Saturday evening our friends Teri and Colin Lloyd and Erin Lloyd Denny and her husband Chris arrived in Kathmandu, and Sunday morning Don, Ian, and Leyla arrived. We all checked into the Nirvana Hotel not far from Claire’s apartment. Sunday afternoon Claire took the whole group around Kathmandu, through Thamel, Assen, and Durbar Square, and through Freak Street where the hippies used to hang out. Half the group ended up shoe shopping and the other half made our way home.
Monday Claire had to work, and Teri went to work with her, but the rest of us hopped in a taxi and visited Bodhnath, a large Buddhist stupa surrounded by a Tibetan community and many monasteries. The taxis took us to what seemed like a random street corner on a random chaotic street somewhere in Kathmandu. We asked them where Bodhnath was, they pointed, and suddenly we saw an arch, and beyond the arch a stupa that looked very much like Swayambunath, only much bigger, a world apart from the frantic street. We walked, or strolled, clockwise around the stupa, found a door and steps to walk up on it, and made the circuit several times. In addition to the regular prayer wheels, there were enormous ones housed in monasteries, larger than people. You walk around these prayer wheels and sometimes double prayer wheels, turning them as you walk. Even though there was plenty of shopping available there, the sellers weren’t pushy and the atmosphere remained peaceful.
Watching the prayerful movements of the worshippers there was fascinating and instructive. Not only was there bowing in various places and meditative walking. At one place someone had stacked about 20 bowls of corn and other pigeon delights, and worshippers would come and take a bowl, say a prayer, and scatter it to the waiting birds. We ate lunch on a rooftop looking out over the stupa, climbing a stairway that was more of a ladder to get there. How the waiters brought full trays of food up those stairs was a mystery.
From there we went to Pashupatinath, the largest Hindu temple in Kathmandu and the cremation ground. It was an area many times larger than Bodhnath and not as peaceful, much more coming and going. A young man approached us and started telling us about it, then asked if we needed a guide. At first we said no, but as he talked, and then showed his “student tourguide” card, we saw he was not only legitimate but quite knowledgeable, and he turned out to be a delightful companion. He took us all around, showing us the temple itself, which only Hindus could enter. It had a large golden bull in front of the entrance, turned to look inside and thus displaying to us its substantial hindparts. In fact, the whole place was filled with phallic and fertility symbols of various kinds.
We went inside a government-run old folks home on the grounds, which looked quite uncomfortable. Interestingly, though, when we entered the courtyard, they were doing what old folks in American nursing homes do—clapping their hands to religious musicians that had come to perform for them.
By the river we saw the pyres where bodies are cremated. We saw one that was finished, its ashes being swept into the river. A second that was nearly burned but still recognizable as a human form, its smoke rising up into our eyes and its ashes into our hair. It was striking to witness a stranger’s earthly existence ending in this way. Holy, I think. Later we saw another body shrouded in yellow and red being prepared for cremation, the family gathered around holding marigold garlands in their hands, several women weeping and one woman in particular the center of consolation. The body was put on a slanted slab close to the water and washed with the water. It was then covered with flower petals and powders, then moved to a level place. In the meantime another body was carried and and preparations begun for it.
At the same time as these, across the river a festival was being prepared. Musicians began to play, and a very happy holy man, who looked like he should have been on a 60s flower power record album cover, and could well have been smoking the substances that are legal for holy men but illegal (except one day a year) for everyone else, danced in bliss. We stayed awhile, watching the juxtaposition of life and death all happening at once in that place before we made our way home.
The next day, Tuesday, we traveled to Bhaktapur, a medieval city outside of Kathmandu. It too had a Durbar Square in front of a royal palace, filled with temples and monuments, and surrounded by souvenir shops.
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