They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  So I did. The older woman clasped both my hands in hers and smiled into my face, chuckling her gratitude.

  That done, Shyama said her uncle would guide me down the hill because it was time for her to teach. She took my hand, said once again, “You my dear friend,” and walked uphill to the school. In the end, I didn’t know what to make of her, only that I felt relieved at my release. Anxious lest it be revoked, I immediately turned to follow her waiting uncle down the hill. He spoke no English, and we walked in silence. We’d traveled less than halfway down when we met up with a skinny old man holding an umbrella. The uncle left, indicating I should follow the man with the umbrella the rest of the way.

  We were nearing the bottom when I saw a bus pulling out of town. The bus was so crowded that a number of people were sitting on the roof. One lanky white guy with blond hair sat among them, sticking out among the horde of Nepalis like a sugar cube floating in a pot of strong tea. I began running down the hill and waving my arms. Someone saw me, and the bus stopped.

  As I reached the bottom I shouted, “Besisahar?”

  “Besisahar!” a young male passenger shouted back, nodding.

  I quickly pulled off my pack, threw it into the doorway of the bus, and jumped in after it.

  ***

  When I stepped off the bus in Besisahar, I saw nothing but Nepali faces. The blond sugar cube from atop the bus had evaporated. I began to worry I would be even more alone on this trek than I’d expected. But I shrugged the feeling off. If I ended up walking alone, maybe it would be a profound mystical experience.

  I found a rooftop restaurant, where I was the only customer for lunch. I was relaxing there in the warm sunshine, watching villagers come and go on the street below, when I heard footsteps on the stairs. It was the sugar cube. His surprise mirrored my own.

  “Another white person!” he said in an unmistakably English accent. “You’re the only other white person I’ve seen!”

  “Me too!”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound insane or anything. It’s just that I came to Besisahar by myself, and I was hoping to find some people to trek with. But I haven’t seen a bloody soul, except for Nepalis.”

  “Me too!”

  “You’re alone, too?”

  “Yeah. And I’m looking for a trekking partner, too.”

  “I know I’ve probably blown it by sounding like an absolutely desperate madman, but I’ll walk with you if you like.”

  “Absolutely. A desperate madman sounds perfect. I’m Cara.”

  “Nat.” We shook hands and he sat down. “What a massive relief,” he said. “When I got here and didn’t see any Westerners—”

  I interrupted. “Actually, I saw you earlier. I was on your bus. But when we got to town it was like you just vanished.”

  “On my bus? . . . Wait . . . Are you the one who was running down the mountain?”

  “That was me.”

  “Bloody amazing! This I have to hear. Go on, then: what where you doing up there?”

  I told him the whole story, which Nat punctuated with his amusing vocabulary of colorful exclamations, such as, “Bloody amazing!” “That’s brilliant!” and “Fucking fantastic!” Later I dubbed him “Nat, The Constantly Amazed.”

  When I finished, he said, “I was pretty fucking astonished to see you come flying down that hill—out of bloody nowhere! I figured you must be some sort of social worker. I knew that wasn’t part of the circuit, so it never occurred to me you might be a trekker. You know, you’re very likely the only white person who’s ever been in that village.”

  I thought about Shyama’s shrewd bait and switch. Somehow I doubted I was the only foreigner who’d been there.

  Nat and I hit it off so easily that I decided all my initial dallying had paid off. We began talking about the trek. He told me a friend had insisted he “must” look for a place on the trail where the friend had stayed on his trek: a combination bakery and guesthouse called The Braga Bakery, where the pastries were “absolutely amazing!”

  “Speaking of sweets,” Nat said, “I’d absolutely kill someone for a chocolate bar. Would you like to go for a walk through downtown Besisahar and see if we can find one?”

  “Someone to kill?”

  “If necessary.”

  We walked up and down the main street, a collection of small, unremarkable buildings that didn’t look promising in terms of candy. We passed a gathering of about a hundred Nepalis singing and playing music. A local guesthouse owner explained that someone had died and they were celebrating that person’s life. The mood was much more festive than any memorials or wakes I’ve ever attended. It truly sounded like a party. We also spotted a few other foreigners sitting at rooftop restaurants. The ones we spoke to were going rafting, not trekking, but it gave me hope that we wouldn’t be alone on the trail.

  “I’m not worried about it,” Nat said. “I’ll tell you what my problem is: there’s no place to get a candy bar in this bloody village.”

  After dark the village’s power went out. But life continued by candlelight, and children continued to play on the main street, running in and out of the flickering light.

  Nat and I ate dinner on the roof of the Hotel Annapurna, where we’re staying tonight, and agreed to depart by nine tomorrow morning. All our guidebooks and maps say it’s about a six-hour walk to Bahun Danda. We figure, even if we take a two-hour lunch break, we’ll still arrive with plenty of time before dark.

  I know it will be physically demanding, hiking through high altitude mountains for three weeks. Yet it seems to me it will be mentally easy, knowing that all I have to do is get up each day and start walking.

  bahun danda, annapurna circuit, nepal

  At breakfast, Nat told me he’d heard a group of trekkers leave the hotel at 6:00 a.m. Under invisible peer pressure, we bumped our 9:00 a.m. departure to 8:30, which is to say we left at 8:45. Besisahar town, which had slowly filled with Westerners the night before, was quiet as a bar after hours when we walked out of town.

  “Everyone’s left except us,” Nat said.

  “Do you think they know something we don’t?”

  “Too late to bother about it now.”

  As we walked, we speculated about the Nepali people we passed. One small group of women walked by, all wearing identical pink and orange saris. Against the dull backdrop of the dusty town, they looked like spring flowers.

  “Do you suppose it’s some kind of uniform?” Nat said.

  “Maybe it’s like one of those embarrassing moments back home,” I said. “You go to a party in a brand new sari and, damn, some other woman is wearing the exact same one!”

  Further on, we spotted two small boys in school uniforms playing in the street until an old grandfather shouted at them. “They’re dawdling on their way to school, and the old man’s giving them hell,” Nat said. As the old man approached, we exchanged greetings, “Namaste!” We exchanged this same greeting with everyone we passed.

  The path remained more or less steady and obvious throughout the day. For two hours we walked through gentle green hills and alongside the rough, rushing beauty of the Marsyangdi River, until we came upon a suspension bridge leading into the Gurung village of Khudi. It was the first of many river crossings. The narrow bridge of thin, flimsy-looking bamboo strips felt dangerously pliable, a Wile E. Coyote deathtrap under my feet. I tried not to look down at the furious water and fat rocks far below.

  After stopping to buy sodas and catch our breath, we pushed on for another hour to Bhulbhule. There, we ate lunch at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the river and watched two men try to coax a reluctant cow across another high, rickety bridge. The cow mooed pitifully, refusing to budge for some time. “I don’t blame her,” I said. We stayed in Bhulbhule for two hours, waiting out the worst heat of the day.

  We walked nonstop from about two o’clock to fi
ve o’clock, before we spotted other trekkers ahead. It was almost dusk when we caught up to a group of seven people checking in at the first police checkpoint, just before the Brahmin village of Bahundanda. The first people we met were two young women bringing up the rear: Melanie, an American, and Lucy, a German.

  “We started the day with that group over there,” Melanie said, listlessly gesturing to the five trekkers gathered around the two checkpoint policemen. “But they’re setting a very fast pace, and we decided there was no point in struggling to keep up with them.”

  “Ja, they act like this is a fucking race,” Lucy said. The plump young blonde sat propped against her pack, red-faced and irritable. She went on to tell us her pack didn’t fit right, this trek was already much harder than she expected, and she lost her camera in Besisahar. I wondered whether she’d give up and turn back.

  While Nat and I sat around waiting for the police to check our permits, we also chatted with the other trekkers in their group: two other German women, a German guy, an Englishman, and an American guy. Everyone except the two other German women had started this trek alone. But, by unspoken agreement, we became a group of nine as we climbed the final steps to Bahundanda, which means “Hill of the Brahmins.”

  As we trudged over the next rise, we found ourselves in the midst of an all-male political rally. Several men carried white flags, each emblazoned with a red sun: symbol of the democratic communist party, known as the “Sun Party,” which is rapidly gaining popularity in this country. Nepal still abides by a caste system. High castes, such as Brahmins, own land and live relatively well, while the lowest caste, the Dalits, receive little education and work as menial laborers. Under such a system, it’s easy to understand why communism attracts followers. Graffiti painted on a nearby building said, “Vote for Sun . . . OK.” I imagined Shyama saying “Okay?” with a hopeful wobble of her dashboard-doll head.

  Our group bypassed the rally and moved en masse to a wooden lodge on the hill. The lodge gave us a CinemaScope view of the mountains, which hemmed in the village on all sides. Each room had two or more beds, but I scored a room alone. Each bed was nothing more than a thin mattress atop a wooden platform. Still, the beds seemed a luxury. After talking to people who’d done this trek years ago, I’d been prepared to throw my sleeping bag on the floor. The price was ridiculously low, just ten rupees per person (about fifteen cents U.S.).

  Before dinner, I washed a few clothes in the bathroom sink and took a shower. The water was ice-cold, but after a long, hot day of walking in the sun it felt refreshing.

  At dinner, all nine of us ate together. We ordered a variety of dishes that must have driven the few employees mad trying to keep up. It took about an hour and a half for them to start serving us, and then the food trickled out of the small kitchen in dribs and drabs. But it was a warm, breezy night, and we used the time to get acquainted, making a rambunctious job of it.

  notes from later in the trek

  In social situations, I often see myself as the last planet in our solar system. Like the theoretical Planet X, I revolve around the periphery, I take longer than anyone else to get around, and, even if I’m part of their system, no one else knows for certain whether I exist.

  Yet for the first time in the company of others, I can feel the gravity that has pulled us together. I have trouble thinking of us as anything other than a group, even though none of us has ever met before, with the exception of Charlie and Allison.

  Intense experience often yields penetrating insights, but it would be arrogant to believe I see anyone in the group as they really are. I only recognize them by the unique movements of their orbits. Nonetheless, here’s the way I saw them on our first evening together and in the days that followed:

  Nat: About twenty-seven, with spiky blond hair, eyes of bad-boy blue, and the grin of a good-natured jester. He’s an Englishman who went to law school, practiced law for two years, decided it wasn’t for him, and dropped everything to travel. He has traveled in Southeast Asia and lived in Australia for a year.

  When he arrived at the Kathmandu Airport and filled out his visa application, in the blank next to “occupation” he wrote “porridge tester.” Much to his embarrassment, as he left the crowded line with his visa an immigration official waved his application in the air and yelled after him, “So, Mr. Johnson, I see you’re a porridge tester! We’ll have great use for your services here. We eat much porridge in Nepal!”

  Nat is the madman.

  Ron: Mid-twenties, with sympathetic blue eyes and the demeanor of a sweet but sorrowful hound. He’s another Englishman, and quite a witty cut-up when paired with Nat. But catch him alone and he’s a thoughtful gentleman.

  When I told him I brought my bamboo recorder just in case I find myself alone on the trail, he looked truly delighted. “That’s fantastic!” he said. “I can just picture you playing your flute, dancing up the trail with a group of children following behind you.”

  He works in computer programming or something of that sort. Or in his ironic terms: “A truly exciting job that sends me traveling to amazing places all over the world.”

  Ron is the amiable one. At six-foot-seven, he’s also the tallest.

  Melanie: Twenty-eight, an attractive woman who would never waste time fussing with her looks, and an intellectual dynamo. She’s an American, but she has lived in England and Africa and has just completed two years teaching English in Japan. Melanie spends so much time considering everything that can go wrong, it makes me wonder how she ever convinced herself to leave home in the first place.

  Although she’s good-humored, she frequently comments that the group is moving too fast. “If you increase altitude too quickly, you can get altitude sickness. And you can’t really experience the scenery because when you’re walking fast you tend to look at the ground more to watch your footing. And if you walk fast and don’t watch your footing, well, that’s another risk.” Before the trek she went to a lecture by an experienced trekker. She told us that he warned the audience to always pass mule trains on the side of the trail closest to the mountain, because a few pack animals have bumped people off the cliff-sides.

  Melanie is the careful one.

  Zack: Twenty-four, small and wiry, with an elvish face and rapidly receding dark hair. Zack is from South Carolina and speaks in a softly triangulated accent that drips with homemade biscuits, porch swings, and fireflies. He keeps asking Ron and Nat to supply him with British slang, and words like bloody and wanker sound particularly amusing in his Southern twang.

  Zack is hiking through the Himalayas in a pair of cheap sneakers—I’d be hard-pressed to call them running shoes—but his choice of footwear seems to be more about sloughing off image and sticking to a budget rather than some awe-shucks pretension to being a simple country boy. He has a degree in microbiology but has never had a job in that field. Claims he’s never held any job longer than a few months. In the summer he teaches water-skiing. He’s traveled a bit and has spent much of the past year teaching English in Taiwan.

  Zack says he can’t stand “political correctness.” He told us that, after his stint in Taiwan, “I’m sick and tired of rice, rice, rice, morning, noon and night.”

  Zack is the politically incorrect one.

  Gunther: Early twenties. Pale and exceptionally slim with faint blue eyes and close-shorn hair, Gunther has the look of a monk. He doesn’t say much. This might be partly because, of the four Germans in the group, he speaks the least English. On the other hand, even when he’s speaking German with his three compatriots he still seems laconic and soft-spoken. Whenever my eyes touch upon him he seems to be intently observing someone or something. He has a sense of humor, but his laughter is as gentle as bits of goose down escaping a pillow. He exudes an almost ethereal glow.

  Gunther is exceptionally kindhearted. Lucy told me that when he was in Kathmandu he met a Sherpa with a broken arm. She said, “Gunther gave hi
m a ride to the hospital, but not only that: he also paid his bill. He told me he thinks anybody else would have done the same thing. But I think he’s a very unusual person.” As far as I know, Lucy is the only person with whom he has shared this story.

  Gunther is the quiet one.

  Lucy: At twenty-two, Lucy is the youngest. She’s the only one in our group using walking poles. Although she’s plump, her generous curves and alternately dimpled and pouting mouth promise the kind of passion that can entice observant men. She doesn’t live in her homeland of Germany, but in London, where she works temporary jobs that allow her to travel frequently.

  Lucy is both the best and worst companion on the trek. She’s a study in annoyance and resentment: her pack is too heavy or the trail is too hard, people “can’t even wait five minutes for her” or everyone is “just sitting around.” Yet, as often as she complains, she’s equally ready to laugh—including laughter at herself—and she has a dogged determination that’s admirable.

  Although her bottomless well of bitching can be irksome, its twin is her deep well of empathy. She’s the first to defend someone else if she thinks they’re being left in the dust; there’s no sense pointing out to her that this group is a creature of happenstance, that none of us have formally agreed to travel together. I sense she’s one of those people whose friends know they can always count on her, and whose habit of dumping all her troubles on the table is worth it to those who value her humor and loyalty.

  Lucy is the devil’s advocate.

  Charlie: Mid-twenties. It’s impossible to picture Charlie without Allison. The two are as inseparable as twins, at least on this trek. Both are tall, athletic women with the beautiful bone structure of fashion models, though they laughed when I told them so. They’re both given to easy laughter.

  When we met, I asked them how long they’ve known each other. They consulted in German for a moment.

  “We’ve known each other eighteen years,” Allison said.