This, Too, Will Fade

We pull into Yeshi Lama’s Kathmandu home just as the rain begins to fall; a relief from the smog-locked Delhi I’d just escaped. Yeshi’s wife, Susma, greets my arrival with pumpkin curry, roti and masala tea, and to the sound of thunder, I eat as they brief me on the destination that awaits us in the northwestern Himalayas.

“Humla is only now opening up to the outside world,” Yeshi tells me. But in such disconnected remoteness, and with next to nothing to export, the impoverished villages of that province face major sustainability issues. We are to fly out on the day after tomorrow, and begin our journey towards Yalbang, the Humli village where Yeshi was born. “So rest,” he tells me, and leads me to my top-floor bedroom overlooking the bowl that is Kathmandu: a humming human hive.

Unable to adjust to the time change, I wake in a gray-blue hour of dawn. I lie awake, thinking of home and how it already feels otherworldly. As I jot a few notes in my journal about the past 36 hours spent in airports and the thunderstorm that flashed in the distance as we flew above the ochre lights of Islamabad, the Lama family awakes and the home stirs. Outside, the city’s soundscape of motorbikes and dog fights, honking traffic and the neighbour’s roosters, drown out the garden songbirds. To begin the day, we sit crosslegged at the living room table with roti, boiled eggs, Nepali tea and the maple syrup I’d brought them from home. Grateful, they smile at me and wonder what they should eat it with.

Yeshi’s younger brother then takes me on the back of his motorcycle through the serpentine streets of the capital. Everywhere there are prayer flags, strung diagonally from rooftops and across the roads, hanging still in the humidity. The damage of last year’s earthquake is still visible, but camouflaged by the city’s usual chaotic nature. Sacred cows share the streets with pedestrians, unbothered, as a man herds his black water buffalo along the traffic. A decapitated dog lies twisted and half-hidden in a potato sack. Steps away, a pristine glass-doored ILLY coffee shop sits nearly empty. Through all of this intoxicating detail, it is the sight of the crimson-robed monks, whether they be but children skipping ahead or adults, standing in doorways and shopping in corner stores, so integrated in everyday life, that I

find most special about these streets.

Twenty-four hours later, Yeshi and I are boarding a two-engine bush plane at Tribhuvan International Airport. The first destination will be Nepalgunj, on the Indian border, where we will stay for the night before catching the morning flight to Simikot, known as the gateway to the trails of Humla, and the great Mount Kailash. The rains of the pre-monsoon streak across the small circular windows as we taxi along the airstrip. All around me, Nepali and Indian passengers flip through newspapers. A few English headlines offer flash news in bold print:

“Many Children Still Out Of School in Mahottari,” “What My Mother Sees in Hillary”, “Search Resumes For Missing Air Egypt Flight”, “Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride”.
Yeshi sits a few rows behind me with Mr. Shalav Rana, an NGO program officer who will be accompanying us into the mountains for development assessments.

That evening, the three of us sit in the garden of our small, blue-roofed guesthouse. The full moon of June rises slowly, heavy and yellow, as we toast to the journey ahead and enjoy full plates of thali. Bats flutter against the darkening sky, and watching them, I am filled with the excitement of an approaching unknown.

An even smaller plane carries us into the mountains the next day. We are glad to leave Nepalgunj’s airport, cursed with unscheduled fligths, bribes, and distressed local travellers who’ve lose their seats. In the turmoil, I caught sight of an elderly woman sitting calmly, adorned with heavy traditional jewelry and Tibetan dress, holding her year-old grandchild. With this infant, her husband, and her daughter, she tells us she will walk even further than our 4-day trek in the mountains. For them, it is but a common trip home.

Out of clear skies, we descend onto the airstrip, unrolled like a short black carpet among the infant Himalayan peaks. Simikot’s airport and village marks the end of one world and the beginning of another: a place without roads, cars, telephone wires. As Matthiessen wrote in his iconic “The Snow Leopard,” it is as though the mountains are centuries-long.

After lunch, our bags are loaded onto a pair of mountain horses and we begin without delay, under the heat of a two o’clock sun. The trail climbs to a rocky point overlooking white-hooded peaks, before gently coiling downward into the first valley. We move from stone, to ancient conifers, to low-growing deciduous trees where roaming goats gather. On our way down, we take a moment’s rest at a tea house and sip instant coffee out of tin cups. A breeze blows uphill from the valley, gently stirring the pines and filling the air with dust. A boy of about five sits next to me, staring unabashedly, as Shalav mentions that he must only rarely see people like me. His hands and cheeks are cracked dry by the elements. Unable to communicate, I offer him gum, and soon realize that he does not know what it is.

We carry on, and cross the valley’s river by what feels like an early dusk, due to the peaks that shade us from any sunlight. Since leaving Kathmandu, I have seen no foreigners, and we share the trail with goat herders, a pack of mules, and locals heading home. But as we pass a Hindu village, the children run out excitedly, some eager to test their schoolbook English on us while others, especially the youngest, yell for sweets, a call that rings in the air as “chock-late”. I take it as a sign that not all of these bright-eyed youths are so unaccustomed to white visitors.

On tired legs, it is only by dark that we arrive at the stone home where we will spend the night. Nestled in the slope by the Karnali River (Nepal’s longest tributary originating from the Tibetan plateau) the guesthouse sits alone and between two villages. While Shalav and Gokul, our mountain guide, opt to sleep inside, Yeshi and I sit in our sleeping bags on the roof. The air is unusually warm, as if it is trapped in this valley, blowing south then north, and back again. That night, sleep is uneasy and dreamless. It is as though the moon, shedding her silver light over the jagged peaks and tumultuous Karnali, nudges me awake: “I am here.”

Early the next day, we cross the clay-colored waters of the river and climb a steep trail in order to visit the village of Muchu, and the students of its small elementary school. As we pause for breath, we listen to jackals crying to each other from opposing ridges. I scan the brown terrain, but their haunting howl does not betray them to my sight. Muchu is an outcrop of stone homes, between which impressive pillars of prayer flags flap in the wind. Weeks later, when I am back in India, a good friend teaches me their significance as we sit beneath some in a garden: “When the wind blows through the flags, the prayers are believed to be scattered and carried to those in need,” he says. “Their colours are intentionally made to fade, to remind us that nothing in life is permanent.”

We depart before noon and continue onward toward Kermi. For a while, thunder rolls in black clouds at our back, filling the valley’s corridor before eventually over-taking us. We take shelter in a tea house with but one small window offering dim rain-light, and to the deep glow of embers, discuss this changing province. Yeshi tells me about the road China is building into Humla from the north. A road wide enough for cars, that will bring trade, jobs, and an inkling of the 21st century to these people. These thoughts follow me later, and from them sprouts an unexpected sadness as we approach Kermi, at the sight of a woman standing beside her black cow in a barley field. I realize that this way of life, so remote and primitive and so close to the earth and land, will eventually be replaced with something akin to modernity. As the new road unwinds through these mountains, its villages will change. Another culture will soon be claimed by the reaching hands of a relentless world. The traditional clothes, the heavy-beaded necklaces of turquoise and fire-red stones, the homes with walls of hand-piled rock, beams and window frames carved by the local carpenter, made of timber cut in these woods. The look in a pair of eyes that does not know a word of your language, but blesses you with a silent “namaste” anyway.

What will become of all this difference? This uniqueness, this keeping-alive of something old, when the new road finally connects this remote province to the world's fastest consuming and producing country. The inevitable loss of something that we will never be able to regain or recreate saddened me in Kermi, as we entered the village under gentle mountain rain.

Only hours away from the brown and arid Muchu, Kermi sits lush and mysterious, cloaked in mist. Lime-coloured barley terraces descend from its houses all the way to the Karnali below. The opposing escarpment is a rampart of rock covered in pines, silhouetted like the figures that stand watching us from the roofs.

We spend that evening in Yeshi’s grandfather’s home, gathered around the central wood-stove, drinking butter tea and eating tsampa out of politesse. I am fascinated by their tea cups and ornate silver covers, apparently more useful to keep the swarming house flies from drowning in the drink than to keep it warm. A worn copy of Epictetus’ “The Art of Living” lies on the table, making me wonder who in this home would be reading the classic in English print. A steadfast translator, Yeshi asks my question aloud, and explains to me that the fourteen year-old boy to whom the book belongs is currently at Yalbang’s boarding school, where we should arrive by tomorrow afternoon.

After dinner, Yeshi and I follow Gokul and Shalav to Kermi’s hot springs, so that we may bathe after these two full days of trek. They point to chimneys of steam rising from the mountains into the mist, making it appear as though the hot springs were the secret source of all this cloud cover in the Himalayas. The water is scalding, and we inch ourselves into the shallows, but soon we are laughing and watching darkness descend on the village below from our private baths. I think that the four of us, crouched in our underwear in the steam, must look like the red-faced monkeys of Japan that bathe in boiling winter pools.
That night is moonless and starless, and we return to our sleeping bags by the light of our headlamps.

As expected, we arrive at Yalbang by the following afternoon. The half-day’s walk took us in and out of a valley of ferns, white stones, and glacial ribbons flowing between emerald trees. Gokul ran about looking

for a maple tree, to show me that Nepal, too, hosts a derivative of the Canadian emblem.
Reluctantly leaving this sanctuary, we climbed slabs of dynamited rock, indicating the beginning of the Chinese road development. Further along the path, we stood before an immense orange grater, sitting idle and alien in this land.

Before making the last climb to our destination, we spent a half-hour on the Karnali’s riverbed. Grey Himalayan doves swept above the waters, heading upstream, as a yak silently emerged form the trees and came to drink in the shallows. I moved slowly from my companions in an attempt to photograph the long-haired beast, but noticing me, it sluggishly returned to the trees like a spirit of the woods.
Beyond where it stood, the wall of the gorge rises as a sheer face of granite, several hundred feet high, before climbing ragged and slanted, ending in snowfields against a cloudy sky.
I am just a speck. An insect in a gorge, looking up at these titans of rock, that grow to touch the vast sky and the universe beyond: Earth’s final frontier.

At the Yalbang school gates, a group of students stand waiting for us in the rain, white silk Khatas folded across their upturned palms. We bow before them as they place the delicate scarves around our neck in the traditional Tibetan motion of welcome. Much like the children of Muchu, they are shy, and smile with their eyes to the ground, but are nevertheless excited to see us. After tea and lunch, we are led to the unfinished soccer field, and sit aside the school staff and headmaster as the children perform a march to the beat of drums in ceremonious welcome. Behind them, the land drops steeply to the river and rises again, as if the mountain had been sliced intentionally by the strike of a knife. Looking south-east, from this high vantage point, I can gaze upon the shining Karnali that snakes through the rock and trees where we have just come from. Beyond, a dark cloud is dusting the highest peak in snow.

This is the view that greets the children every morning, when they wake from their dorms and stand on the wooden balcony. They are surrounded by all this natural might and fragility, as they perform their daily tasks of soaping their clothes on the sun-kissed rocks, showering beneath the hose, walking to their first class. The only sign of the world I belong to is the coming and going of red choppers, high in the sky, carrying Indian tourists to Kailash.

That night, when I am invited to say a few words to the children in the hall where the entire school is gathered, I tell them about the five flights and four days trek I took to meet them. And I can see from the look in their eyes, as they watch me cross-legged on the floor, that the world I come from appears grand. The one you and I belong to.

Where we wake to incoming e-mails and Facebook, commute through traffic, study in rooms with windows that look out onto concrete and glass. A world of comfort and privilege, of high speed and relentless ambition, but one without children who come to you from a barley field and ask you for chocolate. Without “namastes” spoken softly to every passer-by on a trail. A world without the absence in an earthy slope when it holds a hidden jackal. Without a silence that, surely, the starry river between Himalayan peaks nursed into existence. A world where man-made lights have dried that river from our sight, its silence replaced by our modern demands for a never-ending more.

Of course, I say none of this to the children. I tell them, with an empathetic heart, that if they study hard and find something that they love to do, the entire world opens up for them. That they can go anywhere. Be anyone.

Since that moment, I have taken the road home across the mountains and returned to the 21st century. I often think of what Yeshi told me, when we spoke of the Chinese road entering Humla, that day we’d gotten caught in the rain outside Kermi. When I confessed to him my reluctance to see all development projects as positive, he replied to me by saying: “But these people are not museum pieces, Liam. They just want to live a normal life.”

Weeks later, seated in a KLM flight bound for home, I pulled from my journal the card my father wrote me when I’d left. I re-read the anonymous quote he’d inscribed there, about the way “we travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.”
I had flown across an ocean and two continents to chase something I felt had slipped from my life, from my grasp, while I had been studying in my world of concrete and glass. And on the other end of all those miles, a child slept in a dorm overlooking an immense valley, dreaming of all that lay beyond.