Friday, November 03, 2006
The River
As I make my way up the ostensibly 365 steps to the Swayambunath
stupa, or the Monkey Temple in Kathmandu, I hear a clear small girl's
voice in Danish: "Ja, men det er jo ikke så slemt, far." but I am too
winded to turn around to look at what must be a very fair
blonde-haired little girl. She keeps talking and walks past me up the
stairs, but she is a small fair complexioned Nepali girl. I chat with
her in Danish, to her surprise, and her Nepali father tells me they
are on a two week visit back home from Denmark. Her mother and baby
brother stayed back in Denmark. Finally reaching the top, after
passing scores of hawkers and beggars, I sit down to simply rest and
gawk. It's hard for me to be here. I want to cry again.
I want to cry because Katmandu is so smog covered. I want to cry
because Vishnu's river, which we had to cross on a bridge, is so
filthy, so depleted, with raw sewage, wild pigs foraging large black
bags of garbage, the stench, the filth, is more than I can bear.
Perhaps I am naive, perhaps I am frail, but I don't mind. I cry.
Across the river, there is a small temple, and inside the inner
chambers where I find dark images of various Hindu gods and goddesses,
and reliefs of the Buddha, all smeared in sindhu, vermillion powder,
rice, ghee, marigolds, I start to cry again. I mourn and grieve all
this is lost to me and to my world. There is no judgement about who
and why and where. I know that the whole world is on a monumental
environmental roller coaster ride, reaching incredible speeds near the
bottom, and that the only difference between my Vancouver Island and
this place is that we hide our filth better.
I cry because I have lost so much. My Hindu Grandmother, and her daily
faithful devotions in her Takugorh, despite the incredible injustices
she suffered silently in her life, having no choice, and me sitting
beside her on the cement floor fifty years ago, is never again going
to do that for me. I cry because my Grandmother Earth also so
violated, having no choice, continues to heal herself stoically. The
river, handicapped, terrorized, continues to flow.
There is no solace in my worldliness. And that I am, worldly. I blend
into any culture I want in Katmandu, by simply changing my clothes and
language. The old Moslem tailor from Bihar and I chat in my broken
Hindi about his family and the lack of tourists due to the Maoist
insurgency. We talk about his five daughters, and his opinion that
there is really only one God for all people, and it doesn't matter
much which one you worship. The Danish bookstore owner has lived here
for ten years with his Nepali wife, and we discuss the mental
development of children who have learned more than one language before
the age of five. Two young Frenchman from Bretogne discuss the
depression and drug addiction among Tibetan monks and laugh at my
Quebecois French. I get treated differently when I wear a salwar
kameez and tikka on my forehead. My greying hair allows me to be firm
with taxi drivers and the hawkers assume I am not interested or unable
to afford their adapted-to-western-taste would-be Himalayan
merchandise, mass produced Goddess knows where. I get lots of nods and
extremely friendly smiles from Nepali women and children.
It is a pleasant distraction, all these people. But there is no solace
when the water and the air and the earth of this subcontinent, and
that of the earth, are ravaged with poisons and garbage and sewage. I
am a doer. It is hard for me to do anything here, on a short term.
After a good cry, and a rant that my children kindly listen to, the
sun rises again in my heart. The monkeys in the monkey temple are
funny. If indeed it is the end of the Kali Yuga in 2012, I for one
can't wait. I hope it comes now and I hope it comes fast. I need a
renaissance, a new cycle in the wheel of life. I need to know that
there is another way to live. That we are not inevitably greedy,
careless, cruel and violent, towards our planet and towards each
other. I need to believe that my efforts, however miniscule here, in
the form of kind words, and somewhat larger actions at home, are
meaningful and that the New Age indeed will be upon us. And I don't
care much what the new cycle is called. Just come now, and hurry. Let
the earth restore itself, let the waters run clean, let the air move
oxygen into our lungs and carbon dioxide to the flora.
