The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,13
cab he put your average Bangkok cabbie to shame. His eyes were black oil wells with insane flecks of red. His name was Shiva, of course.
Shiva wanted to know where I was staying. After studying the guidebook I narrowed the short list down to two: the five-star Yak & Yeti (I was most tempted by the name), which used to be someone’s palace, or the downmarket but internationally loved Kathmandu Guest House. To make a decision I really needed to think about the psychology of my business partners. I mean, in your line of work, farang, everything depends on projecting the right image, correct? Which was exactly my dilemma. On one hand, I was here to arrange a high-value supply-side contract, which would normally mandate the Yak & Yeti as the only joint in the whole Himalayas qualified to provide the appropriate ambience; on the other hand, it was not exactly my style and I was dealing, if my information was correct, with a mind master of considerable skill and insight—didn’t he just destroy the life of Rosie McCoy and put one huge crimp in General Zinna’s operation, without, apparently, leaving his cave? No, I didn’t think the Yak & Yeti was a smart decision; with guys like Tietsin, you better go naked or not at all.
“Kathmandu Guest House,” I told Shiva.
“Forget it, it’s full, anyway very overpriced. How about the Himalayan Guest House?”
“How much commission does the Himalayan Guest House give you, per customer?”
“Five percent.”
“Okay, I’ll give you five percent if you get me a suite at the Kathmandu Guest House.”
Shiva stopped the taxi for a moment so he could wai a Hindu shrine (much gaudier than the Buddhist equivalent, and with more flowers, not all of them boring white lotus, either—I do love marigolds), before saying okay. It turned out the Kathmandu Guest House was only at 50 percent occupancy, so I got my suite and Shiva got his commission, and I found I liked his wacky taxi and dirty head cloth so much I hired him for the rest of the day for the knockdown price of five dollars. “Swayambunath,” I told him, as soon as I’d checked in.
Some smart-ass Tibetan Buddhist prophesied about a thousand years ago that when iron horses ran around Kathmandu on wheels, that would signal the end of Buddhism. Well, it did. About the same time as the iron horses started to appear in this town, the barbarian Chinese invaded Tibet and the D.L. had to flee. The problem I had with the iron horses at that moment was more prosaic: the pollution was (believe it or not, farang) even worse than Bangkok’s, and Shiva’s rear nearside window didn’t close. (He’d taken the lever out of the door; of course, these windows had never seen electricity; the car was an old Indian Ambassador.) The silver lining here, though, was that the open window enabled a welcoming committee of very skinny cows to come and pay their respects. One shoved her massive head into the back of the cab during a traffic jam, enabling me to fondle her shaggy, black-velvet jowl and wish her good luck in her next incarnation, which, after such patience, was likely to be celestial.
Swayambunath is generally known as the Monkey Temple, for the simian thugs who seem to run the place. They’re everywhere, and they keep their beady eyes on you while you’re climbing the million and one steps, sniggering at your feeble strength, openly deriding you for forsaking the rain-forest paradise and your hairy superbody for this pathetically inferior bare-skin version, which had me gasping for breath halfway up. It didn’t help that Shiva, who decided to make merit by accompanying me, and who was an authentic third-world chain-smoker of a cigarette so foul they made our humble L&Ms smell like havanas, effortlessly took the stone stairway two steps at a time and patiently waited for me while I leaned on the iron rail that divided the steps, coughing my heart out.
Farang, I am ashamed to admit (but I know you’ll understand) that my first thought on finally reaching the temple on the high summit was that my cell phone would surely work from there—it had been acting up since I arrived, and I hadn’t been able to make contact with Tietsin. Well, it did work, and I told someone on the other end who promised to tell Tietsin that I was staying at the Kathmandu Guest House. That chore over with, I was ready for Shiva,