34
“THESE MEN, very much friends.”
Looking back, it seems that the seeress had made the connection that finally explained what happened to Nigel. But it was one that would continue to elude me—somehow—for many years to come.
Somehow, because during my first stay in Nepal I had become “very much friends” with another man myself. One brisk fall evening in 1975, in a village a few days’ walk from the base of Mount Everest, I joined a raucous crowd gathered round a tipsy, beaming Sherpa couple. (What I took for a lively wedding turned out to be a devil-may-care divorce.) When I noticed another onlooker staring at me, I thought I knew why—we were the only Europeans present. He was tall, bearded, and muscular, a little older than me, with eyes of pale cornflower blue.
But he turned out to be a Sherpa, and after an awkward encounter I wondered whether his father had been one of the first white men to pass through the area, with the 1953 British Everest expedition. A few days afterwards, in another village, there he was again, staring, and we talked again, just as awkwardly, and then, weeks later, when the cold weather came and the hill people came down to Kathmandu for the winter, I saw him in a barley beer shop by the great stupa at Bauddha.
Somehow, because finally, over chang, the unresolved tension between us vanished. We understood each other perfectly, and my increasing fluency in conversational Nepali had nothing to do with it. One weekend we took a bus up the Chinese road to the Tibetan border. We got off in the only town it passed through, hiked for several hours to the shrine at Namobuddha, and braved the arctic chill of a tumbledown lodge to spend the night—one of the warmest, I have to say, that I ever spent.
Somehow, because I had looked him up again on my return to Nepal in 1982, not long before my session with the seeress. He ran his own lodge catering to foreigners on one of the newly opened trekking routes. After he greeted me, he said that he already had enough business to employ his whole family.
“Splendid!” I said in Nepali.
He considered this longer than he ought to have, eyeing me gravely. Then he flashed the smile I remembered, bright as sun on snow.
“Sisters!” he said in English. “Brothers!”
His blue eyes pierced mine.
“No wife! No kids! Never!”
He hugged me fiercely, then said he was taking off time for a trek he had planned for the two of us, the destination a surprise. He kept me guessing for four or five days, choosing tracks that were sure to confuse, until finally I recognized the only path up the Mukti Kshetra (Salvation Valley). It led to a shrine in the heart of the Himalayas called Muktinath, sacred for millennia to Hindus and long regarded as a “wish-fulfilling jewel” by Buddhists too. There we bathed beneath each of 108 faucets, cast in the shape of a bull’s head, closely arranged in a semicircle. Gasping—and shriveling—in the icy water, we joked of dire consequences later. (As pilgrims in a state of grace, of course, we suffered none at all.)
Somehow, because what, after all, had my companion said in Lahore in 1975 when I showed her Nigel’s letters that mentioned John Nicholson?
“They sound like love letters.”
By the time I returned to Nepal in 1996, I knew that historians had begun to speculate about John Nicholson’s supposed homosexual attachments. I had stopped writing for magazines and taken a job writing speeches for the chancellor of a university. It called for long days in the research library, which I habitually broke up with trips to the stacks concerned with British India and its luminaries. I had long since abandoned hope of finding out anything more about Nigel. But I was curious about the documented lives of people he had known. And when I thought about it, the most striking thing about Nigel’s regard for Nicholson—apart from its fervor—was how little the two men had in common.
Unlike Nigel—and the officers at Barrackpore who befriended him when he lived in Calcutta—Nicholson cared nothing for Persian poetry or Mughal architecture. Apart from the Holy Bible, the only book he ever mentioned reading in his letters was a tome on military tactics. And while Nigel came across in his correspondence as outgoing and sociable, Nicholson, according to an ensign who served with him, “was reserved almost to moroseness.” Under the circumstances, it seemed reasonable to wonder if what drew the two men together was mutual attraction rather than shared interests and compatible temperaments, if the bond between them was identical to the one that Nicholson might have forged with Herbert Edwardes and Muhammad Hayat Khan.
Who could say? No one living, certainly. The closest thing I found to supporting evidence when I reread Nigel’s correspondence was a letter he wrote in 1846 that described a Hindu festival. It began with the ritual slaughter of livestock in a public square, followed by a raucous parade in which a young girl costumed as a goddess was borne through the streets to a temple on a riverbank, where feasting and drinking continued long into the night and reflections of bonfires danced on the water. It reminded him, he wrote, of the festivities of “low-born Egyptians,” harvesters of dates and olives, who on “periodic occasions” enjoyed the “freedom of the town.” Consumption of palm wine worked to the detriment of their singing and dancing, but seemed not to compromise the “sweet melodies of their flutes,” which he found “strangely pleasing.”
The passage drew my attention because I was trying to fill in the gap in Nigel’s letters after he met with Louis Linant about visiting the oasis of Siwa, in the Western Desert; whether he made it there or not was one of the enduring mysteries about his life after he left England. In reading up on Egyptian cultural observances, I discovered that the Egyptian “festivities” he described did not correspond with any holiday celebrated in Cairo or Alexandria. But Nigel’s description—and his comparison to the Indian festival—evokes the character of one unique to Siwa, called moulid. Émile Laoust, who helped organize schooling for native Berbers there, published an account of it in 1924:
“The fellahin go into the gardens where they feast upon a sheep, whose throat has been cut the evening before in the citadel, and get drunk on palm wine. They gather in groups to the sound of flutes, and pay court to a young boy whom they have dressed in women’s clothing. They return by the light of torches in the evening after having visited Tmussi spring for ritual ablutions.”
Until the mid-twentieth century, Siwa’s agricultural laborers practiced another observance. When Nigel wrote home about calling on Egyptian civil servants shortly after arriving in Alexandria, he provided no details of the “immoderate” habits they attributed to Siwans. But Siwa, I learned, was notorious for “dubious morals,” with special reference to the homosexual inclinations of its male inhabitants. Single men and adolescents, barred from residing within the walls of the town, lived a communal life in the gardens surrounding it. Most were landless peasants, who were not permitted to take wives until the age of forty. They passed their evenings playing music and drinking fermented palm sap. It was anything but a chaste existence. When enduring attachments formed, genuine wedding contracts were drawn up, awarding dowries to the families of the younger partners. The wedding itself was the occasion of a large public celebration—so outwardly similar to Laoust’s description of moulid that Nigel, if indeed he visited the oasis, might have attended not a harvest festival but a male marriage.
Male matrimony was not the sort of local color he would have shared with his parents. Even if his correspondence was intact, I doubted it would provide further insight into the nature of the oasis’ appeal for him. What is certain is that he knew of its reputation for “immoderate” goings-on, a reputation that did not deter him from the prospect of a taxing journey there. It was tempting to speculate that Siwa’s reputation might actually have served to entice him.
But, once again, who could say?
What I could say, though, was what I told a Japanese graduate student on a spring day in Kathmandu at the Unity Restaurant in 1996, after he handed me a photograph of an unusual star-shaped tile of faience mosaic, inset between the roots of an ancient tree. He said that it supposedly memorialized an Englishman.
“Do you know Namobuddha?” he asked.
I said that I did, without saying why.
Without saying I had been very cold there, but also very warm.
What I said was:
I remember it well.
Even after twenty years.
What I said was:
I know this poem.
From somewhere.
Without remembering Herat.
Without remembering the poet Jami’s epitaph in Rosi Bagh.
When your face is hidden from me,
Like the moon hidden on a dark night,
I shed stars of tears and yet my night remains dark
In spite of all those shining stars.
“Like a head without a trunk,” said the spurious archaeologist who was probably a spy, after he translated the incomplete stanza of the poem on the mosaic tile of the derelict royal tomb.
Without knowing then that Nigel’s friend Sa’adat was a prince of the blood royal, credited by the Afghan Royal Genealogy with “no issue,” a conspicuous exception to the rule for Sadozai nobles who lived into manhood.
Without recognizing then that the words in English on the star-shaped tile of the chautara at Namobuddha completed the truncated stanza in Persian on the star-shaped tile fifteen hundred miles distant at Rosi Bagh, and could only serve as a private memorial to the lives shared for twenty-eight years by two men, a Muslim and a Christian, a prince and a clerk, an Afghan and an Englishman.
Not the only Englishman who was different from the rest. Not the only Englishman for whom the empire made a bed and beckoned him to lie in it. But a rare one nonetheless, who permitted his liking for a native to become so much more than just attraction that there was no turning back, no going home, no darkening the love-lit nighttime sky until death did them part.
The revelation finally came later, back in America after my encounter with the Japanese student. One day, as I was looking for something else, I unearthed a school exercise book that had served as my daybook when I lived in Kathmandu. It also contained my journal from Afghanistan, which quoted the lines from Jami as translated by Boris’ friend beneath the spreading dusty leaves of a pistachio tree, once upon another time.
What I remembered in the moment that I read them was the seeress, saying that I already knew the place.
Saying:
“Exact same, sahib with other man.”
Saying:
“These men, very much friends.”
Saying, finally, in answer to a question I never asked:
“You are not his reincarnation.”
How could I be? I thought. If I was Nigel’s reincarnation, I surely would have known it when I found it, the place I thought I could not find.
But that was then.
Now I think that she was speaking of another man, the man with him when he died.
Now that I know who he was.
Now that I know that Sa’adat was what happened to Nigel.
Now that I know that everything she told me turned out to be true.
It wasn’t personal, I told her.
Not personal at all.
She knew better.
It would have saved me time and trouble if I realized it then. But in this world we can only walk one step at a time.