Shopping for Buddhas

by Jeff Greenwald

  “I have no memory of anything happening until thirty-five days later, when I regained consciousness in Samiti Vej Hospital in Bangkok.”

  Thakurathi has pieced together the events that followed immediately after the shooting. His wife had been sleeping with him; when she heard the sound of the gun she jumped from the bed and threw on the light—nearly fainting from what she saw. Her husband’s right eye had been blown from its socket, and the cotton mattress was saturated with blood. She ran from the house and called the neighbors, who helped get the journalist to a local hospital.

  But the Kathmandu facilities were inadequate to his grievous wound. Fortunately, Thakurathi—himself a former member of the National Assembly—had friends in high places. An official order directed that he be flown to the more sophisticated operating theaters in Bangkok.

  I remarked that God must have been on his side, for him to have lived.

  “Yes. That is the only factor that I lived—because of God. My doctor told me that in all the years of his practice, he had never witnessed such a miracle.”

  In late 1986, there was a huge and unprecedented crackdown in Kathmandu. Many of the slimiest officials, including the inspector general of police and Prince Direndra’s aide-de-camp, were arrested and eventually given long prison sentences. I asked Thakurathi if these measures had lessened the corruption problem in Nepal.

  “No, no, no. It has not even been touched. There are a few people who have been taken, but the organizers of the corruption and drug trafficking are still running freely. Mostly they are the people from the Royal Palace: the secretaries, and the King’s brothers—both of them, until recently. Earlier this year, you see, Direndra left the country. For good, I think.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Well, because he was defaming the royal family with his actions. There was his involvement in things like my case, and things like drug trafficking and gold smuggling. So he was made to leave. The news given to the people was that he had resigned his post, but it was a forced resignation.”

  “So that leaves only Gyanendra. Are things just as bad as they were before?”

  “Yes.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” I said, “because, as you know, Prince Gyanendra has an international reputation as a great conservationist. He’s the chairman of the Lumbini Development Project and the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation. He even gave two baby rhinos to the San Francisco Zoo!”

  Thakurathi gazed at me sardonically with his left eye; his right seemed to trace the weave of the cotton tablecloth. “That’s only show business,” he said. “Gyanendra is the main link to the international drug traffickers. We have come to know this through discussions with very reliable sources: the people who worked closely with him. Certain people in prison have made statements.”

  This evidence seemed circumstantial at best, and I told Thakurathi so. But both he and the other insiders I would eventually speak with laughed off my doubts and regarded me as if I were astonishingly dense. It was all a matter of logic, they said. It had to be the royal family. How could anyone else get away with it? Nepal is a small country; the Kathmandu Valley, where the vast majority of the addicts live, is even smaller. Nepal is a word-of-mouth society; everybody knows what everybody else is up to. If a thriving, multimillion-rupee business in heroin and brown sugar is being tolerated, it can only be because the highest people in the know—the very highest—are either in direct control or receiving an extraordinary cut.

  “You’re giving me the impression, Mr. Thakurathi, that members of the royal family are basically immune from criminal charges no matter what laws they break.”

  “Yes! That’s right!” He gave me the look that a teacher gives to an average student who surprises him with a moment of insight. “Mr. Bharat Gurung was the aide-de-camp, the bodyguard of Direndra. He was caught, tried and penalized for the crime of trying to kill me. But as I was told by some of the people who were in custody along with him, he kept saying that he had just carried out the order to kill me—an order that was given to him by Prince Direndra.”

  “Bharat Gurung,” I said, “was sentenced to thirty-three years in prison and millions of rupees in fines. I’m surprised he hasn’t come right out and pointed the finger directly at Prince Direndra, if it was he who gave the order to assassinate you.”

  “It is the police who have to take the statements. And the police won’t mention the prince’s name.” Thakurathi laughed without bitterness. “Even if Gurung says the prince told him to do it, it won’t be reported.”

  “So were both the princes involved in these illegal activities?”

  “Oh, yes. They are equally responsible. Especially in the gold smuggling. According to the law of Nepal, customs officers are not authorized to check their baggage. They travel in an entourage and can smuggle in any amount of gold or heroin. This gang has been doing all sorts of things, including the art smuggling. As I was told by their contractors: they bring the drugs in from Thailand and there are some agents here. Some of them were caught this year, along with the others.”

  “Does the King know what his brothers are doing?”

  “He must know. I had a chance to meet with His Majesty two or three years back. I told him, ‘Your brothers are involved with such business, and to save your own image you must act quickly.’ He said, ‘I will see.’ ”

  Thakurathi sipped at his water for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think in that family he has little say. I think they decide everything in family meetings.”

  “Okay—so what if your paper was to publish a story that said it was Direndra who ordered Gurung to shoot you?”

  “We cannot publish like that. We will be arrested, and our paper will be seized. Canceled.”

  “So what can you do?” I wondered out loud. “Nepal’s problems seem to be directly connected to the Royal Palace. How can you keep hammering away at them if it’s against the law for you to implicate the royal family?”

  “We will be publishing as much as we can. We will make the people conscious of what’s going on in the country. I’m not afraid. I will continue on with my work.”

  I asked Thakurathi if he had seen the Amnesty International report. He said he had indeed gotten hold of one, although copies were, predictably, difficult to come by in Nepal.

  “The report is perfectly correct,” he said. “In October this year, I was taken into custody for a story I wrote about the milk scandal. It was claimed that the Government Dairy Board was buying cheap powdered milk from Poland that had been contaminated by the Chernobyl fallout.

  “During my twenty-five days in prison, I saw a person who was taken in, seven hours a day, for beatings. They beat him on the soles of the feet, and on the whole body. When he used to come back from the beatings, he was not able to walk. And I saw so many cases of burning from the cigarettes. The police wanted a false statement from him, a confession, that he had stolen sacred art from the temples.”

  “Had he really stolen the art?”

  “No.”

  “Then why were they beating him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Thakurathi. “There was nothing. I think they wanted to use him as a scapegoat. They wanted a confession. In Nepal, most of the cases are decided on such statements. To get that statement, they used to beat him seven hours a day. But they never got it. Perhaps he is still in prison.”

  There was a long silence. Thakurathi took a small packet of Pan Parag, a herbal chew, from his jacket pocket and popped a few of the pungent granules into his mouth.

  I refilled our water glasses. My mind wandered. The story about the beatings in prison was dramatic and deplorable, but I found myself thinking about human rights on a much larger scale. Nepal is one of the world’s poorest countries; the average per capita income is something like $160 a year. For most Nepalis—the vast population of subsistence farmers who live outside of the Kathmandu Valley—life is a continual struggle against a host of problems: deforestation and erosio
n, malnutrition and disease, population pressure, bad drinking water, illiteracy. All over Nepal, the basic needs of millions of people remain unmet. Meanwhile, journalists who try to bring these issues into public debate—people like Thakurathi—are hauled into prison for expressing their views.

  “Nepal is obviously in trouble,” I said. “But millions on millions of dollars in development money is constantly pouring in from foreign sources—Japan, China, Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, the World Bank. Isn’t it helping? I mean, do you think the situation for the average person in Nepal, the people who live up in the hills, is getting better?”

  “It’s getting worse. Because the foreign aid is being distributed among a few families. Very little goes to the areas for which it has been asked. All the officers and project chiefs are nominated according to the wishes of the Royal Palace.”

  “Do you think,” I asked helplessly, “that there’s any hope for a change here in the near future? Is there any way that things will get better?”

  “I don’t think so. Because the King is so powerful. The army and police are very much behind the King. And that is the only base of his rule.”

  Thakurathi agreed with the conventional wisdom that the King is a decent human being surrounded by very bad advisers. “During that period of time when I was in the Nepalese parliament, I had the opportunity to talk with him. In person. And I received the impression that he is truly worried about the development of the country. But he’s not decisive enough. He can’t make the right decision at the right moment.”

  The tragic irony of the whole situation, I felt, is that Nepal has a constitution that ostensibly provides for law, order and basic human rights. But unlike the Constitution of the United States, which originated “Of the people, by the people and for the people,” Nepal’s constitution is a gift from the King—who can revoke it at any time.

  “There is one proverb in Nepali,” Thakurathi told me. “ ‘The elephant has the teeth outside: they are only to show, not to eat.’ And so, in Nepal, the constitution is just like those tusks: only for show.”

  Listening to Thakurathi’s reflections on Nepal’s crisis of leadership, I was reminded of a story that I’d heard at a dinner party a couple of weeks before.

  All over Nepal—“the World’s Only Hindu Kingdom”—cows are revered as sacred. It is a Hindu belief that cows are the reincarnations of beloved relatives; allies who play a crucial role in the cycle of existence by leading recently deceased family members—who, blind and terrified, cling desperately to their tails—across the dread Rivers of Fire that lie between death and the afterlife.

  Cows are given the run of Kathmandu. Festivals honor them; passers-by touch them for a blessing; vegetable vendors throw them wilted spinach. I once watched an old woman stand behind a cow in a courtyard, collecting its sacred dung in her hands before the steaming mass had a chance to hit the ground.

  Bovines of all colors and sizes are often seen lounging about the roads and sidewalks, chewing their cuds as traffic swerves around them. And swerve it must: to injure a cow is a criminal offense, and drivers who inadvertently hit and kill the animals have sometimes been lynched right on the spot.

  All this just to relate a brief anecdote about an occasion when a truck had to unload some crates in front of a shop where a cow had settled herself for the afternoon. The driver tried honking; tried shouting; tried pushing. No avail. Finally, he figured he’d just nudge the cow with the vehicle and get it on its way. But the bovine wouldn’t budge—it stayed right where it was, even as the truck crushed its leg.

  It seemed a perfect allegory. Cows are sacred—why should they move just because they’re being pushed? Especially if the one doing the pushing can be thrown into prison on a whim. The monarchy is, to some extent, like those sacred cows. It may be blocking the smooth flow of traffic (err, ideas), but the entire system has evolved to respect its inviolable right to immobility.

  15

  Human desires are endless. It is like the thirst of a man who drinks salt water: he gets no satisfaction and his thirst is only increased.

  —BUKKYO DENDO KYOKAI, The Teaching of Buddha

  Every time I go shopping in Nepal I encounter an array of objects as fascinating as crib toys. You remember: those marvelous, colorful busy-boxes that gave us our first lessons about shape and color and sound and prepared us for the intimidating world of eye-hand coordination. In my more enlightened moments, I begin to realize that everything the adult world plays with is just an extension of the crib toy.

  Wandering through the streets of Patan’s Durbar Square in search of an elegant bronze statue, flying high on a few light puffs of eye-opening Nepali hash, I was able to recall the flavor of that enviable infant attention span.

  It was in this frame of mind that I espied, in an out-of-the-way little shop, a handsome bronze statue of Chenrezig.

  Chenrezig, like Tara, is a bodhisattva of compassion. His beat is Tibet; the line of Dalai Lamas is believed to be the direct human manifestation of Chenrezig, tirelessly striving for the liberation of all sentient beings—cats, puffer-fish, ants, camels, canaries—on Earth. South of the Himalayas, Chenrezig wears a lighter outfit and is caught performing different asanas and mudras; in Nepal, he usually goes by the Sanskrit name of Avalokiteshwara. As Nepal is the Land of Ten Thousand Gods, broad-minded in its esthetic and devotional tastes, it was not the least bit surprising to run into the patron deity of the Tibetan highlands in a Patan curio shop.

  The shopkeeper noticed that I was admiring the statue and took it from the display case. He set it on the counter and traced its perfectly symmetrical outline with his hands.

  “Can you see,” the merchant asked, “that Chenrezig’s meditating body is imitating the shape of a bell? In our Tibetan religion, the bell—we call it drilbu—is the shape for compassion. Compassion and wisdom, united together, mean enlightenment. So Chenrezig, you see, being bodhisattva of compassion, is shaped like the bell.”

  “And what about wisdom?”

  “Ah!” The shopkeeper lifted another statue from the case—one I readily recognized. “You see: this is Manjushri. He is holding the sword. This sword is like the shape of the vajra, what you call thunderbolt. It is the symbol of wisdom. Very bright; very powerful. Manjushri is shaped like this.”

  The Patan shopkeeper’s ideas about the metaphorical shapes of his statues may have owed more to his own imagination than to any traditional teaching, but one element of his lesson clicked home. During Tibetan rituals, I had watched the high lamas grasp a drilbu in one hand and a stylized, two-pointed vajra in the other, swinging them toward each other while chanting the sutras. Now it all made sense: they were combining the two, blending wisdom and compassion, mixing up the recipe for enlightenment.

  I continued my rounds in Patan, looking with new interest at the Chenrezigs in the various shops. None of them seemed nearly as good as the first one I had seen—not by a long shot. A leisurely survey through the markets of Kathmandu confirmed this impression, and within a few days the wonderful, terrible truth of the situation became clear to me.

  I had made a find. An honest-to-goodness find. Mysterious glands began secreting their potent liquors into my bloodstream, compelling me to buy. My heartbeat began to quicken at the very mention of Chenrezig; my breath came in short, shallow gasps, as if I were recalling the face of a lover. No doubt about it: I was primed for the pounce. All I needed was a quick blessing from my hunting partner.

  As soon as Nancy returned from her sojourn in the Chitwan jungle, I phoned the owner of the shop—Tashi was his name—and set a time for us to come and look at his Chenrezig again. At the appointed hour, Nancy and I hired a cab to drive us out to Patan.

  Patan is a four or five-kilometer ride out of Kathmandu, over the Bagmati River and up the hill. As we passed the river, we saw a poignant sight: a bright yellow dumpster, one of many recently installed as part of the Solid Waste Management Program, had been overturned by a group of street waifs a
nd beggars. The foul contents had been scattered over the street and was being sifted for fruit rinds, tattered cardboard and other scraps. Another ambitious gesture gone awry; I was certain that the foreign aid organization that had donated these dumpsters to Nepal had not calculated that they would be the Third World equivalent of Goodwill depositories.

  For the remainder of the ride to Patan, I talked up my once and future Chenrezig, recalling its perfect bell shape and swelling with conviction. At last, the cab dropped us off near the fabulous temples of the old Palace Square. We strolled past the pagodas, into the shopping district, through an ever-narrowing maze of alleyways until—right on time—we located Tashi’s shop.

  It was closed! Bright blue shutters boarded the windows, and a big, black Chinese “Friendship” brand padlock bolted the door. What to do? I muttered an awkward apology to Nancy and ran off to fetch some plain sodas. We planted ourselves on the step.

  We waited; and waited. I started to get a little bit irritated. Where the hell was this guy, anyway? After another fifteen minutes I was a lot irritated. Who did this arrogant son of a bitch think I was? Nancy cleared her throat, and my badly stretched thread of good will snapped. Time, I determined, to adopt a somewhat more aggressive strategy. Where, to begin with, did this clown live?

  After asking around at the neighboring shops, we were directed to the sculptors’ district. The setting was positively medieval. Dogs limped through the streets; thick smoke, tasting of rough tobacco and hot wax, plumed out of carved wooden windows. Clusters of pan-spitting twelve-year-old boys sat in some of the doorways, chain-smoking Yak filter cigarettes and laying into half-finished Buddhas, Taras and Manjushris with primitive carving tools.

  Our shopkeeper’s house was a tall white structure that leaned imposingly into the narrow, brick-paved alley. I knocked at the rickety wooden door. No answer. Damnation! The guy wasn’t even home! At last, the sowji’s little son answered the door and bade us wait inside.