Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

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Kingdoms in the Air (Cont.)

VIII. KNOWLEDGE AND PAIN
ON THE FIRST HOT, bright, clear day since we rode out of the canyon, Laird and I ladder up through somebody's roof to walk the eastern wall of the city. From our vantage point we can see that most of Lo Manthang's houses have solar panels. One even has a satellite dish.

The passage of ten years has made the world of the Loba no longer simple or static; Mahendra himself had told me, "Life wasn't confusing until the queri came; you made it confusing." Not just Tom Laird—everybody. Laird inhales heavily and sighs; not self-pity, I think, but grief. Any role he had to play in the history of Mustang is over. His legacy here, despite the emotions and distortions, despite his own cynicism, is positive, life-affirming. He was a forerunner of change, a particle in the convergence of forces that lifted the veil from the Lost Kingdom of Lo. A year from now, after photographing terror and civil war and massacres, Laird will move from Kathmandu to New Orleans, where he and Jann hope to spend six months a year. After 30 years he is too tired to stay.

The groan of horns in the square ends our conversation. Tiji, the annual cleansing ritual, has begun. As they have for centuries, the lamas in their magnificent costumes will perform their legendary dance. The courtyard will twist with incense and dust as the good spirits, the better spirits, pull mankind back from the brink of darkness. The demon—the tattered skin of a Bengal tiger—will be stabbed and defeated. A year's worth of malignancy will be destroyed. Life will be renewed, absolution dispensed sparingly, and in the morning Mahendra and Tomay will bring the horses and we will go.

He who gathers knowledge, it is written in Ecclesiastes, gathers pain. And when you romance a dream to death, what remains is a dry residue of absurdity that will mock your passions for all eternity.

On the morning of Thursday, May 31, the day we are leaving Nepal, I take my wife to Pashupatinath, where we watch a son place a torch to his father's mouth, the shrouded corpse atop a stack of sandalwood on the cremation ghats beside the Bagmati River. History speeds up, history crackles through the present. By the weekend, the river will reflect the blaze of royal pyres, the sparks of Nepal's past sucked away into the celestial darkness of midnight.

All readers yearn for meaning, all travelers, all pilgrims. But where is the joy in understanding? History speeds up, the future implodes into the present. Sometimes quietly, sometimes not. Kingdoms open, kingdoms close, kingdoms...disappear. Tongues of flame speak riddles from the lips of a monarch, the heads of dying gods radiate heat and light like a row of setting suns, a king's heart turns to ash as cold as the dust on the moon. A prince dreams of love and wakes up bathed in hatred. A young man dreams the most spiritually fertile of dreams; he dreams of Shangri-la and wakes up old, disillusioned. Meaning is not understanding. And for a moment, this moment, Nepal has slipped past both.

The monsoon arrives in force. Something to count on.

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