Austin Pick — TEXT— MAINFRAME

Under the Spell of Ancient Deities

Eleven Days in Kathmandu

SEPT. 2007 • TEXT & PHOTOS BY AUSTIN PICK

Descending, flying in low, our first glimpse of a land spread luminously green and floridly tufted, a day-glo model layout cupped by dark wedging mountains and peppered with blockish dark-window buildings, blackhole houses scattered like tossed dice and climbing in piles atop the low hills: Kathmandu, Nepal.

It's a first impression that shatters explosively with an almost percussive snap inside our skulls as soon as we enter the image itself, a cut-rate taxi-ride from the airport and into a mad confusion of rushing muddy streets shot thru with motorbikes fuming honking and spinning with all the fury of a smoker striking a wet match—pinballing among shouting sellers, potholes, heaping garbage, porters and pedestrians, slow sacred cows and sleeping dogs, endless pigeon-hole shops closing in along narrowing lanes, bright billboards mugging toothily over crumble-brick slums, laundry hung like prayer flags and everywhere people, people, people.

Ten minutes into a cheery chat with our tag-team taxi-drivers and we learn that they intend to take us to a "good place" they know, the hotel they work for, rather than our destination. Ever friendly, our young guide intones for the first time what we soon learn is one of Nepal's modern mantras: "Just have a look, looking is free." He adds, "You can just see for yourself," and I reply, "Yes, my friend, I can see you are a salesman!" Surprised, he rubs his head blushing, and does take us eventually to our destination: Freak Street, in the heart of Kathmandu.

Freak Street is one of the original traveler's haunts, carved out before the present boom by the hippies of the 1970's, after which the street is also affectionately named. Most tourists these days stay in Thamel, the sprawling, gaudy backpacker's ghetto in northern Kathmandu, where home and it's comforts are never far at all. It is said —shamelessly quoting the Lonely Planet— that Nepal has three religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Tourism. Even in quiet friendly Freak Street, we began to feel the truth in this, and were inevitably assailed by beggars, peddlers, tour guides, travel agents and would-be holy men whenever we ventured out to visit Kathmandu's famous sites.

A developing, land-locked, largely mountainous country, tourism is a critical industry in Nepal, and many in the city have come to depend on the misplaced generosity (or coerced emotion—these guys can be pushy) of travelers who glide on the graces of the rupee. We never give—but, feeling both the greedy opportunism and the genuine desperation, we try and sharpen our smiles, learning to say no without going broke in our beating chest banks, to give kindness, and be light.

It hasn't been easy. Kathmandu proliferates its bizarre admixture of teaming market commerce, sickly-sweet refuse stink and choking pollution in every direction around us. Nepal is predominately Hindu, and for a culture shaped by a religion ostensibly obsessed with purity, I have never experienced a dirtier place. Every holy courtyard seems to be feces-smattered and riddled with flies, which dance about the rotting offerings and sindur-smeared statues in strikingly weird worship. These are, afterall, gods of destruction and fecundity.

But east of the city, around the Great Stupa, we found something altogether different: a living Buddhism. Bodhnath is an ancient trade-center along the route between India and Tibet, and since the Chinese invasion of their homeland, the area has become the largest and most openly accepted community of Tibetans-in-exile. Clean and prosperous, the township around the Great Stupa is alive with Tibetan culture and active Buddhist study. The area is home to hundreds of monks and nuns in residence at dozens of monasteries, many named after those destroyed by the Chinese in Tibet. We sat together and watched as hundreds of local people, many of them elderly, gathered to circle the Stupa, a daily practice of walking meditation called kora. The open-heartedness and simple dignity of these people overwhelmed Shauna and I as they passed by, glowing and grinning, and their happiness was infectious. We were crying then, sitting in the shadow of the stupa...

And in the ancient palatial Newari town of Bhaktapur, now a sort of living museum east of Kathmandu City, we were graced with a glimpse of what Kathmandu is said to have been like twenty years ago, before the incursion of modern attitudes and machinery. The Newars are the indigenous people of the Kathmandu Valley, which has always been a crossroads of intermingling cultures, exchanged by travelers and traders for millennia. Amidst these diverse influences, Newari culture has developed its own characteristic style, a unique synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and aesthetics reflected in everything from festivals to fine architecture. Though still predominant throughout the Valley, perhaps nowhere is traditional Newar style better preserved than at Bhaktapur, where many of the roads are closed to motor traffic and life moves in rhythms more accustomed to the flux of seasons and harvests. This is rather unlike Kathmandu, which bullies on at a manic pace despite monsoons and mud, cramming its medieval streets with the chaos of its crowds.

Bhaktapur, by contrast, seems relaxed into a strange sort of time-warp, and we found it a pleasure to simply wander along the narrow lanes, thru markets and public squares where great old pagodas hold their crumbling heads high, wooden roof slates green with monsoon growth, new life. There are other lovely places in the Valley, too, such as Patan, another great palatial town to the south, but our hearts belong to Bodhnath, which had for us the resonance of a true refuge, a homecoming amidst the strange contingencies of our time in Kathmandu.

We will return to Bodhnath when we finish our next vipassana meditation course, which begins tomorrow. We've been in Kathmandu and surrounds for a long week, one full of surprising challenges and many blessings too. We arrived at the end of the monsoon season, and have looked thru our windows every afternoon to confirm yet again that it's "raining kathmandu," at least an hour of torrential downpour followed by several more of drizzle and gray. We've been forced to spend a lot of time reading in the poor light of our cheap guesthouse room, and Shauna was sick for a few days, but we're anyways thankful for time to shake off the jetlag from our 36-hour 4-flight gauntlet.

The mind drifts during these monsoon binges, rains which sound like massive turbines and heighten the other sounds of the city when it grows suddenly quiet again, children screaming, horns constantly honking, temple bells jangling, and, as darkness falls, dogs in great packs howling as they roam the soon-deserted city streets, Kathmandu still under the spell of its ancient deities, wrestling, it seems, with the demons of that frontier where the continuities of the past confront the anxious potentials of modernity's promised future. We are truly a world away, but maybe, even amongst the touristy buzz of Freak Street and the fruit-rind grind of Kathmandu's backstreets, still sometimes touching that space we all share, humans, hands, an impassioned planet...

Yours with Love, A

For information about vipassana mediation visit www.dhamma.org
see also FudoMouth:Links for more...

Dispatches from the Subcontinent (6 months traveling in Nepal & India):
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five