MattCarney::FictionWriter

Most of our time in Kath­mandu was spent blow­ing out our intestines in the hotel bath­room. Thank­fully, it was a nice hotel and bath­room with warm cof­fee col­ors and all that.

We know food didn’t do us in; our stom­achs are invin­ci­ble to spices or weird­ness of any kind regard­ing food. It was some sort of virus. I know the Ital­ians and Lithuan­ian we shared liquor with in Varanasi were sick at some point, so maybe we picked it up there. Regard­less, there wasn’t much we could do for the week except lan­guish and watch Wipe­out (both the Amer­i­can and Indian ver­sions, the later sub­stan­tially bud­geted and some­how hosted by Shahrukh Khan).

Socially, Kath­mandu felt very sim­i­lar to our other expe­ri­ences around South Asia with excep­tions rooted in one notable dif­fer­ence; women seem more out­spo­ken here. More than once, I noticed women bark­ing an order to a gent who would obey with­out hes­i­ta­tion, on busses most of all. A woman wanted a seat, so she needed only to snap her fin­ger at some gent, tilt her head aside, and he moved instantly for her. This would never hap­pen in India; the lungi wear­ing gent, or even one in trousers, would only stare back at her and move on to his mobile, or what­ever. Sub­se­quently, I noticed the high fash­ion sense of women around Kath­mandu, many opt­ing to mix native and global fash­ions for fan­tas­tic results.

Kath­mandu has incred­i­ble sites in terms of archi­tec­ture and the like. The dur­bar squares host well pre­served 16^th and 17^th cen­tury build­ings from Nepal’s feu­dal past, includ­ing amaz­ing wood­worked pil­lars and but­tresses. The true won­ders though, in my opin­ion, were in the two major Bud­dhist stu­pas, Swayamb­hu­nath and Boudhanath.

Boud­hanath was the most sub­lime of these stu­pas. A cir­cu­lar vil­lage of shops, monas­ter­ies and eater­ies had risen around the stupa, which itself pos­sessed some­thing uncanny; it was a mas­sive, mono­lithic sphere, topped by a crown painted with the iconic Nepalese Bud­dha eyes and a gold spire, ris­ing from a white wall encir­cling it and it’s square base, prayer wheels in the wall spin­ning all the while. The sky was over­cast and ema­nat­ing a faint, blue glow, per­haps from the white light illu­mi­nat­ing the entire site.

Hun­dreds of peo­ple were there. Sin­gle peo­ple, cou­ples, fam­i­lies, chil­dren, monks, work­ers, all of them expe­ri­enc­ing the place both alone and com­mu­nally. Some peo­ple walked qui­etly, while oth­ers laughed and chat­ted with friends. Regard­less of how, every­one walked around the stupa clock­wise, a great cir­cle, the same begin­ning and end­ing in the same place for everyone.