ROAD TO HOLY

INDIA



-My wife keeps saying,
"I have no words!
I have no words!"
As if that's a bad thing.

-I tell my friend, Larry, that I am leaving for India on the day after tomorrow.

-"Why?"

I think, “why, indeed?”

-Because there are only so many countries on the world’s surface
and
I have limited time,
and
many questions.

-But
a billion people?
How to make sense of a billion human beings?



-Day after tomorrow I leave for Switzerland and then on to India.

-My 65th birthday is today.
Last year, as I left for the Middle East, I phoned my mom.

-At the end of that trip, she passed away.

-With both my parents having passed through without asking much from life except for some small degree of security,
and finding precious little,
I want to try hard to find sense in my own life.

-Though, is it a matter of finding sense,
or making it?

Show me the security in sensibleness!


-I leave Eugene, bound for Farther Away, and find myself bouncing around in a small propeller plane, trying to make myself comfortable in the darkness and wind and rain, imagining myself inching across a long-ago-looking map in a little plane crawling across it, with a large, ornate compass in the lower left-hand corner pointing East, and following a big red line south to San Francisco, then New York, and over the North Pole to Geneva and then on to Delhi.
-It certainly sounds like the makings of an adventure.

-As a big fan of Tin Tin, or Indiana Jones, is it too much to ask for a couple of grizzled, narrow eyed men in heavy wool coats, slouching nearby, just for a little atmosphere?

-Traveling alone, I have the license to turn every moment into an adventure.

-The thunderous noise of the engines reverberates throughout the cabin, defeating any attempt at conversation with my fellow passengers, and making it easier to spend time with my imagination.

-A small plane has a more intimate connection with the sky.

-In times past, embarking on a transcontinental trip, at this lower altitude and with this noise, as used to be the case, would have been exhausting.

-Intimate, though.

-Intimate in the gusting wind.

-Intimate with the land below.

-Loud.

-But adventure tosses comfort aside.

-Adventure means commitment.

-So commit, my friend, commit.



LEAVING HOME


-Later, on a larger airplane and heading for Europe, I peer out the window and see, below me, the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean rolling onto the beaches of Long Island. They pass out of sight beneath the wing. Looking out over the ocean and off to the horizon, a sense of vastness engulfs me- the vastness of possibility, the possibility of loneliness, the loneliness of leaving my family, the family that has made this all possible.

-Is Possibility the Holy Grail?

-Sitting across the aisle from me, an older man (well-coiffed, silver hair and chiseled features), sitting quietly in a nice suit and starched shirt and a tie, spills his cup of water onto his tray and freezes, shocked to watch the water run down towards his lap. I can see that he is fully expecting to be drenched, his suit ruined and being humiliated for the duration of his journey. I quickly reach over and, with my hand, sweep the water and the cup and the ice off his tray and into the aisle and onto the floor.
He says nothing.
I say nothing.
He looks at me as if what I did was only short of crazy by a very small margin.

-While it doesn’t seem crazy to me, we all operate a little differently at the margins.

-Without words, I help him to mop up. I assume that he doesn’t speak English, and the world suddenly feels a little bit bigger.


-On this plane, one equipped with satellite television, I look down the aisle and see, on a small screen off in the distance, our President, Barack Obama delivering a speech. And I ask myself,
"Why are things in our world the way they are?
“Why must he be forever encouraging us, as citizens, to think?”
“Have we stopped believing in Possibility?”

-Can we stop listening to the opinions of people who want to do our thinking for us and, instead, wake up?

-"Who are we?"
-"Why are we?"

-Obama is our Socrates.
He wants citizens to think, and they want to kill him, for undermining their gods of convenience and attracting their children to new ideas.
Wisdom accrues to intelligent people who want to learn more.
Obama, considered an outsider by those who feel they know more than enough, thank you, responds with patience.
How much patience might it require?
How much newness do we really want?




+
I eat to live.
I live to sleep,
and dream of butterflies.
+



-Maybe butterflies first awake in India...

-Going to the rear of the plane in search of a glass of vino, I notice that the steward is studying "Latin for Dummies ".
Well, all right!
Some hope for the old world, after all.

-At the moment we are born,
When we cut the umbilicus,
From the shore of Dreams,
We cross the Rubicon,
To the shore of Deep Breaths and Open Eyes

-Waking later to the smell of coffee and croissants, and noticing on the map that we are 35000 feet above Paris, I pop open the window shade to the rosy dawn and the resounding final choral movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony in my earphones.

-Great ways to break open a day.



-Stopping first in Switzerland,
affords me an opportunity to see
my daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren,
who live near Vevey.
And Vevey, I come to discover, is home to a center for Buddhist studies in Europe.
Coincidences comprise a substantial part of our personal mandala.





LEAVING GENEVA

-I set out from the rarified heights of Switzerland's comprehensibility
for the humid chaos of India's Gangetic Plain, and her billion ancient souls.

-I arrive first in Frankfort, and as I walk through the airport looking for my departure gate, I pass those for Rome and Boston, and other western cities, seeing people who decidedly resemble me.
Heading deeper into the airport, towards the gates labeled Teheran, Djakarta, and Delhi, people no longer look quite so much like me. The occasional exotic foreigner I encounter on flights throughout America is now myself.

-Another thing you won't find in many airports in the U.S.- a woman mopping the floor behind me while I pee into the urinal. We could all could stand some loosening up.

-Finally on the flight to India, the woman in the seat in front of me just got up to put her blue, spongy, rubbery mat away.
The world's longest commute to yoga class.

-I am reading my newspaper when an offensive odor permeates the cabin. I look around to see what it might be. Uh oh, I realize it's the smell of the Indian spices in the soon-to-arrive lunch.
An inauspicious beginning to what many people have assured me will be one of the best parts of the trip- the food.
It didn’t work out that way for me, but I wasn’t to know that, yet.

-So very amazing to watch the map and the plane and the names of places below me I never imagined getting even this close to: Rawalpindi, Lahore, Qandahar, Almaty, Karachi...
As I cross over the various cities, I realize that, from some of them, I am only 7 or so miles away from their city center-
admittedly straight up.
What would be a short camel ride otherwise,
were I on the ground.

-I feel a long way from home.

-I sit next to an Indian-American woman who, as she says, loves to talk.

-So I talk too.

-She left India for America with her husband, by way of an arranged marriage, and he promptly became involved with another woman, though not before they had had a son together. She left her husband, something more acceptable in America than in India, and became a schoolteacher in Houston.

-Would we all be better off if we could share everything, if we would, could, did share everything about ourselves- abundantly, to any passing stranger at anytime of the day or night?

-Why default to hiding behind closed doors?

-I am in no position to avoid conversation.
Our elbows bump on a flight that promises to last for many hours.
She has already committed to talk, no matter what.
We both realize that it’s unlikely that we will ever see each other again-
the freedom of no past and no future,
being here, being now.


-Her son is grown and has married a 100% redneck, as she describes her, whom he married without her input, no less.
That her son's wife was divorced and came with a daughter did nothing to endear my fellow traveler to her new daughter-in-law who, then, asked for her, the mother, to move out. As incomprehensible as it was for her to believe, he did as his wife wanted. She lets some of her pain and impatience with change creep out from behind her schoolteacher’s defenses. The conversation veers towards the uncomfortable as I discover all this. Why is that? Rather than simply listen, do I feel the need to help her solve this problem? We talk long enough for her to start out sweetly, and then, with a little prodding, I find
Ancient Mama India.


-Beside her, I listen to her life unfold.
-On the map, I watch Asia unfold beneath me.


-In fact, I am immensely interested in her story because most American families shared, at some point in their genesis as Americans, some similar pain, incomprehensibility and fear of change that she wrestles with.
She raised her son by herself, now she is thinking of returning to India to be with her nine brothers and sisters, saying that she doesn't want to die alone.
She has made the trip back to India for a wedding, a wedding for eight hundred people!

-Exclaiming, saddened, laughing, surprised- everything existing in a medium of trust and non-judgment- I wonder at the actual facts, and even though probably true, might as well be irrelevant.


-When we part at passport control, she says that it feels like we have known each other forever.

INDIA



-Alexander the Great and I, though separated by several millennia, arrived in India the same way- by crossing the formidable Himalayan Mountains. Granted, he tended to drink his wine the Greek way, i.e., mixed with water, while I prefer mine unadulterated, more in the French style, but those mountains remain essentially the same. It took him a little longer than it took me as he had to trudge through some snow, true, but that’s Progress.

-Even as I enter the modernity of New Delhi’s international airport, I am assailed by the pungent odor of wood smoke, not unlike what he and I might have found in a small village a long time ago.

-The juxtaposition of changing and unchanging India starts now.


Górdios desmós


-Centuries ago, Alexander severed the Gordian Knot and received the title of Lord of Asia. My knot, my own intractable problem, viz., determining who I am and why, I try to solve with the equally bold stroke of taking myself, likewise,
to Asia.



-My first day in India starts brightly.
And early.
It takes more than a few sleeping pills to shift myself by twelve time zones.

-My hotel being outside the city, and anxious to see India working, I choose the Metro over a taxi. The train station could not be newer; the smell of freshly poured concrete permeates the entire building. But to get to it from my hotel, I have to walk through neighborhoods of dirt roads and open cooking fires.
-The train begins to fill up with a lively portion of the one billion inhabitants calling the area between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal,
home.

-On the Metro into New Delhi, the announcements sound vaguely British, as in, "mind the gap," until I hear, "passengers are advised not to sit on the floor of the train."

-As we head into New Delhi, two older women, sitting across from me, and dressed in colorful saris, one red and gold, the other light yellow and green, laugh and chat animatedly,
while texting.

-No other persons on this train look like me.
I feel, simultaneously, strangely visible and invisible.
A wraith, but smiling.


-How did all this vast concatenation of peoples and religions and architecture arise here, in the Indus valley, before even in Egypt or Mesopotamia?
With so little discovered, if the collection in the Indian national museum is any indication, so much the more is left to the imagination and oral history. The history of uncountable numbers of gods, goddesses, universes, and possibilities, less and less knowable with each passing year, resides underfoot, buried beneath the scrambled rubble, beneath the humid ground. We surmise and wonder based on tales and rituals, unlike in Egypt, where we have so much archeological evidence.
On the other hand, there is a feeling of continuity between Harappan civilization and the present time, as if we can ask- who needs archeology when all we have to do is go to the local market to see what was eaten 5000 years ago, or to Shiva’s temple on the corner to watch the ageless sacrifice of the ever-useful goat, a link that I found missing in Luxor.

Ra and Isis, unlike Vishnu and Lakshmi, have faded from memory.

So much more could be here but the climate doesn't encourage the preservation of antiquities as the desert does in Egypt.











-Outside again, I'm impressed at how beautiful even Delhi is.

-How to make sense of a billion people?
Well, one person at a time.

It becomes impossible, finally, to avoid climbing into one of the small green and yellow tuk-tuks, a motorcycle with a cab, which are everywhere and insistent, and coincidently always going in the direction you want to go,
or, so every driver would have you believe.

-Walking, my preferred way to see a city, is considered madness.

-Hello, Ranjit Singh.

-I decide to climb into his little cab more to meet this smiling Indian than because I have any particular place to go. As we drive through the streets in the evening, horn screeching, the tuk-tuk narrowly avoiding disaster, I ask him if we are still in New Delhi because, with dirt and chaos accumulating, life seems to deteriorate markedly as we leave the vicinity of the Presidential Palace, and he says, "No, no, no, this is not Old Delhi, the traffic in Old Delhi is much worse!"
Only the Holy Grail of Possibility
Makes this sound tempting.

He takes me on a tour of New Delhi, up some down streets and down some up ones. What the rest of the world does seems to matter very little.
He tells me about being a Sikh, and how they represent a warrior class, then and now, and how they were even the bodyguards of Indira Gandhi, even as he fails to mention that they assassinated her.

He, in his tuk-tuk, is a happy man.













-Once a person has been to NYC and ridden the subway there, this strikes me as certainly no worse, while smelling much better. People seem to get a lot accomplished while riding cheek by jowl, going through their camera pictures, working on their computers....

-I realize if you don't say yes sometimes, and take the risk, new things might not happen.
Once I admit that that it may be part of my nature to be gullible, maybe I will just relax when life takes an unexpected left turn.

-As I write this, swaying on the train back to Huda City Centre, I glance up and meet the eyes of a wizened, sari-clad old woman with a huge red dot in the center of her forehead and the deepest black eyes imaginable.
I smile.
She doesn't.
It doesn't seem rude, somehow.

-Back in the hotel, I am doing my best to understand this cricket match on TV. The Cricket World Cup takes place in India this year, which is right now. The bartender is trying to tell me, after I ask him whether he has a little book of rules, that it's "pretty simple".
I laugh.
And then he laughs, too.

-Simple- like Hinduism.

-With no one else in the bar and the cricket match on the center TV, the waiter hangs around- and I pounce. I love talking to wait staff. They have to talk to me.

-After I break down the cultural barriers by showing my abysmal knowledge about the national sport of India, I ask him if he’s a Hindu.
And what is Hinduism, anyway?
How do you keep all those gods and goddesses straight?

-Joined by a friend who, hearing the last question, says that if he hadn’t been born a Hindu, it would make absolutely no sense to him.

-They both admit that the eons that they have before them to achieve Paradise gives them plenty of time to enjoy life now.
Neither admit to being particularly religious, but are proud to be Hindu.
To be Hindu means being born Hindu.

-So, I’m not certain which is less likely-
understanding Hinduism
or
understanding Cricket.

-Lord’s, in St. John’s Wood near London, can claim to be the oldest site for cricket in the world. The earliest recorded match occurred in 1787.
-Dedicated to the Lord Shiva, the Amarnath Caves are said to be over 5000 years old.

-Lordy, Lordy.

-Without seeing Old Delhi, I can’t believe that I have begun to see India’s billion people.


-Now that I have just gotten off the Metro in Old Delhi, I can believe that I have begun to see India’s one billion people. I walk outside the station and immediately feel like I have been injected into the living bloodstream of India Eternal, being buffeted right and left by uncountable number of heaving and swirling corpuscles. I slink behind one of the pillars of the ultra-modern exit of the Metro to stare, with a faint heart, at the solid stream of human beings flowing by me.

-As Ranjit Singh said, Old Delhi is not New Delhi.

-Some kind of plan might help.
Somewhere out there, like a clear and distinct idea in the midst of this tumult, is the Red Fort, an imperial citadel of the Mughal Empire, dating from 1639. It’s on every map of Old Delhi.

I decide to find it.

-Right or left?

-Looking at the map and seeing that the fort is to the north, I step into the pulsing humanity heading to my right. No one seems to notice one more corpuscle. With no more plan in mind than to keep the sun behind me, I dip and dodge my way up the dung-dappled street. Trucks and tuk-tuks, bicycles and bullocks, people in brilliant saris and mere rags, all seem determined to get somewhere quickly, while I saunter, marveling at the motion.

-After so many thousands of years of meditation,
this country wants to move.

Stopping occasionally to ask a storekeeper if I am on the right road to the Red Fort, I encounter complete bafflement- tourists simply don’t wander around Old Delhi, and especially if they appear to have absolutely no idea where they are going. My hoping that there might be a Red Fort out there somewhere doesn’t count as Knowledge.






-I finally come upon the Red Fort.

-Everyone says that I will find Varanasi very dirty. It will be amazing if it's dirtier than Old Delhi. Yesterday, in New Delhi, I entertained the now-quaint notion that India resembled a warm NYC.

Well, no.

I have no idea, not yet anyway, how so many people can live so close together, with so many big smiles. What is it about this country, why are there so many people here? And growing faster than nearly any other country in the world. India possesses one of the highest birth rates on Earth. My next trip will be to Italy, which has one of the lowest.
-Why the difference?
-Might souls, in their pre-existent state, before being born as human beings, be choosing where they want to be born?
To be born here, in India,
rather than in Italy?

-That seems laughable!

-Until you think about it.
Italy abounds in Old Souls.
India explodes in Possibility.

-If I am more interested in the growth of my soul instead of an especially beguiling view out over the hills of Tuscany, maybe I, as my soul prior to birth, will choose India.

-Indians believe in multiple opportunities to fully actualize the Self.
In Italy, it’s one and done.



THE RED FORT

-One of the small benefits of an admission charge is that the sheer quantity of humanity drops by about 99%. Inside the Red Fort, it couldn't feel more like an oasis if it were the middle of the garden of Eden, what with trees, shade, breezes. It's not that all the people are a trial; it just takes some getting used to.
-A woman in a full chador passes me, not necessarily something I would have even noticed last year in Jerusalem, but here, in a country with such a large population of Muslims, this woman, fully covered, is the first one that I have seen. Saris don't seem as restrictive somehow. One thing sure, no one wears shorts. It must be close to 80 degrees and yet many people, men and women, wear sweaters.

-In trying to relate Old Delhi to some other place that I've been, I might compare it to the souk in Cairo, but few people here try to sell you anything. I keep waiting to say "no”, but nobody asks!
-True, there are a lot of people, especially close, but almost everyone smells nice. Part of living together, I suppose. I've been paying particular attention to loading on the deodorant.
-Being a responsible tourist.

-I prefer not to think of myself as overly fastidious, but after going into the Gent’s toilet stalls and, yes, it's as disgusting as you would imagine, I am asked for 1 rupee as a cleaning fee and. Who has 1 rupee? I had to give him a 50 rupee bill and have him make change. As I thought about his hands being the same ones that "cleaned" out the toilets, I looked slightly askance at the 10 rupee bills he handed back.
Glad I brought the hand wipes.

-I can see that it's only a matter of time, though.

-I guess things have improved somewhat since my daughter last visited India, I haven't seen any dead people in the streets, yet.

-But there sure is a lot of life!


-Leaving the Red Fort
And standing on the edge
Of Chandri Chowk,
I slip beneath the surface
To find something
More like a reef
Than any kind of city
That I have ever seen.
This wonderland teems with glorious
Silk-color saris
Fanning out like fins
Behind burbling vespas,
While ponderous Truck-fish,
Brilliant with lights and streamers,
Move perilously
Through schools of small,
Unconcerned fry.

I nose in and out
Of shops-
Abundant with goods
And of temples-
Abundant with gods.
All is white like old coral.
I pick at this.
I peck at that.

I drift, watchfully.
Here, people don’t change direction,
They dart.

I see neither reason
Nor rhyme.
“Why,” passes me by.

I’m not so much
A fish out of water
As a non-fish in.

I try to stop and watch.

Impossible.

The current of Chandri Chowk
Has its own idea.
I need to swim at an angle
To emerge.

And then I ask myself,
Where was I?

Heading back to the city center,
I try to shake off,
As a wet dog might,
This feeling
Of Ocean-like Immensity.

Back to New Delhi.
Back to the order
Of the British Raj.

Where was I?

Really.
Should I expect
To understand
After only one
Lifetime?







-Chaos is in the eye of the bewildered!

-I finished off my bottle of water; I don't know what to do with the empty. If I toss it, it would certainly feel at home with all the other bottles in the street.

-Thinking I might try to find a hotel closer to the center of the city, I try the Taj Hotel.
I inquire about availability and the woman behind the desk, in her blue sari and red mark on her forehead, in the finest King’s English, replies. "I'm sorry, sir, but we're jam-packed."

-On the front page of the sports section of the India Times, is a photo of a golfer at a tournament not far from where I was yesterday. As I sit here, hacking and sneezing, even inside the hotel, I have no idea how anyone could have spent yesterday, and probably will spend today, playing outside for four hours.

-Like Jerusalem, Delhi has its myriad smells: the acrid smoke of frying meat and the stink of who knows what animal’s manure underfoot and in the roadway, which then becomes pulverized by the incessant traffic, becoming a fine powder that the wind throws up into the mishmash of air that we have to breathe and try to see through, the diesel exhaust of the trucks with the signs on their tailgates saying,” Honk.” Even the taxi to the airport has the odor of indefinable spices that lets me imagine every kind of kitchen and mealtime, far from those that I have known. Even though I have come to India to familiarize myself with the food, I keep getting sick and so am only becoming more and more acquainted with white rice and bottled water.

-Time has come to leave Delhi until I return at the end of the trip to head home because of, in a word, pollution. The thick, stinging air makes it difficult even to be outside for any length of time. In fact, from my hotel window, the building barely a mile off is all but invisible.
Rather than stay in Delhi for another two days, as I had planned, I'm taking advantage of cheap airfares and debarking for Kathmandu. Maybe, up in the mountains, the air may be clearer.

-Of course, if Kathmandu is in a valley....


-I don't know exactly what you think when someone pops the word “Kathmandu" up in front of you, but over here, people think "Las Vegas".
How about that?
The gambling center of the Asian Subcontinent.

-An instantly likeable guy behind the airline check-in counter, a Sikh, whom, when I asked if I might have window seat, said, "Oh, you want to see some mountains!" I laughed and said I had come a long way to see "some mountains".
The next counter over is another flight, and although the flight is going to Kabul, Afghanistan, no one looks any different from the passengers in my line.

-1 hour and 10 mins to Kathmandu, but over the Himalayan mountains!

-Impetuosity spices up the curry of travel.

-Some part of me thinks that if I'm not exhausted, in a good, over-stimulated, way, then I might as well have stayed home.

-I'm not a blasé traveler; I don't always get it right the first time, but even after more than 50 countries, crossing a new border gives me goose bumps.
Standing in a bookstore, I notice a woman looking for a novel and I see "Shantaram", a book I tell everyone about, and so I recommend it to her, especially because it takes place in India. It turns out that she has been living here for a while and has heard of it.... Sounds like what she has heard about it is probably not her cup of Lapsang Suchong.
But anyway, we start chatting.
She has two children who go to a private school up in the mountains near where she also lives, but she (her name is Kai) is having visa problems and needs to go out of the country and apply to re-enter from Nepal, having to leave her children temporarily.
Crazy.
But she seems to be quite the experienced ex-pat and is only mildly exasperated.
She wants to know if the social and political climate back in the U.S. is as nutty as it appears in the press in India. I have to admit that it probably is.
She's originally from the San Juan Islands north of Seattle and is a Democrat!
One thing that seems obvious to me, having seen The U.S., Switzerland, and now, India is that no country is trying to solve the myriad problems in the modern world the way America is. Switzerland and India have much more in common: public transport, universal healthcare, international outlook, and many people living together in a small place, i.e, apartments. America continues to believe that it doesn't have to live by the same rules as everyone else, that we are decidedly on our own, individually, and that the rest of the world needs to make room for us.
A friend, who lives in Japan, says, “Japanese people don’t take up much space”.
Americans are uncommonly, generously, large in so many senses.

-There is just so little concept that we all share a common fate.

-But for how much longer?

-What if something happens?


-Out the plane window, peeping up through the clouds, are mountaintops! It's within the realm of possibility that one of the peaks might be Mt. Everest!
In fact, Everest is the name of my hotel in Kathmandu.

-A woman leans over, looking out the window and asks, "ces sont les Himalayans?". The plane is jam-packed (there’s that word again, so appropriate for Asia!) with the People of France..

-Unlike tourists in India, everyone on the plane to Nepal appears to be thin, from France and carrying a backpack.






Amazing.


-I am walking down the street in Kathmandu behind an old Nepalese version of my friend, Barry, all grizzle and a swagger befitting a re-incarnated Ernest Hemingway. It doesn’t seem at all improbable that he might be here, even so far from Paris, though there are plenty of French to keep him company. I never knew him personally, but Ezra Pound, who lived near me in Venice, said that Hemingway was “responsible for a general debunking of a great deal of stodge.”

-Stodge, like the head louse, seems endemic to us humans.



Kathmandu, with all the colors and confusion, dust and cooking fires everywhere, and the evening gloaming coming on, resembles nothing so much as an urbanized campsite.


-I wander around this city smack-dab in the middle of the Himalayan Mountains- THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE!- wondering why I am here. Everyone else that I know seems to have living better figured out.
-Everywhere I look I see French people, Japanese people, Italians, Filipinos, even some Americans and they are all like me in that they are a long way from their comfortable homes, maybe dog, maybe cat, life insurance policies and Daily Grind.
Is what we want likelier to be here,
Rather than
there?




-I'm surrounded by more gods than I could ever conceivably need, yet I feel very alone in this universe. Kierkegaard wants me to stand naked before my creator, but it would be easier further south where it's warmer. I won't make it to Kerala this trip.

-Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining.



-A certain hesitancy lurks in the strangeness of this high land.

-John Lennon said, after he had spent eight hours a day, for months, meditating with his guru, that he had never written such bad music.

-Now, of course, I’m not John Lennon and I don’t write music, but, I am Me, and ultimately, the one responsible for making of my life something worthwhile.

Coming to India, and Nepal, in and of itself, debunks some little amount of stodge but how to keep it de-bunked, that’s the question.

-This is where Sisyphus pops back into the picture. Say that you, like the son of Aeolus, are told to roll a great stone to the top of one of these mountains- pick a top, any top- and then you have to stand there and watch it tumble into the distant valley, realizing that you have to follow it down and then, for all eternity, push it back up.

-Push Up and Tumble Down.
-Push Up and Tumble Down.
-Forever.

-Would you do it?
-Assume that, unlike Sisyphus, you have a choice.
-Would you do it?

-In order not to die?

-How much stodge
until you finally say, “enough.”




-Alexander refused to push the rock at all.
Not many of us can say that.









-Do these people know something that I don't? That woman crouched over her cooking fire, a few feet away from the major highway full of enormous diesel trucks, what does she know? As she stirs her meager meal, does she do so while suffering any
crise de foi?


-Does she feel naked before her Creator?




In The Everest Hotel.

-Later, sitting in the hotel bar and having a drink before dinner, two young girls sit down and introduce themselves, and ask if I am alone.
Well, yes,
But, no longer, it seems.
Even my underdeveloped “crap detector”
can see where this is going.
I ask where they come from and they say that they are from the Philippines. When I ask how old they are (because they look to be about 16) they say that they are 21 and 28, respectively. When I try to insist that that seems impossible, they say that maybe it's the other way around.

-Much too sad, much too complicated!

I’ve read enough to know that their situation might very well be a desperate one. Their bright eyes belie the darkness ahead of them.

I, of course, know what they want.

-Should I try to get in touch with their parents?
In the Philippines?
Maybe they really are 21 and 28, and vice versa.


-I tell them I'm leaving to get some dinner, but that I hope that their time in Nepal is a good one.
I encourage them to climb a mountain, to get outside.

-Ever the dad.

-I leave the bar and its big sadness and go into the restaurant. Just like in Paris, with my family so many years ago, even though it's going on 8:00 p.m., I'm the only one in there.

-Living to eat,
or eating to live,
whichever,
but, never
before 8:00 P.M.

-I signal to the band that I want to take a video of them (after giving them a nice tip) and they respond with smiles and “namastes.”
-The music, the lamb rogan josh and afghani naan leave absolutely nothing more to desire!


-The next day, I spend the morning scrounging around Kathmandu looking for a mobile phone charging cable, which I left in Delhi. Well, I didn't so much leave it in Delhi but that it was taken from me by the security people as they ransacked my bags and tossed everything about and then, when they crammed it all back in my backpack, they neglected to include the bag with my shirts and pants and charger. So, no charger, no shirts and minus my other pair of pants!

-How many pairs of pants did Alexander bring with him?

-Apple has an untapped market in Nepal, meaning that it is extremely difficult trying to find in this strange land an item that we take so for granted at home. An unlikely and impromptu quest- it never fails to uncover parts of a country that the tourist rarely stumbles across.
What surprises me most is, rather than how few people speak English, how many know at least a smattering. I can only just imagine, for a Nepali tourist wandering around in America, how likely would it be to encounter even one other person speaking Nepalese!

-Similar to Hong Kong, businesses are organized by streets and all the mobile phone people do business next door to each other.

Makes competing both simple and cutthroat-
just the sort of business plan that would cause American businessmen to grind their teeth and call their lawyers.

I'm hiring a driver to take me to the temples of Bhaktipor and Nagrikot.
Here, they call them World Heritage Sites, but I only hope that the same people who determined that The Everest Hotel warrants 5 stars did not also designate these aforementioned sites. But hey, the hotel’s got an acceptable bed and the Gorkha beer (authentic Himalayan brew) is cold.



In Bhaktipor.



So many gods surround me; maybe someone invented the One-God-Concept because no one could keep them all straight. This city abounds in Presences, some sleeping outside of temples, others deciphering
the murmurings within.






-Hinduism intertwines their gods, humans, and animals so that they transcend fable and hearken back to a primitive and elementary relationship with the world, familiar to the Greeks but now long gone.

-We began somewhere,
in some star system somewhere,
and it might as well be this one,
And here,
on Earth.
For Hindus,
we began inevitably.
Hindus imagine that their beliefs
amount to a simple playing out
of the immutable laws of the Universe.
We are here
because
we have to be here.

-Should we ever have to start over,
the tenets of Hinduism
will be our first religion
because they lie close by
to the First Principles of the Universe.

-What did Prometheus do?
He stole language,
The fire of myth,
from the gods of Olympus
and out of Animals,
and by that one act,
he made us Humans.

-Zeus punished him.

-Hinduism, less threatened than the Olympians, welcomed humans into a world of gods
and the animals whence they came.

Even up to this day.

India and, to a lesser extent, Nepal, abound in gods on every street corner, temples glowing with flowers lit by candles and the well-wishes of myriad humans accepting and reveling in their god’s proximity, and their god’s easy acceptance of the human devotion, and everyone getting along just fine with animals everywhere: monkeys in garbage cans, cows sitting on the road among the cars and trucks, pigs rooting in the water by the road, and chickens too numerous to count.

More than peering through the façade, I imagine that I am transporting myself through to a time and place when today and 3000 years ago coexist simultaneously.





-This potter uses techniques that have changed little in all those thousands of years:
clay, water and a spinning wheel- techniques
more visceral than intellectual.
Like Hinduism itself.
In our own shop in Oregon, we cast an ancient metal, pewter, in molds of our own making and throw pots on a wheel in an entirely recognizable similarity to the potter in Bhaktipour, not because one potter has copied another, but because the medium has demanded these similarities for millennia.
According to Hindus, inasmuch as the Human Race will forever rediscover the basic beliefs and practices of Yoga,
so Pottery,
the marriage of fire and earth,
the stuff of Prometheus,
is an art that will always reassert itself for those artisans who care.

-How far we feel from the truly elemental!
Yet how simple to rediscover that which already exists!


-On the way to Nagrikot, guardrails are all too few and the precipice too sheer!
It's hard to know where to begin. Nagrikot amounts to no more than just a lookout from the top of a small mountain from where you can catch a glimpse of the really big ones. To get to the small mountain, however, involves a harrowing drive on a road fit only for motorcycles, of which there are hundreds, but that doesn’t stop cabs like this one I'm in,
or even enormous tourist buses.

-Like I said, no guardrails.

-The driver wants me to snap some photos on the ascent because he said it might be dark on the way down.

-I'm thinking, "No way".

-No sooner do we get to the top then I tell him to start back, which seems to disappoint him. I think he feels that I am missing out on the sunset over the Himalayas.

-Not wanting it to be, possibly, my last sunset, I decide that I'll buy the postcard.

-At the moment, I am sitting in the cab outside a police station because, on the descent, a motorcycle passed us and yelled something rude to the cab driver, but, since it was in Nepalese, it went right by me. But not by the cab driver. In the next little village, he saw the moto driver and pulled over and started yelling at him. Of course, the cops arrived with their machine guns, and then all the rest of the village because what else is there to do in the middle of Nepalese Nowhere?
The cabby pointed out the cyclist and the cops started yelling at him and pushed him around. The crowd closed in on the cab and I heard someone yelling "Americani".
I was wishing, then, that the cab driver had just let those few rough words pass. You know, be a big guy about it, and all.
But no, a major federal case seemed to be in the making. I asked the driver what was going on and he said that we couldn’t have people treating foreigners this way, as he got out of the cab and disappeared into the police station with the motorcyclist, who had followed us down the mountain.
Twenty minutes ago, he said this would take two minutes.
Frankly, from a tired foreigner's point of view, I'm willing to let bygones be bygones and let's get back on the road.

-I can’t even imagine a taxi driver acting like this back in the U.S. One interpretation might be the playing out of the old adage, “it takes a village to raise a child.” Another may be a manifestation of wealth and power asserting itself over the less defenseless. Whichever, the acvtions of my cab driver, while beyond the pale in America, definitely fell within the bounds of acceptable behavior here in Nepal.
His English, while good, probably does not include “busybody.”

Finally, back in the hotel, I turn on the TV, hoping to see how the cricket tournament is going and I find that there has been a terrible earthquake in Japan and there is a tsunami headed across the Pacific Ocean, towards Oregon.
Suddenly, I feel so far away.
I know the wave will never reach Eugene, but what a strange feeling to know that I'm half a world away and a monster wall of water threatens them- and they're asleep.
I feel so bad for the people of Japan.
The pictures on BBC are difficult to believe.
Our world, our cherished planet Earth, our Mother, lashing out at us,
washing out of us,
dreams, hopes, futures.
I feel so bad for the people of Japan.
I start to cry.
Darkness has fallen outside.
I lie on my bed in this rickety old hotel and cry.
Somehow, being on this side of the world makes me feel so much more a part of the tragedy than I might otherwise, if I were home.

-And then the lights in the hotel go out!
What the hell?
The TV goes off and I fumble through my stuff for my little flashlight.
Wow. Hotels are really dark. Not only will I always remember the light, but extra batteries, too.
I now understand that traveling off the beaten path requires a few added accessories...

-The lights go back on.
TV on.
I get halfway through wondering about what’s going...
TV and lights off again!

Before I have a chance to hop off the bed again, the lights and TV return.
I love my flashlight.
This would not be quite so unnerving if it weren’t happening while the Earthquake in Japan, and the aftershocks, weren’t still occurring.

-I take the stairs down to the front desk (no elevator!) and make sure that there has been no earthquake. They assure me that those things only happen in Japan.
Wow, they established that line of defense pretty quickly!
And incidentally, they say that the hotel has been constructed to withstand a 15 earthquake. Assuming that they mean 15 on the Richter Scale, that would be an earthquake hundreds of times more powerful than the one in Japan.
While I don't believe them, it seems impolite to scoff. I'm at least glad that they are considering these possibilities.
Namaste.


The next morning in Kathmandu, at the airport, I board Buddha Air for the flight up into the Himalayans. Buddha Air- someone has a sense of humor. It is already cold but I am grateful to have a window seat. Luckily, the plane's wings are on top of the fuselage so it will be easier to see below us. There is an entire fleet of aircraft taking off simultaneously.
-What a great way to make a living- flying people up to Mt. Everest every day. If a mere taxicab driver can have people pulled off the street and arrested, these pilots must personally know the President!

-We are scheduled to cruise at 21000 feet, which is 7000 feet below the top of Mt Everest. The pilot invites me to come into the cockpit, just at the moment we turn towards Everest. Seeing the Himalayas out in front of us, head on, I take my eyes off of where my feet are going and miss the step up into the actual cockpit. I keep walking forward to see better and stumble and fall forward onto the controls!
I grab for something, anything that hasn't a handle. And the pilot, who up to that point had been smiling and welcoming, lunges at me, grabbing me before we de-incarnate together. I have visions of sending the entire plane into the side of Mr. Everest.

-He laughs!
-I love this guy!

I can't imagine what the TSA would say about passengers in the cockpit, I can’t imagine anyone laughing but, wow, the view is terrific. At the moment, the plane is headed directly at Mt Everest. It's so rare to see anything head-on from an airplane anyway, let alone this!

-A woman, who mentions that she is from the Philippines, sits down to look out the window (I have a window seat) at the mountains. We both remark at how little snow there is, except for the highest peaks.
She says that the climate, the world is changing. Look at what happened in Japan.
I tell her how glad I am that the Tsunami missed her homeland, though mentioning it only brings the nearness that I was feeling about yesterday's disaster, closer.

-Leaving Nepal

-Later that afternoon, I fly Air India to Varanasi.
It takes five separate security screenings, with pat-downs, to finally get on the plane, the final one on the very steps upon entering the plane's cabin.
I hope that it's just security people with too much time on their hands, rather than some kind of alert.
After reading my guidebooks, I may have scheduled overly ambitiously my stay in Varanasi.
Every chapter begins, "you will either hate this city or consider it the highlight....."
I'm try not to dwell on the references to hyper-aggressive touts and smoldering corpses being tossed into the Ganges River.
Up here at 30,000 feet, all that still seems pretty far away, but we are getting ready to land.


-After all these days in Asia, India seems more enigmatic than before I arrived. After all that I've read, after all that people have said, the haze over everything only gets thicker.
I have a hard time reconciling human sacrifice which ended only in 1835, with all these love-preaching yogis on television.

-I leave the airport in a pre-paid taxi and we drive no more than 1/2 kilometer and we stop in the sun and wait.
And wait.
I wish I had booked an air-conditioned cab, but I thought it would be a quick trip.
On the other hand, I couldn't have known that the President of India is visiting Varanasi and is trying to get to the airport we just left.
On the way into town, I would like to hold my camera out the car window and snap the onrushing torrent of traffic but I'm afraid I might not only lose my camera, but also my arm!

Oh, thank you! The driver refuses to answer his mobile!

I decide that I need an ally in Varanasi, so I hire Panday, the cabdriver, to pick me up tomorrow morning at 5:30 a.m., in order to get a boat ride on the Ganges at dawn.
I have no idea how I am managing this much initiative, after not sleeping at all last night so I wouldn't miss the flight to Everest.


Later in the day in the restaurant, I am recording a man playing on a flute off to my left, while I am surrounded by table after table of acolytes all dressed in white except for one table of monks in orange. People who walk in kiss the hand of one of the monks.
I'm in over my head.
But it's really cool, somehow.
When it becomes evident that there is no possible way of understanding what is going on around me, I remember what Don Juan said to Carlos Castaneda viz., open the eyes wide and let the world in, without judgment.

-The only part of this that centers me is the maitre'd who keeps stopping by asking me if all is good and do I want another glass of wine, my glass, I might add, being the only glass of wine in the restaurant.

-Big monk himself came over near my table and I smiled at him and he smiled at me and I wondered if I (being the only westerner in the room) looked as strange to him as he looked to me.

-Went next door and bought myself a new shirt. I told the guy at the front desk that it was a chancy thing to do without my wife here but I had to do it, being down to a single shirt.

-Across the street, there's a big festival going on but, you know what, Varanasi is a big enough festival for me right now.
India's beating South Africa in cricket.
I bought a second shirt.

I enjoy hotels with intimate little bars where, after a meal, it’s easy to sit and talk to people.
The bartender wants me to open a bar in the States and hire him.
I'm reading "Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist".
And I have to get up to see Hindus on the Ganges