In The Days To Come

Picture of farmland surrounding Lumbini courtesy of the Silken Road Group

Imagine life without electricity.

Well that was exactly what it was like.

Thrown back 500 years.

No running water. No electricity.

Cheap passions forsaken.

“I loved you so much,” he thought, looking out of the unlit café into a dark street.

There were no street lights.

No mechanical sound.

Even the phrase, “I loved you so much”, was delivered at no one in particular.

Or at everyone he had ever known.

His present company, heir to an estate no one was prepared to give up, hid his good looks behind ugly dark rimmed glasses.

Whenever they sat opposite each other in an unlit café he would reach over and take them off, declaring: “You are more handsome without them.”

It wasn’t long before the currently poverty stricken heir was taking them off each time they entered one of the tiny, mud brick houses where tea and cigarettes were sold.

And while the heir spoke English, he mumbled, as if he didn’t want anybody to understand what he was saying, exactly as he himself did.

And so he couldn’t help but relate.

And desire.

In Nepali society everybody did, nobody talked.

The rapid rhythm of the thwack thwack thwack he heard every morning, in the “darkest hour before the dawn”, was testament to that.

“There must be teenagers in the house,” he thought when he first heard it.

And sure enough, he caught sight of a shy young woman and a slightly less shy young man the next day. They were clearly happy, clearly delighted with life, with their physical forms; energy seeping from them.

“If I could turn back time,” Cher had sung.

But there wasn’t any way to grow younger by the day.

When he protested at being called grandfather at the local café, they backed down and started calling him “big father”, same same “grandfather”.

“Father”, he insisted, laughing as he departed.

He came from a family with longevity in its genes. If they didn’t live to be 100 they died young.

Outside Buddha’s birthplace there were a number of 20 baht notes in the collection box, confirming what the heir had said, that a number of Thai tourists came here.

But for him the last of Thailand seeped away.

He opened a jar of balm he had bought at a “Seven” in Bangkok, treating a repetitive strain injury from typing and writing too much which had been the source of interminable pain for years.

And he mistakenly tried to pay for something with a one baht coin which had lodged in the bottom of a pocket.

And occasionally, as he looked across the beatific scenes of an agrarian culture, scenes cast from the hyper-capitalism of Bangkok would flicker behind his skull.

But the pain persisted wherever he went, even here. Getting the newspaper he worked for to pay for the treatment of his injury had been a feat, particularly considering that much of his writing had been for other more voluntary pursuits; but once again that particular exercise opened up unlit worlds.

The head of the occupational health and safety unit, no doubt on a better income than a mere newspaper reporter, had been virtually invisible.

What she actually did for her money was a mystery to everyone.

Virtually the only time she would come in on his case was at 4.30 pm on a Friday afternoon, when she would ring to say she would be in her office for the next half hour if he wanted to talk.

With early deadlines for the Saturday edition, most journalists would rather shoot someone than talk to them at that particular time.

Crazy is as crazy does.

He and the heir had already made plans to drive a thousand kilometers into a remote part of East Nepal.

Crazy is as crazy does. Should have died sooner.

But he wasn’t going to die in a motor cycle accident touring Nepal.

His dream of termination, of flying through a car windscreen, had been repeated so often it had taken on the form of destiny.

He wasn’t going to die in a place where his instant friend told him he would be stared at because they had never seen foreigners before; and where, perhaps, another adventure he could not relate to anyone awaited them both. Where the landscape was lyrical beyond the capacity of words. And where, perhaps, he would find salvation of a different kind. Whatever the case, it wasn’t over yet.