The High Road to the Mountain Gods

Chapter One: Sonam and the Bullies

When she first arrived in Kathmandu, the summer after graduating high school, Emily stayed in a little guesthouse off Gangalal Road, near the river. In those days, her interest lay further east, in the Pashupati temple by the airport. At three miles or so, the run directly there was not enough exercise. A zigzag route through the streets made it much more satisfying.

The morning air always felt big with expectation of the day to come—the sights and sounds of a living city, brightly colored buildings and people, deliveries by bicycle and motor scooter weaving this way and that, children shrieking in the streets, tourists everywhere. “Surely Amaterasu will not find me here,” she told herself when she first arrived. But under the guise of Pashupati, the lord of all living things, Vishnu spoke in her dreams with the shrill voice of the sun, the queen of heaven.

Raised in Hawaii and Virginia, Emily did not pray to the Shinto gods of her mother’s native Japan, and did not know how to find the comfort of the Buddha. To be caught in the tension between two spiritual yearnings with no rituals to reconcile them was disorienting, to say the least. The dreams that disturbed her sleep proclaimed her the great-granddaughter of the goddess of the sun—she didn’t bother about the precise number of generations standing between herself and Amaterasu. She simply thought of her as “Granny.”

Her own reading, driven by spiritual turmoil, had reinforced what she felt deep inside. The great nature demons commanded the worship of our ancestors for millennia, until a more spiritually abstracted faith supplanted them, no longer focused on appeasing the personalities who controlled the bounty of the harvest and the turning of the seasons, weighing instead the contents of our hearts. The process was strikingly similar in Europe, Africa and Asia, in each case working through one or another paradoxically historical figure to mediate for us with an increasingly distant divinity. The Buddha was one of these.

But the Buddhism of Japan felt to Emily like too stark a contrast to the demands Granny made on her. She craved mediation, and sought it in the foothills of the Himalayas, in the homeland of Siddhartha Gautam, in Nepal. Perhaps here, living among a people with a unique genius for assimilating opposites into an already crowded pantheon, she could finally find some relief, or at least understanding. Now her attention had shifted to a temple at the western end of the Kathmandu valley.

Her landlady, Sunita Kansakar, plump and self-satisfied, gray hair dyed black, watched as she went out early to run through the still dark streets of the city all the way to the outskirts. And she watched for her return an hour or so later, just as the sun peeked over the rooftop of the building next door.

“I’ll never understand you, Michi-chhori,” she said, using Emily’s Japanese name, but appending a couple of affectionate syllables. “Why do you run so far? It looks exhausting. What is the point?”

“I find it restful. It helps me think.”

“And what is so difficult to think about that you need to exhaust yourself over it?”

A fair question, Emily had to admit. And why come all this way to think? Mrs. Kansakar must expect to hear that a young man occupied her thoughts, someone like fourth year midshipman and soon-to-be Ensign Perry Hankinson back in Annapolis. But would she so gladly hear the rest of it, the violence that seemed always to stalk her, the deaths she felt somehow responsible for?

“You know, the usual things,” she said.

And it would have been more or less true, or at least not utterly false, if the usual things included wondering if she could risk releasing her chromosomes into the human gene pool.

“Young people,” Mrs. Kansakar said, with a snort. “Everything is always so dramatic.”

Emily laughed. “Thank goodness I haven’t disappointed you.”

“Come, child, at least you can eat.”

A couple of bowls of potato vegetable curry and a plate of poori bread filled the little space between them on the kitchen table. Emily was the only guest she ate with, the only one up early enough to share a meal with… and the only one whose company she enjoyed enough. The breakfast for the rest of the guests sat steaming in a large pot on the stove next to a huge iron skillet ready to fry the rest of the pooris. It wouldn’t be needed for at least another hour.

The orderliness of Mrs. Kansakar’s kitchen soothed Emily on a deep and visceral level. Everything found its place here under her direction, legumes and root vegetables in cool bins below the counter, spices allotted temporary quarters in jars and boxes on the upper shelves, greens delivered just that morning while it was still dark heaped up next to the sink. Everything expressed equally Mrs. Kansakar’s providential authority. She was the tutelary demon of this place.

“Can you teach me how to make curry?”

“Yes, certainly, child. But you’ll have to give over your running to find the time in the morning,” she said with evident satisfaction, and a sneaky little smile.

“Can I come with you to the market?”

Mrs. Kansakar nodded, eyeing her companion with fresh curiosity. How quickly Emily had found a place in the affections of an irascible old lady, one whose stern moral judgment and sharp tongue all her neighbors feared at least as much as they respected. Like the kindly old dragon-lady from a Russian novel, everyone tiptoed around her, apprehensive of the sarcasm that stung wherever it landed. A visit with her could loom over one’s day like an ancient fortress on a hill. What must they think of her newfound protegé?

“Michi-didi, Michi-didi,” cried a young man in the burgundy and saffron colored robes of a monk, standing at the kitchen door. Clearly upset, practically trembling, he addressed her as “big sister.”

“Michi-didi, it’s Sonam… he… he…”

“Nawang,” Emily replied, glancing at the clock over the sink. “What’s wrong with Sonam?”

Just then, a little boy peeked around the doorframe, dressed in a light gray uniform shirt and tie, wearing a torn blue sweater. A scrape on his chin and a purpling bruise under his eye told her all she needed to know.

“Here, chhora, take that off,” Mrs. Kansakar growled in the voice of maternal authority. “Let me see to it.”

She gave his sweater a disapproving shake and took it into the next room.

“It wasn’t my fault, Michi-didi,” he pleaded.

“Another fight?” Emily said. “What was it this time, more name-calling?”

“They ganged up on him, Michi-didi,” Nawang offered in Sonam’s defense. “I know he didn’t start it this time.”

“Kaji and Gulu pushed me down in the mud,” he said through a loud sob. Stains on his pants corroborated this element of his story. “They say I have no family, and I’m good for nothing.”

“Is that when you hit them?” she asked, as she dabbed at his face with a damp cloth. “Now let’s have those trousers.”

“They hit me first,” he protested, a little embarrassed by all the female attention. In the end, there was no way to avoid taking off his pants. “And they tore my sweater.”

Emily smoothed out the little boy’s hair and patted his cheek. Her hand seemed to have magical calming powers. He stopped sobbing. She brushed dirt off his pants.

“There. That will hold it for now,” Mrs. Kansakar said, returning with the mended sweater. “Bring it back this afternoon and we can do something more permanent.”

“You’d better get back, Nawang. I’ll walk him to school,” Emily said. “C’mon, Sonam, put these back on. Let’s get moving.”

“Do I have to go?” Sonam whimpered. “I’m not supposed to be late. I’ll be in trouble.”

“Oh, so you think the reward for fighting is a day off from school? Well, think again. Let’s go, soldier.”

After a smart tug on his shirt and belt, Emily pulled the sweater over his head wrangling each arm through a sleeve. With a hand on Sonam’s shoulder, she guided him out the kitchen door. He went quietly.

Out on the street, the city now almost fully awake bustled with activity. Shops and businesses had begun to open their doors, carts loaded with produce rattled along the pavement, stands and barrows piled high with colored fabrics, flowers, fruit greeted them around every corner.

“You have to learn to control that temper, young man,” she said.

“You won’t tell Rinpoche, will you?”

“I won’t have to, because you will.”

Sonam’s face fell at this news. In front of a shop window, Emily pulled the little boy aside and knelt down to look him directly in the eyes. Sorrow and pain made their home there, as well as fear, probably of Rinpoche’s inevitable disappointment. But there was more, a deep resignation, as if the boy had convinced himself that happiness was not possible in this life. His father died when he was an infant, a gangster killed by rivals. Three years later, his mother, dying of consumption, persuaded the Rinpoche at one of the monasteries on the fringe of Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple, to take him in. Now the monks were his only family. His eyes were dark, almost as dark as hers.

“Making a mistake isn’t the worst thing in the world. But you can’t learn from it if you conceal it from your friends.”

“What did you do about bullies, Michi-didi? Didn’t you fight back?”

Another fair question, she thought. She did fight back, eventually, and with terrible effect. She’d gazed into the eyes of too many dying men, hoping to ease their passage. But what consolation could she offer them, distracted as they were by the sudden finitude of their lives? “Can he sense that about me?” she wondered.

“I fought back when I had to, but never because someone called me a name. And nothing good ever came of it. Not fighting is always better. If only I had known.”

“I want to be strong like you, didi. You’re not scared of anything.”

He was still small enough for her to carry, if only for a few steps. When she scooped him up and pressed her nose to his, something like joy flashed in his eyes. After a brief moment, he set his head on her shoulder.

“Okay, big guy, now you’re too heavy for me,” she said, putting him down. “Let’s get walking.”

Hand in hand, each filled with new resolution, they wended their way to a little Catholic school near the temple, stopping to collect his book bag from behind a trash bin where someone had thrown it. She had a word with the Sister in charge, then peeked into the classroom to let Sonam have one last glimpse of her.