Last Day in Nepal with Liam
03/23/10
I love masks.
I always felt there was something in them, in the eyes and the eyeless faces, yet I could have not said what it was at those jungle shacks and makeshift shops where they were purchased from across the globe. When I look at them, I am not comforted for what I see in these masks; I find more than you would think. Each time I look at them, I feel utterly defenseless, and I feel within my heart the hollow throbbing of a muffled drum, like a backfiring car’s bass that shoots into my skin, while they look back, scowling darkly in their reply, these glances crossing like sword blades that I can feel within the marrow of my bones. Although there are no true human faces, and yes, I know there are no souls in them; it feels as though there is a person, or some other thing, scanning outwards. Smiling towards me.
During our last day in Nepal, Liam, Boxie-boo and I walked around Kathmandu, bartered at shops, including long battles between various stores, in the hopes to get a good deal on Thangka paintings and potentially another mask. Also known as scroll paintings, Thangka paintings often depict the life of Buddha, including various influential lamas and other deities, usually outlining the Wheel of Life, which is a visual representation of the Art of Enlightenment. Although Liam and I were not religious, we loved this art, the paint bright with colors and outlined in gold, which are still to this day used by traveling monks in Nepal to be used as teaching tools, rolled up in their bags as scrolls.
We all spent hours online at internet cafés researching our next destinations – Liam to bid us farewell and stay in Nepal, while Boxie-boo and I were headed off to India. My afternoon was only eventful for the bizarre site of a bag pipe band I saw outside the café’s window in Kathmandu. Strangely, though, in this band, a man carried a screaming two-year-old boy instead of bagpipes, yet the sound was the same. I took the time to think about our adventure in Nepal, from riding elephants and motorcycles, to seeing dead bodies cremated publically. Elongating with my arms out wide and swaying my hands up and down to stretch my shoulders between typed sentences, I waited for the screen to load up guesthouses options for New Delhi. I realized, suddenly, we’re probably accidentally giving ghosts’ handjobs all the time.
My messenger popped open. It was a buddy back home.
“Hey man, what are you doing?”
“I am in Kathmandu trying to figure out way to stay in India. What are you doing?”
“What? Wait a second.”
The usual questions began. Questions I would have to get used to back home in Canada. I told him that I had recently ridden an elephant that bashed a wild rhino out of a bush, saw dead bodies being casually carried by a river and rode a motorcycle through the Himalayan Mountains: And these were just the recent stories. I told him where else I had been and where I was going, outlining our itinerary without realizing he was responding sarcastically. I was trying to say all this as if it was the most normal thing in the world to be doing.
I should have tried harder.
“Sure buddy. Wanna meet up to watch the Canucks’ (hockey team) game?”
“I can’t. I’m in Nepal.”
“Cool. I’m in Nicaragua.”
“Seriously. I’m going around the world.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
At this point, I convinced him to check my Facebook to see photos of where I had been, though I had not uploaded many at this point. With the internet slowing, I knew it was time to move on.
“Namaste!” I wrote, logging off the computer and turning off the chat, but not before receiving “???????” in response. It was time for us to head back to the room to get our packing done before Liam, Boxie-boo and I met up for our last meal together.
Kathmandu really came to life in the dark, when the blackness seemed to increase the sounds, the back-firing vehicles, the constant horns and shouting salesmen, where within this noisy chaos and crowding of bicycles, cars and scooters, we dodged the rickshaws and Tiger Balm salesmen, in a darkness that encouraged yelling and the echoing of lights, spraying these images against brick walls, this dim light, where booming exhaust pipes and car stereos seized the remainder of our statements, causing us often to walk either screaming our conversation or staying in silence.
Liam was one the best friends we made on our trip. He had a great sense of humour and an eagerness to learn as much of the language and about the culture of places we visited together in Nepal and China. Sometimes, he told us hilarious stories about rednecks he had come across in his work in Alberta, Canada. He was fit and energetic, a man who overcame illness, culture shock and exhaustion without little complaints. He was a good man to travel with, though all this being said, Boxie-boo and I were ready to be alone again. Like all couples, we enjoyed our times with friends, but also, we loved spending time just the two of us.
At the top of a small building, we sat at a restaurant with no roof over our heads, silencing the city below, the stars glistening like dew drops, as if a gust of wind from the Milk Way collected all sounds. There were no clouds and a gentle breeze; Tibetan prayer flags moved erratically like a scared heartbeat; the heat still in the air.
Liam was traveling simply because he wanted to. I liked that about him. He had no real reason other than a genuine thirst for adventure. When he left Canada, he boarded a plane alone, but seemed to make friends quickly. Once we left Nepal, he continued traveling with a fellow backpacker he had previously met in China. I always enjoyed his blunt honesty, the way he never held back on how he really felt, from being one of the more motivated people to get even with China by sneaking into the Leshan Buddha, to immediately supporting the risky idea of riding motorcycles in Pokhara, all the way to Peace Padoga on his scooter up a nasty road of massive rocks and huge holes, all the while, on the edge of condemning cliffs. The three of us had enjoyed gorgeous sunsets over the Himalayan Mountains, using just our flashlights, when the power was out, to find our way up steep staircases to the roof of our guest house. He often joked about taking courses in Mandarin, only to return to China for what he called “The Revenge Tour.” We laughed, the three of us, each day and every night. Our last night together was no different.
Off to the side of the building, in the streets, one engine backfired loudly, a booming solitary note. I felt it enter my own heart through my skin, like a muffled, hollow drum.
This was when Liam revealed his present to me. A couple days earlier, I had bartered hard with a woman at a Tibetan village outside Pokhara. While Boxie-boo successfully bought many items, there was one thing I wanted that I never got down to a price I was willing to pay. Liam pulled this from his small, day backpack: A mask of Ganesha, a Hindu god that looks like an elephant. It was a welcomed surprised.
It was in every way, a beautiful a night.
There was light moving amongst the darkness, where the moonlight threw down shadows and our smiles fused with sweat. Our last dinner together was an event that occurred not fast nor slow, but in suspension, no heart beats or breathing, as if time did not pass, no beginning or end. I was simply happy to relax, having traveled hard and long distances with little rest during our short time in Nepal. This is what travel has already done for me, to give me this odd feeling of comfort: Deliriously happy, to levitate, to forget my head and listen to my heart, to be swept away, head over heels like love, this thrill ride of passion; singing, dancing, goose bumps, all these powerful emotions we forget we cannot live without, this craziness, to try for the madness, to stay open for the strike of lightning, the unknown, where it took me away, with each blink of an eye, the glances of wonderment.
Hanging on my apartment’s wall in Canada, I look at all the masks often, including Ganesha. Looking along its trunk and large ears, each time, it takes me back there, to that country hidden in valleys, hills, mountains and rivers that surround Mount Everest. I could see the landscapes we drove through, rode buses, motorcycles and elephants across; the village girl we met and the monks I played keep up soccer with; the Tibetan refugee camp; the glistening lakes and snow peaked mountains.
But in this mask, there are no backgrounds, only my apartment’s wall behind it; no image of Mr. Madman driving, no little boy holding on tight to the back of Liam’s scooter. There are no cows laying in the streets, no marijuana fields, water wells, Tibetan prayer flags, Tiger Balm salesmen or garbage-strewn streets. In them, I cannot see my arm covered in bed bug bites, my wrist gripping the throttle on an old battered motorcycle; no stray dogs or pigs or chickens by my feet. There are no rhinos hiding in the bushes, no crocodiles in the water, no monkeys hanging from telephone wires. No.
Yet, I still see beyond its face, beyond Ganesha’s trunk and ears. Every single mask I own is a collection of memories. In Ganesha, I see Liam, surprising me with this mask; hiking to the Leshan Buddha; eating chicken feet and drinking rice wine on a Chinese train. I cannot see him exactly, but he’s there. I see him in the darkness of Kathmandu, walking amongst the back-firing vehicles, horns and shouting, through the crowding of cars and noisy chaos, dodging scooters, yelling to us while we screamed back, leaned up against a brick wall in the dim light to avoid a puddle. When I look at Ganesha, I see Liam, smiling towards me.
This is an important truth of travel. Unlike the mundane predictableness of regular life, when you are immersed in the unfamiliar, caught in the glances of wonderment, your mind is so charged that it stores these memories in stronger detail than those moments we experience daily at work and in other repetitive routines. I can picture backpacking memories more vividly than my apartment, even with finer detail than the intricate details of my masks that take me away, even though I walk passed them every morning and each night.
What’s beyond them, beyond the eyes and eyeless faces, will always be more important; and in them, I see even myself, this apparition like my own shadow moving towards me from the darkness, scanning outwards as it moves into the marrow of my own bones.
That’s all for now.
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