The Young Sherpa

The only really vivid image, the only definite and accurate memory the young Sherpa has of his father is of the back of his neck. A nape with close-cropped hair that grew noticeably denser as it encroached upon the crown. A cubic nape, projecting at abrupt angles towards his temporal bones. Similar to the young Sherpa’s own nape, just with more personality. As if the young Sherpa’s skull had lost some definition through generational wear and tear.

That nape of his father’s that the young Sherpa recalls was in an automobile. It must have been borrowed: the family never possessed any mode of transport of its own. Someone else’s car, temporarily theirs, with no headrests, or central locking, or sound system. In the young Sherpa’s anamnesis, it seems to have been some kind of holiday. Or a courtesy call to his grandparents in Kathmandu, meaning go, participate in some family ritual, and return in six to seven days. Walk five hours from Namche to Lukla, make use of the mail plane that charges bargain prices, land in the capital… Escape from the mountain. To the lowland, where spherical objects will roll in a manner more or less predictable, without flying out of control in their pursuit of a gravitational centre. Take, as well, the opportunity to see the area. Borrow a car, be – they, too, even Sherpas – tourists.

So his father had the steering wheel in his hands: a British steering wheel, situated on the right-hand side of the car, another inheritance of colonialism passed down to the Nepalese. He might have been driving with his elbow propped up on the frame of the open window, in which case the wind would have been blowing. But these are deductive reconstructions, spurious attempts; in the young Sherpa’s memory, there is only a nape. And his mother, who was sitting in the front seat on the left, a cloth bag on her lap; and in the back, his sister and the young Sherpa himself, his perspective, their seatbelts without inertial locking mechanisms, fastened at the level of their armpits.

At the start of this sequence, it was not yet night, although a vector into darkness could already be perceived. They must have been returning to Kathmandu. His sister was complaining about something in an irritated tone, but soon she was asleep, her head bouncing oneiric off the window. His mother was silent, upholding the status quo through sheer concentration. The young Sherpa’s eyes were open and on the back of his father’s neck as his father’s physiognomy changed according to the colour progression of dusk. Frank afternoon led first to an ephemeral evening fading; then, to the throes of the arc of twilight; finally, now, a night that was timid and clear; the estuary that extended into the dense starry vault; the weight of that threat.

The young Sherpa was distracted for a moment by what was outside their borrowed car, and he tried to divine shapes in that nocturnal clarity: rocks, here and there a sign of human occupation, an abandoned home, the remains of a dead animal near the road’s shoulder. In the intermittent velocity of the road through the foothills, a static moon followed the car’s path without distraction. Everything was moving, everything left behind except the moon that remained anchored in the sky and, at the same time, in perpetual motion, imitating, perhaps becoming the guardian of, the young Sherpa’s family journey. So he – three years old, his ignorance astronomical – looked at the moon and wondered why it was chasing them, what they had done to it. How it managed to be in the same place always, yet all the time with them. He looked at the back of his father’s neck, shaved so close, pale in the selenite light. Then he went back to the moon: why was it so hard to leave behind?