29

STUPEFIED

Bhoudhanath Plaza, Kathmandu, Nepal

The taxi stopped with a skid on the dusty tarmac, inciting a fit of honking and shouting from the cars and buses behind, while a swarm of motorcycles laden with two or even three people refused to wait for a second, screaming their engines to pull around the stationary vehicle in clouds of oily smoke. The driver ignored the abuse as if deaf to point Beth to the Tibet Guest House on the other side of the road. “It is there,” he said, seemingly excusing himself with a shrug from any U-turn to its door across such a violently busy road.

Beth, tired from her early start from Dharamsala and running to catch her flight change in New Delhi, and faintly nauseous from her first experience of Kathmandu traffic, insisted the driver make the turn by flashing him a look that could kill. She got her message across even if, for the next seconds, it was she that thought she was going to die as the old car lurched to the opposite curb between a volley of oncoming vehicles.

Once inside the hotel’s quiet sanctuary, Beth quickly checked in to her room, washed her face to settle herself, then set off again with the address given to her by Wangdu Palsang for his best contact in the city. With a faintly wry smile, Wangdu had described Temba Chering as “famous in Kathmandu,” a Tibetan exile who had worked on all the great mountains and used the money earned to amass a number of businesses including the Tibet Guest House where she was now staying. When he had left Beth at Kangra Airport first thing that morning to start her hastily organized journey, he had added enigmatically, “I am sure that Temba Chering will help you find the story you seek even if you do not yet know what it is.”

At the lobby, Beth showed the address where she had been told to meet Chering and was pointed back across the road where an immense stupa pointed into the sky above the shops and buildings that lined the street. She quickly ran the dusty gauntlet of the road once more to enter the focal point of the Tibetan community in Kathmandu.

Inside, surrounded by hotels, workshops, stores, cafés, shrines, and monasteries, the otherworldly structure at their center awed Beth. The huge dome at its base resembled the back of a bleached whale, the whitewashed plaster stained fatty yellow and sooty gray by the valley’s polluted rain. Above, a deck of peeling painted eyes looked out over the surrounding city as if staring down the cardinals of the compass. A gilt spire rose above, seemingly tethered by bowed ropes of prayer flags to stop the entire rocket-like structure from blasting into the heavens.

Instinctively Beth joined the pilgrims and tourists already merged into a slow clockwise circumambulation of the monument. The faithful devotedly held out their right arms to turn the brass prayer drums set within the base of the Bhoudhanath Stupa, the tourists mimicking them as pecking pigeons competed for empty pavement in between. As she walked, Beth searched for Temba Chering’s restaurant, the Blue Poppy.

Around her, over the chatter, the mumble of mantras, and the contradictory blasts of pop and meditation music from the surrounding shops and cafés, she heard the squawk and crackle of walkie-talkies. It was coming from the narrow side streets. Beth had reported on enough demonstrations in her career to understand what it signified. She glanced in on shadowed squads of mustering paramilitary police. Armored and helmeted like black beetles, a number held fire extinguishers, others long poles. Beth quickly understood the reason for those also. The ranks of the walkers around her began to tighten, the speed of their recitations and pacing increasing until, with some relief, Beth finally saw the bright blue painted sign of the restaurant. One of the burly Tibetans at the door seemed to almost pull her inside when she said her name and asked for the owner.

She was shown to a table and told to wait. And so she did.

Every time Beth inquired about Temba Chering the reply was that he was busy but that he knew she had arrived, and she should have what she liked from the menu in the meantime.

Still unsettled from her spontaneous and hectic journey from Dharamsala to Kathmandu and suppressing the thought that she had acted irrationally on little more than a whim—even if she was trying hard to professionally justify it as a “hunch”—she ordered only green tea and drank it watching the television mounted on the far wall cycle images of the immolation between rapidly talking heads she couldn’t understand.

An hour passed then another, a palpable feeling of tension growing in the restaurant as a procession of young Tibetan men came and went from the plaza. When the last to come in said something urgent to the two toughs at the door, they immediately bolted it and just as quickly dropped the blinds of the restaurant before pulling heavy brocade curtains across the window openings.

A few minutes later an older Tibetan, equally as tough looking as the men on the door—but better dressed—entered the dining room from the rear and walked directly to Beth’s table. Dispensing with any introduction the man, who she instantly knew to be Temba Chering, asked urgently, “Do you have a camera, Mrs. Waterman? And not a phone, I mean, a real camera with a bloody big lens?”

“Yes. I do. In here,” Beth replied, a bit taken aback by the man’s gruff manner. She patted the bag looped over her shoulder that contained her Nikon.

“Good. Then please get it out and follow me.”

Temba quickly led Beth up through the building onto a rooftop terrace. As they walked to the edge to look down on the square, hundreds of pigeons exploded up into the air around them like ashes from an erupting volcano. Beth watched as black streams of police armed with shields and batons began to run into the main square below.

Groups of young men deliberately blocked their way. Some were instantly snatched by the police and pulled struggling back into side streets where windowless vans, rear doors gaping, waited. Others dodged the riot policemen’s grasps to run or were aided by others to create struggling clots in the panicking crowd. More people began to run from the surrounding buildings to help them.

“Come on, photograph it!” Temba ordered, prompting a momentarily stunned Beth into action as sirens blared and people screamed.

The plaza below had become a melee. Beth’s lens focused on a phalanx of young Tibetans storming through it to climb onto the base of the stupa where they raised the red, blue, and gold flag of their lost land. The long flexible pole began to sway defiantly as if orchestrating the chaos below.

Beth also photographed the reply: an armored police vehicle thundering into the plaza, lights and siren blazing. Piglike, it began pushing and boring through the crowd as bricks and roof tiles rained down from the surrounding buildings. Its water cannon began to hose the demonstrators, the force of the water flinging them to the ground or pinning them against walls. The cannon’s aim raised to douse the flag bearers who lost their footing, slipping and sliding down the stupa’s curved mound under the deluge. The flag fell.

Beth snapped picture after picture until Temba took a call on his cellphone. He reached across to lower Beth’s camera arm.

“We have to go. We haven’t got long.”

The Tibetan quickly led Beth down and out through the back of his restaurant. At a run he almost dragged her up an empty cobbled alley to the entrance of what appeared to Beth to be a monastery building. There, two young, tall monks standing to the sides immediately opened the door at their approach. Inside, Temba raced on, twisting and turning through a maze of dark, narrow corridors, to finally arrive at another heavyset door. There he very deliberately slowed himself, took some deep breaths, and turned to look at Beth.

“Be warned. What you are about to see will not be easy, but you can and must photograph this as well.”

He tapped on the door.

The bolted wood panel silently opened onto a shadowy room lit by butter lamps. The reflection of the tapering flames shimmered on varnished painted walls decorated with mountains that rose from green valleys and blue lakes to become immense triangular snow peaks. Puffy gray clouds surrounded their towering white summits, each one carrying the image of a deity. Beneath their many eyes, in the center of the room was a single bed on which a naked man was laid out. He was being tended by a group of nuns.

Temba seemed to almost push Beth forward to the foot of the bed. There her gaze met a pair of bloodshot eyes staring from within a raw face, more skull than visage. The body below was hideously burned, but in the half-light Beth could see that what little skin remained was totally tattooed.

The Tibetan moved forward to speak quietly to the man.

A slight gesture from the man’s claw of a hand caused the nuns to step aside.

The bared teeth moved.

Through the wet wheezing of ruined lungs, Beth heard him say something to Temba in reply.

“He wants you to be the witness, to show the world how his journey ended here,” Temba whispered to Beth as the burned man began to cough horribly, setting off spasms of agony. A yellow fluid spewed from his mouth.

“Be quick!” Chering demanded. “I think he is going soon.”

Beth took a series of photographs as the nuns worked to ease the man’s suffering. When the ruined body arched once more in extreme pain, the broken hand raised again. Its two remaining fingers pointed directly to the biggest of the wall’s painted mountains. “Mount Ga San,” the man seemed to utter in recognition then exhaled, hand falling, spirit finally released from the suffering.