“I’m sorry, sir. I am only doing my duty!” The customs agent gauged my distress and adopted a more conciliatory tone. “Please; we will not destroy this Buddha. We will only hold it. The next time you return to Nepal, no problem. You just get the proper tags, and we will let you through without a second glance!”
I raged; I moaned; I begged and pleaded. Finally, it was just him and me, staring at each other: a total stalemate.
Well, I thought. Well. It seemed futile and inappropriate to lash out with my fists, although that was definitely the primal inspiration. So I tried a few deep breaths, and a silent prayer, instead.
God grant me the serenity to know what I can’t change . . . and I determined, with a little snort of insight, that this had to be some kind of a test. I mean, think about it. Wasn’t yet another crucial teaching of the Buddha—non-attachment—being offered up to me in one not-so-easy lesson?
A tinny loudspeaker clapped into the gloom: “Final call for Flight 650 to Bangkok, please board immediately at Gate Number 2! Royal Nepal Airlines Flight 650 to Bangkok, boarding immediately at Gate Number 2. . . .”
“Kay garnay,” I muttered: what to do. “Take it, daju. Hold it. Keep it. Enjoy it,” I said. “After all, that isn’t really the Buddha—no, daju—it’s just molded metal, dirt, paint . . . nothing but trash!”
And then I laughed, a dizzy, what-the-hell laugh, and my whole body contracted with an enormous sense of release—as if I’d come to the end of a very long book, long and confusing, but suddenly all the jigsaw pieces were spliced together by a few completely unexpected words.
I had lost the Buddha; but I had won the war.
This was it. I took a deep breath. “Namaste,” I said to the customs agent. “And ramro sanga basnos”—Remain here with all my blessings.
“Namaste,” he replied. Then he smiled and, after a quick glance from side to side, handed me back the Buddha.
I stared at him, knees weakening, and croaked out one word: “Why?”
“Maybe, I think, you have an honest face.”
21
It was a night flight from Kathmandu to Bangkok. A clear, brilliant December night, and by the time the flight took off—we were delayed, as usual—the moon had risen above the black spires of the Himalayas and was gleaming off the snow.
We circled the valley, and the lights of the runway got smaller. From this height, Kathmandu looked like anywhere else—sodium yellow along the avenues, spot lit factories, the headlights of Japanese cars crawling across the earth. The dull, phosphorescent glow of civilization.
It was all down there: my entire other life. Those wise and funny people and great gods and goddesses; those shuttered shop windows full of fantastic, expensive Buddhas. And so much more! I looked down and tried to imagine the black cows sleeping in darkened streets, the rickshaw drivers huddled in their carts beneath the temples of Asan Tole, the musicians chanting ballads in the bandstand at Chhetrapati. And I imagined a black crow, festering and precarious, awaiting its inevitable rendezvous with gravity. . . .
The previous evening, an hour before midnight, I had left the house for a final stroll through Kathmandu. I walked past silent Nag Pokhari—Snake Lake—and caught a creaking rickshaw down to Asan Tole, the central market district.
Ah, the night: so fine for wandering, so deep and amber and sharply etched, lit from a hundred unlikely directions at once. Time and again I could have sworn it was stage lighting, and that I had wandered onto a Hollywood set or into a dream. Every alley was a nook-filled diorama, ancient and crumbling yet awkwardly modern, still off balance after the past decade’s rough shove toward Westernization.
It was a full moon—always a puja night somewhere in Kathmandu. Even at that late hour, I encountered half a dozen troupes of musicians, chanting in the bandstands; parades of singing worshipers bearing statues of Lakshmi and Ganesh into otherwise empty Asan Tole, their arrival preceded by pairs of pirouetting ragtag kids spinning around in crazy ballroom-style dance; cymbals beating, horns bleating, the incandescent bulbs hanging along the narrow avenue swinging in the breeze and casting spastic shadows—everything looking as if it had sprung directly out of the soil of Nepal itself. I was caught short, wondering how I manage to live without that riptide of spirituality back in the United States.
After the final parade had passed, I sat down on a step at the crooked elbow of a dark and totally unfamiliar little avenue, leaning against a shuttered doorway. The street was so bafflingly twisted and funky that it might have inspired a drawing by M. C. Escher or Dr. Seuss. But then a strange and singular little Ganesh shrine caught my eye—bent metal banners leaning from a battered brass roof—and I realized, to my astonishment, that this surreal, empty corner was, by day, the same manic marketplace where I had shopped for incense, herbal toothpaste, kitchen pans and cotton blankets during the past few months. And as I sat there, marveling at the seemingly impossible transformation, the whole catalog of disguises that Kathmandu slips into and out of suddenly flashed across my inner eye with dizzying, flipbook animation.
A city, I realized, becomes far more than a passive repository of its people; it can also play the role of magus, mask dancer and sage.
The stewardess walked by, offering hard little candies. I took a red one and popped it into my mouth, as if it were a pill that would help me weather culture shock. Tomorrow morning I would wake up in Bangkok, have a cup of coffee, and give myself plenty of time to think about how terrible and exciting it was to return to the United States of America. Back to California, where the wonderfully skewed psychology of Asia would slip slowly out of my mind. Back to the cold, cold rain, bumper-to-bumper traffic on the bridges, fast food, and television; back to the land of tightly wrapped people, barren avenues, extortionate prices, answering machines.
Right now, just the idea of it exhausted me. I leaned against my window and peered into the night.
Then I jumped—somewhere due north of the Kathmandu Valley, high above the foothills, a brilliant flash had caught my eye—and I saw, for two brief seconds, the huge silver cornea of the gibbous moon.
It blinked at me, brilliant as a diamond, reflected in the icy waters of Gosainkund Lake.
A Brief Political Postscript
Several weeks after my departure from Kathmandu, the King left Nepal as well. He was off for a short visit to the Maldives, where the royal family owned a small island . . . just in case.
The most direct route (at least, the best paved road) between the Royal Palace and the airport passed right by the compound that I had lived in with Ray Rodney and Krishna.
A few hours before the King’s passage, crews of low-caste sweeper women were placed along every meter of the road. Squatting low, they swung their short brooms in wide arcs over the pavement. The yellow dumpsters of the Solid Waste Management Program were trucked away; piles of crumbling bricks were shoveled out of sight; dog-doo was removed. Around Ray’s house, weeds were pulled up and a fresh coat of whitewash was heaved onto the soot-blackened compound wall. As the hour approached, an immaculately uniformed policeman carrying a polished lathi club rang our doorbell and warned Krishna and the gardener not to venture outside for the next half-hour or so.
In their zeal to tidy up the roadway, the legions of cleanliness had not bothered to look up, directly above their heads. It was to prove a fateful oversight.
At precisely 10:45 a.m. the King’s Mercedes limousine, packed with handsomely monogrammed luggage and accompanied by a full escort, left the Royal Palace. The convoy sped down Lazimpat, past the ranks of saluting police officers and curious onlookers. It sailed past the cinema, whose banks of snack-sellers had been concealed behind a tall hedge, and moved up the hill to loop around Nag Pokhari, the mercurial surface of which had been skimmed of the slimy green algae that, left to its own devices, would have soon crawled from the pond to terrorize downtown Kathmandu.
The motorcade approached the compound. The Nepal Television van passed our front gate; then came a bank of mo
torcycle escorts, a car with a red light revolving on its roof, and another couple of motorcycles, followed at last by the sleek white limousine.
At the precise instant that the King’s Mercedes drove past the compound, a fruit that had been ripening on the vine for a number of weeks decided to take the plunge. The unspeakable dead crow fell from its wire, rotted through at the “hip” joints, and burst against the windshield of the royal limousine in an explosion of dried blood, moldy feathers and maggots. The astonished driver immediately threw the washer-wiper switch. Needless to say, the blades acted more like spatulas than squeegees, spreading the jellied mass evenly across the glass.
“Stop the car,” the King demanded.
Sri Sri Sri Sri Sri Maharaja Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev opened the door and stepped from the Mercedes. He looked up and saw the two bleached, bony crow’s legs dangling from the wire. He looked at them for a long time; and then his gaze wandered. He saw the clumsily patched brick wall of a nearby schoolyard. He saw barefoot girls in ragged dresses standing in doorways, baby brothers and sisters perched on their narrow hips. He saw the greasy rear ends of three-wheeled tempo cabs and broken-down rickshaws that had been crammed, ostensibly out of sight, behind a nearby building.
The King gazed all around, at the scores of incredulous faces staring at him from crooked windows and precarious rooftops. A dog broke free from its rope and ran across the street to piss against a nearby wall. A little boy waved from a doorway. The King stared at the boy—who was immediately grabbed by his terrified mother—and waved back. A breeze of amazed giggles filled the air from all directions, and within five seconds every boy and girl within eyeshot was waving wildly to His Majesty, flailing like an anemone in hopes of a royal response. . . .
The King began to walk. He walked away from his motorcade and toward Nag Pokhari, followed by half a dozen disbelieving police and army officers. He wandered past the abandoned cement Ping-Pong tables, a padlocked bicycle shop and a grove of thriving ganja bushes. This was the edge of the neat little set that had been prepared for him. But the King did not stop there; he crossed through a scraggly little park that led onto Naxal Avenue. Though only two blocks from the palace grounds, he might just as well have been on the moon. Like a sleepwalker who has suddenly awakened into a totally unknown environment, the King continued up the hushed street, roving unchained into the startled morning miasma of urban Kathmandu.
Okay, okay; it didn’t happen that way. There was no such fantastic confluence of gravity and royal traffic. No puréed crow served on polished Mercedes windshield. No giggling children peering down at His Majesty from the wooden window frames of Naxal and Nag Pokhari. No impromptu stroll. . . .
But happen it did; and with a degree of speed and violence that I could never have imagined when this book was first released.
Between 1989 and 1990, Nepal witnessed a series of events that changed, seemingly overnight, the ancient political structure of the Himalayan kingdom.
In 1989, Nepal found itself embroiled in a crippling trade dispute with India. The King was utterly ineffective (in fact, disinterested) in resolving the dispute, which brought life in Kathmandu to a virtual standstill. While this was going on, an historic coalition was forged between two outlawed political groups: the head-butting Nepali Congress, and the Communist Party. Fed up with corruption and oppression, they combined forces and launched joint pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the kingdom.
The protesters—mostly students—were met with lethal force. In February of 1990 alone, more than 30 innocent people were killed. Thousands of peaceful demonstrators and suspected “agitators” were rounded up, beaten and thrown into dank, subterranean holding cells. (For more on this dark period and its resolution see my 2010 memoir, Snake Lake.)
The Nepalis, usually a non-confrontational people, were horrified. The urban atmosphere was rife with tension: riot police roamed the streets, wildcat strikes paralyzed the cities, and foreign embassies issued stern warnings to the government. The ever-taciturn King Birendra, long given the benefit of the doubt, was falling very dangerously out of favor.
In late March, the cork exploded from the bottle. Demanding multiparty democracy and basic human rights, tens of thousands of Nepalis spilled out onto the streets of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan—barricading roads, digging trenches and conducting mass demonstrations. The protesters were no longer limited to students and other “divisive elements.” Doctors and nurses stood in silence outside their hospitals; teachers left their classrooms; pilots of Royal Nepal Airlines, the monarchy-owned flagship carrier, stunned the Royal Palace by staging a one-day strike.
Once more, the demonstrators were met with deadly force. This time, though, they did not retreat. Pressure on the King increased—and on the morning of Friday, 6 April 1990, he appeared on Nepal Television to announce a series of reforms. But nowhere in his statement did the King touch upon his subjects’ primary demand: a multiparty democracy that would place Nepal in step with the modern world.
That same afternoon, an enormous crowd—more than 200,000 strong—assembled near Tundikhel Parade Ground and began moving up Durbar Marg. When they were 500 yards from the palace, troops guarding the royal nest fired tear gas; but the winds carried the noxious fumes back toward the police. The crowd continued to advance—and the troops aimed their rifles and fired. At least 50 people were killed immediately, though witnesses reported hundreds of deaths, and many more wounded.
The point of no return had been reached. For the next two days, a twenty-four-hour curfew was clamped on most towns in Nepal. Police were ordered to shoot violators on sight. But international outrage and diplomatic pressure were overwhelming, and the King—ultimately a reasonable man—had no taste for an all-out revolution that would almost certainly culminate in his own execution.
The crow had finally fallen—this time for real. On the evening of Sunday, April 8, His Majesty appeared on Nepal Television to announce the lifting of the 30-year ban on political parties, and his new role as a constitutional monarch. As Nepal entered the world of democratic nations, the citizens of the Kathmandu Valley again poured onto the avenues: banging pans, lighting fireworks, singing, dancing and dousing each other with bright red tika powder.
Those days were giddy, while they lasted. But the honeymoon soon ended and, 25 years on, democracy is proving to be a long and bumpy road for the Nepalis.
Nepal’s first free elections after the revolution were held in May 1991. The Communist Party gave its rivals a run for their money, but the Congress candidates ultimately prevailed. They remained in charge until 1994, when infighting brought their government down. The Communists then vaulted to power—giving the world its first example of a democratically elected communist government presiding over a Hindu constitutional monarchy! But the Communist government proved unstable, and soon lost control as well.
In 1995 Nepal’s regressive Maoists—long dismissed as a nutty fringe group—began a systematic drive to overturn Nepal’s political system. The insurgency became a civil war, and would claim some 12,000 lives. But the greatest blow to the nation’s psyche came on June 1, 2001, when the Royal Palace Massacre claimed the lives of King Birendra, Queen Aiswarya, and many other members of the royal family.
Even through the 1990 revolution and its aftermath, King Birendra and his family had remained a largely beloved symbol of Nepal’s unity and neutrality. Their violent murders—ostensibly by their eldest son, Crown Prince Dipendra—threw Nepal into a state of profound disillusionment from which it has still not recovered.
But there have been some positive notes, as well. The 10-year Nepal Civil War ended in 2005, with the Maoists accepting a ceasefire and entering politics, surprising many by winning a majority of votes in the general election. But Gyanendra Shah, King Birendra’s sourpuss younger brother—who was out of the country during the Royal Palace Massacre—was still in the palace, consolidating his power. This inspired a second “People’s Movement,” much less violent than 199
0 revolution. In May of 2008, Gyanendra calmly stepped down—and the ancient Hindu kingdom became the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.
At this writing, Nepal’s political climate is in flux. There is still no formal constitution, and contentious debates are raging as to how the country will be redistricted and governed. Anything I say here may be obsolete in a month’s time.
When I last returned to Kathmandu in 2013, the city hovered on the brink of chaos. An influx of rural people fleeing the Maoist rebellion, combined with a lack of leadership during the long years of political uncertainty and minority governments, had dramatically weakened Nepal’s already wobbly infrastructure. Corruption was rampant, and the Valley hung under a pall of smoke and soot from half a million cars, trucks and motorbikes. An uncontrolled building frenzy saw lovely traditional homes being destroyed (along with countless trees), and ugly cement high-rises popping up everywhere. Drivers swerved madly around children and garbage piles, blasting their horns and obeying no one’s rules but their own. The roads, dug up for repair (in what had initially seemed a rare case of enlightened urban planning) were abandoned for lack of funds, and were left barely navigable.
The scene called to mind ecologist Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which described an all-too-familiar situation: individuals, acting out of self-interest, destroy a shared resource, their actions crippling their society as a whole.
One thing that does unite the nation’s culturally diverse and geographically isolated people is a restlessness for change. So far, though, there is scant agreement—even about where to begin. Nepal’s list of woes remains daunting. Even with foreign aid and the best intentions, Nepal remains a country with severe geographical challenges and a lingering legacy of caste and class discrimination. Centuries of poverty, illiteracy and repression—and a disillusioned populace struggling to get through each day—cannot be erased overnight.
Shopping for Buddhas Page 15