The Godfather of Kathmandu - By John Burdett Page 0,75

in the washing and prepare the evening meal. From the rooftop I call Lek.

“I want you to call the Thai Chamber of Commerce here in Kathmandu, if there is one, or whoever at the embassy deals with this kind of stuff. If the Thai government can’t help, ask Kimberley to contact the American Chamber of Commerce. I want to know the names of all the agencies here that might be involved in filmmaking, you know the kind of thing?”

“Of course I don’t, I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ll work it out, though. And by the way, what did your last slave die of?”

Naturally, I try all the numbers Tietsin gave me to contact him. Naturally, none of them are in operation, either because he’s turned his phones off or because the network is not operating just now. I go to my room to unpack, then stroll down the driveway, through the iron gates manned by impressive men with black moustaches and military uniforms, out onto Thamel.

26

Once on Thamel, though, I realize I simply cannot resist a visit to Bodnath, even though I’ve not been able to contact him.

It’s almost dark by the time I arrive, with just the faintest glow in the west, when I begin my ritual journey around the giant stupa. Its brilliant white breast disappears with the last of the sun, but the two great eyes benefit from spotlights. There are not so many pilgrims and tourists spinning the brass prayer wheels at this time of day, and the eyes have an intimidating aspect to them. Without the certainty of clear daylight, it’s easy to imagine the mind behind them as master of the night.

The journey all the way around the stupa takes much longer than during the day. Strange thoughts assail me; my mind changes. It occurs to me that a stupa was originally a means of contacting the dead, that it is a Neolithic burial mound that I’ve come to pay my respects to. It occurs to me that the Far Shore is never all that far away, had we not been programmed to pretend it doesn’t exist. It occurs to me that our ancestors, long before the Gautama Buddha arrived with his clarifications, knew more about death than we know about the motions of the stars. With their short, hard lives they must have faced the mysterious disappearance of loved ones every year; it must have seemed as if the whole stream of human life led straight back to the stupa—the sepulcher, you might say—and the more enduring world of the dead. And it occurs to me that nothing has changed, except that the extra twenty or thirty years we can expect to spend on the planet these days seem to have blinded us to a truth that for our ancestors was brutally obvious.

This meditation takes me one complete circumnavigation. I deliberately began in the west so after three and a half turns I will end in the east. When I start the next round, I am thinking, I know he is watching. He knows I am here. Nevertheless, the second round with the brass I spend in a kind of trance state in which thought, though it still exists, is relegated to a secondary function while some kind of emptiness, a beautiful, indescribable absence, takes its place. So it’s not until the last leg, the half turn from west to east that will finish my tour, that I remember what the stupa looks like when I see it through Tietsin’s eyes. And suddenly there it is: black under a bloated full moon, quite still, no people anywhere, only me dwarfed by this great dark mountain of death from which a lurid lightning bolt seems to split the sky.

But this time the vision doesn’t fade. It stays with me in the cab on the way back to the guesthouse, and when I lie down to close my eyes it becomes obvious that this is where Tietsin’s blade wheel has been leading. That all the great fuss I’ve made about my state of mind is as nothing compared to what comes next. And it’s not Tietsin whose name I call just before nodding off. I hear myself whispering, Pichai, my brother, my self. Pichai, tell me, what happens after you die, really?

Well, what happened to me at that crucial moment in my spiritual development was that I fell asleep. Now it’s some awful predawn nightmare that has awakened me;