A story by Madhuri
In 1987 I flew from Los Angeles to Bombay to be with Osho, who had arrived there after his world tour (where he was refused by twenty-one countries). He was staying in the bungalow of a disciple, and he was ill, and not coming out. I stayed in the Hare Krishna guesthouse, milled about restlessly for a few days, and then one day I was talking with Greek Mukta, who suggested I go to Kathmandu. She said there was a great sannyasin guesthouse there. My ego came up: “Oh, Nepal, never been there, that’ll look good on my inner CV!” And it was a challenge: all by myself, to get up there into the fabled Himalayas. Okay. Sold. I flew to Patna, Bihar, stayed in a hotel, and looked for the next step…
The Journey:
Rajkumar the rickshaw boy puts me on the bus. It’s 7:50 a.m., a Friday.
“I am most popular rickshaw driver Patna,” he had told me. “I have friends Osaka, California, Munich, Vancouver, Tokyo, Austria… I have ten friend California. Look – “and he’d showed me a little photo album, saying he had a big one at home. I see colour photos of himself grinning in groups of rather sheepishly-smiling Westerners. He always has his arm around the girl, leaning close to her. The girl in each picture has the same tentative half-withdrawing grin. But he is a good tour person, always on time, got all my tickets arranged, did right by me. It’s true that he did urge me to fly to Kathmandu. But I want to save money, and think it can’t be that bad.
The seats of the bus are covered in torn, filthy cotton, brown grit colour. The aisle is narrow. Filthy boys and men in ancient filthy lungis and cracked brown feet hurry here and there, climbing on top of seats, arranging things, always talking to each other. Rajkumar puts me in the front seat by the door, which has no door on it. I think that might be an advantage.
The bus is filled to bursting. Several grubby men sit in that big front cabin the buses all have. Baskets of things with green leaves sticking out, string-tied cardboard boxes, plastic briefcases vie for space with crusty feet.
The first leg of the journey, to Raxaul at the Nepali border, is supposed to take five and a half hours. We careen out of town, scattering chickens, pigs, people, oxcarts, bicycle rickshaws, dogs, (often three-legged or otherwise wounded), more people, bicycles, cars, and auto rickshaws – as indeed we do almost every mile of the trip.
A few miles out of town the bus loses power and stops. A young boy in an ancient yellowish lungi, who apparently is baggage-master and mechanic, hurries into the front cabin, crouches down and lifts up the quilted vinyl hood of the motor, which is right beside the driver. He messes around for awhile, emerges dripping with diesel, and the bus starts, then stops again. He tries again. This time it works, and we go up over the slight incline of a bridge and down, only to stop again a short time later. After a little while a few men get out and push halfheartedly, with at least fifty still on the bus. The boy goes back to the engine, and the bus starts. This procedure is repeated several more times in the next hour.
At our next-to-last stopping place I have leisure to observe the lush countryside, with vast lotus-filled ponds, banana trees, green grass, and a dhobi family by the side of a pond – the man vigorously raising a wet sari above his head, WHAPPING it onto the bank, raising it again. The woman caring for the child, a little thing beside her who looks like another piece of washing. Mrs. raises her arms to readjust her sari-train and her full breast falls from underneath her choli. She rearranges it, not in a hurry, and a well-built young man appears, lifts a huge bundle of washing onto his head, hoists the child onto his hip, and swings off down the road, graceful with his double burden. The family look not impoverished, just traditional, ancient.
The bus moves on, over the great span of the Ganges on a half-finished bridge. The Ganges is wide, wide beneath, the sands for its monsoon overflow wider. More banana trees. I note that while we move I feel good. While we sit I don’t (except in my very interior centre).
The bus stops again. How badly I have to pee! How to do it? No toilet. No cover. People everywhere. Men troop out and pee anywhere. Nobody has overtly paid me much attention so far, for which I am grateful, but for a Western woman to pee in their sight would be unthinkable, and I have to ride with them all for hours yet. I look longingly at a clump of banana trees, go towards it, hesitate, draw back. People live too near. What to do?
Finally I ask advice from a man who looks fairly kindly. He tells me to go to the back of the house. I go, and find a deserted banana patch. I pee and pee, ah.
After an hour the bus starts again. I ask someone, “What is wrong with the bus?” Because it has stopped again.
“No nut-ting nut-ting.”
“Something must be wrong with it,” I say, “it’s not going.”
“Oh yes something but soon fixing. Oh yes.”
The bus starts. A black piece of shredded-looking fibrous hose lies dripping diesel on the floor of the cabin. The yellow boy is dripping diesel everywhere he goes, intent on his job. We go down the road a mile, and stop again.
Hmmmm, this is bad. The ruin seems to be final. I get out. A huge pool of gasoline is spreading under the chassis.
A vast crowd has gathered, in this green empty countryside, which had seemed to be populated only by banana groves and little huts with buffaloes pegged outside. Trucks and buses roar by, spewing grey toxic clouds. They never stop to help.
I sit on a green bank off the road as the fumes had begun to make me feel ill, and soon I feel better. After an hour and a half or so, suddenly all the men rush towards me pell-mell, stampeding up the bank, throwing me over and hurting my leg. I scramble too, shoes lost, and when they’ve all calmed down they start laughing.
Me: “What’s happening?”
Them: “Nut-ting, nut-ting.”
This release of adrenaline seems to make them discard their inhibitions. They begin staring at me closely, and laughing. I’m getting the feeling that it could get ugly. I’m thinking of hitch-hiking, but that could also be dangerous.
The connection in Raxaul, where I change buses at the border, may be missed too. Right now I’m sitting on the grassy bank again, absolutely surrounded by men (no women on the bus) and they are pressing closer, examining my old Timex watch, talking loudly, laughing. Apparently they think this is acceptable behaviour under the circumstances.
One man reaches out and touches the watch. Emboldened, another touches my Boy Scout hat. Then another… An unknown Samaritan says, “No, no!” to the others.
Uh-oh. They are right around me – skinny brown arms outreached, skinny brown ankles sticking out of their trousers. This is all I see as I keep my eyes down and scribble.
I get up and plough through them and walk away.
Shaken, affronted, I look around and buttonhole someone who seems to speak some English. The crowd are now pointing at my Dr Scholl’s bumpy-insoled sandals, laughing; it is very difficult to assess the group for an English-speaker because each time I raise my eyes from the ground I find sixty pairs of eyes on them, staring, staring, eager, I surmise, for sensation of any description; and in this situation feeling themselves the majority, the master. They can do with it what they will.
This English-speaker I’ve just found looks disturbed and unwilling. “Please, please you get inside bus!” he says.
I get. As I sit in my seat, the fumes from the huge pool of diesel under the front of the bus come directly up and begin in me a throbbing headache. My body keeps wanting to move to the back of the bus. But each time I try to move my head around to assess the situation, many pairs of brown eyes meet mine, and I feel I can not bear to deal with ousting one of them from his seat and ask him to take mine. My body keeps wanting to get up, away from the fumes. Finally it just does, and as I move towards the back of the bus (which is full of cigarette smoke) I see to my astonishment that two Englishmen in blue are there, pasty-faced and unhealthy-looking, one with brown teeth and a badly-pocked face – but they seem harmless enough. I sit near them.
”I must say, I think you’re very brave to go out there,” says Brownteeth, in a strong Yorkshire accent.
Once I see that they are here, I feel very indignant that they had not rescued me. But they hadn’t seen anything, had never gotten out of the bus. Even the stampede, which I had thought was done because of a terror of the bus exploding, they’d merely asked someone about and been told that the boys were afraid of a cop or a schoolmaster or someone. They didn’t see me being trampled.
I go outside again and they come along. The Indians immediately stop noticing me. One of the Englishmen tells me about his sugar addiction, and curls his lip when he finds out I am a sannyasin. Buses keep roaring by, stopping, there are huge confabs, maybe some people can get on them, people rush; we would have got on the roof of one but the luggage compartment on ours has a stuck door and the Sugar Guy couldn’t get his bag out in time. Finally, after six hours of utter hot grassy stasis, we cram into an already-full bus. Me and my bag manage to get stuffed into the front with the driver, more men, and the FUMES.
My feet are trapped in a conglomeration of luggage and other feet and are roasting quietly in the heat from the gap under the engine cover. I have a few inches at the edge of a seat – half a buttock’s width – and to stay upright have to cross my leg over and twist my neck weirdly. Also I feel I have to keep an eye on the stream of wildly-painted trucks and careening buses bearing down on us full speed and then swerving aside at the last minute, in and out of the deep potholes, as we hit the holes at the edge of the road, scattering the pigs chickens dogs bullock carts etc. etc. through hamlet and village mile after mile over the hazy eternal flatness of India. For some reason I feel if I kept an eye on them maybe they won’t hit us.
The driver curses and speeds and shouts, his handsome animal lips back from his betel-stained teeth.
He switches on music, godawful shrieks and loudspeaker wails of dirge and wiggly-woggly moviestar caterwaul. Most people light cigarettes. My nice grey Sasson overnight bag on its side covered with grease and diesel, myself likewise where I’d lugged it, white trousers turned khaki with grease. We hit a dust cloud where the road is being worked on. For half a mile the air is white and we choke into handkerchiefs and t-shirt fronts held up over noses. My twisted neck feels the swelling blood-vessels of smoke and fume reaction set in. But at least we are moving!
Sometimes the driver gets really angry. He and his first mate shout and spit. The first mate keeps doing a strange thing: at intervals he folds a two-rupee note around a fifty-paise piece, faces the half-open window, and catapults the object out, presumably to someone waiting there. (There are always people there everywhere here.)
We climb steadily for an hour; slowly. We get to Raxaul in pitch black at 7 p.m. We were to have arrived at 12:30, with a long space to eat and go through customs before the night bus leaves for Kathmandu at 7:55 p.m.
As we alight the air is cool and filled with the smell of woodsmoke. No electricity on the streets – only the lights from lanterns and candles of the street-sellers give a faint illumination. I am beginning to feel hungry – had had an apple, some protein powder, a banana, a few peanuts, a piece of coconut, and that’s it, all day. And all that, long ago.
A swarm of desperately eager men are upon us, pushing arms through windows, shouting “Modom modom! Ticket booked?” By some luck – and at first I am very sceptical – I am found by exactly the right wizened bicycle rickshaw driver with a screw of cloth round his head and another over his loins, and perhaps a shred of shirt:
“Modom modom. Take morning bus or night?”
“Night.”
“Ohh! Then don’t have much time! Look! I paid by company! No charge rickshaw! Please!”
Inclined to be hesitant of propositions in pitch black I begin to walk away, having no idea where to.
“Modom modom!” desperately. “You don’t know! I yam forrr you! Which agency?”
“I’m supposed to see Mr. Gupta.”
“Huh huh! I am work for him! We go we go!”
This decides me. I climb up once again onto a bicycle-rickshaw with a trusty guide, feeling curiously safe in the veil of darkness. People run thither and hither, shouting. Carts stand lined by the road, selling measly bits of roasted gram, piles of yellow things, puris. All move in darkness as though underwater, in the wavering lights of the lamps and candles.
“Travel oppice one kilometre down road!” cries my guide. “Then all all customs pive kilometre after that! We hurry!”
We travel a few hundred yards down the teeming road with its clear cold ancient smoke-smelling air, and I am shown into a wooden ‘office’ cubicle painted toxic aqua. Again ushered into a smaller room, where many youngmen gather and begin to stare.
“You are alone?” asks the grey-haired older man, who looks responsible and worried and not unkind.
“Yes.”
He seems very surprised. Gives me the ticket in about thirty seconds (I have an envelope from the Patna office to give him), and I and my driver hightail it down the road again, at least as high as you can tail it in a bicycle rickshaw in the dark on a hopelessly rutted and potholed lane, surrounded by all kinds of traffic. A train is going by and we have to wait, behind lorries and bullock-carts.
Now we go on down the dark road, and it really is a few kilometres, leaving the town behind and moving towards the border. (Kathmandu Boarder 3 Km., had said an earlier sign.) We stop at the hut for Indian Immigration. I run in with my bag, jabber through the formalities, run out. Same at Indian Customs, a quarter mile further on.
“You are alone? No friend?” surprised again.
Now we go past a strange edifice, and a gate guarded by a policeman, and a long horizontal pole made out of a skinned tree and painted, drawn up like a drawbridge. And now we are in the Kingdom of Nepal.
It’s 7:30 p.m. Nepalese Immigration. I have to fill out a visa application plus another form, sign many things, produce a photograph (which weirdly enough I have) and give them 150 rupees, and they stamp my passport and I am out the door, into the rickshaw and down to Nepalese Customs. The officer isn’t in his hut. My driver finds him and we get that over with. It’s all fun, especially being outside and breathing. The officials are all nice enough.
Climb back onto rickshaw.
“I tage good care of your all, all,” says the driver. “I make easy. Otherwise longtime going. Bus soon going. I do good work for you. You baksheesh, unnerstan’? You me good baksheesh, I good work do for you.”
“Don’t worry,” I reply. “You’re helping me very much, I giving baksheesh.”
“Huh huh,” he says.
He takes me to another office. This is on the same road, but a new town now – Birgunj. The place has something sinister about it. Youths looking like Japanese hoodlums slouch everywhere. All is dark but for candles and lanterns. A bustle, laughs of derision, constant chatter in the semi-dark. The middle-aged man in the office – just an open shed with a dirt floor and a counter – checks my ticket, takes it, and gives me another, different kind of ticket. He takes me outside to a bench by the road opposite what is apparently the bus park, and sits me there, tapping my luggage.
“You watching this here, huh?” he says.
“Huh,” I reply. “I watching everywhere!”
There’s a desk outside on the dirt. People are crowded around it jabbering. Little boys are as much in evidence as men, doing the same work. But still no women, anywhere. But me.
I wait. It’s after 8:00. The rickshaw driver has collected his baksheesh and gone, having delivered me to the middle-aged man: “He take care now.”
Rajkumar at the office in Patna had told me I’d be on a luxury coach from Birgunj to Kathmandu. I see a couple of big, not-too-ancient-looking coaches opposite, with red lights glowing in them.
Suddenly a thin young man with a narrow moustache, a flat head, and a face like a swollen fox, who is working with the tickets, approaches and says to me, “Oh modom modom there going only – bus there – you come now – we go –”. He grabs a little boy, a rather sinister-looking little boy, tall and thin with an unnaturally beautiful half-Japanese-looking face and a corrupted streetwise Hindu vibe, and tells him in Hindi to take my bag. I grab it myself and start to follow them – others are coming too – but something doesn’t feel right. I stop and say, “Wait, wait, I wait here for bus.”
“No no Modom coming coming only.” Again he tries to get the little boy to grab my bag. He’s trying to get me to step over a low stone wall into the field where several buses are parked.
“That bus that bus going Modom,” he says. He does not look the illiterate this makes him sound. He looks clever and cunning. It doesn’t feel good.
“No,” I say, “I wait here.”
He tugs and grabs, using the little boy to help him. “No no, this bus going! Getting on now!”
“Why can’t I wait and get on with everyone else?”
“No no.” Finally I think, Nobody’s led me wrong yet, and I always thought they would. I go. This whole process takes about sixty seconds. I’m being dragged! We climb into a bus and I see that someone is in the cabin with the light on and I feel reassured, and I see that the seats are high and brown velvetish old stuff and that the aisle is almost impossibly narrow. The little boy and another youth ahead of him are searching for my seat number. “A11, A11,” they cry. “Where is id where is id?”
And suddenly I know I’ve been tricked. Simultaneously I am saying, “I don’t need this now, I’m getting out of here,” and the evil fox-faced one behind me is brushing my breast with his hand, grabbing at my bag, and putting his hand on my bottom, pressing his fingers there. Laughing at the same time.
Adrenaline turns my body without thought and raises its hand and whacks him across the chops, with all the fury of a pent-up day and the wrath that the evil Neanderthal so richly deserves! Whack! Whack! WHACK!! and again WHACK!!!! with all my burning unblocked force. First one side, then the other, of his thin smooth bony face, and he only laughs and I pick my bag up and use it as a battering-ram, getting him back down the aisle and off the bus, cursing him all the while. The only thought that even flickers is “Gosh, I wonder if they’ll do anything to me for this,” but I couldn’t have stopped myself. Apparently all the witnesses think it appropriate behaviour, mine I mean. As soon as I look at it it feels absolutely right.
The guy melts away behind the bus, chuckling. I find the first person near – I think the driver – and say, “That man is bad! He does bad things! You hear? And I hit him hard, you hear?”
I am trembling.
As I stalk back over to the desk by the road I watch the trembling stop and a feeling come instead of… confidence! I don’t have to be afraid! I’m strong and I can hit the bastards! In fact it – my energy, my body – does it for me! I find the middle-aged man and tell him what happened, furiously.
“If you see that man, sow me,” he says worriedly. He walks away and a bit later comes back. “As you tell this boy he says me he has seen,” he says. “Now you just sitting. Is okay. Bus coming one-hap hour.”
I feel great, actually! Adrenaline does that! So I sit on the bench firmly grasping my bag in this world of men, all of them dark and without English save a word or two. I know that my alertness is all-important. And that is easy. But I am hungry! Really hungry! The middle-aged guy tells me to go to a little hole across the street lit by a small lantern. Pieces of mutton, very fatty, lie on one platter, uncooked, and my stomach turns over. More mutton cooks on a pan.
“Mutton you like?”
“No! Any vegetable?”
“Huh huh alu alu. Want hot?”
“Yes, but no with mutton! What cooking in? Mutton?”
“No no. Only potato.” He fries the vegetable in another pan. “Want plate?” His expression says he has some evil joke on me.
He’s put the potato on a plate.
“Huh,” I reply.
Whereupon he takes a piece of ancient yellow newspaper and empties the potato mess into it, removes the spoon, folds it up and gives it to me. Shuddering, I take it away to my bench. As I am eating the greasy hot splodge I see a black thing inching its up-and-down way along one of the potato pieces, silhouetted against lantern light. I pick that piece up and chuck it but eat the rest. I am that hungry.
A bit later my nose feels funny. I reach up and brush an inchy, crawly thing off the bridge of it.
The bus comes. To my horror, Mr. Skinny Asshole is there smirking and grinning to help us board. He is imperious with everybody. I am in the back quarter on the aisle beside a thin youth. I feel very bad here. People are beginning to smoke. The bus is so crowded with seats, even before all the people get on, that the man opposite has to squish his girth around a pole to get in and out. I ask the youngman beside me if we can trade seats.
Laboriously we do so and I open the window wide, sticking my head out and breathing gulps of mingled cold air and exhaust fumes. The youngman makes himself comfortable, presses his leg against mine. No divider on the seat. To ride twelve hours this way, I think. I cannot. I squish myself very small against the window. He spreads himself out more. His friends are joking with him in Hindi. They say things like, “Ha ke foreigner ke ha po goobletragadalamone.”
He smirks and preens. Lights a cigarette.
“Look,” I say, “I really can’t stand cigarettes. They make me very sick. Can you not smoke, or sit somewhere else?”
In Hindi he says, “What?? Not smoke all the way to Kathmandu? You must be joking!” and he goes right on. At intervals he turns and pokes my arm hard and gabbles something very loudly in my ear.
“Look,” I say, knowing he understands not a word, “in my culture people don’t jab each other and shout in their ear. It’s a cultural difference. Just be nice and quiet, okay?”
He shouts and jabs. His friends shout to him and he to them.
I am thoroughly, except for the inside bit, miserable; and the bus hasn’t even started. The seat caves out where your spine is so that it feels like a used coffin, with that worn brown velvet. It’s that inviting. The top bit curves over your head and presses you down further into it. I don’t like that guy’s leg against my leg, his body pressing against my side. I don’t like it at all. He isn’t exactly putting vibes, but just the yuckiness of it! My precious sensitivity, cultivated so carefully, being jammed up against by a thoroughly unconscious, stinking, animal-urgencied-in-its-movements, being. Ugh. For twelve hours, in a sea of smoke and fumes. Ugh. And there is no way out. So I sit again, as I have all day, face composed so as to be invisible, watching the invisible point of silence within which is before and beyond all this… No matter what.
The bus starts. At the edge of town it stops for a few minutes beside a row of hutches where people live and keep shop and sleep, three or four to a hutch; at night lights burn under cooking-pots. I hear a solid scuffling noise and look down out of the window just in time to see a middle-aged man in a white dhoti and kurta and grey hair, kicking outwards at someone who is slipperily fleeing and who is laughing, as though pleased. The attitude of the dhoti’d man is of someone provoked once too often, done wrong by once again. The slippery man fleeing is Fox-Face.
With perfect impunity, he gets back on the bus. He is apparently the second-in-command. He ties a woolen scarf over his head and under his chin, Russian-grandmother style, and pulls on gloves. He then orchestrates everything, with more glee than one ever usually sees in a bus employee.
And where are the Englishmen? They have finally made it through customs; are put at the back of the bus, where there are four seats against the rear wall. Though there are empty seats in front, for some reason Mr. Evil keeps pushing poor men in their white lungis and head-screws back to the back, till they are sitting on each others’ laps, and piling out into the aisle, filling it halfway up. My bag had not quite fit under the seat, and projects halfway into the aisle. Without complaint people step over it, on it, time and again. My nice quasi-designer luggage, in the aisle of the bus, with the head of a man who is sleeping in the filthy metal aisle pillowed on it.
The bus is moving. Out of the little city, into the cold clear air of the first really steep rises of the Himalayas. It’s pitch-dark save for a billion stars. Huge trees line the sides of the road, huge boulders and then ridges and then hills rearing themselves up. The only thing that saves me is sticking my head out into that air, out of the living infectious smoke-embalmed sarcophogus of that bus. I can feel my head clearing, sharpening, my lungs’ ache subsiding.
“Wooah, thanda! thanda!” cries the boy beside me. (Cold, cold!) He takes out a cigarette. Makes emphatic window-closing gestures, shivering ostentatiously.
“No way,” I declare. “If you smoke I’m keeping window open.”
“You no thanda?” he asks.
“No thanda, garam,” I reply. (Hot.) If I didn’t think it would be a waste of breath I would say, “You fool, all the smoking constricts your blood vessels and makes you feel cold. I don’t smoke and I’m fine. I refuse to suffer for somebody else’s bad habit.”
I should have flown! You can’t change people. But I am really pissed that the passengers have absolutely no care for whether it makes me sick. They all smoke. They tell their friends I don’t like it, and keep right on doing it. I keep thinking about America, and Tofutti non-dairy ice-cream, and people not smoking, and a place with clean air.
And yet outwardly and inwardly much calm.
Suddenly the boy reaches over across me and closes the window, slam. I promptly open it again.
The Englishmen produce a huge bottle of vodka. They drink from it, then they pass it around the back of the bus. It seems every man aboard guzzles some. My seat mate drinks up. I decline emphatically. My seat mate now smells of both booze and cigarettes. He becomes even more animated.
After a while suddenly his head drops and he falls asleep. I keep my head out the window, into the billions of stars. The bus grows very full of smoke.
A while later the boy wakes up. He groans. He jabs me and makes a gesture with his hand towards his throat, a sharp, upwards gesture, his mouth half-open like a sick cat. He points to the window.
At first I don’t know what he means. I say, “If you want a window go sit in another seat.” I point towards the front.
He groans again. Makes the same gesture, stands up and forces his way across me in the squished confines, groaning and widening the window. I move hurriedly, squishing into his seat, he into mine. He hangs his head out the window and pukes.
After while he gets his head back in again, subsides. Then he reaches up and firmly closes the window again. He falls back asleep. He lolls over onto my shoulder, his breath, which now smells of vomit as well as booze and cigarettes, in my face. I push him away firmly. He lolls to the other side. The bus jerks and his head cracks against the window. He wakes up. He falls asleep. Repeat same, many times.
I think, Lord, thy people are idiots even in their misery. Robots.
The bus climbs. The boy wakes up. I turn back to the stupified Englishmen. “You fed this guy your booze, and now he’s puked.”
“Oh, has he?”
The young guy apparently understands some of this.
“Huh, huh,” he agrees. “I”… makes gesture for drinking, with thumb down towards mouth, fingers curled – “then sick!”
“I know,” I say, “I didn’t have any and I’m not sick. You drink, you get sick. You’re very stupid!”
“Stoopid,” he says, laughing a bit. A man across the aisle repeats, “Heh! Stoopid, stoopid!”
After an eternity of hours, the bus stops in a prehistoric black slit of a gap cut in the mountain, beside a row of little shanty cafes crammed together. It is after midnight. I can see men and boys bustling with pots over fires; a lantern the only other light. I can see the usual white rice, puris, slop being dished onto plates. I need badly to pee again, but as I’ve had no water since 6:30 a.m. there isn’t much there, so it isn’t that uncomfortable. There is a great thirst gathering in my abused body though. I ask the exiting Englishmen to see if they can find any soda or bottled water.
There is none. The guy next to me jabs me.
“Khanna nahin?” he asks, gathering his fingers together and stabbing them towards his mouth, in a gesture very similar to the puking one, but somewhat reversed.
“Nahin khanna,” I reply. The thought of eating when I am this filthy and feel this gross is not nice, nor is the sight of the food. My seat mate climbs out. I move back by the window and open it. The evil fox-faced one appears below me. Leering. (As indeed several times during the journey he had leered over me and inspected me with his bright beady eyes, and said something to my seat mate, who laughed.)
“Khanna nahin?” he asks.
“Khanna nahin,” I reply.
“Nahin khanna?” he says. I turn away and ignore him. He goes away, laughing.
We go on, rattling through the night.
A couple of hours later, we stop again at a place almost exactly identical to the last one. I think that just maybe I can find a place to pee. Most people leave the bus. After while I get out, hating to because to stir myself at all causes so much curiosity and attention that it is very uncomfortable to just go about the business of being a human being. (I think of peeing in my seat, which would not make things appreciably funkier. And I was in fact to do just that, some years hence, on a bus between Bombay and Poona. But that’s another story.)
Trucks and buses rattle by constantly. The night is black as black. The walls of the mountain are black. People are everywhere. Men are pissing against the mountain. It is obvious that a thousand men a day piss here, that this is truck-stop and pissoir without separation. The smell fills the gap, acrid and ammoniac. I walk down past the little huts. A sheer drop to god-knows-what in the blackness, just past the last hut and the downcropping of the ridge. Not even a bush. I think I’ll go behind a stopped bus, but it moves then. I give up and get back into my tourist-bus-in-hell. Many eyes follow me. The smell in the bus hits me like a wall.
We drive on. On and on, climbing always. I muse over what must be the chemical composition of the ‘air’ inside this bus, and what microbes it contains, and how my immune system is coping with the onslaught.
The passengers all shiver ostentatiously with cold, sucking air in between their teeth and wrapping woollen scarves over their heads, arranging scarves around themselves. They shut every window tight. They sleep.
I see that the boy has got my trampled-on hat off the floor and has put it on his suspiciously-close-shorn head.
I sat with myself, being, watching. Watching myself endure, musing on what it is within that is not touched by smoke or grode or hell.
The air slowly slowly begins to grow light. It’s colder. I am by the open window and revel in the sharp cold air. We are climbing into a country of terraced slopes planted with rice. Square white houses of mud and wattles made perch by the road. In India it seems, and Nepal, people these days build only by the road, be it house or hut or shack or beggar’s lean-to. They nurse their babies where the trucks leap and gambol in and out of the potholes spewing ungoverned black fumes.
Tiny villages we pass through seem unimaginably poor. No bright signs like Hindus favour. Just cold houses, and a woman wrapping her thin sari about her head, and her barefoot child, filthy with road-dust, as they stand beside a mud-brick house in a kind of windblown wistfulness.
We wind up the side of an enormous long ridge. Slowly… passing trucks and buses gingerly. The drop gets sheerer and sheerer on the window side. Often the wheels of the bus are inches from a thousand-foot drop. Sometimes there are little concrete posts a foot high to reassure us that we aren’t really just beside the void; often nothing. The road curves, snakes, climbs, hugging the mountainside. The driver is fairly careful. But I sit now on the aisle so as not to look.
Finally we pass through a final gap near the top of the ridge, and are out into a valley.
Houses, brown and square, perch on hillsides above terraced rice-paddies. The sun is golden through the early mist and woodsmoke. A sense of vastness pervades the landscape – of land heaved up so high and so wide it has lost all memory of the sea. On and on the empty clean wild, just sky and hills and then mountains and more mountains, washed by winds, belonging to themselves. And the certain feeling of the Himalayas, as each place has its own feeling. A feeling born of vastness.
The bus goes down a long curved road into the valley, which is not deep, but rather set high up in this expanse of ridges and lifted rock, and sheltered only slightly by them. We pass into a little town, ugly, poor; people hang out of second-storey windows, unshaven, wrapped in woollen shawls, staring. Houses seem to be dried mud-brick – unadorned, square. Shops just holes in the brick, where cold boys stir chai over fires.
Some people get off, the boy next to me among them. I wonder, “Is this Nepal? Kathmandu? It couldn’t be – Kathmandu was recommended to me by two rich ladies who love comfort… this could never be it.” And it isn’t. We drive on.
And now here we are, pulling into the bus station, tall trees and real streets, wide and with big buildings, and helter-skelter alleys of shops, and a lake, and a whole different feeling to everything. The twenty-four hours over.
I purposely leave my hat on the bus.
And soon I am at the pension owned by people I knew from India – a Frenchman and Kalpana, his Australian woman. I am hugging them – a bit gingerly – then teaching myself how to pee again in the clean bathroom; and then lying in a hot hot bath. I gaze down in wonder at the V of thick grime where my shirt had opened onto my upper chest. I revel in luxury. (I had thrown my clothes – a pair of now-grey-black-brown, formerly white trousers, a thick long-sleeved t-shirt – into the nearest rubbish-bin. The oil-stains alone were enough to condemn them; as well as that they were brown with grime.)
There is a heater on in the bathroom. It is very cold here – January in Kathmandu – and Kalpana brings me tea in the tub. Ahhh.
And a revelation strikes me, which I have never forgotten: The nature of happiness is simply the contrast with misery… in whatever degree. It is not really cosmic, happiness; it is just contrast.
As it happens, a couple of days later I am strolling, happy and rested, up a strangely-deserted road near the outskirts of Kathmandu. The winter day is fresh, the sun is high, and the mountains which completely ring the valley shine white and are of impossible panoramic quantity. I wear my clean jeans and a warm sweater.
Someone grabs my ass from behind.
My body spins around. My knees bend slightly as my legs plant themselves more firmly, a little apart. From whatever hell these demons rest in, waiting until they can be useful, a roaring, hissing one rears up out of the ground… through my feet… up through my body. My mouth opens, an unbridled feline HHHaaannnnnhhh!!! comes out – my tongue reaches to my navel and turns blue – my eyes bug red. My body goes black and eight arms grow from me all in a second, each with its taloned fingers. My necklace of skulls rattles, and a headless man still manages to shriek like a rabbit under my trampling feet.
The Black Goddess has arrived!
I hold nothing back, let Her take over completely. She roars with all the igneous savagery of her labyrinthine home. Let out in the air!
Now her tongue draws back in – my body calms – still vibrating with the blissful totality of her rage. A happy settled composure comes over my mouth as it regains something of its former shape.
The man leaps back as if I’d thrown boiling water in his face. His aghast expression says I’ve done him some unnatural injury, far out of proportion to his crime. Wounded, terribly put-upon, he slinks away.
Hah-hah!
Featured images by Sonika Agarwal via unsplash.com and Soumya Bhattacharjee (detail) via pexels.com
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