The Tourist Police

In 1999, I take a trip to Tibet.

After we drive four hours from Kathmandu to the border, after we drink tea and eat omelettes on the Nepali side for two hours, after we walk across the bridge the spans the river which separates the Subcontinent from Tibet, after we are transported in the back of an open truck over a gravel road, up the side of the hill, squeezed together in an uncomfortable yet exciting way, my friend Karen and I bickering over who is stepping on whose toes, after we wait in line as the Chinese check our passports and visas and permits, after we officially enter the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and then sit in our bus in the dusty going-nowhere-fast border town of Zhangmu, waiting and waiting for something to happen (we are not quite sure what), after all that ----

We finally begin to climb. We leave Zhangmu behind, clinging as it does to the side of a mountain, looking as if at any moment it could slide into Nepal, and we twist and turn along the road, which also clings to the side of a mountain. The pine trees are thick, somehow foreign, different even than those in Nepal, craggy, suctioned-on, disappearing into gaps and gorges, gasping for breath as they grow higher and higher, waterfalls cresting off and falling down to the river below, the stone and dirt pushing more and more frequently forward as we go higher and higher, and higher and higher, and then we turn a corner in the road ---
and everything changes.

We are on the Tibetan plateau. There are no more trees, just earth. The mountains are snow-covered, glacier-like and they surround us, going on in the distance for miles and miles. The flat land extends in all directions as well, stopping only when it butts up against one of those snow-covered mountains. The air is so thin and clear that the mountains look as if they are cut out of paper and stuck to the sky, which is the brightest of blues. And when clouds do drift across that clear, blue sky, they are a child’s perfect vision of the clouds of Heaven. I’m happier than I have ever been.

*

Even though we’re on a guided tour. The Chinese have clamped down on independent travel and there seems to be no way to get into Tibet from Nepal except in an organized group. We’ve just finished crisscrossing India and trekking round Nepal, and are debating the guided tour issue while eating pizza in Kathmandu. Karen runs her fingers through her curly black hair and states the obvious: we’ve come all this way, it would be just stupid not to go. Tibet had always been planned as our final destination; we’ve lugged Tibet guidebooks and warm clothing all the way from Bombay. But a guided tour? She then states the next bit of obvious: there’s no way the two of us are going to try bribing the border guards and hitchhiking to Lhasa, even if I had met a Danish girl in Delhi who had done it.

So even though we both hate forced group activities --- as I child, I wouldn’t go to day camp, wouldn’t go on field trips, wouldn’t join clubs --- it’s the only way in, and so we book ourselves onto the cheapest tour to Lhasa we can find. $350 US dollars, which includes bus ride there, meals, accommodation, entry tickets for historical sites, gala last-night dinner and cultural show, and the all-important Chinese visa and entry permit for Tibet.

The tour also includes: a group of eighteen other people like us, people who don’t like to travel in groups. A tour guide named Tashi who doesn’t like speaking in public or telling people what to do. A driver named Lobsang, who is quite happy about everything as long as his tape deck works. And a rickety bus which only seats 19, even though we are 20, so the last person on the bus everyday has to sit on a stool in the middle of the aisle. The tour is scheduled to fly out of Lhasa after a week, but Karen and I have managed to score a coup. Spurred on by annoyance at the guided tour issue, we joined forces with Mark and John --- two punk rockers from Minneapolis whom we met while trekking --- and persuaded the tour agency to give the four of us a separate group visa and permit for two weeks, so that after the formal tour is over we can stay on in Lhasa for another five days and then ride the empty bus back to the border as it goes to pick up another tour.

Our fellow tourists bristle when they find out about our extra week. Every so often, throughout the whole tour, one or the other of them --- Martin the adventure-seeking Czech businessman or Karla the hyper-athletic six-foot tall Dutch woman --- sighs and threatens to complain to the tour agency when they get back to Kathmandu. I bite my tongue, try not to say “You just don’t get it. Take a lesson from the Ugly Americans. You have to complain BEFOREHAND, not afterwards! That’s how you get the extra week.” Because, of course, that is how we got the extra week.

And so now we’re riding the Friendship Highway --- it really is called the Friendship Highway --- all the way to Lhasa, with scheduled stops at Sakya Monastery, the towns of Nyalam and Lhatse, the cities of Gyantse and Shigatse, Lhakpa-La and Lalung-La, the first and the second highest motorable passes in the world, and Yamdrok-tso, the Turquoise Lake. It takes us five days along the Friendship Highway, days of paper-cutout mountain after mountain, mud-brick villages painted white and black, those passes where there’s no air, only wind blowing the prayer flags, and those cities where the pre-fabricated-white-tile-and-blue-windowed buildings of the Chinese mingle with the age-old crush of monastery and market.

Darkness falls very late at night, since all of China is on Beijing time whether it makes sense or not. We get up in the morning and it is still pitch black, the stars still beaming down, even brighter than they had been when we had gone to bed. We pile into the bus, try to get a seat and not the stool, and hit the dirt road for another day of surrealistic scenery and yak herders and the challenge of taking bathroom breaks roadside on a treeless plateau.

On day two Karen gets just a touch of altitude sickness when we cross the highest motorable pass. She sits on the ground by the bus having oxygen administered to her by Anthony the Australian doctor while I take photos of a man with a big fur hat and a pony. He’s happened upon us, appeared out of a literal nowhere, and is now posing bemusedly and accepting the pretzels which Mark and John are offering him. On day four, we have a picnic of peanut butter and crackers by the Turquoise Lake. The other Anthony, a stockbroker from Vancouver, flirts with me while we eat, and then later I flirt with Martin the Czech guy as we crouch by the shore and dip our fingers in the water. It’s very cold, bluer than the Caribbean, surrounded by snow, and draining slowly with no renewable source as the Chinese use it for hydroelectric power.

*

Every so often along the Friendship Highway there’s a police checkpoint. Tashi our guide collects all our passports and brings them along with our group visas and permits out to the guard post. We sit there in the bus, in the middle of the highway, feeling that slight guilt you feel when your bags are searched in the airport, even when you know that you aren’t carrying anything illegal. At least, I hope none of us are carrying anything illegal --- our tour agency has told us: no Dalai Lama photos, no Dalai Lama photos. Do not bring Dalai Lama photos to Tibet.

Tashi returns after five minutes, having smoked a cigarette while the guard checked the papers. He smiles at us, says “No problem” and everyone gets their passports back.

Tashi is soft-spoken, cute, about 30. He’s an honest guy, uncomfortable with the scams that some of the other tour guides try, and he’s eager to tell us about Tibet and Buddhism, though he’s still guarded, held in check. We pass ruins along the Friendship Highway, huge mounds of destroyed buildings, and when we ask him what they are he looks uneasy and always says “medieval castle”.

We reach Lhasa on the evening of day five. As we approach we can see the Potala Palace suspended above the city, that impossible goal of countless adventurers. On our second day there, our last day as a group, we tour the Palace, once the Dalai Lama’s home and the seat of power in Tibet, now a museum with panda-shaped plastic trash cans keeping guard at each door. Karen and I, as usual, as it had been throughout the entire tour, keep getting left behind; we peer at each and every mural, each statue, each shrine, consult our guidebooks, try to figure out if that figure is Avloketishwara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, or is it Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Knowledge. We study paintings of mandalas, meditation mazes that aid in the twisting journey towards the ultimate reality. A young monk says to us: “Like you remember your family, your home, when far away, in your mind you remember, like that I look at mandala, meditate, remember what way I go.” Just then Tashi comes to get us. The rest of the group have been waiting, drinking Cokes in the Potala Palace café.

Next, Tashi makes a departure from the tour schedule. He takes all 20 of us to his house. It’s right at the base of the Potala, one of the few old houses there that has survived Chinese civic improvements. The front part’s a souvenir store now, but in the back is a courtyard with small apartments surrounding it. Tashi’s is on the second floor. We meet his wife and his baby daughter and his father-in-law, who sits in a corner and beams at us toothlessly, pointing with pride towards one of the walls and encouraging us to bow. It is covered from top to bottom with forbidden Dalai Lama photos.

And then, as we gather in his living room, Tashi tells us his story:

In the 1980s there are demonstrations in Tibet and he and his older brother take part. His brother is arrested, but Tashi manages to flee across the border into Nepal, and then makes his way to India, to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Dalai Lama’s present-day home. His brother spends several months in prison and when he’s released he’s been beaten so badly that he can no longer walk.

Tashi stays in Dharamasala. He finishes school, learns English. And after nine years, he receives word that his father is ill. So Tashi returns home to support his parents and his brother. He leaves India, crosses back into Nepal, crosses back into Tibet, is arrested, and spends six months in prison. After his release, he gets a job leading tours. It’s an incredible irony. The Chinese need tour guides who speak English. Western tourists don’t want Chinese guides. English isn’t widely taught in Tibet. And so, by default, many tour guides end up being Tibetans who’ve been educated in India, in Dharamsala, ground zero for a free Tibet.

Tashi says that he is still suspect whenever there is any trouble, like all the Tibetans with Indian connections. The police are always knocking on his door.

As we walk back to the bus, passing through the huge stone plaza that the Chinese have built in front of the Potala, passing under the giant red flag that waves in the centre of it, I wonder if Tashi tells every tour group his story or if he picks and chooses and somehow our group is special. If his story wasn’t so palpable, it would seem staged, the perfect finish to our Tibetan experience: a real-life dissident, murmuring stories of torture and escape in our ears, right before the group boards the plane back to the Free World. They could put it in the brochures.

*

The next morning, day eight, after the rest of the group have left, Karen and Mark and John and I move into the Pentoc Guesthouse.

It is run by German evangelical missionaries. How the Chinese permit this, I can’t quite figure out. But we never see any of the Germans, except in the Barkhor Market, where one fat, pink, middle-aged blonde man sits outside all day long with the trinket sellers from Amdo Province --- women with faces like moons, thin, thin eyes, ruddy cheeks and 108, 108, the Buddhist holy number, 108 braids in their hair, the braids threaded with huge chunks of turquoise. He sits with them all day long and their eyes disappear as they giggle at him and smack him playfully and heaven only knows if he is really trying to convert them or is just enjoying their beauty, which is famed throughout Tibet.

Back at his guesthouse, there is a handful of young converts, dressed in jeans and sneakers. They sit behind the reception desk reading the Bible and looking at the photos in old copies of Der Spiegel. The hand of Germany is very present at the Pentoc --- it is ordered, immaculate, with unlimited hot water in the communal showers. Gemutlichkeit pervades, that comforting cosiness, that essence of home.

I leave the cocoon of the Pentoc in the morning and wonder about the nature of the ultimate reality as I wander the back streets of Lhasa. Sometimes, as I wander, monks see the picture of the Buddha on the cover of my guidebook, and we use the phrasebook in the back to trade pleasantries and the names of bodhisattvas. Sometimes old women sidle up beside me and mutter “Dalai Lama photo, Dalai Lama photo” and I have to turn my hands up empty. Sometimes young Chinese tourists, Nikon cameras around their necks, Nikes on their feet, enthusiastically ask me where I’m from and explain how they plan to go to graduate school in Texas and ask me how I like Tibet. And so I wonder and wonder, inarticulate dangerous questions poised on the edge of my tongue. I wonder and wonder, all day long as I wander and wander, and I return in the evening, my brain in a meltdown despite the crisp wind, still trying to figure out who and what are on the up and up, and who and what are taking us tourists for a ride.

But even if a ride is involved, it’s nice to have the Pentoc to go home to. Every evening at eight there’s a video in the lounge. There’s always quite an audience: most of the guests, all of the converts, and a few Tibetans who seem to me as if they are weighing their karma in one hand and Hollywood in the other. The first night we’re there they show ”The Fugitive.” The second night is “Sister Act.” Whoopi seems to go over a little better than Harrison, with her comedic take on nuns and convents and questions of faith. As I race through the darkening streets after the credits have rolled, heading to the Makye Ame Cafe to have a yak burger and a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, I plan the Tibetan remake, in which a secular, Chinese-educated detective must shave her head and hide out in Lhasa’s Ani Sankung nunnery, introducing a touch of Hong Kong pop music to the sisters’ ancient chants.

*

When I get to the Makye Ame, I tell Karen and Mark and John about the remake. Karen doesn’t quite get it, but fellow fallen Catholics Mark and John appreciate nun humour. The group of Swedes who are sharing our table look at me like I’m insane. I ignore them. Karen says the yak burger is yummy, so I order one well-done. Mark and John are vegans. In Tibet, this means that there is almost nothing they can eat. John is showing the waiter one of his many, many tattoos while Mark eats the apple filling in a piece of apple pie.

Two Americans designed the Makye Ame: comfy sofas, original art on the walls, pesto ravioli, brownies, extra big cups of very strong coffee, as well as momos and thukpa and China’s favourite Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. (“This occupation brought to you by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer,” says Karen.) Its windows look down into the Barkhor Market, and some days I sit there for hours, watching pilgrims from the countryside circumambulate the Jokhang Cathedral, watching the security guards and the security cameras watching us, watching the warrior men of Kham Province sell hunks of dried yak meat from blankets spread out on the ground, their long hair wound around their heads and bound up with ropes of red yarn.

Usually, I wouldn’t spend so much time in a tourist café. I usually wouldn’t sit around and watch videos at night. But Tibet is so odd, so disorienting. Now, this isn’t my first time someplace odd. Twice I’ve spent several months in India, and India is certainly odd, India is disorienting. But India acknowledges that it is these things, it flourishes its hands, and it moves on. Somehow Tibet doesn’t seem to be aware of its oddness. It is aware of its precariousness, its uniqueness, its trauma, its possible future. But it is not aware of the effect of its extremes. In Tibet my head is swimming in a late-night-I-drunk-too-much-red-wine-about-to-pass-out kind of way. In India, it swims in a constant, functional, pleasant high, with only occasional lapses into paranoia and anxiety. In Tibet I am a tourist, whether I like it or not, whether it is cool to say so or not. In India, I am sometimes a tourist, but sometimes a traveller, and sometimes, even, a familiar face.

*

On my first trip to India, I arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport at midnight. It was strange to finally get there. For years I had expended so much psychic energy on India, on reading about it and studying it and fantasizing about it. The airport is full of women in saris, men in turbans, all with immense amounts of luggage. There are molded plastic orange chairs, all hinged together. I sit on one and wait for my backpack to come along the conveyor belt and then I step outside through the sliding doors and the heat hits me. Everyone is shouting, a mass of people behind a barricade, and I see all the drivers lined up, holding big signs with the names of companies and tour groups and important individuals.

And at the very end of the line, I see my driver, a tiny rumpled man holding up a tiny piece of crumpled paper, with my name written on it in ballpoint pen.

We drive off in a big battered Ambassador, that car which is almost the only type of car in India, and which looks like a car from the 1950s even if it was built in the 1990s. The car’s headlights illuminate the white mooing face of a cow in the street as we turn into the driveway of the New Delhi Ladies College, my home for the night. I’m a guest of the headmistress, who is a friend of my Indian friends.

I dream that night that I am trying to change money. The streets of Delhi look like the streets of Rome, only filled with cows instead of churches and saris instead of Gucci.

The next night, after I had gone back to the airport and flown to the city of Bhopal, where my friends live, I am almost gored by a bull in the market. Aparna and her mother Manisha are leading me through the open air market, looking for Western-style white bread, known as double-roti --- roti being the Hindi word for bread, and Western bread being twice as thick as Indian bread --- and Manisha is pointing out the faces of the tribal women selling vegetables and Aparna is showing me the stacks and stacks of bangles in a bangle stall and then I lag behind and get caught between a crowd and a cart and the bull that is pulling it and the bull lunges and I freeze and then I move.

Later that night I call my parents. Right before I call, there is a blackout, something I’ll soon get used to in India. The whole city slows, pauses, lights a candle, waves a piece of paper in front of its face. I was almost gored by a bull. When the power comes back on and I call my parents, I don’t tell them about that. But I feel this thin current running beneath my skin. I feel something taking hold.

And on my second trip to India, two and a half years later, my flight also arrives at midnight. I sit in the molded plastic orange chairs again and wait for my friend’s flight to arrive. When I finally see Maureen emerge, I feel a shift. I feel that current. I’m not lost. She is. I’ve seen the orange chairs before. And she hasn’t. She better watch out for the bull. But I already know that it’s there.

I feel returned. The place is no longer so much foreign, as much as I am a foreigner in it. I know for certain now. I am an addict.

*

Early in the morning of the thirteenth day, Karen and Mark and John and I get on the bus that will take us to the border. It’s just like the bus that brought us here --- perhaps it’s even the same bus --- except instead of Tashi and Lobsang, our guide’s name is Dorje and, well, I never do catch the driver’s name. Dorje went to school with Tashi in Dharamsala, but he’s very different. He’s probably a better guide in many ways --- has no problem organizing us, is very much in control. He wouldn’t have let me and Karen lag behind so much.

There are two additional passengers in the bus. One is a Japanese girl who is travelling by herself, not in a group, and seems to be managing this solely by letting her face blend in as much as possible, because she speaks no Tibetan or Chinese. The other is a Englishman named Richard. Richard is an old Asia hand. He’s lived in India and Nepal for the past twelve years, speaks Hindi, Nepali and Tibetan, has a long blonde beard and long blonde hair, and belongs to the small group of Westerners who have made Lhasa a part-time home. He has a very, very upper-crusty accent. When I ask him where he’s from, he disavows any remaining connection to England and for the rest of the day, he sits in the very back of the bus and doesn’t speak to us at all.

We drive all day along the Tsang-Po River, and in the evening we reach Shigatse, Tibet’s second city. Instead of the deluxe hotel we had stayed in the first time around we stay in a little guesthouse with other random tourists and wanderers. Richard and the Japanese girl do yoga on the rooftop, and then disappear to perhaps do something else. I go to the marketplace and encounter some housewives who get great delight out of slapping me --- hard and repeatedly --- on the back. I throw them a karate pose and they all laugh, and then they hit me again. I spot Karen and make my escape.

In the guesthouse restaurant that night we eat noodle soup, and listen to the anticipation of the people who are heading to Lhasa.

The bus departs bright and early the next morning. Dorje has threatened to leave without us if we aren’t there on time. The Japanese girl stays behind, her trip not over yet.

We cover in one day what we had previously done in two and a half. No stops for photos, and a minimum of bathroom breaks. For a few hours a dust-storm obliterates the road, like a dense fog, we can’t see a thing through the windows, clouds of dust are hovering inside the bus, we wrap scarves around our faces to try and keep it out, the nameless driver keeps on going.

With just the seven of us in the bus, the space outside, when we manage to see it, seems even larger, even emptier. The bus bounces on the gravel road even more than it did on the way there, so we bounce more too, each in our own private seat, free radicals.

When we reach the town of Lhatse, we stop for lunch. Lhatse doesn’t have much to it. The Friendship Highway’s the only street in town. Half the people around are off-duty Chinese soldiers from the nearby army post; the other half desultory Chinese merchants. All are wondering what they did to be exiled to such a place. Some Tibetan men stumble drunkenly past the pool halls and brothels.

And then, as we eat more noodle soup, Richard opens his mouth:

You know, he says, this isn’t really Lhatse. Lhatse is quite a few kilometers in that direction, as the crow flies, not near a road. When the Chinese built the Friendship Highway they built this town we’re in, named it Lhatse, and left the other one nameless. But the real Lhatse is still there, and the Tibetans still call that one Lhatse, and this one New Lhatse, while the Chinese call this one Lhatse, and the old one just someplace desolate that doesn’t exist on the map anymore.

Back on the road, we pass mud-brick houses, painted white and black, prayer flags flying on the roof. You know, Richard says, those really aren’t Tibetan houses, strictly speaking. The design of the house, yes, its paint-job, yes, but that large courtyard is pure Han Chinese and has nothing to do with traditional Tibetan architecture. Traditionally, Tibetan houses have small courtyards, the walls built close to the house --- better protection from the elements, makes more sense that way. Seemingly little things are seeping into the culture, Richard says, degrading its purity in ways tourists can’t tell.

And those ruins we’re passing? What about those ruins? Medieval castles, Richard intones. Destroyed in the Cultural Revolution? Oh no. They were ruins long, long before then.

Hmmmmm. So. How much have I recognized and how much have I been fooled? And what was it that fooled me --- the whitewash on the Potala or my own vision of Tibet? I knew I couldn’t get it all in two weeks, but how much of the little I got is wrong? In India I don’t get an eighth of it, but there’s no plan behind that, no machinations, it’s just that there is a lot to get. Even the Indians don’t get it all. But I want some straight answers before I leave Tibet. I want to know.

Richard has clammed up. He’s back at the back of the bus again, eyes closed.

And the turn off the Tibetan Plateau comes as suddenly as the turn onto it. Before I can anticipate its passing, I am mourning it, as we wind into the world of trees and waterfalls. We’ve tumbled off. We’re back in. The Subcontinent laps at our toes.

We’re spending the night in Zhangmu, in a guesthouse Richard knows, hidden on a back street. It’s made of little shacks stacked one on top of the other, but it’s pretty clean, pretty cosy. Karen and I are in one room, Mark and John in the other. They don’t realize that the walls are literally made of cardboard, and we eavesdrop on their conversation as we lie in bed. They are talking about the Lucky Cat underwear they bought in Lhasa.

The next morning, the Chinese officials check our passports and permits at the border headquarters by the edge of the town, and then we get in the back of the truck and ride down to the border crossing by the river, this time not squashed, this time tired, resigned, not anticipating. We say goodbye to Dorje, and say goodbye to Tibet, walk across the Friendship Bridge with our backpacks, and are greeted by the squawk and chaos of Nepal.

At the border post, Richard is grilled by two bored officials from the lowlands. They give him a very hard time, saying his papers are completely out of order. God only knows, they probably are, since Nepal doesn’t like permanent foreign residents, and Tibet doesn’t like independent foreign visitors. His fate is still not decided when we take our place in front of the desk. “You don’t have a Chinese stamp in your passports,” the officials say. We are confused. The tour agency told us specifically that the Chinese never stamp your passports in Tibet, either coming or going. The Chinese only stamp your visa and permit, and they keep those when you leave. They know you were there, that’s good enough for them, and, on the Nepalis’ part, well, there’s really nowhere else you could have come from. “You don’t have a stamp in your passports,” the bureaucrats repeat. “Your passports are not in order.”

We’re so confused. We argue with them, explain the border crossing procedure to them. They aren’t listening. My awful American can-do side pops up, a side that is not appropriate here, and I volunteer to walk back across the bridge to tell Dorje that something is wrong. The officials gaze at me without expression as I head back to Tibet.

To this day, I don’t know why Karen and Mark and John and I didn’t get it right away. They just wanted a bribe, a little baksheesh. But, despite all you hear about the corrupt officials of Asia, I, personally, had never been in a bribe situation before. So I tromp across the bridge. And there I am, back in Tibet.

Dorje’s surprised to see me, to say the least. He’s sitting by the truck with another guide, a woman who had also gone to school in Dharamsala with Tashi. Neither of them get the bribe thing either. The Chinese guard in the little guard post by the bridge calls up to Headquarters in Zhangmu. For whatever reason, the folks up at Headquarters also don’t seem to get it. They tell me to wait while they discuss it among themselves. As I sit there I spread my growing annoyance equally between the Chinese and the Nepalis, since I don’t really know who is to blame, and then this particular annoyance changes to an oh-so-familiar annoyance at Asia in general, where, inevitably, things must be made harder than they really need to be, where we don’t know the signals, and can’t read the signs.

Then rising up over these two annoyances is that whole other one. I’m clinging on to the side of Tibet, to the very last bit of it, clinging like the town of Zhangmu, like the pine trees, like the road to Lhasa. Two weeks is not enough, a guided tour is not enough, not if you need to pierce beneath the surface. Not in a place with such hard, unyielding ground.

I’m chatting with the female guide. She’s wearing platform shoes. I guess she could be my last chance, but I’m still trying to formulate that perfect question when Headquarters calls down and gives Dorje permission to walk across the bridge into Nepal and talk to the officials himself. He trudges back with me, perspiring and looking pissed. And so I leave Tibet for keeps, at least for now, with no final answer and no lump in my throat, only a twirling brain and a tourist’s regret.

Back in Nepal, Karen and Mark and John had already figured it out and given the officials 100 rupees for each of us and everything was suddenly stamped properly after all. Richard had given them 300 rupees and his out-of-order papers had rearranged themselves into order. They had done all of this ten minutes after I left, and had been waiting for me since. So Dorje turns right around and goes back across the bridge. We get on another bus and ride it down to Kathmandu. The weather had turned to summer while we were away; when we arrive it’s hot and sticky.
*
And just like in Tibet, after Karen and I get to Kathmandu, we have a hell of a time getting out. Our flight is delayed due to a storm and so we’re stuck in the departure lounge for five hours. They won’t let us out, since there’s no intercom system to tell us to come back. The air conditioning’s off ‘cause the storm is messing with the electricity and the place is boiling, but when we go and sit by the cracked open windows, the mosquitoes attack us. We’re hungry --- everyone is hungry --- and eventually the airport breaks down and gives each of us a cup of flat 7UP and a cheese and double-roti sandwich. I can’t wait to get home.

I can’t wait to get home, even though I know deep-down that this desire to leave is based purely on conditions beyond my control. I know that this desire will pass. It will have gone by the time I arrive. But the desire to return --- that will always be there, also out of my control, that current beneath the surface, a constant, nagging, intangible want.

I try not to conjure up that desire, not now, not here in the departure lounge. I try not to think of saris laid out to dry like banners on the banks of the Ganges or the milky taste of lukewarm chai in plastic cups on a moving train. I try not to think of the snap of the prayer flags in the wind of the highest pass or the butter-scented gold and maroon light inside the Jokhang Cathedral. I’m trying, for once, not to complicate the issue. I’m leaving, the sweet taste of flat 7UP in my mouth, and I won’t cling on to the last bit of Nepal. I’ll just sit here in this airless room, cling desperately to the certainty of the moment, ask no questions, and remind myself, over and over, that I can’t wait to get home.