Apartment E, 57 Sukhra Path, Kathmandu, Nepal
May 28, 2009
9:00 a.m. (Nepal Time)
Henrietta Richards first came to Kathmandu in 1969, but she was no hippie. In fact, she couldn’t have worked any harder to complete her degrees in politics and history at Oxford University the previous summer. During those long pleasurable days of intense study backdropped by a murmuring radio that promised a world beyond her academic cocoon, a world that finally had young, sharp edges, Henrietta had felt ready to take her place in it, fully prepared to experience a little of its excitement and danger. “Dropping out” would be for others.
She was as determined and thorough in her pursuit of a job in the British Foreign Office as she’d been in earning her double degree with honors. With an outstanding academic record and a respected high court judge for a father, it was inevitable that Henrietta would be successful even though she was a woman intent on entering what was still very much a man’s world. Her first posting was as junior diplomatic secretary to Portugal in September that very same year.
Once there she found the British Embassy in Lisbon crumbling and quiet, like the city itself. While her more senior colleagues constantly slipped away to Estoril to play golf or tennis, she remained, mindful of her lowly status and keen to prove herself. Henrietta diligently typed daily summaries of generally dull Portuguese current affairs and promptly dispatched them. She suspected no one in London even read them.
Henrietta Richards herself had little weakness for diversions such as golf or tennis or even the eager-eyed men who, attracted by her tall, slender form; dark, glossy hair; and piercing blue eyes, continually knocked at her office door inviting her to play. Her only weakness was for the truth. She believed rigidly in it. Detesting the lies of others and utterly unable to deceive herself, she quickly concluded that she was little more than a prisoner in a seaside paradise. With dreams of living more challenging, relevant days in Berlin or Moscow or Saigon, Henrietta applied for a transfer. It didn’t take long, nor was it a matter of choice or discussion. A quick-talking, fruity voice called from London to say simply, “Kathmandu, in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, is suffering from a plague. The British Embassy there needs urgent assistance. You are to go at once. Travel details to follow in the next diplomatic pouch. Good luck.”
Henrietta knew little about Kathmandu beyond its name, which, like Timbuktu or Ouagadougou, conjured in the mind as somewhere hopelessly remote, exotic, exciting. As she hastily packed, she thought about what sort of plague could be ravaging her next destination. Was it disease or infestation? Cholera or TB? Locusts or rats? What precautions should she take in each instance? She had no clue. It was only when she got off the BOAC Boeing 707 at Tribhuvan International Airport and rode with the deputy ambassador into town in his battered Morris that she began to understand. The city’s plague was not some rampant disease or unending swarm of voracious insects. It was a “plague” of people.
While the deputy expertly wove the little car through potholed streets teeming with pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, and sleepy, freely wandering cows, he explained everything to her in a mellifluous voice that instantly took her back to the lecture halls of Oxford. He told of how, a few months after the Battle of Waterloo and following its own smaller-scale yet surprisingly persistent war with the British, Nepal had agreed to the Treaty of Sugauli. A concession of much of the country’s lush Terai lowlands, the hillier territory of Sikkim, and the supply of an annual quota of fierce Gurkha troops won the tiny mountain kingdom little more than the right to be left alone.
It was a splendid isolation that lasted for nearly 150 years. When Nepal finally reopened its borders in 1951, it did so as a medieval time capsule, an untouched land of old ways and beliefs that looked out onto a new world it had no hope of understanding. To the south, the once all-mighty British, bankrupted and diminished despite victory, had left India after the Second World War. Mohandas Gandhi assassinated, Nehru was now trying to lead the populous new nation through the complexities of independence. To the north, China was now an equally huge communist republic under Mao Zedong, particularly as the chairman had moved quickly to expand his already massive borders by “liberating” Tibet from its own people. Like a baby rabbit caught between two fierce headlights, Nepal did not know which way to turn, so all it could do was crouch and stare as people started arriving from all sides: Tibetan refugees from the north, Indian traders and migrants from the south, and then, most confusing of all, the hippies from everywhere.
These “freaks,” as they preferred to be called, were young and had little money but saw neither as limitations to seeking a different world. In army surplus Bedford trucks, battered Volkswagen Kombis, even old London double-decker buses, they turned their backs on the postwar America and Europe of their parents and headed east in a self-perpetuating spiral of spiritual interrogation and narcotic experimentation. The journey quickly became a mythical search for the perfect source of both, and the word was that it could be found in Kathmandu.
It was true at first. The myriad of gods and temples, the distant, all-seeing, all-knowing snow-covered mountains, the shops that sold charas, the sweetest and strongest hand-rolled hashish of all—“I mean, can you imagine that, man?”—all magnified the ancient, smoky city into a continual and wonderful kaleidoscope of the senses. There was no need for any onward destination from there, and the word quickly spread.
What began as a trickle became a river, a river that flooded and left a swamp, a human swamp. By 1969, five thousand freaks were crossing into Nepal every week—each day more embittered about the Vietnam War, more reckless in their pursuit of the biggest high, more impoverished, if that was possible, by the army of con artists and rip-off merchants that now lined the magic way east. They shopped at the Eden Hashish Center, joined the herd on Jochne’s “Freak Street,” then, to the electric sounds of Janis and Jimi, let it all go. And, for some of them, it did exactly that, leaving them in the city’s squalid hospitals or jails or just catatonic on a hippie skid row. No way out, no way home. Sooner or later their respective embassies had to come and clear up the mess.
From the minute she arrived, Henrietta’s days and nights were filled getting her countrymen freed, getting them better, getting them home. She threw herself into the task, enjoying its many challenges after the torpor of Lisbon. The only thing she didn’t like was the fact that, in their stoned ramblings, her charges lied to her continually. There was little that she could do about it—most of them were so addled they could barely remember their names—so she resigned herself to seeking the truth in her second task at the embassy, which was to monitor the inflow of the Tibetan refugees and report to London every snippet she learned about the Chinese occupation. This time, the people in Whitehall did read her reports. The Chinese were missile testing; they had “gone nuclear.” The Himalayas were a frontier of interest once again, just as they had been in the heady days of Younghusband and the Great Game.
The job was not what Henrietta had imagined, but she was busy, very busy, and time flew until, in the ’70s, the hippie tide started to turn. President Nixon, increasingly cognizant of the fact that he was losing the war in Vietnam, decided to start another—that he had even less chance of winning—on something much closer to home: drugs. He formed the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and sent Henry Kissinger off to meddle with the rest of the world all over again. Nepal was an easy, early stop for him, drugs quickly banned in exchange for greenbacks—seventy million of them, some alleged, that never left the deep pockets of the royal family, who, others said, already controlled their country’s now-illegal and therefore more valuable drug trade. Nice.
By the time the next generation of proto-hippies in Woking or Waco had read Billy Hayes’ Midnight Express, rather than The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the ayatollahs had taken Iran, the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and the “hippie trail” east had become a no-through road. A few stragglers stayed on in Kathmandu, but most went home to get haircuts and mortgages, resigning themselves to changing the world by endlessly reinventing the computer or the coffee bar, their future revolutions confined to new washing machines.
Henrietta didn’t miss any of them. She had always sought her company elsewhere. She loved the Nepalese who adopted her as someone altogether more honest and serious than her bombed compatriots. She was respected by the diplomatic corps of the city for her incredible powers of insight and analysis—even if she’d already realized the many spooks and spies that inhabited its fabric were even bigger liars than the hippies. She also increasingly enjoyed the company of another group that now continually passed through the city: the climbers and mountaineers. Her deep knowledge of the bureaucracy and intricacies of getting things done in Nepal made her a much-sought-after fount of information whenever they got into town.
Intrigued by their stories and still a history student at heart, Henrietta in return became fascinated with their quests to climb the world’s highest mountains. She read the little she could find on the subject and began to keep records of everything she heard. The simple black-and-white truth of whether someone made it to a mountain’s summit or not seemed to fill a need within her. She quickly learned that climbing had its liars too, and for some reason she found that to be particularly unacceptable. There were brief romances with a few of them, and then there was love with one. He was a blond, curly-haired American at the forefront of a new breed of climber who, rejecting the huge siege-style expeditions and obvious routes of the first Himalayan summiteers, instead sought to go lighter, faster, and more elegantly up the hardest faces to reach the top.
Henrietta’s relationship with him became as intense and severe as the climbs he made. When he wasn’t in the mountains, he stayed with her in Kathmandu. They would sit together analyzing maps and photographs, studying her growing collection of expedition notes and books, designing the most perfect routes up the fiercest mountains. He would then leave her to climb them with a ragtag group of climbing gypsies who all followed the same creed. She had no desire to go with him. Her only desire was for him to return, but always she knew that, one day, he wouldn’t. It was statistically probable that he would be killed. She couldn’t even lie to herself about that—after all, they were her statistics—so she just chose not to think about it until that inevitable day arrived in 1981 and she was left with no choice. When her American was hit by a falling rock during a desperate, freezing descent of the West Face of Makalu, something in her also froze, so hard she knew there would be no thaw. Henrietta Richards should have gone home, left that place the next day, but she didn’t. He would be there for eternity, and so would she.
She quietly continued her work at the embassy. She studied the Nepali and Tibetan languages and many of the dialects in between, becoming fluent in them all. She watched as the tiny, antique city she loved grew into a brown-brick sprawl that scabbed the once-green Kathmandu Valley. The old city’s infrastructures crumbled around her, unable to cope with one million people. Legions of small motorcycles and cars replaced the cohorts of bicycles. Their pollution unchecked, Kathmandu’s once-blue skies receded behind a metallic smog that Henrietta could taste on her tongue by midafternoon. The country’s royal family corroded further from within, finally self-destructing when Prince Dipendra, heir to the throne, murdered nine of its members, including the king, before turning the gun on himself. The king’s brother Gyanendra took over, but, unpopular and mistrusted, he only accelerated the final fall of his house. Narrowly avoiding a revolution, he stepped aside at the very last minute, just as the Maoists prepared to come down from the hills and take power by force.
Kathmandu should have collapsed under it all, but surprisingly it didn’t. Nor did Henrietta. Her dark hair greyed, her back bowed a little, but her piercing blue eyes stayed focused on the truth as she observed mountaineering change once again, this time into a multimillion-dollar industry that offered every type of trek or climb to every level of climber. Summits were packaged and priced, and public perceptions, conditioned by those dark, dangerous first climbs, lionized anyone who reached them. Everest became the biggest, most sought-after prize of all. Henrietta eyed it all with a caustic acceptance. She knew it was a rare source of income for the impoverished country she loved, and that much of it was a sham. However, she insisted that its participants at least be honest in what they claimed. Night after night, she applied her now huge knowledge to every climb that claimed a summit, to every climber who published a summit photo. Her records grew to fill twenty filing cabinets crowded with details of over fifty thousand ascents. They said she had every Himalayan expedition report ever written, some going back to the nineteenth century. It wasn’t true, but she did know more about every route, every lofty summit pyramid than most of the people who actually visited them.
When she finally retired from the embassy in 2006, there was still neither tennis nor golf in her plans. The only change Henrietta made to her life was to move her recordkeeping into the daytime, juggling it with the freelance consultancy she continued to provide the city’s diplomatic corps. Her free evenings she now used to channel her encyclopedic, obsessive knowledge into writing books about Everest, particularly George Leigh Mallory and Sandy Irvine’s ill-fated attempt in 1924. After forty years in Kathmandu, Henrietta Richards was still no hippie.