Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

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Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

VII. MACHIAVELLIAN PLAY DATES
THE MORE PROFANE VICISSITUDES of Lo lurk just around the corner the next day at the colossal, pillared Thubchen temple, which a camera-laden Laird and I enter, stepping across mounds of construction debris. Inside, on the wall opposite the altar, a crew of local workers sits on scaffolding under the blaze of floodlights, delicately swabbing clean an area of murals. Virtually nothing is known outside Mustang of Lo Manthang's temples, masterpieces of 15th- and 16th-century Inner Asian culture. They are incomprehensible achievements, their frescoes painted in the glow of butter lamps, their massive wooden pillars hauled by yak from the southern slopes of India, their statues cast by ancient Lo's own metallurgists. To my untrained eye, John Sanday's team has performed miracles—the roof replaced and waterproofed, the skylight above the altar rebuilt—and in comparison to the soot-darkened, stained, and cracked frescoes yet to be addressed, the opulence of the restored murals stuns the senses. The paintings gleam from the walls like sheets of jewels.

But no sooner do we enter than the floodlights go out; the crew of young Lobas up on the scaffolding climbs down and leaves. A foreman advises Sanday that the generator has broken. I approach Sanday, hoping he can tell me a thing or two about restoring frescoes. "Ask the boss," he growls, ill-tempered and enigmatic.

I haven't a clue what's going on here, this sudden turn of awful manners, unchecked scorn. Also, I'm perplexed by Laird's behavior, his audacious insistence on standing fast, taking pictures, and waiting for the generator to start up again. Sanday ignores him; the rest of us leave.

I meet up with Laird hours later; he tells me the generator won't be fixed until tomorrow, when he has scheduled an hour-long shoot, for which, he adds, he has shelled out $100, not to Sanday but to the mayor, Pema Wangdi. Laird and I run into Sanday on the street; the encounter escalates directly to ugliness.

"The locals are very distressed about you," Sanday tells Laird. "We've worked very hard for four years to establish trust here with everybody, and you have a bad reputation from ten years ago."

"I've heard you have a bad reputation too," says Laird, ambushed.

"Who's telling you this?" says Sanday.

"Who's telling you?" says Laird.

"Well..." says Sanday, hesitating. And then, pushed onstage by a trickster spirit, the premier witness for the prosecution walks by. "This guy," says Sanday, motioning over a sour-faced fellow. "This guy Tashi says you owe him 12,000 rupees from ten years ago." Laird and Tashi wrap themselves into a heated discussion. The amount is roughly $200, payment for some rope, six wool bags, and rental on a tent. Laird has no recollection of the debt. Tashi, as everyone knows, worked for Laird regularly, earning many tens of thousands of rupees. There's not much Laird can do—of course he'll pay. "There's plenty of room for this to have happened," Laird admits, "plenty of room. I'm not saying Tashi invented this. He kept saying, 'I was like your child,' you know, this whole feudal thing, and I was his father, and he trusted me completely. And what am I supposed to say to John when he says people are saying bad things about me?"

The dispute is only the tip of the Machiavellian iceberg lodged deep in Mustang, Nepal, Third World development, cross-cultural interaction, human nature. Who's got dibs on what? Who owes? Who controls? Standing on the street, Laird feels the anguish, as anybody would, of accusation. The following day, when the appointed hour arrives, Laird and I walk over to the temple. The generator's working, the floodlights burn, the crew is on the scaffolding, and Laird, resolute, sets up his tripod. Sanday and I have an amicable discussion about the restoration. The project is in many ways a model worth replicating:Sanday and his experts are training 26 young Lobas from villages throughout Mustang in wall-painting conservation. Four more trainees are carpenters; five others are learning masonry repair.

But as we talk, one of the trainees pulls the switch on the floodlights, and the workers monkey down from the scaffolding—this time, nobody bothers with the ruse of a broken generator. Sanday seems genuinely surprised. These trainees, all of them teenagers, twentysomethings, are a new breed of Loba, products of the opening, of democratic verities and illusions, a generation molded by forces they have mounted but will never conquer without being conquered in return. They are striking because of Laird, and the charges fly. Sanday translates the gist of it to me: The kids think Laird desecrated the paintings.

When Laird first arrived in 1991, religious conservatives were vehemently opposed to his attempts to photograph the massive wall paintings in the temples, but the king had given his blessing, and Laird was willing to suffer social opprobrium to record the works, because he believed then, and remains firm in the belief, that art is protected once you photograph it. But the Lobas hold the conviction, also very strong, that photography angers the gods and invites stealing. In 1992, the year Laird photographed the temples, the rains were late, and he was blamed. Then one day in July three yogis came to town, the rains followed, and Laird left for good. People were convinced he made a fortune on East of Lo Monthang at their expense.

Not that Laird didn't make mistakes. One day he scaled a sacred chorten with his camera, and the king himself warned Laird that this was taboo. On a trek up to the northwest highlands to photograph Chudzong, the legendary water fort, his liaison officer—over Laird's strong objections—took a rifle along to shoot endangered argali sheep, which caused a great furor back in the walled city. It was always rumors, and always depressing.

Ten years ago in the temples, Laird would tell Tashi and his other helpers: Don't touch a ladder unless I'm there; if these paintings get damaged I'll be blamed. Now the trainees have mobbed around Laird to echo his words back to him: You damaged paintings with your ladders, you stood with your legs spread over deities on the floor, you're a bad man, and nothing you can say will change our opinion. Laird is appalled, despairing. The Lobas never understood his passion about the paintings; they thought it was about money. Tom came and treated us like animals, one of the young workers tells me. How old were you then? I ask him. Seven.

Sanday doesn't intercede, and I can't really fault him—he has a future here and Laird doesn't. (His Thubchen renovation, now complete, is the subject of a Nova documentary that will air on PBS this October.) Overcome by the certitude of his detractors, Laird weeps. The last thing he could ever have imagined for his life had come true—he was the Ugly American.

I empathize with Laird's predicament, because he is no more innocent and no more guilty than any Westerner working in the Third World, where even the purest heart becomes entangled in profound and ancient conflicts. ACAP's mantra, printed in big letters at its Lo Manthang office, is a pretty thought, a seductive lie: Nepal is here to change you, not for you to change Nepal. More true are the words of the new amji, the royal physician, who carries forward his revered father's dream of a school for Tibetan medicine. A year after his father died, the school was built by outside sponsorship. "Only foreigners," the amji believes, "can make real change up here."

A legion of Tom Lairds roam the planet's hinterlands. They're always out there, autodidacts, loners, freelancers, info hustlers, image hounds, students of adventure dedicated to exotic histories and enigmatic cultures, surviving by their wits, altruistic or not, imperfect but devoted, brave and arrogant, exasperating and unprotected, skirting convention, working without a safety net but not without a value system, not without scruples, not without, for lack of a better word, a calling. The Lairds of the world are a catalyst, they come and go, and then it's up to the locals themselves to close the gap between the past and the future. Or not.

For Laird, there is no objective place to stand and fight. But he has heard enough bullshit to compose himself and regain his obstinacy. Back at his tripod, he squints into his camera's viewfinder and snaps a picture. "One picture—100,000 rupees," says one of the Lobas. The shutter clicks again. "Two pictures—200,000 rupees," says another. "Look at how much money he's already made," someone else jeers. From atop the scaffolding, the workers pelt him with paint-soaked cotton balls.

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