So I pulled on shirt and pants and blearily tied my bootlaces, and we were off, into the dark empty streets of Thamel and down to the alley and Yongten’s shop. It was closed and boarded up, but when Freds knocked on the door Yongten opened up for us; like a lot of residents of Kathmandu, he slept in his place of business, on a hard cot set right next to rolls of thick carpet. He appeared unsurprised to see us, and told Freds quite a lot in Tibetan before waving us through to the back room. There we took two flashlights instead of a Coleman lantern, and followed the narrow way to the low door, and the tunnels below.
It was weird down there by flashlight. Whenever we took them off the rough stone under our feet, the beams lanced hither and yon in the blackness and caught things I hadn’t seen in the localized glow of the Coleman lantern: a massive wooden lintel over one intersection, carved and painted in an intricate red green and yellow pattern; a snarling blue pop-eyed demon face, down one dead-end; a thick post of spiraling silver; and everywhere, unexpected depths where the flashlight beam never touched a thing before dissipating in the blackness. Big caverns, endless tunnels—I stayed right on Freds’s heels and hoped that my flashlight would exceed the usual half-hour lifetime that these Indian models had, because if by any chance I got separated from him, I would never find my way out.
Freds stopped as we descended the cavern staircase. “George, you’re kicking me in the calves.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Here. We head north up this one.”
We hiked for what seemed an hour, though it could have been as little as twenty minutes. We passed rooms and niches on each side, and if I flashed them with my light they burst with the crude colors of mandalas, or the gleam of burnished metal. Our footsteps and breathing were the only sounds we heard; but at one point we stopped, and from far ahead of us wafted a faint clank, then a scrap of whispery voices.
“Hey,” Freds said. “You’re gonna break my arm you grab it that hard.”
“Listen!” I hissed.
“I hear. That’s who we’ve come to see, I reckon.” He whistled like Star Trek, then pointed his flashlight down the tunnel and turned it off and on three times, leaving it off. “Point your flashlight at the ground,” he told me.
Steps approached. We could hear them a long way off, and it took them forever to reach us, growing louder and bigger as they did. It was all I could do to keep from turning my flashlight up and blinding whoever was approaching, but Freds held me still until the steps were just down the tunnel from us, and we could make out a dim figure, just beyond the glow of my wavering light, holding a lowered flashlight of its own.
Freds switched his light on and aimed it at the wall. By the reflected light the figure could see us, and we could see him, suddenly smaller—
It was Bahadim Shrestha, our friend from the Nepal Gazette. “Mr. Freds,” he said. “Mr. George! So good to see you again.”
“Bahadim!” I said, amazed. “What the hell!”
“Indeed,” he said with a small smile.
Freds quickly explained why we were here, and Bahadim frowned when he heard of the proposed sewer system. “That would be most inconvenient, yes indeed.”
“Here, show George what you got going, will you? I want him to see it himself.”
Bahadim looked at me closely, considering it. Then he nodded. “You must promise not to tell anyone about this. And from this point we must be very, very quiet. We have just made a noise accidentally, and it would not do to be making another so soon after it. Those above might hear us.”
So we tiptoed after Bahadim down the tunnel, and came upon a group of men working by the light of a single candle. We extinguished our flashlights, and after a while I was surprised to see that the single flame actually illuminated a great deal. We were in a broad, circular room, with a low earthen roof held up by a number of wooden crossing beams. Piles of raw dirt pyramided under some new holes in the ceiling, and spindly ladders stuck up into these dark holes. Bahadim led me to one of the ladders, which appeared to have been made on the spot, the rungs lashed onto two long poles with rope. He tugged on a piece of string hanging down between the rungs, and shortly thereafter another small Hindu man came down the ladder, moving slowly and silently. Bahadim pointed up the ladder, then whispered in my ear, “Go to the top and look in the mirror tube.”
So I tested the bottom rung and found it would hold me, and skinnied up the hole into the dark until my head bumped dirt. The top of the tunnel was illuminated by what I thought at first was a little penlight, but which actually turned out to be the mirror tube Bahadim had mentioned. I put my eye to the end of this thing, and saw in a tiny chip of mirror a small part of a well-lit room: a desk, apparently, with an empty chair behind it, and a wall. A blurry tan shape moved before me and then it was the same scene again. After a while I figured that was it, and descended the ladder.
“You saw?” Bahadim whispered in my ear.
I nodded. “What was it?” I whispered in his ear.
“That was the working office of the King.”
I whipped my head back and stared at him.
He nodded. “Truly,” he whispered.
I waved my hand around at the other holes in the ceiling, each with its ladder.
He nodded again, and the red dot on his forehead gleamed. “Offices of the Palace Secretariat,” he whispered. “Ministers’ council room. King’s private quarters. We have been finding all the important places in the palace.”
I looked around again and saw that a group of men seated in a circle on the floor were busy constructing another mini-periscope, made of taped-together cardboard tubes and the tiny circular mirrors that are sewn into local dresses. Other cardboard tubes, cut and shaped like antique hearing trumpets, served them as microphones.
Bahadim saw that I was miming questions at him, and led me back down the tunnel the way we had come, then off into a side tunnel and into a little chamber. There on the floor were a candle lantern and a tiny primus stove, teacups and a teapot. He sat cross-legged before the stove and began to brew us a pot, just as if we were in his office at the Gazette.
“Yes,” he said when he had poured us steaming cups of tea, “we are under the palace grounds. The tunnels themselves have always been here, but lately we have been sending up the observation posts, to be seeing better what goes on in the Secretariat.”
“You’re spying on them?”
“Yes. You see, as I told you when we met before, it is impossible to tell from the outside how decisions are made in the palace. But without that knowledge we cannot oppose these decisions successfully.”
“So who are you?” I said.
“We are a wing of the Nepali Congress Party, the largest opposition party. Nepal is officially a no-party system, you see. The Panchayat Raj. But there are opposition parties despite that, and the biggest is our Congress Party. We would like to see Nepal changed into a parliamentary democracy, with a real government—something besides the people over us.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “Unfortunately, the Congress Party itself is highly factionalized. There is a wing led by G. P. Koirala, another by Ganesh Man Singh, a third by K. P. Bhattarai. All somewhat at odds with each other, and that combined with the fact that we are officially illegal means we do not do very well in the elections. So—” He whispered a sigh. “We lose the elections to the Panchayat Party. And the palace Ranas rule, and nothing is ever changing in Nepal.”
I nodded. I had seen that up close and personal, in my miserable and completely futile attempt to kill the road to Chhule by diplomatic means.
Bahadim’s face brightened. “But now we have hope! When one of us discovered the tunnels here, our wing of the party decided to take direct action, pending the day when we are having more of a voice in the legal government. We have constructed this system for observing the palace Ranas at work, and when we discover their plans, we do what we can to aid or obstruct them, depending what they are.”
“It’s a great idea,” I said.
Bahadim nodded. “We have also constructed a kind of underground government, you might call it.” He fingered diagrams on the colored cloth spread under us. “Most of the foreign aid in Nepal comes from big international agencies or other countries, and most of it goes where the Ranas direct it. Often to businesses they themselves own. Big money, big projects, big delays—little results. This is always the story in Nepal. The people never see any of it. So we have begun aid projects ourselves, funded by a few prosperous Nepalis who support us. The amounts are small, and they are given to the smallest kinds of projects—the irrigation of a single field, the beginning of a basket shop or a carpet loom or the like. Our headquarters are kept down here in the tunnels for secrecy’s sake. And in time we hope to become the real government of Nepal—because we are the ones actually helping the people of our country, do you understand?”
“You bet!” I said.
Grinning, Freds put a finger to his lips. “Don’t talk too loud, guys, you’ll give it all away.”
Bahadim smiled. “Sorry—it gets me excited. You understand?”
I nodded. “Listen,” I whispered, “there’s a beggar in Thamel, a beggar with a little girl, and they don’t have anywhere to stay, or any work. Could you help them?”
“We can try,” Bahadim whispered back. “Give me their name— Ah. You don’t know it. Well—I will visit you, and you can perhaps take me to them.” I nodded. “We will see what can be done.”
Impressed, I looked at Freds. He grinned and said, “See what I mean?”
X
I SAW WHAT HE meant. And as we made our way through the dark, back to the entrance behind Yongten’s shop, the huge system of tunnels took on a different appearance for me. It was still the lost ruins of an ancient and long-forgotten kingdom, sure; but it was also, it seemed, the vestigial network of a new government of Nepal—an underground government, created to work against the corrupt rule of King Birendra and the Ranas in the palace. It pleased me no end to learn that such a thing existed.
So when Nathan woke me with a knock at my door early the next afternoon, I felt awkward with him, and tried my best to put him off. But Nathan is not the kind of guy you can put off easily, and he wanted to show me what his sewer project was hoping to do.
So we walked around the northwest quarter of Kathmandu, not only in Thamel, but also in the less-visited areas outside it, on the banks of the Vishnumati River. Here there were hardly any foreigners; it was home for the locals. Many of these people worked in the tourist trade in Thamel, but it was clear they didn’t make much from it; the neighborhoods were packed, the buildings old and small, their bricks handmade and irregular so that the buildings tilted crazily. The streets between them were mud runnels, and all in all it looked like I imagine Elizabethan London must have looked, except for the sacred cows and the little Toyotas zooming by honking their horns. This was the home of Kathmandu’s poor, a dirty, cramped, squalid zone, utterly unlike the funky and picturesque downtown. In this district any Westerner was as rich as a king. It was a sensation I had enjoyed, once upon a time.
Here and there in corners or wide spots in the street piles of refuse had accumulated for years, worked down by the rain and by foraging cows, goats, dogs, rats, children, and beggars. As we watched the crowds swirl around these dumps, Nathan told me more about the project. Apparently the South Asian Development Agency, the sponsor of the project, had been one of the worst-run aid agencies working in Nepal. Lax accounting practices had made it one of those money funnels that rumor speaks of, wherein money intended to help the people of the country actually ends up lining the pockets of bureaucrats along the way.
Nathan had taken the job offered by the agency determined to end this kind of thing, and the first step had been to establish a full-time Kathmandu office, which he manned himself. Before that the agency’s business had been done on short visits from the main office in Manila, which of course meant that no one really knew what was going on in Nepal. This had resulted in some horribly inappropriate aid programs, some of which had even been vetoed by the agency’s donors, which was a rare event. “But everyone’s been enthusiastic about this sewer project,” Nathan said, “and you can see why.”
“Yeah.”
We had reached the banks of the Vishnumati River, and there under the bright sun and the scattered cottonball clouds we could see the whole story: women washing clothes in the shallows; trash being dumped from a cart onto a big pile on the bank, which was undercut by the stream; makeshift huts set right on the water’s edge; spindly kids scavenging empty lots or the gravelly floodlands; and there around us, the spoor of old shitting grounds. And this river merged downstream with the Bagmati, which ran by the university and a couple of the city’s hospitals. Polluted as it was, it was inconceivable that the city’s population could ever become healthy.
Then on the way back we navigated the crowded muddy lanes into the hive of Thamel, and all around us it was clear that the locals were doing their best to make a living from the inexhaustible fortune that the Western visitors represented, and some were succeeding and others were marginal and others still were for whatever reason flat-out failing, living in the streets and begging to avoid starvation. I had been doing what I could to help two of these people, a man and his little girl, until Freds had wagged his finger at me one night when he was stoned and told me that those two were relatively prosperous because of people like me fixing on the cute and pathetic little girl; that there were old men, old women, alone and ignored and several steps down the ladder even from the man and his girl; and after that I had, in effect, given up. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to help. Kathmandu wasn’t the same place it had been. And now Nathan waved a hand at the garbage pile just up the lane from the Hotel Star and the Kathmandu Guest House, and said “See what I mean?”
And all I could say was, “Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean.”
XI
SO THERE MATTERS STOOD when Nathan and Sarah dropped by my room to see if I had made up my mind, and Freds and I were sitting in there working on a bowl of hash and Nathan naturally assumed that we were conspiring together and his upper lip lifted with hearty disgust for me. “I don’t know why I thought you would want to help the poor of Nepal anyway,” he said bitterly. “Just another trek guide, exploiting the country for all it’s worth. I wish I’d never even met you!”
“Well hey,” I said, aggrieved. “I wish I’d never met you neither! In fact I wish I hadn’t stolen your letter to Freds and read it because then I’d never have gotten involved with you guys, and I’d still be having fun over here, and my face would still be in one piece, and I’d weigh more than a hundred and thirty pounds!” It was hard not to shout at him. “But you!” I shouted. “You wouldn’t ever have found Freds, or saved your brain-damaged yeti, or gotten it together with Sarah here!”
“You stole that letter?” Nathan said, ignoring everything else I’d said.
“Well, yes. I did. It looked interesting.”
He threw up his hands. “No wonder you won’t help us! I mean, what kind of principles—I mean, who would steal a letter?”
“I would.”
Freds exhaled noisily. “He’s worthless with the bureaucracy here anyway. You’re better off without him. We tried to get him to help us and they only use his brains for a volleyball. Can’t you see that by the look on his face? Worthless. Watch. Singha Durbar!” he snapped at me. “See that? He flinches if you even say the name.”
“Ungrateful bastard,” I said to him. “You just ask your Manjushri Rimpoche if I was worthless. You ask Colonel John if I was worthless.”
“If we’d be better off without him,” Sarah pointed out to Freds, “then you wouldn’t be trying to convince us not to get his help.”
“That’s right,” I said. Sarah seemed to be the only one to have paid attention to what I had said about helping to get her and Nathan together, and she watched me through the argument with a little smile, which made me feel rambunctious. “
You’d better show more appreciation,” I growled at Nathan, “or I might actually help Freds, and then you’d really be in trouble. Here, sit down and smoke the pipe of peace with us.”
“No way,” he said, folding his arms. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation.”
“Spoilsport.”
“Degenerate.”
“Bridge smasher. Liar. Home breaker. Pet thief.”
The skin of Nathan’s cheeks was turning a bright red, except for a narrow line at the top of his beard. I found this phenomenon interesting, and was trying to think of more names to call him when Sarah stepped in, and ordered us to stop being silly. “We’re just wasting time here, and there isn’t that much time to waste.”
“That’s right,” Nathan said, anxiety and indignation battling in him. “That Rana is about to turn us down—”
“Rana?” I said. “Which Rana?”
“You don’t care about him,” Freds began, but I waved him off.
“Not A.S.J.B. Rana, by chance?”
“Why yes, I think so. Do you know him?”
“I thought I had ended his career.”
“Why no—he was just recently made head of the foreign aid office in the palace.”
“Promoted! It can’t be the same one.”
“You don’t care about him,” Freds told me.
“The hell I don’t!” I yelled loudly.
“Quiet!” Sarah said loudly. “Stop this bickering!”
We all looked at her.
“It isn’t necessary,” she said, laughing at us. “I can see by the look on George’s face that he’s got a plan.” She sat down next to me on the bed and put her arm around my shoulders. She gave me a hug. “I can just tell. You’ve got a plan, right George?”
The funny thing was, a plan was kind of coming to me. It was like inspiration. “That’s right,” I said, feeling warm. “I’ve got a plan.”
Nathan and Freds stared dubiously at me.
“The first part of the plan,” I said, thinking about it, “is that you both get me maps—Nathan of the proposed sewer sytem, and Freds of the old tunnels. Can you do that for me?” They nodded. “Good. The second part of the plan is that we go have dinner at the Old Vienna, and look them over.”
Escape From Kathmandu Page 27