Shopping for Buddhas

by Jeff Greenwald

  When I pressed him for further rarities, the shop owner fetched a folio from the shelf and pulled out a snapshot of an old wood carving that he was safeguarding at home.

  It was, as Goodman had predicted, a wooden torana—neatly stripped from a Bhaktapur temple.

  13

  Nepal has a reputation for being a kind of Shangri-la. Most people who visit—the average stay is only a week or two—don’t have any need or desire to look behind the mask and notice such problems as art theft or human rights abuses.

  A friend of mine working as a psychotherapist in Kathmandu remarked to me one evening that people visiting Nepal behave exactly as if they were having a love affair with a human being. They become giddy and intoxicated, seeing only the exoticism and mystery; as if their critical faculty had somehow been suspended.

  “Or like a person on drugs,” my friend said, “who is wandering through the jungle, and suddenly a tiger leaps out of the bush, right at them, and they scream, ‘Oh, my God! What gorgeous green eyes!’ ”

  Perhaps he was right—literally. Maybe a holiday to Nepal, a sudden and complete immersion into the stewpot of simmering human funk and fragrance, actually does something physical to your body and releases an enzyme into your bloodstream that makes everything seem so much more lush, more beautiful, more poignant. . . .

  But Nepal is not Shangri-la. This became quite clear to me one afternoon as, between shopping bouts, I sat in the garden of the Kathmandu Guest House and read through an Amnesty International report entitled Nepal: A Pattern of Human Rights Abuses. Reading the booklet gave me a nagging sense of disconnection from the immediate environment, which consisted mainly of Western tourists and travelers lounging around on the manicured lawn, drinking fresh lemon sodas, reading travel guides, smoking hashish or Yak cigarettes, and reminiscing about the Hill Tribes of Thailand or the beaches at Goa. . . .

  What, exactly, are the dynamics of responsible travel in the twenty-first century? Is a part of it knowing, insisting on knowing, about the human rights situation of countries that one visits on vacation? Do Americans deserve a vacation from that kind of information? The more I read of the Amnesty report, the more I felt an almost overpowering urge to climb up on a soapbox—to let everyone in that garden know exactly what I was reading, to ask questions about it, to become informed, outraged, active.

  Instead, I climbed up to the hotel’s roof and read, alone, about torture, disappearances, pins under the fingernails, chili peppers up the ass, pausing every now and again to gaze northward toward the parade of shark-tooth Himalayas, or out over the hazy skyline of brick buildings toward the Royal Palace. The Amnesty report grated harshly against the Nepal I wanted to believe in: the magical land of incense and Buddha eyes, tea shops by the river, vermilion-smeared stone carvings of the Goddess of Compassion.

  During the next week, I became increasingly curious about this hidden aspect of Nepal—the world of royal privilege, political intrigue and human rights abuses that exists in the shadows of the sacred mountains. I began to make phone calls and arrange interviews, bent on finding out just how widespread and pervasive Amnesty International’s charges were.

  The first person I approached with my questions, a droll and insightful Nepali businessman who had been observing the political scene for nearly half a century, laughed out loud when I expressed my interest in investigating the kinds of abuses described in the Amnesty report.

  “Human rights in Nepal,” he declared, “is a square peg in a round hole. The entire thing is alien to the Hindu concept. In the Hindu world, you see, the loyalty is to family, clan, group. You do your duty as part of a group. You do your duty! Human rights, on the other hand, involves a conception of the individual: a single person, who can stand alone against the rest of society and the state.”

  He removed his glasses and began to polish them with the corner of a yellow handkerchief.

  “Nepal is a hierarchical, caste-based society, based on exploitation. We are a Hindu kingdom. We swear by the Manusmriti: the Code of Manu, the Hindu religious code, written some five hundred years before Christ. And do you know what it says? ‘Do not let the producing classes, the lowest castes, accumulate wealth. Dispossess them of their wealth as soon as they may gain it. They are there to serve the higher-caste people.’

  “This very mentality,” the businessman lamented, “works behind the scenes. It explains many policies, practices and attitudes of the government, which consists mostly of appointed members from the higher castes.

  “So never mind how you apply a veneer of Western political thought to the situation you find in Nepal! Our way of thinking remains traditionally Hindu.”

  The next afternoon I cycled up Lazimpat to the unwelcoming gates of the U.S. Embassy. If paranoia were a virus, this would be the petri dish to breed it in. Video cameras and body scans at the front gate; multiple, narrow-eyed telephone calls from the Nepali guards to their superiors deep inside the castle keep; the cardboard Marine guard at the reception area, ensconced behind a myopic thickness of bullet-proof, grenade-proof, humanity-proof glass. One states one’s business and obeys orders. I was instructed to retire to the stark waiting room. The only diversion in that relentlessly functional purgatory was a copy of State, the State Department’s anemic house organ, which lay on a thinly veneered table directly under a cheesy portrait of the president of the United States.

  Richard March, the embassy official charged with keeping track of people like myself, entered the room through an armored door and greeted me. He possessed the classic, fade-away anonymity of a John Le Carré spy. A narrow man, March was dressed almost completely in gray, which added to my impression that he was deeply and fundamentally uncomfortable; a bit drained around the edges, as if his body had recently become a stomping ground for micro-organisms.

  March led me upstairs. Every room looked self-consciously official and inexplicably weary, as if the whole place had been designed as a set for a TV miniseries about Washington intrigue and backbiting. March himself, whom I quickly pegged as a basically harmless and well-meaning chap who spent most of his free time wondering what the hell he was doing in Nepal, found his complete physical opposite in Roy West, the beefy, cigar-puffing interim ambassador, who sat enthroned on a bulging Naugahyde couch in an appropriately intimidating office.

  One never knows how frank diplomats are being. It’s the nature of their business to be obtuse. But West was, as he readily admitted, “a bit to the right of center.” He basically felt that the situation in Nepal was really no worse than the situation in, say, Mexico.

  “The problem of King Birendra’s lack of personal willpower is something that all of us have been hearing about lately. There’s no doubt that people have become more and more outspoken, particularly over the past two or three years. You hear a lot of criticism of the government, of the system and, after a scotch or two, about the King himself. Usually those kinds of statements have reflected more sorrow than anger; but maybe these days we’re hearing more anger than sorrow. And they imply that the King is basically a well-intentioned, but perhaps ineffectual, man.”

  “It’s hard being a king,” March interjected. “It’s hard breaking out of the shell. You create it, and the people around you create it.”

  When I asked directly about human rights, West said there was nothing unique about Nepal. “It’s not very good—it’s a system of limits. Within those limits, which are tolerably broad, you can get away with almost anything. Go a step beyond them, and you’re in the slammer.”

  “The list of countries that live up to our standards,” he added wryly, “is very short. . . .

  “There are a lot of things about this kingdom that are extremely restrictive. Under the Public Security Act, you can arrest any Nepali citizen and put him or her away for nine months before charges have to be filed; eighteen months, if the order is imposed by the central government. And then, after you let them out, you can immediately re-arrest them a day or two later. It’s very hard to claim
the right not to be in prison if the government wants you in prison. And I’ve heard too many allegations of torture not to believe some of them.”

  “Anybody taken to jail around here gets beaten up,” March added. “This is the procedure: you take somebody in, whether they’re a pickpocket or whatever, you beat them up and get a confession. They don’t do it to foreigners or to people who are socially prominent, but to everyone else.”

  “I’m not talking about beatings,” West said. “I’m talking about torture: the deliberate infliction of pain, physical and/or psychological, to extract information.”

  The tactics of the ruling class, it seems, sometimes go beyond even torture. One person who both March and West suggested I speak to was a journalist named Padam Thakurathi, an outspoken critic of government corruption who had recently—and miraculously—survived an assassination attempt at point-blank range.

  “He would be a perfect person for you to talk to. That is, if he feels like talking to you. He’s been considerably more subdued since the shooting.

  “And by the way: be prepared,” March cautioned soberly. “I hope you’re not too squeamish, because he was pretty horribly mutilated by the whole thing.”

  I left the embassy, emerging, mole-like, onto the assaultive landscape of Lazimpat Road. For a moment I could hardly remember where I was. Then I mounted my bicycle and pedaled home, infected with an irresistible sense of purpose.

  One of the great things about Nepal is that almost everybody, with the obvious exception of members of the royal family, is easily accessible. Thakurathi was one of the great opposition figures in Nepal, but it took me less than fifteen minutes to find his phone number, call him at home, and invite him over for lunch. He agreed to come a little later in the week.

  14

  I finished a cup of Sumatran coffee (Krishna had lobbed some whipped cream into it, left over from the previous night’s pumpkin pie) and checked warily on the crow. It was truly hideous; just looking at it was a serious threat to my mental health. It dangled by a thread, the once-meaty drumsticks down to white bone, yet the talons still miraculously grasping! Please, please let it fall! Let fall the abomination, and be done with it! I shuddered. Only a matter of days now. . . .

  Another day, another shopping spree. I wheeled my Hero bicycle outside our gate to confront the latest in an ongoing series of municipal nightmares: cumulus clouds of choking dust, and a fusillade of apocalyptic roars as truckload after truckload of coarse gravel was dumped onto the roadway right in front of our little garden compound.

  I groped, half-blinded, through a universe of chalky, abrasive powder, my hacking cough matched by a burning sense of embarrassment as I recalled my innocent lover’s recently ended, ill-omened visit.

  For months, Karen had been regaled with stories about the incomparably exotic charms of Nepal: its quaint streets, unpretentious lifestyle and easy pace. But the Kathmandu she finally landed in whined an ugly contradiction to these psalms of praise. Throughout the entire length of her stay, His Majesty’s Government was embroiled in a titanic effort to modernize Kathmandu. The process included paving kilometers of dirt roads, installing traffic lights, lathering the temples with fresh coats of paint and generally flinging about millions upon millions of rupees for cosmetic surgery. So intense was this zeal for modernization that many funky old homes—some of which had stood for centuries, surviving even the disastrous earthquake of 1934—were being razed to the ground (or literally cut in half) to make way for the broader avenues.

  The speed and no-nonsense efficiency of the whole process was unprecedented, leading me to suspect that these were not your standard municipal improvements. Indeed, a few queries had revealed a very specific method to the madness. In early November, a major international conference (known by the acronym SAARC, for South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation) was scheduled to take place in Kathmandu. SAARC (pronounced “shark” by the disgusted Nepalis whose homes and neighborhoods had been gobbled up in the course of the city-beautification program) was to be the first multinational political event ever hosted by the Kingdom of Nepal. Heads of state from India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives would soon be conglomerating in the capital for casual, convivial chats. This was a landmark occasion, and no expense was being spared to give these cabbages and kings a convincing illusion of how truly advanced, how marvelously cosmopolitan little Kathmandu had become.

  Karen and I had beaten an escape from the city and trekked up to the sacred lakes at Gosainkund—that fateful trip—but it was just a temporary measure. The facelift was still in full swing when we returned and continued so—right up to the moment when Karen boarded her homeward-bound flight. Her memories of “Dreamland Nepal,” I sadly realized, would always be dominated by violent images of backhoes, steamrollers and cement mixers.

  By now, at the eleventh hour, the “improvements” had expanded to a level far beyond a simple revamp of the city’s surface area. I noticed, as I bicycled down the street, that all the familiar cripples, the ragged men who scoot around on little carts or pull themselves along the ground on pieces of tire rubber, were mysteriously absent. They’d been “relocated,” I was informed—but to where? And where were the infamous rickshaws, with their barefoot drivers, garishly painted cabs and pathetically skewed awnings? Had they, too, like that ill-fated car within eyeshot of the King’s motorcade, been taken off to some “lonely place”?

  The cows, of course, remained; but even they seemed somehow manicured, deodorized and freshly shampooed. It was as if the entire city were being given a gigantic enema! Up and down the sidewalk in front of the Royal Palace, men on tottering ladders, their arms soaked to the elbow with silver enamel, were smearing paint all over the high, spiked fence that protects the beloved King and Queen from their loyal subjects. . . .

  As I pedaled along the eerily tidy avenues, I found myself thinking about the legend of Buddha’s youth. When Prince Siddhartha was born, the court astrologers instructed his father—King Suddhodana—to virtually imprison the prince in the palace and prevent the boy (at all costs!) from laying eyes on old people, sick people, dead people or holy mendicants. The prince had all the marks of a divine king, Suddhodana was told; but if the boy ever beheld these baffling illustrations of the human condition, his extraordinary temperament would drown him in a maelstrom of compassion. The young prince would renounce everything—his family, his kingdom, the works—and wander off to seek the true causes of human suffering.

  No wonder, then, that Kathmandu was being swept clean! No wonder that flatbed trucks were rolling down the streets, full of bucket brigades who threw pails of whitewash over walls, garbage mounds, flowers, fences, trees and dogs! No wonder that cripples, the homeless and itinerant sadhus had been shooed into the woodwork! These awful truths of human existence had to be kept hidden at all costs—for what limit to the apocalyptic renunciations that might ensue if any of these great Asian leaders glimpsed what life was like outside the palace gates??

  The morning that Padam Thakurathi was due to arrive, I did some research. The journalist had been involved with a newspaper which was shut down for criticizing His Majesty’s Government. He then began Bimarsha, a weekly that focused on hard-hitting investigative reporting.

  In 1976, there were about five hundred heroin addicts in Kathmandu. By the late 1980s, that number had exploded to over fifteen thousand. Exactly how these boatloads of hard drugs were making their way into tightly controlled and geographically landlocked Nepal was a multimillion-rupee question, the answer to which was suspected by many, but verbalized by very, very few. In 1986, Thakurathi’s paper started publishing a two-part exposé on the direct relationship between Nepal’s skyrocketing heroin problem and the King’s two brothers: Prince Gyanendra and Prince Direndra. It was that story, specifically, that very nearly cost Padam Thakurathi his life.

  Thakurathi arrived on the dot of 11 a.m. on the appointed day, parking his bicycle on the front lawn. I finished brushing my teeth and le
t him in. The journalist was formally dressed, wearing a pale blue daura surwal—Nepal’s traditional two-piece suit—under a sports jacket. A colorful green and orange topi, patterned with an abstract rhododendron motif, gave a splash of color to the outfit. His right eye—the artificial one—gazed morosely downward, but his living left eye was direct and convivial.

  I saw no sign of the disfiguration that Richard March, the U.S. Embassy official, had mentioned; no “horrible mutilation.” Thirty minutes into the interview, though, Thakurathi gave me a measuring glance. He then casually lifted off his topi, and I saw at once what March had meant.

  The upper-right portion of the journalist’s skull, from just above the eyebrow to high up the scalp, was . . . missing. The skin simply caved in, following the shape of a huge, crater-like depression that seemed to have eaten up a good thirty percent of his frontal lobes. It looked for all the world like the surgeons had gone at him with an ice-cream scoop.

  Thakurathi’s survival was a double miracle. Not only did the journalist live; he had apparently retained all his incisive mental functions. Although Thakurathi spoke slowly and with great deliberation, he immediately disproved March’s theory that he would be subdued and reluctant.

  I asked Thakurathi if he felt capable of recalling the events leading up to the assassination attempt itself. He agreed without hesitation.

  “I had nothing; no suspicion in my mind. The very day the shooting took place, I was participating in a journalists’ conference that lasted from morning to evening. From that meeting, I came back home and took my family to a friend’s house. We had been asked to dinner there. And then we came back to our house and went to bed.