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Mr. Raja's
Neighborhood
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"Night Moves"
from Mister Raja's Neighborhood
© 1986 by Jeff Greenwald
Night moves...in a plush living room with the mosquitoes buzzing,
the sound of bells outside, always bells even if they're only
voices, the dogs that never stop barking, the arrogant horns of
the nouveau-riche, sound of my own breathing, arrogance of the
man alone. Three and a half weeks and already a surfeit of tales
to tell. My senses are sharpening to what's going on around here
and I'm keeping good company, although none of it stays the night.
Only the 'skeeters....
At night, like now, it's usually reflections on what the day wasn't,
and sometimes a rare sweet jerk-off to the tune of one of these
Newar beauties drawing her sari, all five meters of it, deliciously
through my crotch. But there's no point being desperate. Everybody's
settled in to their own private safety, and I'm on the waiting
list. Come what may, I can't hold on to stateside expectations;
everything's drilled at a different calibre here.
Here. What do I see? Gods and clouds reflected in scummy puddles;
my own reflection in a bowl of mo-mo soup; the brown faces with
white teeth and a weird sense of what's funny that I seem to share;
the holes burned through my stack of typing paper from the smouldering
incense I forgot about; a tree stump hammered thick with ten thousand
nails, each one a prayer to the goddess of smallpox; rainbows
every evening as the sun breaks under the thick belly of the sky
and shoots to where it's been raining.
But it hasn't rained for two days now, and you could cut the air
with a khukuri. It's impossible to move from point A to point
B without a thin scum forming on your body. No amount of the parasite-polluted
water can clean you for long. Scratch mosquito bites and worms
of dirt roll under your fingers. It won't last long.
I know it doesn't sound very appealing, but the monsoon does have
its own peculiar beauty. It's like living in the elbow of a question
mark.
Write me a letter and you're in my world, but I know damned well
it's a stranger world than any of my friends out there can speculate.
We carry sticks to fend off rabid dogs, boil the buffalo milk
for 20 minutes before daring to drink it. The flowers that grow
here eat human flesh, and all our peanut butter is imported from
India. Twice a day the electricity fails, plunging us into darkness
or silent light. The nearest ocean is a thousand miles away.
As I came out of Narayan's Pie Shop this evening I saw an odd
scene transpiring in the center of the pitch-blacked-out intersection
just outside the popular haunt's front door. Someone had built
a weird little shrine on the ground, with Indus Valley-esque clay
figurines, incense, a burning candle, an offering of cooked rice
and about a dozen 5-paise coins (100 paise in a rupee; one rupee
worth about a nickle). It was all right out there, on the scrambled
pavement, spared by the wheels of rickshaws and bicycles that
hurried by in the otherwise dark. I crept up to have a look, then
asked the kid running the "pharmacy" next door was the story was.
"For coots," he said cryptically.
"Coots??"
"No, no, coats!" He started to laugh. "Like night-time they are
coming, bad coats."
Suddenly I understood. Everything in Nepal is understood suddenly,
or not at all.
"Ghosts!," I shouted. "You mean ghosts!"
"Yes, yes! Goats!"
We had established that the bizarre construction somehow related
to spirits, but any other attempt at drawing the boy out was futile.
By the time I glanced back at the shrine a dog had arrived and
was gobbling up the rice. The ragged kids came by and stole the
coins. A passing rickshaw smashed the figurines. Still, the candle
did not go out.
I returned to Narayan's. A Tibetan woman had come in with a wounded
crane she's picked up in the street. It wouldn't eat. The bird's
wings looked fine, but the eyes held a completely resigned expression.
The thing wasn't even fully developed; maybe it had been born
sick. I ran next door to the medicine shop, returned with a plastic
eye-dropper and showed the Tibetan how to force-feed the crane
sugar water. She took over and I left, feeling like a regular
bodhisattva of compassion.
Rode home through the unimaginable stinks and the hulking shadows
of sleeping cows, the racy panic of barking dogs, black alleyways
illuminated for blinding instants as gigantic buses heave by,
spewing clouds of diesel, black on black, to the posh safety,
the rugs and warm lamps and wicker of this house. Sometimes I
just want to bolt the door behind me, even though there's nothing
and no one to fear. It's an E-ticket ride out there.
The fact remains that Nepal is a different world, and the edges
of Asia scrape incessantly against what's common and true to us-in-America.
Even the little things. Drinking tea this morning in the offices
of Himalayan Steel, a spry clerk asked me to guess his age. The
game never fails to delight the Nepalese.... I regarded the man,
his eyes alive, his posture erect, hair a distinguished gray above
a virtually wrinkle-free face (enlivened by a red tika-mark on
his forehead) and guessed, charitably, fifty-five. Both he and
my translator broke into laughter. "Guess again." All right; I
guessed sixty-six. "I'm sorry," my liason admitted, "But Mr. Manohar
here is eighty-four years old."
So many things that are hard to believe; that I'm here at all
is a constant source of amazement. Funny how a place can be so
much home, yet so full of unexpected angles and inconveniences.
A list of things there are not: drinkable water, drinkable milk,
washing machines, dish soap, ready telephones, mailboxes, avocados,
35mm slide sleeves, toasters, ten-speeds, size 10 tennis shoes,
bowling alleys, Dos Equis beer, etc... but what is here compensates,
albeit in a different dimension.
Like the fantastic Swayambhunath temple, high on a hill inhabited
by monkeys; I love to go up on full moon nights and watch dusk
descend upon the Kathmandu Valley. Since it's the monsoon the
cloudscapes are beyond imagining, puffing like huge white blowfish
over the towers and pagodas, sometimes running like quicksilver
over the shoulders of the hills. From inside the monastery comes
the anamelodic rhythm of a puja as saffron-clad monks ring thick
brass bells and blow through horns shaped from human bone...and
all around the massive stupa, butter lamps flicker in the breeze.
Night-time is alive and full of mystery. Riding my HERO bicycle
over the potted, muddy streets, I catch glimpses of other worlds
at every turn. Two men working by the light of a bare bulb, planing
huge sheets of wood with primitive hand tools; doorways full of
sleeping humans and dogs; the shadow of a sacred cow, shapelessly
chewing some rinds thrown out as an offering from a nearby fruitseller.
Down the alleys I sometimes glimpse a temple, where vermillion-smeared
gods and goddesses dance erotically in the darkness, or where
the intense, all-seeing eyes of Buddha peer out with enlightened
indifference. Rickshaws, pedestrians and other bikes come bumping
out of the blackness at any moment, and only quick serving cheats
a collision.
During the afternoon the sidewalks are a tangled maze of merchandise
and humanity where one can find spectacular printed cloth, incense,
padlocks, Tibetan thangkas, bangles, Yak cigarettes, lentils,
sugar, tofu and tea. Seedy individuals materialize by your shoulder:
"Hey, hashish? Heroin? Cocaine? Change money?" Or it'll be some
hopeful entrepreneur who reaches into his satchel and extracts
a traditional khukuri knife in a gilded sheath, or a copper prayer-wheel,
and waves either or both in front of your face until you break
away with an oath and the requisite smile. Grain-sellers squat
in the stalls alongside huge scales, living on the thinning profit
margin; a grotesque butchery displays the yellow-dyed head of
a freshly-slaughtered goat on a spike outside his shop, its guts
spilled out alluringly below.
I wander through my day-to-day, not yet settled, and wonder how
the hell I plan to do justice to all this, and how long it's going
to take. All my ambitious plans seem so superficial, as if as
if I naively believed I could live in one of Asia's liveliest
cities and concentrate only on cuteness. There is a dark side
here as well, and it cannot be ignored by anyone who hopes to
give more than the tourist-guide impression of the Kingdom.
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