The Discovery of the High Lama

The older I get, the more I am astonished by this trickster hand of time.

     Look at all the boys we thought would go on to become doctors and engineers. They became lafanka men playing guitar in Thamel. And all the lafanka ones went on to become stars in unexpected places. One boy who came last in class throughout his school days won a scholarship to study fashion design in New York. Another boy, who was the top student of our batch, became so disheartened after Harvard rejected his application he spent the next decade drinking in the Bamboo café, talking sadly about his plans to be a chemical engineer.

     But the most surprising story of all was Bigyan's. Did you ever meet him? He was one of the boys who played in the Dead Rose Tigerbalm band in the Insight Bar. Yes, that's right - the guitarist. He had that curly hair always slick with gel, and the dreadful pair of sunglasses. He wore that Pakistani imported leather jacket with a big white yin-yang patch on the back.

     "What's up with the yin-yang, Bigyan?" I said, slapping him on the back as he sat there on a high chair at the Maya Bar. He was drinking Mr. Everest whiskey. I had recently returned to Kathmandu for the winter vacations. A scholarship to study environmental science had taken me to Boston, where I had acquired a taste for pizza and a penchant for long-haired hippie girls with liberal tendencies. Now, sitting down in the chair next to Bigyan, I felt myself so much more hip, elevated and distant from this backwater than I could ever have imagined.

     He grinned that lop-sided grin, strummed a few chords on the guitar, and then looked up. "I thought it looked cool," he said, without apparent irony. I wanted to give him a lecture on the meaning of the two signs, their gendered implications, the way Eastern spirituality was being exoticized, appropriated and marketed by the West to advance its own values of profit-driven, globalized capitalism and destroying the world with its crass materialism. Then I restrained myself. He wouldn't understand anyway, I thought as I pulled up a chair. "Looks like you're pretty deep into this spirituality game, Bigyan. Trying to find god with the rest of the world travelers, huh?" Only a moron would have missed the note of sarcasm in my voice, but it flew over Bigyan.

<  2  >

     He grinned and replied, "Yin and yang is fashion, Prakash. Like headbanging." That, in short, summed up his understanding of spirituality.

     After my school leaving exams, I applied to colleges in the States. I waited for almost a year to find out the admission decisions. That year was the most torturous one of my life. I spent those twelve months with Bigyan and four other boys who are now scattered in Europe and Australia. Every time I met Bigyan, he raved about some defunct heavy metal band from the eighties like Cinderella. Or some defunct rock band from the seventies like Uriah Heep. Their band did the cover of Santana's Black Magic Woman each and every night, sometimes twice a night. If it wasn't Santana, it was Bob Marley. No Woman, No Cry. I almost cried from the boredom of it all.

     Bigyan took pity on my miserable existence. "I see potential in you, brother," he said. "You'd make a great backup guitarist for our band. Come practice. Just in case this college thing doesn't work out." He strummed a riff from the Roadhouse Blues. "Hear this? Show me how you can do it." My stumbling version impressed him. That night, he took me to meet another band - the Spiders of Sex - who met to practice in his living room. They had a jargon all their own. "Hey bro, can I borrow your wah-wah? Your crybaby?" a dashing musician with a ponytail and a t-shirt with two embroidered eyes asked. The room smelled heavily of pot. The drummer handed over a foot-pedal, and I realized what they were talking about. The boys told me people who followed Nirvana were cool, Pearl Jam were cooler and Jim Morrison were coolest. When they ran out of covers, they sang awful Nepali pop songs in the same vocal style as Mariah Carey, a quiver at the end accentuating the agony of lost love. That was Kathmandu as I knew it.