Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

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Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)


	The King with Laird and Jann (Thomas Laird)

V. INTO THE VALLEY
TWO DAYS OF HARD RIDING LATER, we are there: out of the gorge and overlooking the Plain of Prayer—the valley of Lo Manthang. The trail becomes, by Mustang standards, a boulevard, with hand-painted road signs pointing the way to the capital. Laird is animated, exuberant, sitting atop his handsome horse, smacking his lips in anticipation. Today he will ride to the walled city of his memory and fantasy and by nightfall will be welcomed back to the palace—the prodigal son—and the aging king will ask him to sit by his side and drink yak-butter tea and talk about old times, when Laird himself was Lo Manthang's big news.

Laird and I spur our horses into a gallop and race away from the pack until the trail narrows to a footpath and we are forced to trot. At the top of the pass, the incessant wind stiffens and snaps the prayer flags strung across the road. We climb down off our saddles,

The troubles ahead were only the tip of the Machiavellian iceberg lodged deep in Mustang, Nepal, the Third World, human nature. Who's got dibs? Who controls?

tie our horses to the guy wires of the flagpoles, and spy down upon the city that looks like a barge refitted as a citadel, a derelict Noah's ark run aground in a long, green lake of barley fields and pastures, here on the back side of the roof of the world. "They've built outside the walls," Laird notes with regret. "It was the foreigners who didn't want them to do that." He becomes reflective. There below us was his home for almost a year; he had counted himself the luckiest man in the world.

Laird was leading a trek in the Everest region when his father died in 1989, a soul-battering event that for Tom, then 36, finally marked the overdue end of his childhood. Nepal's revolution began immediately thereafter, and in the fall of 1990, on his last commercial trek, he met his wife, Jann Fenner, his staunchest ally and fiercest defender. That year had been a tumultuous one for Nepal, as its masses took to the streets demanding democracy, culminating with riots in front of the king's palace in Kathmandu and the end of the 200-year-long Shah dynasty's grip on absolute power. Laird's pictures of corpses at the palace were photocopied, enlarged into broadsheets, and pasted on street corners. He sold his first pictures to Time and der Stern, was put on the masthead at AsiaWeek. The new Nepalese parliamentarians loved the exposure—as far as they were concerned, Laird had total access.

Before being sworn in as the country's first prime minister, G. P. Koirala had taken him aside and said, in effect, We owe you, what can we do for you? Laird had no response. The next day Koirala repeated his offer. Laird had thought about it, falling asleep the night before with Jann, and he had an answer: He wanted to be the first foreigner since the early 1960s to live in Mustang. The prime minister was sworn in during the spring of 1991; by summer's end, Laird had been granted permission to enter and remain in Mustang to document its history, its culture, and, most significant for him, its art. Which is what, for 11 months, he did, with the assent of Mustang's king and nobles; he kissed Jann goodbye and was gone. In 1995, when East of Lo Monthang was published, the prime minister hosted an exhibition in Kathmandu's Patan Durbar Square to celebrate the occasion. Twenty thousand Nepalis came. The politicians had successfully opened the Land of Lo, but people like Laird had opened the world to Mustang, for better or worse, irreversibly.

His early dream was to shoot the art—centuries-old frescoes, thangkas, and sculptures as accomplished as anything in existence—show it to the world, and then, he hoped, become involved with the people restoring it, perhaps be anointed as the cultural liaison. Whatever, whoever—the Getty Foundation, the American Himalayan Foundation, it didn't matter to Laird; he only wanted the art preserved and its admirers to multiply. But nothing happened; he was out of the loop. He walked away from Mustang $25,000 in debt on Jann's gold card. On he went with his life. Still, Mustang haunted him, as if somehow he had misplaced himself there.

As we descend the pass, Laird confides that in 1991 he came up this same valley in ecstasy and left a year later "crying, just crying, because I thought I had failed to really reach across the void to that other culture, to understand them and to be understood. I could never reach beyond my own cultural assumptions, or theirs." But his melancholy fades as we wind up through the valley; he kicks his horse ahead with Panglossian optimism. He expects things to be better now, a decade after the fact. He expects too much.

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