Nepal panorama

<< Leaf plate vendor in Asan, Kathmandu

Continuing with the attempt to cram weeks of helter skelter into a few hundred words...I have some more coherent, thoughtful posts on the docket, but for now, an attempt at a panoramic shot of the last few weeks, in which I've closed a loop that began 5 1/2 years ago, when I first visited Darjeeling on my initial foray to India and Nepal.  We're always closing loops in space through time: every time you return to the same room in your house you close a loop on the four-dimensional map of your life.  Those places we live become a tangle of small, overlapping, intersecting loops, and then the occasional lone line shoots out to a far place, across an ocean perhaps, to where another tangle begins.  My tangle in Nepal of the last couple years is now part of a finished loop that begins and ends in Darjeeling; soon the thread will head back into uncharted territories to the South.  Puri, Varanasi, Rajasthan, who knows?  
               I left off aboard a sleeper class train to Gorakhpur, near the Nepal border.  We stayed there for the afternoon, Thandiwe and I, to check out the Gorakhnath temple, which commemorates the founder tantric Siddhi who founded Hatha yoga.  But this proved to be something of a dead-end.  Nothing very interesting happening spiritually that we could unearth, and when a Brahmin priest beckoned me over it was only to try and coax large bills out of us for a tiny puja.  Ah, India, the land of extremes, love-child of spirituality and materialism.  The highlight of that day at the temple complex wasn't the life-size likenesses of Gorakhnath's lineage holders or trying futilely to round up some information, anything, on the significance of the place and the teachings, but rather going for turn on a peddle-boat in the square pool with a local school boy excited to practice his English.  A few hours after arriving at this place, one I had been quite excited about, we were ready to leave.  This, of course, is the other side of spontaneity in traveling.  Onward, onward.  The next stop on our sometimes-pilgrimage is Kushinagar, where the Buddha reached Mahaparinirvana.  i.e. died, at the age of eighty, having turned countless of his countrymen and women onto the road to liberation that he uncovered.  The site was long forgotten and has still not reached the popularity of the other major Buddhist pilgrimages, and we are there at the height of summer, when the place is half-abandoned.  Lucky us, actually.  We are able to visit the 25-century-old Buddha statue in peace, and meditate a while under a Pipal tree a stone's throw from the stupa that marks the spot of his death.  A powerful place, resounding in its tranquility.  The only activity around us the slow, steady labor of the man cutting the grass with a machete.  We tour the various temples, Japanese, Burmese, Chinese, spend a sticky night in an otherwise empty guesthouse, and pose for a photo op at the request of a troup of visiting monks from Burma.  The next day, we cross into Nepal, and with the transition comes a  palpable sense of homecoming as I shift from halting, limited Hindi to fluent, comfortable Nepali. From Kushinagar it's ahead 80 years to the place of Buddha's birth in Lumbini.  A stark contrast to the emptiness of Kushinagar, but not in an unpleasant way.  The expected temples from every Buddhist country--each claiming a share in this particular meritorious pie--were present, and rather oddly thrown together in the Japanese-designed park grounds, but the open layout and abundant green space keep the place from feeling too Disneyland.  We pedal around the grounds on creaky Indian cycles rented from our funky guesthouse, and make our first stop near a little straw hut whence an old man has emerged and is beckoning to us.  Definitely not disneyland.  We squat on the earth floor of his shelter or sit on straw mats, and listen to the man speak Hindi as he explains his existence, unquestioned, to us.  His life consists of worship, sadhana, little else, it seems.  He rises early and visits the site of Buddha's birth a short walk away, prays, perhaps meditates, cooks for himself, prays more, sleeps.  He indicates a few fried flatbreads from his breakfast, hour before, and indicates that we eat.  I'm hungry and do so gratefully, savoring the simple food and open-hearted generosity of the man, and hoping my stomach is ready for this kind of generosity.  Leaving the man with a few rupees for supplies--oil, flour, rice, dal, and salt his only necessities--we stow our cycles for a time and enter the main part of the complex.  At the heart of it all is the ancient complex of Stupa ruins that marks the place where the queen of Kapilvastu gave birth to Gautama by a pool, in the heart of her prosperous kingdom.  Again, the time of year and time of day (early) allow us a few moments of relative solitude at this normally crowded site, and we are able to sit and calm our minds in Samatha meditation under a huge Pipal tree that housed the shrine where visitors pay respect.
Meditation has been the constant thread through this trip, the stabilizing force, the quiet at the heart of the madness.  Today, weeks after Lumbini and Kushinagar, while meditating in my gust house room in Darjeeling, a fitting image appeared and succeeded in distracting me: our mind as a disk spinning with great momentum.  In the kind of calming meditation called Anapana, the simple act of focusing the mind on the natural breath, we reach out and try to stop the wheel's habitual, seemingly inevitable motion.  It's moving too fast, and we succeed only in generating heat and friction in the few seconds we can manage to grasp at it.  But, with discipline, we reach out again and again.  As our fingers callous and strengthen we grasp harder and for longer, and the wheel slows.  And once the spinning is under control, the next stage of the work can begin.  Having achieved a degree of Samadhi, contol over the mind, one can work to develop Panna or Prajna, wisdom, through the technique of insight meditation (vipasyana).  One can start to examine the nature of the wheel, the patterns that once appeared as a blur.  And one can start to try and change some of those patterns, generating a great deal more heat and friction (physical and mental discomfort) along the way...Yes, I am back in the thrall of Vipassana, as taught in various international centers by S.N. Goenke of India.  His a pure form of Burmese Theravada Buddhism, which means it's a philosophy combined with a method, without the superstructure of ritual to complicate it.  As Goenka-ji presents the Dhamma, or teachings, or path, it is entirely non-sectarian, merely a remedy for universal sufferings that therefore must itself be universal..  The ten-day courses are designed so that anyone, from any background, can come, and, if she is prepared to set aside every aspect of her normal life, all habits and creature comforts from sufficient sleep and food to reading and writing and communicating with other humans.  As I described after my 10-day sit at Dharmapakasa in Illinois back in March, it's an incredibly hard, cold, dry, and lonely undertaking, but one that effects remarkable transformation.  Like life in the chrysalis, I suppose.  On the tenth day, when the vow of silence is broken and Noble Silence is replaced by Noble Chattering, in Goenka's words, the sense of not just relief but love, gratitude, and good will is palpable.  Well.  Four months on from my own experience with all this, I wasn't quite ready to sign on again, but I was eager for Thandiwe to experience what I had (which makes me sound like a sadist, but I know she's stronger than me in some crucial ways, and that it would as worthwhile for her as it was for me).  While she was sitting her 10 days at the center on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley, therefore, I decided to volunteer as a dhamma worker.  Even the requisite three daily hour-long sits was plenty for me, I discovered, and the schedule had its own demands.  I re-discovered that I'm a lousy disciplinarian (the Nepali guys under 30 took almost every opportunity to start chattering!), but felt the rewards of service when I got to reach out to struggling meditators the way a volunteer reached out to me, in loving kindness, and gave me the courage to stick it out on Day 4 when I was ready to quit.  And what could have been a lonely time is redeemed many times over by the kindness and compassion of the other volunteers, all Nepali, from 16 to 67 years old.  The course remains slow, but leavened with a pen and notebook, a couple novels, and work to do, the 18 hour days fairly flew in comparison to my previous Vipassana stay.  And at the end, sweet reunion, sweet communion, sweet exodus.  And Epic theological, geological, and erotological conversations with a rejuvenated Thandiwe, who had the expected Hard Time but also felt cleansed and clarified.
One upshot of this purification: the sudden return to our haunt on the outskirts of the tourist district, Thamel, came as a slap in the face. After one night we flee south, to Patan, and spend our last five days in Nepal based out of a sleepy little guesthouse over the event horizon of that particular black hole.  Still, we decide not to renew our Nepal visas and buy bus tickets to take us to the Eastern border.  After a social last few days, we find ourselves aboard the night bus to Karakbhitta, on the boarder with Siliguri and the gateway to the Darjeeling Hills of "Gorkhaland," Nepali-speaking India.  We've come almost 100 km west from the Valley after a late start due to a Kathmandu jam and have almost reached the turn-off that will take us down out of the hills and to the east-bound, straight road across the Terai.  We've got adjacent seats near the front (leg room!  A small miracle) and are settled in.  The sun is sinking behind the hills on a surprisingly clear evening, and the moving-vehicle trance is enhanced by the beat of the folk music blasting from the stereo.  Soon it is dark, and I doze, waking to a feeling of peace and security in the face of the almost complete unknown.  I feel coddled, soothed by the warm night air, the music, the banana trees flying by, the jarring turns in the road.  I am able to relax completely, to cherish the moment, knowing that it is fleeting.  Anitya, anitya, anitya, intones the voice of Goenke in my head as on the Vipassana course recordings: impermanence, impermanence, impermanence.  Sure enough, the bliss is not to last long.  Before dawn my reverie is cut short by the all-too-familiar sulphurous belches that precede most of my explosive gastrointestinal episodes in India and Nepal.  This time I reach for a Cipro tablet, knowing the time for holistic, preventative management and time for the big guns.  This is a bus ride, hours left to go, and the closest thing to a bathroom on board is the sliding glass windowpane next to me.  Thankfully the rumblings subside into a minor, vague unease, and Thandiwe sleeps on unaware of my brush with hilarity--which is what would have ensued elsewhere on the bus, I can only imagine, when the passengers caught sight of my skinny ass hanging out the window.  Doubly lucky I am, for within hours the bus is stopped at a banda.  Apparently along this stretch of road in Jhapa a few months ago, a man was killed in a road accident, and his family has still not been compensated.  The strategy, as usual, is to shut down all traffic until a satisfactory outcome is achieved.  Glad not be on a schedule, I ready myself for a long stopped in single-file traffic on an unglamorous strip.  But today the appropriate wheels are greased, and we're on our way and rolling within a few hours.  By mid-day we cross the border into India, suspected visa problems amounting to nothing, and catch a jeep for the hills.  The ride is stunningly beautiful as we are whisked up and out of the heat and bustle of the lowlands into the terraces and tea gardens of the hills.  Behind us stretches the gangetic plain, off into the haze.  Ahead lie fog-enveloped ridges, hill stations like Kurseong and Kalimpong draped over them.  The toy train to Darjeeling criss-crosses the motorable road, the air quickly cools, we are in another world.                     

A couple of loose fragments:
Getting intentionally lost in the labyrinthine streets of Patan with a new friend from Vipassana.  Stopping to eat a big clay dish of the famous, rich Bhaktapur yogurt called Jujudhau (imported from the other end of the Kathmandu Valley), and stopping again when we see a jumbled assortment of musical instruments in a shop window.  We bang on drums, pluck at guitars and what looks like a fretless six-string banjo, until the owner distracts us with something even better: an instrument he's made, like a one-headed drum with a long spring attached.  Shaken, the spring vibrates and reverberates against the drumhead, sounding like storm winds.  Another, smaller one imitates a cricket.  Soon we are all jamming, improvising against a typical Newari street-procession beat...............and at the Vipassana center, craving fellowship, I head up to the course office with a bag of good ground coffee I've brought from the states.  Unsure what the other volunteers will make of this (what, you've been keeping foodstuffs in your room?) I'd considered just making myself a cup to get me through the slow day, but decide to chance it.  Everyone turns out to be as eager as I, and I make a strong, black, sweet cup for everyone in the office.  The next day the ritual is repeated, though I wonder if we're not breaking Vipassana law by craving pleasant sensations, and the next evening, when I must decline, until the coffee's gone.  Small pleasures.

Fit for a King

I had the good fortune yesterday to be invited to a Newar feast, and the intestinal fortitude (despite recent events, see below) to live to tell about it and even to eat some breakfast the next morning.
I arrived in Patan late afternoon, with unseasonable rains threatening to damage the maturing rice crop and flood the imminent festival of Dashain. It had been a long day of navigating the sodden city both on foot and folded into tiny tin buses, newly purchased fabrics clutched tightly about me, but I arrived at my friend's friend's house cheerful. And hungry. As a perpetual guest in this culture, ironically enough, true hunger is rarely something you'll experiece, but there it was. That nervous twinge emanating from an empty belly. And ironically again, we had to wait. There were friends to meet, then more friends, all Patan Newars, and by the time we were all heading to eat it was nearly dark. Mind you I had another dinner to attend, on the other side of town, with an American expat couple I'd been dying to meet--but somehow here I was, hours later than I'd expected, suddenly a welcomed guest at a traditional feast. There was no escape, nor could I really have wished for one, so a phone call later I let myself settle in for the duration.
Before I get to the point--which is the food, of course--I need to make one more digression and explain that this bhoj ( feast) was traditional in a self-conscious sense. It was billed as such, on the tourist-priced Rs. 300 tickets. The whole festival of which it was a part was contrived as some combination of fundraiser and cultural exhibition; all the narrow brick or cobble streets around Patan Durbar Square were filled with Newars of various castes demonstrating their traditional trades, from pounding baji (flattened rice) by hand (nowadays there are machines that do this), to making and hand-firing bricks and tiles, to distilling liquor. There was one area where the entire year's worth of festivals were represented by their distinctive iconography and ritual foods, one after another, on tables around a courtyard. Step over here and it's midwinter, yomari punhi, and eat this sesame-and-molasses filled treat (the yomari) to warm your insides; over here come try this millet beer that the Newar farmers drink on X month. . . it was all fascinating and beautiful to see--this sort of rich cultural elaboration on the ties between season, ritual and food was what drew me back to Kathmandu and formed the basis for my original Fulbright research proposal. But you have to wonder what it means when a cultural group feels the need to put itself on display, or, one might even say, to sell itself. As the Newari man sitting next to me said later at dinner, 'now our culture is less than 25 percent.' I.e. people are no longer making handmade bricks on a daily basis, but they haven't yet forgotten how. There's a sense that these traditions are valuable, both priceless and yet somehow priceable. But back to the feast.
Our tickets purchased, we entered a courtyard and we're Tika'd with vermillion paste and rice, garlanded with red ribbons. Not three step further on a woman thrust little clay dishes of the notoriously strong Newar raksi upon us, along with a large green leaf-plate (i'm a little embarassed, as an amateur ethnobotanist, not know what kind of leaf it was) containing a 3-inch round urad daal pancake topped with unbelievably tasty "buff" (water buffalo meat). The warm-up to the warm-up. We were ushered over to some plastic tables under a tarp. Now chhang--cloudy, tart, slightly sweet rice beer--came in clay vessels one size up from those used for raksi, and a dish of spicy daikon and cucumber achar appeared. What an appetizer! Light, crunchy, and absolutely packed with flavors. What spices, I wanted to know? I counted off the usual suspects: fenugreek? yes. Turmeric? of course. Garlic? that was obvious enough? Cumin, coriander, onion, ginger . . .? yes to all of the above. And of course plenty of chillies. And a small round green thing--vegetable or spice I don't know--whose name was lost in the delicious shuffle. I thought the meal had begun, but no, this was mere child's play, something to accompany the drinks. (I now had another little dish of raksi alongside my chhang). It was now dark, and we moved over to a long table set with metal plates. In good weather we'd have been sitting on long mats on the floor, in long rows facing each other. Now began the processon proper: first the most strictly ritual foods, as far as I understand it, the Samay Baje: a pile of flattened rice (Np chiura, Nw baji) surrounded by little bits each of ginger pickle, black soybeans, a small cube of raw pumpkin, delicate, stemmy mustard greens in mustard oil, and an unidentifiable but memorable achar. I'm already forgetting something, I know it, but there's a time and a place for field notes: this was a time to eat. I followed the lead of my neighbors and set aside the pumpkin piece and a tiny bit of everything else next to my plate--for what deity I know not, in the rich and baffling multi-traditional pantheon of the Newars. Then we tucked in. I barely had time to appreciate the unique savor of each dish before two more appeared, as a line of servers doled out delicacy after delicacy with relentless efficiency. I began to understand the second half of the saying "parbate bigriyo mojle, newar bigriyo bhojle," which translates roughly to "hill Nepalis are ruined by sex, Newars by feasting." It rhymes in Nepali. Anyway, between incredulous mouthfuls of baji flavored with spicy stewed chicken (the British fiction of 'curry' doesn't get us anywhere as far as description goes), cauliflower tarkari, and fragrant, soupy white peas, I caught on from my neighbor's enthusiastic commentary somethig of the set order to all this, the method to the madness. I quickly realized I would have to refuse categorically any offers of seconds of any one dish to have any hope of saving face, trying everything and cleaning my plate at the end. A Newari phrase appeared out of the ether: ghataa, enough! The servers crinkled the corners of their eyes in amusement and gave me little dollops whenever I blinked. There must have been 20 dishes. I remember buff meat; potato and bamboo shoots; something red and very spicy; another incarnation of the daikon achar; assorted buffalo entrails prepared dry (I identified my three little morsels as liver, tripe, ear); another spicy meat broth or other; and raksi. Most everything was perfumed with mustard oil, in which a trace of red onion was fried to a crisp brown. Fenugreek, chillies, turmeric, always. But more subtle permutations of spice, too, mysteries to unravel. At one point a glistening round gulab jamun (a classic Indian sweet, Newar by extension?) was dolloped aboard, "to protect the liver" after the raksi--while the raksi aids in the digestion of the heavy meats, helps the diverse clientele in the bar of the stomach mingle without resentment or mutual suspicion. Nice. At long last, after my world had been focused down to a brass plate and an endless mingling of colors and flavors, came the gentle winding down. A sour, sulphury-salty red broth fell from the sky, lip-smacking after all the preceding richness. Another soupy item, too, bitter and aromatic stewed fenugreek seeds doled out by the tablespoonful or so. Then a scant teaspoon of sprouting raw mung beans, I think they were, and finally a flourish of thick, sweet yogurt. Digestive upon digestive ensuring the continuing health and capacity for gluttony of a people that have attained the status of culinary genius; Ayurvedic principles applied rather perversely, in order to enable otherwise unthinkable levels of consumption. This was truly a feast, of a magnitude I'd never experienced, medieval, almost, in its proportions.
On top of it all I swilled the last of my raksi alongside my compatriots--we were all damn friendly by this point--and ate my gulab jamun with an inward wink at my liver. Handwashing in the dark, much back-clapping and joking, a rare cigarette to celebrate the occasion and give final impetus to my digestive process. Out into the night, in a taxi who's driver had apparently never left the confines of his native Patan--I shouted directional queries out the window at bicyclists and, once in familiar territory, navigated with growing confidence to the house of the American couple. I was only an hour and a half late in the end, quite wthin reason given the circumstances. Their dinner looked good, and I would have called it quite elaborate on any other day. But, except for some Rosh Hashanah apples and honey hours later, I'm eternally grateful they didn't make me eat anything.