of the term. Besides, full-time travelers considered themselves accountable to no one but themselves.

  One night, as we sat on the terrace of the Banak Shol in the starlight, an American photographer asked everyone to wish him luck as he descended for “the big battle.” Almost an hour later, he emerged again, all smiles: he had succeeded, he declared triumphantly, in forcing the owners to accept his payment for his three-wee
k stay, not in the Foreign Exchange Certificates that tourists were supposed to use, but in the “people’s money” that was, in fact, worth 40 percent less. He had thus managed, he announced with pride, to save himself almost $20. The proprietors, a group of Tibetan girls who spoke little English but had hunted down blankets on request and given single travelers double rooms at no extra cost and offered their guests whatever bicycles they could spare, had threatened to call the police; but in the end, they knew, they were virtually powerless against a foreigner. “Man, I don’t like all this chiseling kind of shit,” declared the conqueror. “But, shit, if they’d hassled me, I’d just have shown them my American Express card.”

  At that, others in the audience were moved to recount their own victories in making money for nothing by selling desperate locals their Foreign Exchange Certificates. “I got a hundred sixty renminbi for a hundred FEC,” said one. “Me too. One guy refused to give me more than a hundred fifty. We had to wait for half an hour. But in the end he gave in.” “Jeez, man. I got only a hundred forty-eight.” Through it all, an Indian boy remained pretty silent. Twice in the past week he had had things stolen from his bed; everyone knew that the thief had been a fellow traveler.

  A little later, our conversation turned, inevitably, to the inevitable corruption of Tibet. Already, we lamented, two luxury hotels were under construction on the far side of town (one of them, a $30 million monstrosity, soon to be bought by Holiday Inn), and already there was talk of direct flights from Nepal and Hong Kong. A privately owned taxi firm had already set up business. Already, too, local children were beginning to ask for ballpoint pens, and greeting foreigners with shouts of “Hello!” There was already a copy of “Best Disco 84 Vol. 2” in the marketplace, next to the folk dentists and daggers and curled, yak-hide shoes, as well as a Junior League cap, and even a T-shirt stamped with the curious legend “Los Angeles 1985 Olympics.”

  Soon, the foreigners said, the place would be swarming with corrupting foreigners. Soon, we agreed, it would be full of people just like us. “Tibet is going to get real spoilt real fast,” said a Canadian, between tokes of his Great Wall Grass. With that, he turned up his tape of “Born in the U.S.A.” and prepared to let more fireworks off into the night.

  ONE MORNING IN LHASA, I awoke to find snow blanketing the mountains, and a fine rain misting the town. As if in a dream, I made the long ascent up to the Potala Palace, whose thirteen white and brown and golden stories preside over the town with silent majesty. Inside, the secret rooms were heavy with the chanting of holy texts. The smell of butter lamps was everywhere, and flashes of a sky, now brilliant blue, outside. Banners fluttered in the wind, prayer bells sounded. Sunlight and silence and high air.

  In some rooms, ruddy-cheeked girls and women in many-colored aprons bowed before monks who poured blessings of water in their hands; in others, ancient men placed coins and bank notes on the altar. And into the empty spaces, the slanted sunlight came softly, filtered through red or golden curtains. Uplifted by the chants, the smiles, the holy hush, I felt myself to be a clean and empty room, thrown open to the breeze.

  And then came the golden afternoon. Then lightning over distant purple mountains. Then nightfall, and silence, and the stars.

  YET THE GREATEST of all the sights in the Holy City, according to the wisdom of the Banak Shol, was the sacred rite known as the Celestial Burial. Each morning, at dawn, on a hillside five miles out of town, the bodies of the newly dead were placed on a huge, flat rock. There a sturdy local man, dressed in a white apron and armed with a large cleaver, would set about hacking them into small pieces. Assistants would grind the bones. When at last the corpses had been reduced to strips of bloody flesh, they were left on the Promethean stone for the vultures.

  For Tibetan Buddhists, the ritual was a sacrament, a way of sending corpses back into the cycle of Nature, of removing all traces of the departed. For the visitors who had begun to congregate in larger and still larger numbers to watch the man they called “the Butcher,” the rite was the last word in picturesque exoticism.

  I was no different, and so one morning, I got up at four o’clock and walked for more than an hour through the night, crossing a field full of bones and wading through an icy stream that left my thighs stinging with the cold. By the time I arrived on the sacrificial rock, three Westerners were already seated, cross-legged, around a fire, murmuring Buddhist chants and fingering their rosaries. Twenty others stood around them on the darkened hillside, faces lit up by the flames. As the sky began to change color, three Tibetans picked up a body, wrapped it from head to toe in bandages, and gave it to the flames. Then, as the body burned, they handed some of us sticks of incense to hold, while the chanting continued. Afterward, with customary good humor, they brought us glasses of butter tea and chunks of bread the color of red meat.

  Then they marched back to the rock, where the corpses of two more affluent citizens had been placed. One of the Tibetans tied an apron around his waist, picked up his ax and set about his work. As he did so, a gaggle of onlookers—most of them Chinese tourists from Hong Kong—started to inch closer to the sacred ground, chattering as they went. The man muttered something to himself, but continued about his task. Still, however, the visitors edged closer, giggling and whispering at the sight. The Tibetan stopped what he was doing, the gossip continued. And then, of a sudden, with a bloodcurdling shriek, the man whirled around and shouted again and, waving a piece of reddened flesh, he came after the visitors like a demon, slicing the air with his knife and screaming curses at their blasphemy. The tourists turned on their heels; still the Tibetan gave chase, reviling them for their irreverence. Terrified, the Chinese retreated to a safe position. The man stood before them, glowering.

  After a long silence, the Tibetan turned around slowly and trudged back to his task. Chastened, we gathered on a hillside above the rock, a safe distance away. Before long, however, we were edging forward again, jostling to get a better glimpse of the dissection, urgently asking one another for binoculars and zoom lenses to get a close-up of the blood.

  “Sometimes I think that we are the vultures,” said a Yugoslav girl who had come to Tibet in search of an image glimpsed in a dream a decade before.

  “Oh no,” said a Danish girl. “It’s always wild on Mondays. The butcher takes Sundays off, so Monday’s always the best day to come here.” She turned around with a smile. “On Mondays, it’s great: there are always plenty of corpses.”

  NEPAL

  The Quest Becomes a Trek

  WITHIN MINUTES of landing in Kathmandu, I found myself in Eden.

  The Hotel Eden, that is, not to be confused with the Paradise Restaurant around the corner or the Hotel Shangri-La. The Eden was on the intersection of Freak Street and the Dharmapath, which was, I thought, the perfect location: at the intersection of hippiedom and Hinduism, where Haight-Ashbury meets the Himalayas. This, in fact, was exactly the kind of cross-cultural crossroads that I had hoped to find. For legend had it that Kathmandu was quite a trip—at once a time machine and a magic carpet—and I had come here to be transported. Not, however, to a dusty Himalayan kingdom, or even to a medieval community unchanged for many centuries. I wished to travel back no more than twenty years, and to be deposited in nowhere more exotic than a city of the spirit where people still regarded money as immaterial and youth as something more than a preparation for middle age. In Kathmandu I hoped to find the last stronghold of the sixties. And in the sixties I hoped to find a reflection of a younger and more innocent America, the land of idealism I was born too late to know.

  At home, the sixties had long been the subject of embarrassed revisionism and packaged nostalgia. And where the counterculture had not been demolished, it had—worse still—been domesticated. Berkeley was now the province of born-again Christians and evangelical Reaganauts, the Haight had become a model of elegant gentrification. And all three of the cities in which I had recently made my home—Cambridge, Santa Barbara and Manhattan—had spent much of the last
decade trading in their dreams for securities. The coffeehouses of Cambridge had been turned into croissanteries, Santa Barbara had shed its idiosyncrasies to become nothing more than a bright young thing for bright young things, the setting for a national soap opera; and whatever rebellion against fashion had once been found in Manhattan was now a fashionable rebellion and a rebellious fashion in a metropolis that had consolidated its status as the world capital of greed. As riches had been made, imaginations seemed to have been impoverished. Nonetheless, I had great expectations for Kathmandu—subject of Cat Stevens songs, longtime mecca of the hippies, sometime colony of the professional idealists of the Peace Corps. “When you are in Nepal,” said the magazine ad for the Jhwalakhel Distillery, “the land of the spirited people, keep your spirit high with Ruslan vodka.” The double pun on “high” and “spirit” struck me as exceedingly auspicious.

  My hopes had been further excited just three weeks before my arrival in Nepal in, of all unlikely places, the Schwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon. Going there for the Buddhist Festival of Lights, I found myself in a state of holy enchantment. A great full moon rose behind the temple’s soaring gold-leaf stupa; local families, all in their brightest silks, gathered for photographs by the side of golden Buddhas, tinseled shrines were lit up with halos of flickering candles. A local man waved at me from an antechamber, and I hurried over. Inside, a group of women was busily preparing dishes of vegetables and rice in one corner, while, at the center of the shrine, a Western couple sat smiling back their greetings. The girl was dressed in an earth mother’s uniform of bandanna, thick sweater and jeans, her friend in dropout jumper and jeans. “This is a holy day for Buddha,” explained our host, handing each of us some food. “And this, you see, is a custom of our religion.” “We have a religion too,” offered the foreign girl brightly. “It’s called the Grateful Dead.”