Sleeping Tigers (27 page)
T
he bus was so crowded that Jon and I had to sit separately on the way to Pokhara. It would be a blessed relief not to have to make conversation with him, I thought, until the enormous Hindu woman sharing my seat started waging a space war. Her broad buttocks strained her sari as she opened and closed her thighs like fireplace bellows. She advanced her bid for sole occupancy by spitting red betel juice onto the floor every few minutes, turning the tips of my sneakers bright orange.
I rode with my hip flattened against the hot metal side of the bus, alternately worrying that my backpack would fly off the roof, where it had been tied with the other luggage, and panicking over the driver’s blatant disregard for petty road obstacles like pedestrians and farm animals.
Hindi music screeched from a speaker above the driver’s head and a three-dimensional plastic portrait of Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, glistened in rainbow hues above the dashboard. Ganesh lay in his mortal mother’s arms and gazed down upon us with dewy eyes.
At the back of the bus, Jon was jammed in place by a group of Nepalese men who hung from the overhead bars, smoked cigarettes, hawked spit, farted, and fell asleep with their bodies draped across any seat they chose. At the next stop, the carsick woman beside me vomited into the hem of her sari. Jon grabbed my hand and tugged me out the back door of the bus.
“Oh, no,” I said, as he pointed at the bus roof and held a hand out to haul me up a short ladder.
Jon shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’ve probably got a whole inch of space left on that bench seat.” He began to climb. I saw that my seat companion was now fully inclined against the window, her face pressed flat as a raw steak on the glass, and decided to follow.
Except for a few Nepali teens sucking on cigarettes with petulant looks, we had the bus roof to ourselves. I settled into the nest of tarp-covered luggage.
We began a steep ascent through a graduated series of flooded rice terraces. At one point we passed a group of men swinging sledgehammers against the rocky hillside. Women worked in the fields behind them, their children as quick as hens in the dusty roadside. The kids waved and Jon waved back with both hands high above his head, grinning. I clutched the ropes securing the luggage and hoped the driver knew his knots.
In Pokhara, we caught our backpacks as the driver tossed them from the bus roof, mine almost knocking me flat, then started walking. The town was a welcome relief after noisy Kathmandu. With its mountain views, palm trees, and calm lake edged with cafes and small hotels, Pokhara felt like a resort.
Before hiking farther up into the mountains, we stopped briefly at a Tibetan restaurant overlooking the lake, where we shared a plate of rice and lentils. Jon encouraged me to use my cell phone here to call my mother, since there wasn’t any reception in the village where we would be staying. I did, and praised myself afterward for staying calm, for focusing only on the fact that I would be seeing Cam that night. I didn’t want to tell my mother that Cam was sick until I knew for sure how bad it was.
Jon was companionable now that he had resigned himself to my company, other than flaming on about Nepal’s devastation by tourists in the past few decades. He raged on for several minutes about this, until I held up a hand to stop him.
“You can’t expect a country to stay completely disconnected from the rest of the world,” I said. “What makes you think anyone wants to live in such grinding poverty forever? Why should the Nepalese women keep hauling water in buckets, when so much of the world has faucets?”
He scoffed. “Oh, we’ve raised life expectancy in Nepal, all right, from 40 to maybe 55. But at what cost to the land? Or to the planet, for that matter?”
He had a point. But I was saved from agreeing by the appearance of a young mother dressed in a sari, who stopped by our table with her three children. At first I thought she was begging. Then I realized that she held a half dozen coral and turquoise bracelets for sale.
She and Jon negotiated in Nepali while the solemn children studied the food heaped on our plates. The youngest was a toddler who clutched a yellow wildflower and held it out to me tentatively, pointing at my plate. I gave her the leftover food and accepted the flower. Her older siblings crowded around the plate, too, the three of them squatting to eat with their hands, completely silent as they slid the food into their mouths.
I thought of the classroom parties in the elementary school where I taught, of the mothers bringing plates of treats for birthdays, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter. Inevitably, I ended up throwing out half the food, scraping entire plates of cookies and doughnuts into the vast rubber barrels. My students consumed more food during one party than these kids would see in a month.
Eventually, Jon gave the woman a handful of bills in exchange for the bracelets. When she’d left, I leaned forward to look them over. “Those are beautiful.”
He handed them to me. “They’re yours.”
Startled, I looked up and met his eyes. “Why?”
He shrugged. “I only bought them because she needed the money. What would I do with them?”
“All right.” I put on one of the bracelets and tucked the rest of them into my backpack. “Christmas shopping is almost done.”
He laughed, and we started walking again.
The trail out of Pokhara was a roller coaster path through green rice terraces. It was hotter here than Kathmandu and the humid air hung like a damp blanket across my shoulders. I kept a bandana handy to mop sweat from my face.
Jon continued to make conversation, but I was too distracted by worries about Cam to pay much attention. If my brother was really sick, how would I ever get him down out of the mountains to a clinic? My sides cramped as I kept pace with Jon, who had a burro’s stamina and fancy footwork.
We walked for hours, stopping occasionally to rest our packs on stone walls erected just for that purpose. The only other people on this trail were porters carrying goods in enormous conical baskets strapped to their foreheads and resting on their backs. One group ferried cooking utensils and bedding as they trotted past us uphill. The last porter in line had strapped a wooden table to his back; I could only speculate that this was some sort of household moving company.
The loose trails were hard on my feet and ankles despite my thick-soled hiking boots. I couldn’t imagine how the porters managed the rocky ground. They were either barefoot or wore the same inflexible plastic flipflops I’d bought in Kathmandu and then abandoned because wearing them was like having bath toys strapped to my feet.
By mid-afternoon, it had started raining. Jon whipped a poncho out of his shorts pocket and draped it over his head and shoulders without missing a beat. Karin had loaned me a poncho; I’d thoughtlessly crammed it into the bottom of my pack and had to stop to burrow for it. Finally, Jon took pity on me and held things I removed so that I wouldn’t have to put my books and clothing down on the soupy ground.
“So why do you know so much about Nepal?” I asked, struggling to twist the poncho around once I realized I’d put it on backwards. “Have you spent a lot of time here?
“Yes.” Jon regarded me for a moment, smiling at the rubbery trap I’d made out of my own rain gear, then said, “After college, I was a do gooder like you. I went with the Peace Corps to Africa first, then to Nepal with a non-profit. Our group in Nepal was building a road. I thought I was doing the right thing, making it possible for people here to travel more easily. You know, more access to doctors and fresh fruits and vegetables. That sort of thing.”
But, once they’d built the road, Jon explained, the trucks from India and Kathmandu could drive right up into the village. “The villagers were getting plastic shoes and shampoo and fresh vegetables, sure. Progress, but only in a way.”
“Why only in a way?” I popped my head through the poncho hood like a snapping turtle darting out of its shell.
“Soon, it became abundantly clear that people living higher up in the mountains who used to come down to the lower villages to sell things they’d made or grown themselves couldn’t compete with what was trucked up from the city. They began to suffer because of the road we’d built.”
We resumed walking after Jon helped me zip my belongings back into the pack. “Did you leave then?” I asked.
“Yep. I thought that if I was going to make bad decisions no matter how good a guy I tried to be, then I might as well make buckets of money and have fun instead. So I became the king of marketing and got addicted to all those things Westerners can’t do without. I made money to spend it. I even got married, but my wife wanted to be a mother and I couldn’t see bringing kids into a dying world, so that was the end of that. When my parents passed on and left me the house and a little money, I repented my evil ways. I moved home so that I could give up working and focus on community service.”
“Have you ever been back to that village?”
Jon grinned. “That’s where we’re staying, in fact. And it gives me hope.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because that road we built couldn’t withstand the monsoons, the avalanches, the dust storms, or anything else Nepal dishes out. Our brand new macadam was buried beneath a rock slide within a year. People went back to walking the same old paths, and everything is as it was.”
“And that’s a good thing, right?”
He shrugged. “I guess there was nothing for me to repent after all,” he said, and upped his pace suddenly. “Come on. It’ll be dark soon. We’d better hurry and get you someplace dry.”
I muddled along behind Jon for another hour or so, blinking furiously to keep the water out of my eyes and slip-sliding along the steep trail.
At one point, we crossed a swollen, crashing river on a swaying rope bridge that looked too frayed to hold a squirrel. Jon skipped across the wooden slats. I clung to the ropes and inched my way across.
Two hours later, just when I thought I’d collapse from exhaustion, we veered off the main trail and onto a footpath that led us into a village of a dozen stone houses gathered around a muddy courtyard.
“Home sweet home!” Jon shouted over the rain, pointing out a whitewashed house with bright blue trim. “This is the hostel where RCDP volunteers stay while we work.”
I looked up at a hand-painted sign across the top of the door. It read “Shiva Tourist Lodge” in crooked blue letters. The sign dangled from a single chain, thwacking the side of the house in the stiff breeze. Far below, the valley was filled with thick clouds moving through the air like boats at full sail.
“And what kind of work are you doing, exactly?” I realized that I’d never asked him to be specific.
“The volunteers maintain a village nursery under the direction of a government director, though I have to say he’s been more absent than present,” Jon said. “That’s one reason I came—to pick up some of the slack until they get a new director for the project. We help grow tree seedlings and distribute them throughout the villages. Nepal’s forest cover has been dwindling as the population grows and people keep cutting firewood without replanting. The erosion around here has been terrible as a result.”
Before passing through the heavy wooden door to the lodge, we took off our ponchos and shook ourselves like dogs. My boots slurped and my pants stuck to my legs. I removed my shoes and wished I could do the same with my pants. The kitchen fire felt wonderful despite the black smoke filling the room. A young Nepalese woman in a shabby brown dress tended the fire. She took one look at Jon and me, giggled, set a kettle on the flames, and disappeared through another curtained doorway, taking Jon with her by the hand.
“A port in any storm,” I muttered, and studied the room. The kitchen was furnished with an enormous table and several mismatched chairs. A man sat alone at the table playing solitaire with a tattered deck of cards. The man wore nothing but a pair of cut-offs. His arms and chest were furred with a black mat of curly hair. He wore a silver cross the size of a fork on a thick chain around his neck.
Where was Cam? Jon had evaporated before I could ask him which room was my brother’s. There didn’t appear to be a hotel office. I looked around for clues, feeling like a game show contestant: Which door would lead to Cam? Which to the office? What language should I speak to this man to make myself understood?
I cleared my throat and said hello in English, since the man’s sleek dark hair and pale skin made his origins impossible to determine. He didn’t answer. I persisted. “Can you please tell me where the hotel office is?”
The man answered in English laced with a thick Spanish accent. “There is no hotel office here. This is not a hotel.”
“Well, isn’t this a lodge of some sort? Don’t volunteers stay here?”
“Many people pay to stay here.” He shrugged. “I am no volunteer. I am only staying here to visit the hot springs. I want to be healthy.”
The Spaniard certainly looked as though he were succeeding in that quest. The man’s chest and arm muscles rippled beneath his skin. This would have been appealing, had he not also exuded the musty stink of an animal in its own cave.
“Look,” I said, exasperated. “I’m looking for an American man named Cameron O’Malley. Do you know which room he’s in?”
The man dealt out a series of cards in rapid succession: ten, nine, eight and seven of hearts. He was cheating at his own game of solitaire.
