Maths and leopards

Shit, it's that time of week again: I have dredge up more news. Well, to be honest, I do work in an office during the week. They exist in Nepal. You know, with desks and computers and telephones and stuff. I turn up in the morning, around ten – the kind of hour I can manage, just about – and say hi to my Himal colleagues, make myself a rancid cup of instant coffee, sit before my (yes, my) computer, switch the thing on; and so the fun begins.

My duties are many and random, and vary wildly in interest and importance. At the lowly end of the scale are keywording and updating the address book; I would go into these but I simply can't face it right now. In a similar league is updating 'classifieds' on the Himal website – namely, loading up adds for jobs and awards and suchlike. A good few rungs above these is fact-checking – seeking out corroborating evidence on the web for 'facts' stated within Himal articles; 'two million displaced in Swat', 'Sri Lankan President Rajapakse employs precisely three of his brothers in his cabinet', and so on until I grow weary and contemptuous of truth.

At the top, the lofty pinnacle, lost among the peaks of the high Himalaya, obscured by passing rain clouds, is brief writing. BRIEF WRITING. Oh! The joy, the passion, the adventure, the miscellaneous titbits on UN committee meetings, flowing freely from the bloated udders of the great cow of South Asian geopolitics. In four-to-five hundred word parcels, I keep the masses fed with only the most essential news items from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh, Burma, Bhutan, the Maldives, and beyond.

If you think I'm exaggerating a little, take a look here. Or here. If you're hooked already – these things happen – then be sure to check back every week. (It changes!) And some of them have turned up in the print copy of the magazine, albeit without my name attached; it is simply ‘Himal’s take on cross-border news’.

So, that – with a few exciting extras here and there – is pretty much it. I don’t interview politicians or brave arrest and torture to expose dastardly corporations; neither do I get a nice shiny card I can shove in people’s faces (this especially rankles). What I can say is that my knowledge of South Asia – political, cultural, geographical, pharmaceutical, and plenty of other ‘als’ besides – has been building steadily. My ear is ever to the ground, and the information that surfaces ranges from the banal (the development of broadband in Bhutan; well, good for them), the racy (tribal activism in Orissa; multinationals vs. peasants with bows and arrows), to the bizarre (Nepal has recently been landed with a number of Somali refugees, who traveled to Nepal on the belief they were being taken to Naples). I suppose I can now refer to myself as a ‘South Asia hand’ – a title I have sought from the cradle. But perhaps I’m a little too junior. We shall see.

*

Another Saturday, another sweaty bike trip. This time I made a good, clean escape from the city, without repeatedly returning to the ring road. Oh yes; back of the net. I headed south-west to a place called Godavari. Not much of a place, really, as places go, but it backs on to a forest called Phulchowki, in which I made an abortive, muddy foray. Also close by is a sacred spring – the Godavari Kunda – and surrounding temples where diligent Hindus go to fetch karma, and a towering Tibetan monastery in which red-robed monks were performing a puja as I arrived. A great, raucous, chanting, cymbal-clashing, horn-blowing, drum-bashing thing, the Tibetan Buddhist puja; sounding much like a thunderstorm, only less coordinated, it leaves you with the impression that a tantric deity will descend from the clouds and burst through the vast wooden doors, with flaming nostrils and profound inner peace.

The next morning, Suresh came with an idea: in fractured, over-excited English, he suggested that, instead of him running off to shops and then making me lunch, as usually happens, we both eat out at the restaurant where he and his brother work – Mike’s Café, founded by an NGO worker called Mike (I kid you not), now dead from cancer. It was a convivial, overpriced place, heavy with flower pots. It made for a pleasant few hours, and I chatted with Suresh and his brother – his name escapes me – for a good while. I got to know Suresh a little better.

The following information could be discerned from a series of stunted sentences, which floated gracefully in pools of their own meaning: Suresh has been living in Kathmandu for seven years, since he was fourteen, doing odd jobs, mostly in restaurant kitchens; he has ambitions as a chef in a high-class hotel; for the last few years he has been attending an evening school, where he enjoys maths ‘very very much’; his family lives in a village two days bus ride away in eastern Nepal; he goes back there once a year for a Hindu festival in October. His brother told me about a house – or rather, hut – of his near Everest base camp, a few days walk away from any motorable road. He likes to go there on holidays to ‘enjoy nature’. I nodded appreciatively to all of this.

After lunch Suresh showed me where he lived, nearby. He shared a room with his brother; a shoebox: two beds, two desks, a steel cupboard, and barely enough room left for a sedentary cat, let alone a swinging one. But they’d decked the place out like a funky bachelors pad. The walls were proud with posters of Hindu deities, Bollywood babes, and sheaves of paper scrawled with algebra – evidence of Suresh’s zeal for maths, along with the exercise books that overspilled his desk. A window looked out onto a quiet, tree-lined lane, where rubbish floated and dogs slept spreadeagled on hot tarmac. After I’d nodded and smiled at everything, I made my way back to Lainchaur, to my flat, where I tried and failed to think of what to do with the rest of my day.

*

That Wednesday was a holiday; the day certain Hindus annually change their sacred thread, wrapped around the wrist or torso. Suresh proudly showed me his that morning – bound loosely on his wrist. So, cycling again; I headed north. Budhanilkantha appeared after half an hour’s pedalling. A fairly non-descript suburb, dusty and concrete. But there I found Vishnu – in the form of Narayan, the creator of all life, no less – floating on a bed of serpents over a cosmic sea. In statue form, of course, at the centre of a rank, green, hollowed-out pool. It’s one of the valley’s major pilgrimage sites, and the body of Narayan in the pool enclosure – barred to non-Hindus; I got a view from the railings surrounding it – was covered with garlands, loose petals, incense sticks, and other fragrant offerings. The monarchs of Nepal, being incarnations of Vishnu himself, are forbidden upon pain of death to see the statue – a superstition that still pertains, even after the dissolution. Narayan was sleeping when I saw him – he ‘sleeps’ throughout the monsoon months. A festival is held when wakes up, after the rains.

After a painful uphill slug from Budhanilkantha, on a disintegrated ‘road’, I reached the gates of Shivapuri national park, where a bored ticket collector awoke from death to accept my rupees and jot down my name, nationality and passport number. Shivapuri is a dense forest on the valley rim, allegedly containing bears and leopards, and threaded with torturous, muddy, disorientating trails. A few hours in, after failing to find a secluded Buddhist nunnery – now that would have been something – the day hit the shit. I missed too many turnings and got hopelessly lost. I decided not to retrace my steps, stupidly, and pressed on in the same direction. I MUST find an exit sooner or later, I reasoned, if I kept on going. I even asked a young boy – god knows what he was doing there, alone, but anyway – if the trail led back down the valley. ‘Yes sir, twenty minutes.’

It was not twenty minutes; the little bastard. The day grew long; night fell. I could hardly see a thing – it was really that dark – and I had to dismount and wheel the bike down the steep, swampy trail. I crapped myself – figuratively speaking – thinking I’d have to spend the night in the forest, without water, among bears and leopards. But, on the verge of bedding down in the undergrowth, I reached the park gates. They were supposed to shut at seven; it was well past. But some army boys were still hanging around, smoking and chatting. One of them, a submachine gun around his shoulder, got arsey with me about breaking the park rules – no ‘movement’ between dusk and dawn. He probably wanted a bribe, but a superior came out of a hut and cut him short, telling me I could go on. From there, I crawled down a narrow path alongside a pipeline, awkwardly trailing my bike, and eventually reached a small village. I appeared to the locals as a mud-caked, pale-faced apparition, that sprang fully formed out of the night, and vanished swiftly back into it. I cycled through the valley in the pitch darkness.

*

Next weekend came; time was beginning to speed up. For the length of Saturday I languished painfully with a hangover, following a night out in Thamel with Himal colleagues. (What DO they put in those beer bottles?) I only left the flat for dinner. On Sunday, after Suresh came and made order out of my flat, I took another bicycle trip. This time, to Pharping, at the far southern end of the Kathmandu Valley; a Buddhist pilgrimage spot, complete with not-so-isolated hermit caves, and a town that appears to consist mostly of Tibetan exiles.

On the city streets, the army was out in full get up; blue camouflage combat fatigues, submachine guns, riot armour, shields, the works. I believe the Maoists had been up to something, but with so many newly politicised minority groups grinding separate axes on a weekly basis, it’s always hard to say. At one point I was faced with a line of young men fleeing up the street towards me, pursued by a gang of soldiers, Tom and Jerry style. Outside the city, all was quiet.

I would go into that day trip a little more, but I think there’s been quite enough bicycle for one blog post. Suffice to say, it was a pale shadow of the adventure and trauma of Wednesday, when an entire night in a dark forest loomed like the Reaper.

And that, dear readers, is all for now. Ta-ta.