Through the Looking-Glass #7

Published November 14, 2006 in the Telluride Watch

I love Kathmandu. I have spent hours and days and weeks and years learning its every curve, every blemish, every sharp edge and every soft corner – which gullies to duck into to avoid congested intersections, which soda shop the locals are loyal to and for what reasons, which neighborhoods offer hidden nooks of surprised silence. Those nooks of silence, however, have disappeared loudly and the city offers more chaos than I remember. And there is more that I have forgotten – that the screeching brakes and blaring horns will unsuspectingly seep under my skin, the thick miasma of dust and swampy black bus exhaust will fill my pores and the leering eyes of men on the street will make me want to disappear.

The effects emerge slowly, gradually building in magnitude. First, I ask for exact change from taxi drivers, down to the unnecessary last rupee. Then I start seeing through waiters at restaurants, speaking in clipped Nepali when the food takes too long to come. Finally, when Prayag, the technician at Ganesh Photo Lab who taught me everything I know about using a darkroom, has forgotten a small request I made of him and I belabor the point for a good five minutes, I know the city has gotten to me and I need to get away. With my friend Kate, I hire a guide and we’re off to the mountains, with a brief layover in a village named Gerkhutar, a stone’s throw from the banks of the Trisuli River just west of Kathmandu.

We set out for the bus park early on Friday morning. We walk still-deserted streets from Naya Bazaar to Balaju on the northwest side of the city. Milk trucks deliver 14-rupee plastic bags of milk to shopkeepers just opening their shutters, and health-conscious middle-aged Nepalis make their rounds of the city on morning walks, men in warm-up suits and women in thick cotton kurta surwhals. We come across a few cows sauntering along the path and Nepalis stop to offer brief worship by touching the cow’s forehead and then their own; the cow, as an incarnation of the goddess Laxmi, is sacred in Nepal. Kate and I are quiet on the walk. We’d been up late the night before packing, and the 5:30 AM alarm has still left us groggy. Our friend Ripu who will see us off at the bus station jabbers incessantly. Kate and I exchange glances and she rolls her eyes. Later she will tell me of her intense distaste for exuberance like Ripu’s before 8 AM, or whenever she’s had an appropriate amount of caffeine. This morning both criteria remain unmet.

By the time we round the base of Swayambhunath Hill and near the bus park, city life is in full swing. Vegetable hawkers crowd the sidewalk, as do vendors selling cheap Chinese bandanas, backpacks and shoes. I haggle over the price of a kilo of apples with a Terai fruitseller. When he refuses to drop below 40 rupees for his Chinese apples, I move to the next one down the line, who happily gives me a kilo of Kashmiri apples for 35 rupees. Kate and I stand off to the side of the road waiting for our bus to arrive, and I look up to see my friend Pasang heading in our direction. She is returning from the campus where she teaches English literature every morning from 6:00 to 7:30 AM, and stops to chat for a few moments before she heads back into town to her office job with a Nepali NGO.

Our bus arrives and we climb on, stowing our backpacks on the massive transmission box to the left of the driver. I had made a point to get seats in the front of the bus, hoping my long legs would fit more comfortably on this local bus. They do, but I’ve learned the price Kate and I will be paying for the leg room. Our seats are directly behind the driver on the right side of the bus, and he lays on his horn every 30 seconds or so to alert drivers in front of him to let him pass, or to alert oncoming drivers while rounding a bend. Three hours of this screeching, we both say to each other. “Can’t wait to get to the village,” I add.

And so we’re on our way. I have taken the necessary avomin to prevent motion sickness, and it leaves me not wanting to talk to anyone, an unfortunate condition to be in when everyone on the bus wants to talk to the foreigner who speaks “such clear Nepali.” The old woman to my left will only be on the bus half-way to Trisuli, she tells me, grasping onto my elbow when the bus rounds a particularly hairpinned turn. The man in the seat behind me leans over my armrest to ask me where I work, where I learned Nepali, whether I’m married. Typical conversation, really. He begins asking more personal questions, where I stay in Kathmandu, what my mobile phone number is. I ask him why he needs to know that, and he persists. “I don’t have a phone,” I lie. Usually this kind of excuse is seen for what it is: an untruth and a clear message of not wanting to give information, but without insulting someone by coming out directly and saying that. Again, he persists. “And what about when your friends want to reach you? How do they do that?” I don’t answer him, and he gets off the bus after a few more minutes.

Our next stop is Paintis Mil, at the 35-km mark from Kathmandu. This spot is famous for radishes, and when we all climb aboard the bus again after a short tea break, many passengers are now cradling bunches of long white radishes with their greens still attached. Only 20 or so kilometers more to go from here, and with most of the hairpin turns behind us, we’re almost to Trisuli. When we reach the main bazaar and get off the bus, I realize that although the Pandey family of Gerkhutar knows we are arriving on the 7:45 bus from Kathmandu, we didn’t actually discuss where we would meet. It has been five years since I’ve stayed with this family, and I can’t instantly recall the faces of either of the brothers who might be coming to meet us. I walk up and down the 300-meter length of the bazaar a few times hoping someone will recognize me and take us up to their village. When this doesn’t happen, we decide to walk up the road to Gerkhutar.

I don’t remember the walk being very long, but once we start up the hill east of Trishuli in the full mid-day sun with our packs on our backs, I realize I was wrong. After 30 minutes walking, I smile sheepishly to Kate and say my memory may have been mistaken. And just as I say that, I hear a motorcycle puttering up behind us, and Rami Hari Pandey comes to a stop. We greet each other in a flurry of namastes, and he explains that when he came out of a meeting, a friend told him he had seen us walking up to the village, so he knew to catch up with us on the road. I hop on the back of Ram Hari’s motorcycle for the rest of the way up to his house while Kate and our guide Shiva sit in the shade and wait for Ram Hari’s friends to come retrieve them.

The flurry of namastes continues at Ram Hari’s house when I greet the family I hadn’t seen for five years. I reacquaint myself with the six children of the joint-family home, remembering which children belong to each of the three brothers of the house. Kate and Shiva arrive and we sit in the quiet of their front porch, joined by the youngest brother Ram Chandra and a German fellow named Tom who is volunteering at a local school.

Time slows down, coming to a virtual stop. A girl walks two buffalo down the road in front of the Pandey home, their tails swishing away at flies. A breeze rustles the flowers growing in the front yard and the conversation dies down for a moment. It is quiet in Gerkhutar and there is no dust or bus exhaust clogging my lungs. Rather than feeling the incredible sense of urgency that is Kathmandu, I find myself noticing every breath I take and my ears willingly opening themselves up to take in the sounds around me. Ram Hari’s eldest daughter Pooja comes onto the porch offering freshly-picked papaya from their land. I exhale and taste the sweetness of the fruit.