Chapter  Twelve

     Sunday evening, June sixth, after dinner, sitting in my room at the Shechen monastery guest house near the dome and stupa of Bodhnath on the Eastern edge of Kathmandu. Taxied over here from Bhaktapur early Friday afternoon. The highway all the way in from the ancient city I’m coming from is a multi-lane river of the complete assortment of vehicles on any major Indian artery. The Marg . . . they don’t call it that, but it reminds me of the Gangtok central shopping zone . . . is a circle of Tibetan paraphernalia shops . . . Thangka shops, and every other kind of Tibetan craft shop, interlaced with coffee shops, and small local restaurants and monastery gateways, and narrow streets branching off in all directions, winding their ways to who knows where, also lined with little craftshops, and confectionaries, and vegetable vendors, and three-table restaurants. Everyone at the circular Marg walks in the same direction – clockwise – none of this two-way traffic or a helter-skelter thing. Closer to the center are the more prayerful, at the periphery are the shoppers and the coffee samplers and the folks on their way to somewhere else. Between the inner ring and the outer circle is a line of park benches facing the center. Not facing both ways like the two parallel rows of benches, each row facing one side of the parallel rows of contemporary paraphernalia shops and restaurants and coffee shops in the Gangtok Marg. File in one end of the Gangtok Marg and file out the other end – funnel in one end, and funnel out the other – as the rivers of city streets branch out into the surrounding hills and valleys. Over here at Bodhnath, we all move in the circular same direction, or sit on one of the benches in between and face the inner circle.

     Shechen is one of fifteen or so monasteries nestled all around in the immediately surrounding spaces between the shops along the lanes – flat, gray stone paved lanes, easy to walk on, easy to sweep clean. Some of the monasteries are small, and Shechen is one of, if not the, largest. It’s been a year April since the earthquake, and most of the debris has been picked up and set aside in many places throughout the city. The pinnacle of the main circular fixture of Boudnath tumbled, and scaffolding cages the new construction. Like something is being re-born up there. It will probably look just like the one that came down, but all the regulars who live around here and have been walking around this circle for years, will be watching this rebirth, and I’ll bet there will be a collective sense of awe and wonder at the becoming of this re-incarnation of their guiding light.

     Krishna in Bhaktapur recommended Shechen, and this guest house is an isolated enclave with its own restaurant and garden. I’ve got a spacious corner room, two sets of windows, altogether simple and clean, and the clientele, like myself, are looking for a quiet place to breathe.

     Saturday morning, went out for a walk to get a taste of what is out there on the other side of the gate, to the street where the taxi dropped me off on Friday.

The gateway is between the Tibetan enclave, and the whole rest of Asian - Western civilization out there. Head in the direction going towards the center of the city, with no idea for actually going that far, but do get in about two kilometers, hanging with the main street all the way to the Pashupatinath Hindu temple grounds and Deer Park. Once I get the kinks out, the walking is smooth and brisk as I negotiate my path through the ebb and flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Reminds me of the busy Chennai neighborhoods and avenues I walked outside the YWCA Guest house enclave. Kathmandu is a plenty big enough place and the motorcycle invasion is as thorough here as I guess it is all over Asia. I don’t recall any such thing as this many motorcycles out here forty-five years ago. After sitting quietly at the Deer Park temple grounds, hire a taxi for the return. Initiation stroll across the terrain is enough for today, and the rest of the day is for walking the big circle a couple of times, stopping off for tea, and getting back to my room and the garden, and the open bookshelf – I’ll call it the Library – of a couple of hundred mostly English, German, French, Chinese and Tibetan books, unorganized but neatly lined up, including dharma books, travel books, novels, and miscellaneous. A quiet room sized alcove upstairs on the first floor, with walls of windows for readers to feel at home within. Looks like a promising collection.

     What with moving from one place in the valley to another, and diving into this entirely new world of shops and circumambulations and pedestrian crowds and motorized traffic and immersion into the maelstrom, it’s all day Sunday between the garden and the restaurant and my room, with time off between getting to know the library.

     Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be. Kathmandu is a big city, as noisy and as congested and as nerve-rattling as any other city of this Asian peninsula hanging like a tear drop from the Himalayan glaciers. What will happen as the monsoons shift in intensity, timing and direction? The entire peninsula from Kanyakumari to Varanasi could become the lost civilization of a great desert. For now, so far, the rains have fallen briefly in the morning. Take a taxi Monday into the great interior of the Kathmandu wilderness. Near the center is the Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be. The Courtyard of temples and shrines where no motorized vehicle is allowed. Take a look through the gateway into the Heart of Silence where He or She, Deva or Devi, are there to Inspire or show a Guiding Light. The hawkers with their strings of beads and amulets walk their circuits through the day, looking for that visitor with a loose wallet. Part of the background ambiance, as I look for a stone ledge or step to sit on after I’ve walked my own circuit, climbed steps, read the gestures of the guardian deities carved in wood, and snapped pictures of ferocious stone lions. The Living Goddess Kumari lives in her own temple home with an old carved wooden window frame from which she might look out from time to time. Blessed are those who notice. All of this is the way things once were, nothing to do all day but worship the Devas and the Devis, and sip dark Java in a Starbucks subsidiary. Step out from here through any gate and enter the maelstrom of pedestrian and automotive traffic that requires precision alertness and reaction time from my taxi drivers.

     Once I’ve spent my late morning and early afternoon in the courtyard, and made the return journey to my monastery guest house garden enclave, I wonder about what would motivate me to return to the ancient Katmandu courtyard. In Bhaktapur, I lived across the street from and had a direct overview of the Ancient Courtyard and its temples. It was my backyard stroll every time I walked out of my hotel. The “Freak Street” area branching off of the Kathmandu courtyard may very well have been the neighborhood I lived in for a few days back in 1970. A narrow sidestreet of built-into-the-wall hotels and little shops along the way. So I’m kind of back to where I was before, in the exploratory, whatever comes next, kind of place. Twenty-six year old meets seventy-one year old walking towards each other on “Freak Street.” How do we notice each other? Does the twenty-six year old recognize the seventy-one year old? Here is an image of my future self. Do I know who you are? Would you recognize my voice? What does the older man remember about what that younger one was thinking? A mirage of places and people go by, all of those I met along the way between then and now, and the younger one merges into the older one and I am back to where I am now, Right?! Durbar square of Kathmandu in a day: The Courtyard of Nostalgia for the Way Things Used to Be.

     Tuesday, June seventh, evening at nine. Got so far as one circumambulation this afternoon, with a one hour stopover three-quarters around at the local branch of the Starbuck’s subsidiary. Just looking for a large cup of strong black coffee, together with a first floor window overview of the other circumambulators. Not so very crowded, but never empty. Everybody’s got their set of circles they gotta walk through. Once, or more than once? Spinning the prayer wheels in hand, or turning the large prayer wheels built into the wall, turning the drums full of prayers, counting the prayer beads, the Mala’s, and for others, walking close to the storefronts of the surrounding buildings. Pick up one of those magazine tour guides full of advertisements about Pokhara, pretty much next down the road from where I’m at now, as far as I can tell so far. Looks like it’s turned into a real tourist mecca, much different from the small town I barely remember. Couldn’t have been there more than a day or two on either side of the trek. Completely lost in the background.

     So I can look into the Lake again. Last time, I saw the Lake from a very green hilltop. A very empty space high above the Lake that was a mirror to the blue sky on a clear day. This on the thirteenth and final day of our trek across the hills and up the river valley and return the way we went up. I with my Tibetan refugee guide around my own age, Gopan Tsering. Really do not remember meeting other western trekkers on the path, but one – very few at the most. So I’ve got some kind of memory to visit in Pokhara, and I’m really curious to see how I take to this once-upon-a-time staging area for the climb I had only heard about. Coming from the North American midlands, don’t recall having seen the Rockies during those growing up years. Here I was, walking the river valley gorge as it passes trough Tatopani and other villages between the snow-capped peaks of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri. A memory that never fades. What will I see this time? Not going to get too far ahead of myself right now for my planning.

     Reading stories I find on the library bookshelf. A Wind in the Door, by Madeline L’Engle, a brilliant story for bridging the distance between the seen and the unseen worlds, and about what it means to communicate through the heart. On my wall, a really nice watercolor of the Kathmandu valley and the river and the hills on the horizon all fading through blue-gray washes into the cloudy sky above. The forests are green and the river is fresh, and the clouds are promising rain. The river through the forest before the cities moved in, and belched smoke into the sky and effluent into the water. Recall watching those buses and trucks and jeeps belch black smoke out of their exhaust tubes into the faces of whoever happens to be out there. There is no stopping it. The future generation, and two and three, are progressively fried, and the smoke is not disappearing into nothingness. And so for all that is going on in the world out there, I make one circumambulation today, with a cup of good java along the way, and a passing glance from time to time, wondering where my next conversation will be coming from, and how far it will go, and how far will it go?

     Room with medium-dark brown wooden floors, a bedroom-living room to spread out in. Only occasionally does a barking dog interrupt the nighttime silence. Curtains ripple gently in the breeze. I’m making this Boudnath circle and guest house my home base for four additional days till June fourteenth, one week from today. Planning without planning with intentional focus.

     June eighth, Wednesday morning at ten. Just biding my time (bide-ing) – in a quiet residential neighborhood. Occasionally, children play in the narrow lane outside my upstairs window. What does one do in Kathmandu? I met myself all over again in Durbar square two days ago. He said, hello young man, I remember you. I was once your age, and now I am your grandfather’s age. The hair becomes gray, then white, and the face wrinkles in characteristic patterns of thinking and looking at the world. What you see is where you will be.

     The traffic beyond the gate of the Boudnath Stupa enclave is bedlam. I’ve walked the downtown of the ancient city and met myself from a previous age. I’ve got a shopping and coffee house district within walking distance along pedestrian-only lanes. At early morning breakfast in the garden-side guest house restaurant, I can check my emails and follow the American news, and maybe make a posting for friends and family to read. Feeling a bit more connected now with my American world of family and friends than I was during my first couple of months in India. All part of the ebb and flow of sometimes cultivating solitude and sometimes cultivating involvement. Of all the neighborhoods there are in the city to wander around in, I’ve landed in a perfectly fine one.

     Time to start bridging the difference in concept between tourist and ex-pat. For the past six and a half months, including those three and a half months in Pondicherry, I was still the tourist, the visitor, leaving a lot behind to experiment with a different sense of myself in the world. It’s all been kind of tourist-y. An example is all of that time in Sikkim with all of those road trips and excursions and exploratory walks. Even in my old familiar Pondicherry, I didn’t have much of a sense of reconnecting with a former self. No, I had to wait until I arrived at Durbar Square in Kathmandu, and walked the nearby lanes I knew so very briefly once before. Like a little vortex sucked me into remembering how I was with the world back then. I was a tourist then as well, but now I am graduating into an ex-pat. I don’t have to run around checking out all the districts. Nurturing the district I’m in is much more creatively appealing. My time here is short enough as it is, for I will be moving on. No sense in trying to swallow Kathmandu whole. All I’m really looking for is myself and someone to converse with, and we can be found anywhere. Like-minded people meet in Like-minded places. There is letting things happen and there is making things happen and there is balance between the two. Settling into a quiet frame of mind is kind of like doing both at the same time. The travel journal of the tourist becomes the place where the ex-pat sorts it all out into some sort of idea, or theme, or story. Or, simply lets it be its own story, the unfolding page by page, petal by petal of the blossoming flower, into a never-ending story, where every last page returns to the first page, and the first page never ends.

     Wednesday, June eighth, afternoon at three, at the Himalayan Java shop. Of course you had no idea then that you would become Me. You had not yet even opened your first Anthropology book, and were three years away from painting your first picture. I’m sure you had barely even ever heard of the Aztec calendar stone. You had less than three months to go for your Peace Corps tour. You had an idea for an academic career path. Go for a PhD. in Anthropology, and a lifelong professorship. You had no idea about using your economics degree and Peace Corps experience to pursue a position with a corporation or a bank. You wanted to be attached to a University Library and to follow your line of questioning through the volumes in the Temple of the Book.

     As the months and years went by, doors opened that you had no idea even existed. Other doors closed, or you turned your back on them, in search of another path. It seemed like you were making conscious decisions, just as it seems so today, but aren’t all of our choices rooted in the primordial soup flowing through our veins, rooted in the synapses that were connected when we were learning how to walk and how to speak the language that we were hearing?

     The only scene I remember from those two or three days in Kathmandu on either side of my trek was sitting on a stone ledge on one corner of an intersection between walking lanes with a few middle-aged Nepali men. Senior to me, but not ancient. Night’s darkness had settled in but there was soft light from candles or oil lamps. I was on an exploratory walk, and joined this welcoming group for a sit down rest. The chillum was going around and whatever was in there was strong enough to get me coughing, and my friends were amused. The chillum came around again, and I was a part of the circle.

     As the years go by, the circles grow wider, until they become as wide as a life is long. Circles of Inclusion. Circles of Participation. Circles of Listening. Circles of Heartfelt Understanding. Circles of Willingness. Circles of Artistic Creativity. Circles in the Silent  Language.

     Touching base on Freak Street in Kathmandu was like reconnecting with a ground point, plugging into a socket that had long been idle. I was smart and alert and questioning and decisive, and on a personal mission to know the world around me, along with whatever underlying truth I could discover and understand. I was a complete novice with Tibetan culture, my main experience having been following my guide Gopan Tsering along a trail for thirteen days, sharing sleeping quarters in small homes or huts along the way, having dinner with the family. And listening to 108 school children sing Tibetan songs in their wide, low-ceiling classroom in Jomsom at the end of the trekking trail.

     That’s all I really knew, and what I’ve learned since, compared to what there is to know, could be written on the head of the proverbial pin. And I’m always open to another text that can, through its language, throw a little light into my mind. Like Poetry, the Language of Light. Here is another way to know the world. Listen closely.

     Friday, the tenth at four in the afternoon, with an Americano at Himalayan Java. So what do you do when both of your houses are a pile of rubble and you don’t have earthquake insurance? What do you do when the clouds are rolling in with fresh buckets of water to keep the tourists away from the courtyard? When there is nobody to talk to about what you know, and your wife is living with her parents in their village four hours away, when she will not even be eligible for a teaching position for another four months? How about when your musical instruments have been trashed and your practice is falling further and further behind with every passing day? Time for reaching out, would you say? First an email, then a telephone call, then a bus ride from Bhaktapur to the Boudnath Stupa and Shechen guest house. Is there some way I can help this noble and gracious person? None of this - give a man a fishing pole bullshit. There are no fucking fish in the fucking lake. All the tourists are staying home, and all the fishing poles lie in pieces under a big pile of bricks. . . .

     What an amazingly beautiful conversation to be watching. Between a young monk, perhaps thirty or so years old, and a young western woman of around the same age. I’m guessing the language is Tibetan. It’s not about learning the language. It’s about what is the language talking about. And the language that both of them, and especially her, are speaking through their hands is a magical dance of infinitely expressive gesture. Such a spontaneously interactive exchange of ideas that both are working on together. Both are clearly entirely fluent in the language they share. I have never in my life witnessed this kind of conversational expression. So thoroughly mentally involved they are with one another, and so intricately animated in the way the fingers, palms and wrists move with emphatically precise and graceful innuendo. Such a joy comes through in their linguistic expression, smiles of realization and insight interlace their sentences like emphatic exclamation points. Pure mental, mind-to-mind interactive joy! Here is how we share our words about this whatever that both of us are passionately involved with. With our hands as much a part of our voices as the words on the tips of our tongues. Neither one of us one-upping the other; rather both of us forging a path together in exploration towards the expression of a realization that both of us are searching for.

     Debate as the mutual challenging and reinforcement of ideas in spiraling realizations of a Truth that we both recognize. Something other than Debate seen as a challenge that leads to winners and losers. The young monk is the teacher and there is a notebook on the table he shares with his student, the eloquent young woman who speaks with the hands of a Bharatanatyam dancer. They both know what is in this notebook, as if they had written it together, taking notes in tandem from whatever source. Only very occasionally will this notebook be referenced.  The monk has the final nod, and the woman whose words dance on the tips of her fingers knows full well with absolute certainty when she has reached a conclusion. There is no hurry. This is not a contest. The young woman may even plug into her laptop and look for something in there. As if reconnecting with some half-remembered thought, filling in a blank on the way back to the continuing conversation.

     On this Day for Special Conversations, Krishna comes by for a visit. Took the bus in from Bhaktapur, two buses actually to get within walking distance of Boudnath. Within ten minutes of his arrival at the garden-restaurant where I am waiting at a table, the rains begin, and they come down heavily for easily an hour.  We have a small pot of masala chai. Here is where our voices and our thoughts meet across the table. A different kind of gestural interface. Krishna can talk about the economic disaster he has encountered, and is encountering, with absolutely no trace of any anger towards anyone or the system that keeps him in this mess. He is a husband and a father and can’t go running off to the Emirates to make a bunch of money. He’s got the land his houses were built on and a three room reconstruction, and a well kept garden, and he is in a Love marriage for six years now. What becomes of his Life will Become here. Nothing complicated about this conversation. What this man needs is some Crowdfunding! Hmmm. See how we think in this digital, mindset world! Back down on Earth, gradually the rains subside, and the cloudy sky evaporates. Time for the two friends to take a walk around the Stupa, stop in a Thangka shop for a look-see, and climb the steps to the Himalayan Café rooftop for lunch with a front-row view of the reconstruction progress of the new stupa pinnacle. Krishna and I are a part of each other’s conversation, or shall I say that he and I are each a part of the conversation we have? I think both of these are true. Two people finding each other in conversation! What a Rush!

    

     Fingers dancing on the tips of Bharatyanatyam gestures.

     Thoughts on the tips of our tongues in conversation.

     Lotus Blossom, Petals Open, Dawn.

     Sunday the twelfth at one-thirty at the window of Himalayan Java overlooking the circumambulators while listening to three men and a woman exchanging their ideas in Russian. Nine nights it has been here now at Boudnath. Two more are planned before a Tuesday morning departure for Pokhara. Ninety percent of my Kathmandu experience has been here on the grounds between the Boudnath Stupa and the Shechen Monastery Guest House and garden-restaurant. How are you using your mind, what are you using your mind for today? How are you choosing to direct your thought? How about some monotonous repetition? Like all of the mala-bead recitation people? Carol P. visits in my dream last night, my art teacher back at the University of Wisconsin back in the late-eighties, when I’m in my younger forties. She is kind of teasing me in a playful kind of way. Sooo, John, when do you think you are going to start drawing your mountains and mandalas again?

     Monday the thirteenth at ten-thirty morning. Just gotta Luv these smooth transitions. Yesterday afternoon, stop at the front desk to ask Ngawang for some basic info about getting my way over to whichever bus station can get me going towards Pokhara. Ngawang points to Tashi sitting at his computer in the room across the hall. Tashi has all the answers. Tuesday morning at quarter after six, I carry my bags downstairs, through the garden and to the stone pavement at the security gate where I will meet my taxi driver. He will drive me to the bussing area near Thamel in central Katmandu, where I will be dropped off at the appropriate bus. All these guys know each other. They do this all the time for mono-lingual, bewildered tourists. Bus ride is from seven to three, and I’ve got a mid-coach right window seat, the preferred side. Looks like a short bus, as busses go, nice pretty new in the brochure picture. Tashi’s got me lined up with Little Tibetan Guest House for ten dollars per night. A taxi man will be standing at the bus drop off point with a card with my name on it, and I will be whisked off to the hotel. Door-to-door service between cities takes the edge off of that uncertainty I must carry when I enter a city with no pre-booked room, as I went through with Khakarvitta and Bhaktapur, and which I’m sure I’ll go through again along the road. What will be, in either case along the road, is what will be.

     Since my Durbar Square excursion last Monday, every day has been around the Boudnath enclave and surrounding pathways, and the monastery guest house. Circumambulations, along with a closer look into some shop I newly discover, spiraling staircases to rooftop patios for a veg burger, fries and salad or some such thing while watching the workers on the stupa reconstruction, visit Himalayan Java for a large dark cup with a chocolate muffin, and some windowside coffee house contemplation of whatever and whomever is out there. Walk the lanes back to the guest house around four, and share time between my room and my garden. Same, Same . . . only Different.

     Forthcoming time in and around Pokhara will be eye-opening, consciousness expanding in a different kind of way. I’ve got a memory picture of walking the narrow river valley between the snow-covered gray granite peaks of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. I’ve got a memory picture of the Jomsom hamlet, and the graceful village of Tatopani winding along the river’s course. I’ll be looking for a jeep ride now, through this place where there were then no roads. Airplanes will be taking off and landing at Jomsom. Very much “Same, Same” for the view towards the sky, very much “only Different” for the trail. Jeep ride will likely be a few or several hours of a single day. My walk back in 1970 was seven days up and six days back. Superimposition of old and new images. What was for coloring what’s new, and what’s new to fill in the blanks between the old memory pictures.

     Vajrayogini dances, riding her blossoming lotus, sky-dancing woman with words of wisdom for those who Listen.

     Now Tuesday evening, the fourteenth at nine-thirty in room twenty-seven of the Little Tibetan Guest House in Pokhara. Referencing last night the thirteenth as I’m getting to the bottom of my last cup of tea at the Shechen guest house dining room. Last couple of days, there has been another elder man of European descent sitting at a table, just as I have been sitting at a table, and there are signals in passing that we are both open to a meeting, a possible conversation. Since I arrived at Boudnath June third, now eleven days have gone by, and I’ve had no conversational interaction with any of the other European or American visitors along the way around here. There are mostly younger travelers from their mid-twenties on up through their thirties and forties. Even a group of eight French-speakers for a couple of days who sat around their dining table, four along each side and two across, and I’m not exactly following what they’re talking about, but it seems in my ear as a musical chattering of French sentences simultaneously enveloping the air. Point getting around to when and where one meets one’s conversational partner.

     So I’m finishing my last cup of tea before departure the next morning, and in walks this other elder guy come down for his evening bottle of coke, and our mutual greetings lead us to sitting across the table. Freddie C. is from Britain, a tall, strong, robust eighty-one, thin wisps of white hair across a balding crown, and we begin our stores of how many times, when and where we have known India and Nepal. Freddie’s memories for this part of the world go back fifty years, and includes some time in Pondicherry. He has worked in some capacity for the U.N. as an economic development aide, though all of that is not a part of the point of our conversation. The point is that all of his adult life has been traveling more than half of every year, going here and going there mostly in Asia for different reasons that draw him to his special, magical places. One of which is Leh, which is on my itinerary, and which he makes a point of visiting every two years. I pictured myself in some similar professional role when I was an undergrad Economics major, and as I entered my Peace Corps assignment. Those were the first two steps of an imagined career path. Am I talking to the kind of person I might have become, career wise? My idea changed during that two year tour in Cuddalore. The path took a turn through Anthropology, Art, and Poetry, as I went searching for my original Vision, and my original Voice.

     Freddie has a garden back in England that he cares for strongly, sounds like his home is a place where he can feel quietly, creatively comfortable, until he hears the voice that tells him to get up and go somewhere, usually in Asia, with India and Nepal being his favorites, several weeks at a time, traveling lightly, visiting familiar places, and some new ones. Kind of a way of life I’d like to direct myself towards, according to my own style. Where does one find what one needs to realize a sense of fulfillment? In the garden we nurture, the garden we venture forth from to find new inspiration to bring back to the garden, in the garden where Freddie cultivates his flowers, where I would bring forth my paintings.

     In my travels, I’m frequently asked how old I am, and when I say seventy-one, I am met with looks of amazement, and compliments for how strong and healthy I appear. I tell these people that I keep moving, keep walking, and that is my key to endurance that I plan to continue. Pursuing a life dream for me is an active tense verb. The walking I do now is simply a slower version of the running I did in my twenties. Setting a pace that pushes wherever I am at just a little further. Freddie also extols the virtues of walking, the virtues that keep all of our physical systems in working order. We are designed for walking, and the more we do, the longer we will be doing it. Freddie is an inspiration, so that when I get to feeling sluggish and worn out, I’ll remember the image of this cheerful old guy gallivanting around the world to this favorite places while he leaves his garden to care for itself sometimes.

     I ask Freddie if he reads poetry and he says not particularly, but he has appreciated some on various occasions. I’ve got a copy of my book for him, printed in Poindicherry, and he really appreciates the gift and speaks enthusiastically about reading it because he knows the author, this other world traveler who sees the world and our relationship to it in so many similar ways. Eleven days in Boudnath, to find this conversation, and what a good one it has been!

     Wednesday the fifteenth of June, at nine in the morning at my Pokhara home.

Recollection image: The village on the hilltop that looks across the valley to the snow-capped peak on one side, and from another side of the top of this hill, a view downward towards the sky-mirror of the Lake.

     Today in the City by the Lake, Light and dark gray clouds linger and merge into one another in wistful embrace, from horizon to zenith, the gray cloud hovers. Just in time for the off-season monsoon beginning. How far I will be able to go will be quite weather dependent, between walking along the streets of discovery in the city, or jeeping it out beyond the city limits.

     I’ve got my own semi-circular balcony with one round table and two chairs. The opposite door opens to the communal balcony hallway that leads to the stairway to the garden. This enclave is a cultivated rain forest of different types of trees, interlacing branches and sharing sunlight. A string of weathered prayer flags hangs loosely from one branch of a tree in one corner, coursing through the branches of other trees, to finally tie to the branch of another corner tree.  Opposite doors opening both is perfect ventilation. Maybe I’ll get very far towards the interior and maybe not. For now, I’ve made a beachhead, and what a very fine little place this is. No phone to the office, so I walk down to ring a brass bell to call the Tibetan matron, wife, and mother, in her mid-life sense of the world, to the door. I give her my order from the menu, and she will have her teenage daughter bring it to my room. Breakfast is the only meal served at the Little Tibetan, and I will be going beyond the gate to visit and choose from the endless rows of restaurants along the Lakeside main street, for I am pretty much in the middle of where all the backpackers pass through.

     Yesterday’s eight hour bus ride – station-to-station, seven to three – was rather rattling. Fine scenic views through my riverside window, on a bus with brakes that screeched through several octaves of intensity every time the driver touched the pedal, and besides the fact that, if this vehicle does have shock absorbers, they need serious attention.

     After resting, as dusk is reaching into darkness, walk through the misty air along one block, then another, checking out the shops, reading sidewalk menus, finally settling into a Godfather’s for a vegetarian twelve inch pizza and a small pot of chai. And watch the waterfalls out of the sky and make rivers in the streets. And so it is the clouds drift by overhead, with no trace of blue to be seen anywhere except in memory. It really doesn’t matter, what happens or doesn’t happen, as long as I keep writing about whatever it is or isn’t. All I really do is sit in my room looking out a window if I have a view I like to visit, which in the case of the Little Tibetan is a patchwork quilt of treetop greenery, so I like it. And from here I wait for some idea to take me through the garden to the gateway. Just coming in from eleven days of going around in my little set of Boudnath circles, on the threshold of an entirely strange set of city streets. Through the garden path to the gateway, and something new begins. 

Chapter  Eleven

     May seventeenth, Tuesday morning around eleven, on the second floor (third story) room of Hotel Tranquility on the ridgetop overlooking Darjeeling. Arrived and settled in by noon Sunday by way of a four hour shared jeep from Gangtok, from the hotel Pandim and from Kelsang the owner and manager, who will always be dear to my heart. He did so much to make so fulfilling my visit to Gangtok and Sikkim at large. He briefed me for my eleven day visit to Tashiding and Yuksom, and recommended Sonu’s homestay. He arranged the jeep with driver and guide, and got our official papers fixed for our day trip to Lake Tsomgo: Lily, Robert and I. Kelsang also made all necessary arrangements for Pookie and I to make our three day photographic trip through the North. And he kept me well supplied with good food and a comfort zone at his rooftop dining room, complete with panoramic view and good company. What more to say? Thank you Kelsang!

     Hotel Tranquility is another ridgetop structure with what would be an amazing panoramic view, I’m sure, were it not for the perpetual cloud that fills the valley. Sunlight breaks through only occasionally from the sky above. At my dropoff point at the Darjeeling midtown taxi stand, as I’m asking around for a taxi to take my luggage up the steep hill to my hotel, this old Nepali guy who looks like he could very well be as old as I, or at least in his sixties, works his way into my attention zone. He is about a head shorter than I and carries his tool in trade: weathered and worn, well-used and strong, head band strap, his tumpline, complete with double loop of strong rope. He wants to porter my backpack to the top of this hill. He thinks about weight a different way, I think, than people like myself. He, like all of the porters I have seen in Gangtok, make their daily rounds carrying huge loads on their backs with a tumpline wrapped across their foreheads: four cases of Pepsi Cola in glass bottles, a brand new washing machine all boxed up, and who knows what all in all kinds of bagged up and packaged boxes and loads. They walk up steep hills one step at a time, and their right-of-way is recognized by all. This industrious old fellow is competing at the taxi stand, looking for a load to carry, and here I am, fresh bait, and he is on it!  I wince at the thought of him carrying this weight I’ve brought here, yet know that this is a boon for him, a chance to put his strap to work and make some rupees. So he sets himself up for the walk, and I follow him up, and it is steep, and all I can think about is how much more I should give him than what he asked for, and what these rupees mean to him, as contrasted with how many I have and what they mean to me. I see him again Monday afternoon, yesterday, and we greet each other like old buddies, and make arrangements for him to come to my hotel Wednesday morning at seven to carry it all back down to the taxi stand.

     No particular reason to be visiting Darjeeling except as from Robert’s recommendation to visit the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Center, and the idea that it breaks up my departure journey from Gangtok to Siliguri and Kakarvitta. A two and a half day hiatus between Sikkim, and my final ride to the Nepal border. Two shorter trips instead of one longer one, and a place where everything is new and potentially interesting, with that very pleasant sense of a combination of total unfamiliarity, with as much quiet reflective time as I wish to immerse myself into with my panoramic view of the cloud. Searching for a good place to have morning coffee, searching for a good place to buy a small dish of something or a larger meal. Getting to know the up and down streets and how they either intersect or parallel one another, for the streets and the buildings follow the terrain, and the terrain is sharply inclined.

     On my second last day in Sikkim, while browsing in the Good Books bookstore in a hidden corner of the Marg, the owner hands me a book. A Step Away from Paradise by Thomas K. Shor – subtitled: A Tibetan Lama’s Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality. © 2011, a true story set in the Himalayan regions of Sikkim and southeast Tibet. There are places in the text I recognize from having been there: Tashiding and Yuksom, and descriptions of mountain terrain like I saw in the North. Having noticed me looking at books on Mandalas, Tibetan Astrology and Lepcha folktales, this book store owner figures I’ll take an interest in “A Step Away . . .” So this is one of the books I’ll be paging through in between reviewing and revising plans for departure and ongoing travel, walking the streets of Darjeeling, and finding little conversations along the way.

     Roland from Gangtok shows up at a little Tibetan café near the clock tower yesterday morning. Then again, my choice for a coffee spot this morning turns up Andy, one of my jeep-mates back on the road to Tashiding three weeks ago, and a young British girl named Olive, both of whom I give my card with website addresses, which they look up on their phones, and a nice little conversation ensues. One step at a time, walking up that hill, as I follow my porter, and I just keep watching his feet.

     Wednesday, May eighteenth, afternoon at the Hotel Nilkamal in Kakarvitta, Nepal. Yesterday, my last full day in India, walked down, down, down to the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Center, which is really a quiet and pleasant walk through lots of greenery shrouded in mist. Talk to a fellow down there from Amdo in eastern Tibet who especially relates to Texas, for that is where the cowboy movies with all of their horse riding comes from, and horsemanship is the pride and joy of the high Tibetan plateau Amdo people, and he misses that part of the life he once lived. Certainly not much horse running and racing to be done through the deeply forested hills of Darjeeling and the rest of this vertically inclined hill country. The Self Help Center is a rather extensive compound of buildings on the far edge of town where woolen rugs are hand woven, and other indigenous crafts including carpentry, wood carving, scarf weaving and more brings forth the beauty of Tibetan artistic expression. Wish I could buy a lovely turquoise colored woolen scarf, but I’ve got to be cutting my baggage weight and volume down, not adding to it, so I purchase some hand painted greeting cards on handmade paper, and then walk in the later afternoon on the long path I came down on as all ages of schoolchildren in their uniforms are making their ways down the narrow asphalt lane towards their homes.

     Sit on a park bench on one side of the main pedestrian mall, Chowk Bazar, alongside an elderly Tibetan couple for about an hour as Sun-Surya descends towards the horizon of the hills beyond. Take my last evening meal at Granary’s, the fine western style restaurant with white tablecloth and place settings and all, watching the sun’s final descent into the clouds at the horizon, before winding my way back up through the vegetable market and narrow streets leading to Tranquility. Evening packing, along with some reading from A Step Away from Paradise, and napping in between through the night till Dawn’s first light shines through the cool cloudy skies.

     Head down to the lobby around six-thirty to wait for my porter, who shows up around quarter to seven, and we walk together down the street we came up three days ago. I’m sure a good fare is a good way for him to start his day, and he helps me find a Siliguri jeep I can get first dibs on and buy two front seats, so it will be just me and the driver looking through the windshield on the way down to the plains. Filling the cab goes a bit slow, and we’re ready to go by eight. Then it’s twisting and turning all the way down, down, down to the flatlands and the familiar lowland heat and the longest stretches of straight roads I’ve seen in forty days. I’m dropped off at the Kakarvitta jeep stand, and get a rear window seat in a vehicle that’s about ready to go. Straight on to the Indian immigration office at Panatanki where I get stamped out with no fanfare or complications. Then a cycle rickshaw takes me and my bags across the long bridge over the wide flat green river basin that will likely be swollen when the monsoon comes. Signing up for the Nepali visa goes as smooth as silk. I choose the ninety day version and will have more time than I think I’ll want in Nepal, but then again, who knows? My options are open. Outside the immigration office a young man on his motor scooter is on me to come look at his lodge, and I like his approach so we pile all of my bags and me on his scooter and head on over to his simple place in town where his wife does the cooking and we fill out the sign-in papers in their kitchen – dining room. All settled in by around one-thirty, and I let Sunny know that I’m open to looking around the local area for a day or two, and he will be glad to show me around, and help me think about my options for planning the 600 plus kilometer, sixteen hour bus ride to Kathmandu. Perhaps I can break that up into some smaller pieces. Thus here I wait for now in the middle of a simple and ordinary neighborhood of small hotels and shops in this provincial town on the border, on the edge, on the threshold, of all kinds of new and unforeseeable discoveries.

     Friday, May twentieth, at seven in the morning at my delightful little room at the New Cruise hotel. By mid-morning yesterday, it’s clear that I need to clear out of the Nilkamal. My room there is dingy, with poor ventilation and lighting. I’m glad to have met manager – tour guide Sunny who is full of good information, is very helpful and the kitchen – dining room family atmosphere with him and his brother and their wives, all around in their thirties, and their two infants are kind of fun to be around, but it’s all very tight for space, and I don’t really have any space, either in my room or in the dining room where I can be laid back comfortable. Take a nice long exploratory walk through town, taking pictures and look into what looks like a couple of the better hotels in town. My corner room at the New Cruise is small and tight, and between the two sets of tall clear windows, the red and white flowery curtains are waving in the breeze. On a narrow side street with palm trees and birdsong for company, I feel I could easily rest in this compact room with its two beds and tiny table for several days. A room to like to be in! Hotel Dharka around the corner has a nice little restaurant for breakfast and other meals. Take a mid-afternoon walk down the street from the New Cruise heading towards the edge of town to where it all opens up into scattered houses, and open fields and quiet country landscape. Backyard cornfields and roadside shops with benches to sit on and watch a man chop wood across the street and a woman winnowing her grain. A taste of rural Nepal a kilometer from my hotel room refuge where I can bide my time in planning my next move. Not right now in all that huge of a hurry to dive into the urban metropolis of Kathmandu.

     May twenty-first. The Buddha’s birthday. One in the morning, in the quiet of the night. After breakfast at the hotel Dharka yesterday, walked over to visit with Sunny, my tour guide at the Nilkamal. He takes me for a ride on his motor scooter through town first of all to the Coop Art gallery – DeHi Art, “The Womb of Art” – where I meet with Tseten Sherpa (Chi-ten), one of the four thirty-something year old artists – three guys and a gal – who set this place up – a small space, not too small, that serves not only as studio and gallery, but through which the cooperators conduct art classes and workshops, especially for children, and serves as their base through which they participate in National Art Exhibitions and Festivals in Nepal, India. Bhutan and Bangla Desh. Tse-ten is mostly into very nice little watercolor landscapes, and he has a couple of very fine portraits hanging on this gallery wall. Tse-ten is just now getting ready for an “International Event of Fine Arts and Poetry” to be held in Siliguri these next couple of days. Sixteen participants. “Social awareness through art and public participation programs” is part of the mission statement of DeHi, The Womb of Art, gallery, and I am simply amazed to find this dynamic little center of young enterprising and enthusiastic artists in this small town which otherwise, on the surface of it, seems to be little more that a bus station crossing.

     Into the gallery comes Devendra T., an artist and friend of Tse-ten who will also be participating in the Siliguri event. Devendra is from Katmandu and gives me his contact info for when I visit that city. So that’s cool – to have a Katmandu contact before I even get there!

     Next on the agenda with Sunny is a visit across town to a kindergarten run by Maria, a Bhutanese matron and her husband, where an itinerant Lutheran missionary volunteer teacher, John from New Zealand, aged sixty-two, has been helping Maria and teaching some of the twenty kindergarteners. To hear him talk, John is something of a free-lancer, visiting places and schools he hears about, all over south and southeast Asia, helping out in his volunteering kind of way. Maria offers me an empty room upstairs with a mattress on the floor where I can stay for free, and maybe teach some of the kindergarteners in whatever way I could – in art, most likely – but I’m not exactly into this level of involvement, and prefer to stick with my hotel room at New Cruise.

     After I take pictures of the twenty tots and their teachers, Sunny takes me over to the nearby Buddhist monastery, where preparations are underway for today’s celebration ceremonies and activities for the Buddha’s birthday. I get the ground floor to rooftop tour, complete with overview of town and surrounding countryside, and am allowed to take pictures in areas of the monastery where I would not normally be allowed to take pictures in the larger monasteries I’ve visited. Here again, this is not a place tourists normally visit, and since the next day, today, is the Buddha’s birthday, how can I not be there?!

     Sunny takes me for a short ride out of town along the country road through the tea plantations, and then it’s back to the Nilkamal for lunch, and a selfie picture taking session with some of the Bangla Deshi visitors. Afternoon is my own for reading from the amazing story in “A Step Away from Paradise, “ followed by a late afternoon walk through some quiet residential neighborhoods, and a bowl of vegetable Thuk-pa noodle soup at the Dharka as dusk settles into darkness. The Kakervitta border town is giving me reason to be hanging around and there is no big hurry to be boarding the bus for Katmandu. That will be there when I get there. Right now, just keeping track of where I’m at. Six months of India is now behind me, and where I’m heading seems pretty much up in the air.

     Saturday the twenty-first around four in the afternoon. On my early morning walk towards my first coffee and the Buddhist monastery, find a small school supplies bookstore that has a kindergarten or first grade primer for the Nepali and English alphabets, numbers, and basic words. Thirty-six consonants times twelve vowel sounds plus the twelve vowels sounds themselves gives us four hundred forty-four letters. So the learning curve is going to be a bit slow, but at least I’ve got the chart to keep me entertained during idle moments in the daily program.

     Over to the monastery by around seven-thirty, some plastic tables and chairs are set up around the yard, and I sit with a couple of other septuagenarian men at a table where a thirty or forty-something year old woman pours our cups of tea. More and more individuals and families trickle through the gate and more chairs are set out and more tea is poured. A group of four young grade school girls gathers near me to start asking questions about where I’m from and so forth, and when we reach our language barrier, I pull the alphabet primer out of my sack and we all start having a delightful time as they teach me pronunciations for both letters and words. Sometime around mid-morning, the monks start their chanting program, and people come and go, in and out, of the meditation room – chanting hall according to their wish to make a prayer or be close to the chanting monks. There is no mass. There is no meeting. There is no lecture. There is no organized anything that anyone is required to attend. It’s come and go as you wish, and listen as you wish, and pray as you wish, while the monks make the sounds with voice and drum and horn that carries all of these wishes into the atmosphere, into the universe.

     I sit on a low bench over in one corner and just let those sounds fill my ears, my mind and my heart. I am the only westerner amongst what I guess you’d call the congregation of mainly Tibetan, and also Bhutanese and Nepali Buddhists. Unlike all the other monasteries I’ve visited in my travels, no one minds one way or another about picture taking, and my camera is welcome entertainment for several children and their mothers and I’ve got a few digitized smiles in my electronic memory. The chanting concludes and preparations for the procession begin. Women both young and old go over to the shelves where the sacred texts are kept, and each is given one to carry on the crown of her head. Following the lead vehicle through the streets of Kakarvitta, with colorful flags on its fenders, the smallest children lead the procession, many of them carrying flags and banners, followed by the men who carry the holy statue laden with white scarves, followed by the laymen and monks of the congregation, the latter playing their Tibetan trumpets, all followed by the women carrying the holy manuscripts. Maybe three hundred people altogether and they take a very long walk around town. I break off at a point where I’m getting a bit tired, for I really don’t know how far they plan on going, and return to the monastery to wait for their return. Everybody’s back by around twelve-thirty. It’s a real church picnic atmosphere, and I am a popular guy with the kids with my camera, until I’ve had enough and take a chair next to an old Nepali guy, and we sit silently and watch. Communal lunch of rice and veggies is served, and I wind up sitting next to a couple of Sherpas whom I can talk with. One of them owns a local hotel and is full of traveling suggestions, so eventually he and I leave the party and walk over to his hotel where I look at a room that I decide to take after I’m through with my last night where I’m at the New Cruise tonight. One thing leads to another leads to something else, and Nepal is already unfolding in mysterious ways, right here in border crossing town Kakarvitta.

     Tuesday, May twenty-fourth at six in the morning. Long steady rain in progress. After five full days of blistering hot afternoons, the bleak skies above bode for a cool, wet day. The breezy New Cruise room with palm trees and birdsong turned into a daytime nightmare when the construction crew across the narrow street went into action hammering and riveting my brain with their racket. So glad to have met Lakhpa at the Buddha’s birthday celebration at the monastery and to now have this very lovely room at the Zeesal hotel, named with the first syllables of his daughters’ names. Zeesan, aged fourteen, and Salden, ten – ZeeSal. Huge panoramic view of a quiet street, looking across to shrubs and little trees and the earthy New Mexico canyon colored red post office.

A spacious room I can spread out in. Window to the sky. One entire wall is the window, with ceiling to floor draperies I can pull aside or close. Two cushioned chairs and a small table for my internet typing and note book writing. If all I’m really doing is going from one place to another looking for nice places to stay and set up my office, here is one.

     Finally plowed through the final volume of the Shiva trilogy by Amish. Very entertaining and quite a different way of looking at Shiva, and his entourage of fellow gods and goddesses, friends and enemies, challenges and achievements. Just a down home guy who happens to be very talented, emotionally real, and just trying to do the right thing.

     Looks like I’m walking right into the Nepali portion of the summer monsoon, and have got to wonder how this is going to impact my traveling plans for the coming days and weeks.

     Wednesday, May twenty-fifth around eleven morning. Finally got around to deciding to leave tomorrow, and the destination is Bhaktapur, the small ancient city just east of Katmandu in the valley. Looks like the place is crowded with Hindu temples and sacred places everywhere you turn, a place where after a few dozen or hundred clicks, I’ll just have to put the camera down and Be Here Now.

     Speaking of Be Here Now, Lhakpa, my hotel owner-manager-host comes back from the bus station where he went to set up my ticket for tomorrow, and tells me there will be a one-day bus drivers’ strike tomorrow, and I won’t be able to leave till Friday. Fine! Just when I think I’ve got a handle on a tentative schedule, some planetary alignment comes along and juggles it around for me. Seven nights I’ve now had in Kakarvitta. Tonight was going to be my eighth and final, and now I can look forward to number nine. When I first landed in Kakervitta, I figured on two or three, and they just keep adding up one after another while I watch the weather go by. Only two ways to walk, either towards the central bus station and business district, infused with its dust and noisy-ness, or on an out-of-town pathway, like I took yesterday late morning to the tea plantation fields in their sea of greenery extending towards the horizon. At least you can hear the birds out there, and find a quiet patch of shade to sit. Got into a conversation with a family on their porch, including a seventy-seven year old man and his wife, and who I imagine are his children and grandchildren, and we have a merry time with my camera. The weathered old patriarch and I engage in lively conversation – he entirely in Nepali and I entirely in English – with the complete understanding that neither of us knows what the other is saying, but we pretend that we do and he and I and the family all get a charge out of this delightful charade. He’s holding a Nepali booklet with a picture of Krishna and Radha on the cover, and I think that we are talking about an esoteric interpretation of the Krishna-Radha mythology, like minded intellectuals that he and I clearly are! Never know who you might meet while walking down a country road.

      So it’s the rest of today and all day tomorrow ahead of me now. Noontime rain clouds are building up and here it comes, the waterfall shower that cools things down.

     Saturday, May twenty-eighth at five-thirty in the morning in room thirty-one of Khwapa Chhen Guest House, Bhaktapur. Sometimes you find a place where the silence descends like an avalanche into that space between one inner ear and the other. Oh My! Rolling into a new urban landscape after an eleven hour spin across the plains and up and down the hills leading towards an unknown city, with no pre-conceived notion of where you are going to wind up putting your feet on the ground and your head into a bed, can be apprehensively disconcerting. My driver is dropping me with my bags off on the side of an urban thoroughfare, and with all of his helpful best intentions, pointing to some buildings in a field across the way, telling me that’s where I need to go to look for a hotel. And good luck finding a taxi in this somewhat unlikely place. Lucky me! Just so happens, a rattletrap taxi shows up looking for a fare just in time for the hand off, and my mini-bus driver explains to the city taxi driver what this clueless foreigner is looking for! So it’s off we go across the thoroughfare and into the field on our way to the network of twisting urban streets, and I am completely at the mercy of whatever kind of idea my driver has in mind for where I want to go. My man delivers! Homerun Touchdown Pass! To the gates of Durbar Square, Bhaktapur, the heart of the thousand year old city where Nepal began being Nepal. On target with a bulls’ eye. Those evening hours before nightfall are setting in. However many rupees my driver wants, he gets them. Foreigners visiting the ancient district of Bhaktapur need to buy a fifteen dollar pass and I get mine stamped for seven days. A helpful pedestrian points me down a narrow stone paved lane between tall red brick buildings and says there is my hotel, about a one block walk. The young man in the lobby speaks with a clear, slowly and softly spoken English and walks me up an ancient stonework stairway with dark smooth wooden banisters to this priceless room where, with my intention to stay for one week, I can leverage him down to fifteen dollars per night. Second floor, i.e. third story of this solidly built red brick building in this urban zone where most every building is red brick with red tile roofs, all blending together with the ancient temples of the square into the feeling of an overall place that hasn’t changed very much in centuries. Four stories altogether with a rooftop view across all of the other rooftops around towards the mountains in the distance that for the time being are shrouded in haze. While this L-shaped structure is solid and well built, the L-shaped building that completes the other two sides of the courtyard is a shambles of deterioration and slow-motion collapse and is seriously scarred by last year’s earthquake. And yet, this morning, as I look from my upstairs window into the courtyard below, littered with fallen bricks and shards of timber, an ancient woman draped in her maroon robe hobbles out of a weathered wooden doorway and walks slowly alongside a wall to water a small set of thriving and well-cared for potted plants. The avalanche of silence roars through the space between my ears.

     Going back to yesterday, and the day before. Unplanned for day number nine in Kakerbhitta was well spent. Sometimes it rained and sometimes sunlight warmed the air. Finally wrote my letter of introduction to Janet D., founder and organizer of the UBUD Writers and Readers Festival to be held in Bali at the end of October. It has taken me this much time to get around to composing this simple letter since Harsarran’s suggestion the first week of April. October seems a long way off from now, and introducing myself to an annual event where thirty-thousand people showed up last year seems rather daunting. Hi Janet. I’m a friend of Harsarran, and I’ve got a little book. I plan on showing up to this event. One little book, in a sea of other little books, all of us looking for readers. All of us looking for listeners to our voices. Another one of those Be Here Now events. No extravagant expectations. Just looking for friends and kindred spirits, and looking forward to whatever happens, for I know it will be good. In a Word.

     Back in Kakarbhitta late Thursday afternoon, make a point of stopping over to see Sunny at the Nilkamal hotel. The man who picked me up at the immigration office, set me up with my first hotel room, and rode me around town on his scooter for a local tour and visit to the art gallery, and the kindergarten, and the monastery. Sunny launched my visit into this otherwise invisible border town, and I want to make sure he knows how much I appreciate his guiding light. Sit with Sunny and his brother and a couple of his other friends in his kitchen – dining room, take some group selfies, trade email addresses, and share photos of some places we’ve been.

     A bit later, back at the Zeesal, Lakhpa asks me for my telephone number, and when I tell him my Indian number is dysfunctional, he walks me over to the NCell Nepali phone company office where he signs up for a new number under his name and we get the SIM card to install in my phone, so I now have a fully functional Nepali phone number. I would never have done this myself. To me, the paperwork is a labyrinth of crossword anagrams, and to Lakhpa, it’s one-two-three and done! Nice to be reconnected to the international cell phone world again. 

     Lakhpa also helped me make the mini-bus reservation for Friday’s ride to Bhaktapur. Instead of the big bus which takes the long way around to Kathmandu, Lakhpa sets me up with the mini-bus, a fifteen-passenger Toyota maxi-van, that takes the shortcut through the immensely more exciting hill country leading into the valley from the East. That’s what yesterday’s ride was all about. After a nice long morning stretch of kilometers across the southeast flatlands, our van turned north into the twisting, turning roads of the hill country, just like the twisting, turning roads that run through the hills of Sikkim. I had a front window seat most of the way, and got a bunch of fly-by pictures of rivers, and valleys and steep mountain forests. A bit rattling, as these journeys tend to be, and in the end it all turned out fine, as through one way or another, from one fortunate turn of the wheel to another, I wound up in this treasure of a room in this ancient city where a long time ago, someone decided this place needed to be.

     Monday, May thirtieth morning around six-forty. Looks like sunshine today. Yesterday was all full of clouds from start to finish with damp and drizzle along the way. Have been walking through initial explorations of the old city, dark red brick pavements, worn and warped with years of pedestrian traffic, tall three and four story red brick buildings, some of them older than I and others being built up over again where aging predecessors have crumbled or quaked to the ground. Four main temple squares, all within walking distance of one another through interlacing streets of shops to wander through. Restaurants aplenty to choose from in this tourist magnet town, and shops full of all kinds of wonderful hand made things to buy. Thangka paintings, singing bowls, carved wooden masks, wall decorations, metal crafts, and yak wool weavings. As I’m sitting on a temple step in Durbar square near my hotel Saturday morning, my first day out and not having yet gone very far or seen very much, I am approached by a younger teenage boy who asks if I want him to show me around. Santosh is a free-lance guide out to make a few extra rupees, but I’m mostly a self-guided tourist who is happy to sit and talk with him for awhile but I am not his customer. Then along comes another self-styled tourist guide, around thirty or in his thirties I suppose, and he is more of a professional with government approved I.D. and a very engaging personality, not an intrusive hustler like some of these guys can be. Again, I’m not in the market, but am pleased to sit and talk for as long as he wants. The conversation goes on for quite a while, and I learn a lot about Krishna as our personalities have a very real resonance. He walks here to the square every day from his village five kilometers away along some country road, on the lookout for tourists to guide. His wife and mother and three year old daughter and one month old son are back in the village. His world was devastated by last year’s earthquake. Two nice houses crumbled into oblivion, one buffalo killed and the other two had to be sold because he could no longer take care of them. He’s a musician and his tabla was ruined, his keyboard crushed, and guitar rendered useless. His three year old daughter is going to a pre-school and learning her alphabets and his wife is in some school training program to become a teacher, so when she’s qualified, and gets a position, things can become better. Meanwhile, looking for tourists to guide as a free lancer is difficult, especially in this off-season. He understands I have no money to spend on tourist guides, but business is slow and he leads me on a stroll over to a nearby Thangka painting school where I delightfully meet some artists, look at some works in progress as well as some of the finished paintings. Krishna and I return to the square and sit on a ledge under a roof watching afternoon rain tumble from the sky and collect into puddles on the wide brick pavement. After the rain, we go for a coffee shop drink and piece of cake. Throughout all of this, through silence and conversation, there is a sense of affinity between us. The coffee and cake are on me and I give him some rupees for taking me to the Thangka painting school, because he’s spent his time being helpful and informative, and because I want to help him in some small way. It’s like doing each other favors rather than paying for services rendered. We are clear that I am not his customer, and that there is something else going on here. This time we spend together is a personal sharing, and we agree to meet again the next day, yesterday, with an informal plan in mind.

     Yesterday, as I said, was cloudy and not good for going very far, but we walk through some streets and visit three of the four main squares, and it’s all really about sharing time and space together. We pass by a corner where a man sits on a step playing his djembe with consummate skill and singing some Hindu bajans. Krishna is good friends with this drummer, who steps through the doorway into his home and comes out with a tabla-like drum for Krishna to set his hands to, and these two guys get into a drum jamming session to set the neighborhood air on fire. Another passing friend stops by to join the djembe player’s voice with his own. Krishna is totally grooving with his fingers to his drum, and I am the total listener to this threesome on the sidewalk step. This goes on for easily an hour.

     I ask Krishna to recommend a restaurant, and we go over to the Cloud 9, a fine place where even the locals go, and our meals are on me. We walk back to the Durbar square near my hotel, part ways for the day, and plan to meet again, hoping for a sunny day, which so far this morning, it is.

     Tuesday morning at seven, May thirty-first. Overcast and raining so far. Yesterday started out with a bright, blue sky, and I took an early walk across the red brick paved Durbar square to the Daily Grind coffee shop for a rooftop Americano and chocolate muffin. Then strolled down the narrow lane to the Taumadhi Tole square and climbed the steps to the top of the base of the five-story pagoda, the Nyatapola temple, for an early morning overview of pedestrian traffic below. Descend and walk the red brick lane to the Potters square where terra cotta pottery is all lined up and spread out across the pavement ready for market.

     Take Krishna’s phone call and walk over to meet him at Durbar square. With the weather as nice as it is, the time is right for our visit to the ancient Changu Narayan temple. Eight kilometer taxi ride to the hilltop village overlooking the valley. Changu Narayan temple dates back to the fourth century C.E., the oldest temple in Nepal. Weathered with age and well taken care of, it has been restored from time to time throughout its history. Built in the two-tiered pagoda style, and surrounded within the compound by a few smaller temples, the gateways are guarded with stonework animal deities: Lions, Griffins, and Elephants. Intricate woodwork carving adorns the façade and supporting struts. Walk around, take lots of pictures, honor the deities represented in the stonework and woodwork carvings, sit for awhile in silence and let seventeen centuries of presence soak in.   

     Eventually, Krishna and I walk around the hillside through the forest just below the temple and through the village back to the bus and taxi parking lot. Not very many tourists come up this way, and the sense of rural peacefulness prevails. Sit at a restaurant rooftop for some tea and momos. Take the bus down to Bhaktapur. Strangely enough, the sky clouds over and the rain comes down heavy during the bus ride, and by the time we reach the drop off point in Bhaktapur, the rains have let up. Walk the few blocks back to the city where we began, and sit for a short while again on the square, before I share some rupees with Krihsna for his time and company, and bid him adieu for the day and return to my room for an afternoon rest.

     Three days down in the Bhaktapur area now, two days in the ancient city, and one in outlying Changu Narayan. All three in one way or another to some extent in the company of my spirit guide Krishna. Cloudy and drizzly so far this Tuesday morning, and I just have to wait till it all clears up.

     Wednesday, June first, at ten in the morning, with my rooftop breakfast at the Daily Grind coffee shop, where I have found the best cup of rich black coffee I’ve had in a long time. Blue skies today. Walking across Durbar square from my hotel on the way over here, met with Krishna, my spirit guide to Changu Narayan two days ago, and young Sandosh. Krishna has lined up a tour for today, a couple from Holland, and is waiting just now for them to show up. Great to hear that he landed this piece of work, just in time to pick up some of the rupees he needs to pay this month’s tuition for his daughter’s pre-school.

     Yesterday afternoon was with my other Bhaktapur Krishna, the young man behind the counter at my hotel. We take a walk through some twisting brick paved lanes out of the old town to the highway where we catch a public transportation bus ride, along with half the population of Asia for company, to a hilltop on the eastern rim of the valley, where, just within the last few years, someone has built the largest Shiva statue in the world. Standing tall with trident in one hand, the other hand with palm facing forward in a benevolent gesture, cobra draped around his neck, crescent moon in his hair, cast in an amalgam of metals with an emphasis on bright burnished copper, he surveys the valley and its surrounding ring of hills. It’s a bit of a climb up the hill through the village where the bus drops us off, and Krishna and I spend a good couple of hours enjoying the relative sense of rural peace and quiet, along with the steady stream of Hindu tourists who enjoy the garden atmosphere. Krishna is off from his hotel duties from twelve to four, and he is delightfully happy to share his time showing me the valley from this place. Bus ride back, kneebone to elbow with the local population, who all get along extremely well accommodating each other in the space we are given to share. Thank whatever goodness, I get to sit next to the driver for a through-the-windshield view. Rest of the day, sitting on the Durbar square watching the pedestrians and clouds roll by and with some laid back quiet time on the hotel rooftop watching some masons laying fresh bricks to reconstruct a temple spire laid waste by last year’s earthquake. Another reconstruction going up, one brick at a time, to last another thousand years, or until the next earthquake comes around, at which time the children’s children of these masons will do it all over again. It’s the same temple, always there, just as it always has been.

     Ancient Bhaktapur is just one little corner of the valley, and there are enough temples and holy places to keep a person company on self-guided walking tours, and to keep a camera clicking for days on end. Today and tomorrow are my last scheduled days at the hotel. Maybe I’ll walk and maybe I won’t walk very much at all today. Once one steps very far into the meandering lanes surrounding the ancient square, the horrifically annoying motorcyclists start weaving their way through the pedestrian lanes, laying into their ear-splitting horns, while bearing down on you or from behind with their get-out-of-my-way intensity. That is even before you get to the highway where buses, trucks, and taxis engage in their own version of free-for-all madness. All of which makes hanging around vehicle off-limits Durbar square a rather appealing option for spending a day.

     Forty-five years ago in nineteen-seventy, I spent three days in November walking the lanes of old Katmandu while prepping for my flight to Pokhara for my two week Himal Annapurna – Kaligandaki River trek. After that exhilarating walk through the gorge between the snow-capped peaks, I flew back to Katmandu for a couple more days of walking through those mysterious lanes. It’s taken a bit of time for me to get back to this valley for these further explorations. My program is a blank page. I’m here for soaking-in time for my sense of what this country means to me. I’ve been in Nepal two weeks now, and have yet to see a Himalayan snow-capped peak. It’s not so much about finding Nepal as some objective place as it is about finding my Nepal, those places here that resonate in some personal way.

     Like Changu Narayan with Krishna two days ago. There are free-lancing guides aplenty working the square every day, every tourist knows, and first response to an offer is usually Thanks, but No Thanks. Krishna’s voice and manner touched me in a heartfelt, resonating place, and I felt like I was talking with a person from out of a time before there were borders between what we now call Nepal and India and all of the Indian states. Here is a man who really is, I felt, an incarnation of Krishna, or Shiva, with a personality as old as the stones that lay at the foundation of all of those temples scattered across the countryside.

Our conversation flowed like quiet water, slowly winding its way towards another heartfelt understanding. For all that there is to see and take pictures of in Bhaktapur, there will always be the echo I remember from Krishna’s voice, the look in his eye, the nod of his head, and the way he found his way into my heart.

     I came to India to meet certain people. I came to Nepal to meet certain people. I came to these places to meet the people who resonate with my heart. The temple is a vehicle, a place to gather, a place to focus, a place to find what you are looking for after all of the wandering that you may have done through meandering brick lanes and winding hillside trails. The Lions, the Griffins, the Elephants and the Bulls greet you at the gateways to the temple. Here is the path to the holy place inside your heart. Listen closely to your voice within.

     Thursday, June second around six-thirty in the morning. Looks like sunny and clear so far today. After my leisurely breakfast and extra cup of coffee yesterday morning on the Grinder’s rooftop, meet with Krishna and Sandosh down on the square. Krishna has finished his two hour tour with the couple from Holland and now has five dollars, or five hundred rupees more than he had before. Pickings are slim and you take what you can get. There are more tour guides out on the square than there are tourists. I’ve got time on my hands and a good walk would be good, so I pick an interesting looking Ganesh temple out of the guidebook, the Suriya Binayak temple, which from the square is through town to across the highway to an uphill walk to a quiet forested setting, altogether a couple or three kilometers. Krishna leads the way, the climb is nice and steep, and traffic thins out as we approach the top where the seventeenth century temple sits amidst the surrounding forest. The place is mostly our own for awhile with an attendant Brahmin priest who sells us puja candles for five rupees each. One by two by three, other occasional visitors climb the steps to the courtyard to pay their respects to the great elephant-headed god, and take selfies and family photos. Sit on a bench to one side and just watch three older teenage girls spend an enormous amount of time taking more selfies and pictures of each other than I would think their phones have enough memory to store. What did people do for entertainment before the invention of digital phones and selfie taking? Does anyone remember?

     It was a nice long walk up here and I’ve got plenty of time to sit around this peaceful setting overlooking the city. We’re not exactly on top of the hill. There is an old brick stairway winding upwards through the trees that my exploring mind is compelled to follow. Couple of hundred yards up is a small old dilapidated brick temple with a well worn goddess idol inside, and graffiti initials written on the walls by the less than reverent visitors. A stepped dirt trail leads further up the hill, and now it is I leading my guide into the mysterious forest above. The trail thins out the further we go, and obviously might go on for a very long way, so I finally call it enough is enough, and mark the turnaround point with a photo into the unknown where the trail disappears into the trees ahead. A very old and weathered string of prayer flags whispers in the gentle breeze, threadbare disappearing into nothingness amongst the branches and leaves above.

     Down the earthen trail, down the old brick trail, past the dilapidated temple, down the newer brick trail, walking on by the Ganesh temple that brought us up here, down to the asphalt lane where we sit for a cup of chai at a roadside tea shop before descent and return to the city. Towards the bottom where the road flattens out, stop at a roadside shrine for Bhim-sen, the god with the power of a thousand horses, to pay homage and ask for a blessing. An elderly woman, perhaps as old as I or nearly so, strong and powerfully built, with a strong and wise look in her face, is in attendance for the shrine, and her radiant look of just pure knowing is clearly a reflection of Bhim-sen’s one thousand horsepower.

     Krishna and I stop off for lunch at a local place that he likes, then finish our walk to where we began on the square. Of course I’ve got some rupees for Krishna and the time he spends with me, and for his daughter’s pre-school and whatever else he’s trying to keep together back home. Fresh curious tourists are strolling into the square, and perhaps there’s another good connection for my spirit guide to make before the afternoon disappears into sunset. We part for today with Namaste blessings for one another at heart.

     Back to where I was yesterday morning on the rooftop of the Daily Grind with my mug of rich, dark Java. Light pedestrian traffic criss-crosses the red brick pavement mini-square entryway to the main square. The twin sentinel fang-toothed Lions have been watching them all go by for how many hundreds of years, through how many monsoons and earthquakes, through how many starry nights, through how many sun-baked afternoons, through how many crowded festivals and royal processions, through how many of everybody who has crossed the pavement at the foot of their pedestal, who can count? Now I sit and watch and wait with the Lions, they on their pedestal, face-to-face with I on the coffeehouse rooftop. Their mouths are open and fangs are ready to chew to shreds whatever and every ridiculous observation I might dare to make. A thin elderly woman in clothes clearly well-worn, on their way to oblivion, climbs the five stone steps to the top of the pedestal where the Lions stand. She lights a flame to the wick of a small oil lamp. She walks the few steps over to one Lion and holds the flame up to him, turns and walks the few steps over to the She Lion, for every pair of Lion statues comes as a He with a She, and holds the flame up to her. Flame-bearing Woman returns to the center of the pedestal, extinguishes the flame, and slowly, one step at a time, descends to the brick pavement and walks off into one of the ancient sidestreet lanes.

     Friday, June third, on the Daily Grind rooftop at nine-nineteen. Last day in Bhaktapur. Last morning in this ancient city where I met my friend, the Krishna from right out of the Bhagavad-Gita. This one is happily married for six years and does not run around with those unhappy western tourist women who want to hit on him. He tells them they have to find their happiness in their own heart, that neither he nor anyone else can be the source of what they are looking for. Krishna’s favorite people are little children and old people. Those are the happiest people. They are not grasping and greedy and looking for so many things to get and to have that they think will bring them the happiness they have lost and are searching for. I remind Krishna of his grandfather who passed away when Krishna was a young teenager. He was a loving and generous man, deeply embedded in Krishna’s heart as a man he admires and hopes to become like. I am honored for what Krishna sees in me, and I see clearly that he is well on his way to becoming who he wants to be. Really, he is already that person, just whiten his hair and add a few wrinkles to his face, and Krishna as the grandfather to his daughter’s children, to his son’s children sits now across the table where we came for our late lunch yesterday afternoon, on the rooftop restaurant overlooking Dattatrapa square, billed as the oldest part of the city, less frequented by the tourist pedestrians. At this highest rooftop restaurant in the city, we’ve got the pinnacle table. In the hills to the south, the Suriya Binayak temple where we climbed Wednesday. In the hills to the north, the Changu Narayan temple where we went Monday. To the hills of the southeast, the towering shining Shiva statue, aglow in burnished copper. Tomorrow, I’ll be on my way from Bhaktapur to Bodhnah, a few kilometers west, closer to metro Kathmandu. 

     The Bhaktapur chapter is closing, and more than anything else, my time has been about my meeting with Krishna. The earthquake ripped his house and buffaloes, his home and his livelihood, out from under his feet. He has used the fallen bricks to construct a three room house for his family and he tends a garden with corn and vegetables. The buffalo milk income is gone, and all he’s really got going is this sporadic and uncertain tourist guide gig. Keeping the show together is seriously difficult and there is not one word of complaint that comes forth, for he has and he knows he has the most important thing in the world, the love in his heart for himself and for his wife and two children. Krishna speaks the wisdom of his grandfather, and a ready smile is never far away. He walks the four squares of Bhaktapur and the lanes in between with a greeting in friendship for many whom we meet and pass by along the way. His wish is for his daughter to become an ambassador for Nepal, and to bring the voice of goodness to the world, the voice of peace and caring and generosity, the voice of his grandfather, the voice he has heard, the voice he will pass on. I am entirely privileged to know this man, and honored to be at home in his thoughts.

     Just when you think you’ve come to a finishing thought, here comes another to say, no wait, here is one more. I thought the scene from yesterday with the woman performing her puja with the Lions at the Eastern gate of Durbar square was a lovely finishing touch. Of course I knew I would see Krishna again, but did not imagine the amazingly beautiful conversation we would have on the rooftop restaurant that afternoon. He speaks a way of looking at the world and towards the people we love and the people we find taxing with a practical and uplifting spirit in his voice. I will remember our conversation forever. I knew I would see him again this morning for a couple of hours before my departure. There I am on the Daily Grind rooftop with my coffee and here he comes to join me. I told him how I watched the old woman do her puja with the Lions yesterday. He knows who I’m talking about. The old woman spends all day every day walking around visiting temples and shrines all over the ancient city, burning an oil soaked wick at every place where she stops to pray and pay homage to a resident deity. Sure enough, not much later, here she is again climbing the steps and doing her puja with the Lions. She weaves the thread of her trail every day through the lanes of the old city tying all of the ancient shrines together in one cloth.

     After finishing with our Daily Grind, Krishna and I stroll over to the Taumadhi square with the five-tiered pagoda to look for a shady stone to sit on and watch today’s pedestrian traffic, and throw bread crumbs at the pigeons. After a while, Krishna leads me through a doorway into an inner courtyard where a small pagoda stands and a few other shrines are built into the courtyard walls. A couple of workmen are mixing cement and laying a patch of pavement tiles. Not long thereafter, who should walk through the doorway but the puja lady. She begins with the main temple and shrine in this courtyard, then proceeds around to every other shrine, lighting her wick and saying prayers at every one. Of course, I can’t help but keep watching her and listening, and she comes around to the Shiva lingam shrine where Krishna and I are sitting on the ledge. After going through her entire set of prayers and motions, she comes around and gives a flower petal to each of us to place on the top of our heads, just as she gave a flower petal to each of the three workmen to place on the top of their heads. I’ve taken my hat off to her as I place the rose petal on my head, then put the hat back on, over her Bhaktapur gift. She exits the courtyard, and not long thereafter, Krishna walks me back to my hotel where we pick up my bags and walk over to the taxi Krishna has arranged for my departure from a place and a person I will always remember.