Brown Sugar

I’m tired and intent on spoiling myself in Kathmandu, so the first order of business is to upgrade hotels and find out what passes for pizza in these parts. My buddy Tom Przydrozny beamed out instructions to stay at the Dwarika a few days earlier so I’m booking two nights there. Tom doesn’t let me down – Dwarika is magnificent, luxurious and calm, more a museum than a hotel as its buildings and furnishings are composed entirely of centuries-old woodwork chock full of traditional Nepalese carvings. They were saved from destruction by the hotel’s namesake owner, out of various and sundry demolitions of traditional homes that have occurred in recent decades as the city’s urban blight expands outward across the valley. Otherwise all this magnificent art would have been firewood – often he had to compensate construction crews with an equal weight of plywood in order to save them. I could have spent my entire time in Kathmandu just perusing the inlaid Hindu carvings in these window frames, stupas, headboards and chairs and made excellent use of my time; the furnishings in my room alone could make up a wing in the Met.

The pizza, on the other hand, is pedestrian but acceptable.

Nepal is a deeply Hindu country, though a small minority of Buddhists still live here, and a giant plaster statue of Shiva stands sentinel over the whole of the vast Kathmandu valley as you approach it from the east. Appropriate as Shiva is god of the universe’s endless cycles of destruction and regeneration, and he stands guard, trident in hand, over the most profound destruction of the rural valley and original city, and its re-creation as an impossibly populous third world urban center, a thick cloud of smog-belch hovering over roads choked with construction sites, motorcycles and minivans. Vishnu, the other major extant deity, is the Preserver, he who when possible keeps what’s good from going into the trash compactor of Shiva’s interminable churning. So if Kathmandu is in the throes of Shiva as never before, then Dwarika is a little island of Vishnu amid all the indiscriminate bulldozing.

There are still lovely old neighborhoods in Kathmandu with big square courtyards and wooden window work still attached to their original buildings, but they’re few and far between enough that focusing solely on them is like flying to Paris and talking about Disneyland France. Mostly Kathmandu is a modern third-world Asian city so densely packed with people, rickshaws, pack animals and cars that every moment is a sensory assault, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Stop for a moment in the crushing foot traffic and you’re likely to get mowed down. The locals are so inured to it all that they blithely scamper out into heavy traffic in their business suits and saris and elbow their way through the clogged streets, often with small children in tow and with insufficient regard for life and limb, some carrying huge canvas sacks stuffed with cargo slung across their backs as they bolt out onto the highway. Diwali is coming up so everyone is starting to light candles in their windows and set off fireworks on top of the usual chaos.

Punctuating every part of the city are the ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples that everyone visits while stuck in town setting up their Annapurna treks. They defy umbrella description apart from their antiquity. In some monkeys are considered holy and thus allowed to run rampant, in others it is the rat that is revered and you’re unlikely to escape without having at least one scamper across your leg. There is the vast white dome from the fifth century that attracts hundreds of Tibetan exiles and their shaman prayer flags (I first saw them in Russia and still they follow me), the giant medieval pagoda down by Freak Street and the 2000+ year-old statue of Shiva in his brutish, red-faced Bhairawa the Destroyer incarnation, stepping on the head of a man (looks like Buddha?) with a string of skulls slung around his neck and a pair of nasty looking fangs.

I ask one man what the point is of all these innumerable manifestations of a single deity and he says it’s basically all “illusion” but that the god wears a different face in human society based on the different roles it plays. For example, Shiva brought you into being so in a way he’s like your mother, but when the time comes for Shiva to take your life you don’t want to see your mother coming to lop off your head. “It is as if you have committed a murder and your father is the judge” is the best way he can put it.

The most haunting temple is a little one to Kali where a “living manifestation” of the goddess is installed and made available for viewing and worship from a small balcony. This is a little girl that is plucked from some rural village every few years at the age of four, gussied up like Kali and worshipped until she turns eleven, at which point she’s sent back to her village to resume a normal life. The belief is that she actually is the goddess Kali during that time. She looks cute and a bit sad, stuck up there from 9-5, seven days a week like some primeval Barbie doll. Kali is a strange one to be manifested as a small child. Closely associated with Shiva the Destroyer, she’s bloodthirsty and dangerous, considered a personification of Time itself by those with a philosophical bent. In the early nineteenth century they still sacrificed young boys to her in Calcutta and Kerala, and even now they’ll be sacrificing a goat to her in a nearby temple in two days.

The final stop on the holy site circuit are the cremation grounds along a bend in one of the Ganges’ many northern tributaries. The baths are lined with grimy marble steps where sit a smattering of middle-aged man looking out over the multiple smoke pyres with a wistful look in their eyes, and a klatch of dreadlocked, loin-clothed sadhus, itinerant holy men with their faces painted in chalk, like tribal relics. Sadhus are colorful and give good photo, but as far as I can tell this group is merely a bunch of surly deadbeats who got tired of working and raising their families and now hang out in holy places smoking dope and hitting up tourists for small change. There’s apparently no requirement they become enlightened, they do it “for their own pleasure” as one man puts it, and if they happen to stumble across enlightenment along the way so be it, they share the wealth with the occasional faith healing.

Along the opposite side of the river is a grim-looking concrete hospice where the terminally ill come to die by the side of the river. Every once in awhile an ambulance rolls up and disgorges another body in a burlap sack. The male relatives follow it out and the local funeral director (i.e. an “untouchable”) dresses it up with flower garlands and colorful dusts, then it’s raised to the platform, firewood is stacked on top and it starts to burn, with a big cloud of smoke rolling upwind of it for three hours or more. Further off someone is pouring the ashes from a completed cremation into the river, and a bit further up from that three little children swim. Shiva’s work never stops. And sadly there’s no Dwarika Hotel for the collection of spent human souls. The ashes whorl downstream and dissolve into the mud-color of the river like brown sugar into dark coffee.