Covid in Kathmandu
📍Kathmandu, Nepal (Issue 197)
It's a good title for a post, right? Good memories! Ha! Well, the headache and the boiling over and the sleepless nights make it less fun. However, there is a silver lining: having a blog makes any experience, good or bad, worth it. It's all grist. Column inches. Juice! All, I suppose, great content.
More than ever, suffering is top-quality content. Or, at least, since the Colosseum closed (games ended in 404 AD) and public executions were outlawed (in 1868 AD in the UK). Our era enjoys Big Brother, Takeshi's Castle, I'm a Celeb, and the 24-hour news cycle. And politics! Politics, really, is one heap of suffering inflicted by the media on politicians and by politicians on themselves (and on us). The drama of it! But who is suffering under the drama? Just as there is no such thing as 'bad' PR, there is no such thing as too much suffering for content. On reflection, I miss a trick not sharing my bleeding heartaches (I never will!). But bring on potholes and bedbugs, dysentery, and, well, Covid, and I'll share it here. (I know you enjoyed the exhaust fumes and horror of wicked National Highway 66 that I hated on–I can see it in the reading stats.)
So, under a face mask, what would you do if you're sick in Kathmandu?
Well, there is a Rage Room in the adjacent building and I can hear the carefree smashing. (I simply can't wait until I'm better.) But even without a ticket to the Rage Room, Katmandu is a great place to be ill. The city is mysterious. It's a spiritual tapestry of cobbled streets and brick buildings—the bricks are a little smaller than I'm used to seeing, so the buildings have a more higgledy vibe. They are rougher and cuter. Windows are wooden, not PVC plastic. The streets are clean; people don't throw litter. Every third square has a temple (often golden) where old men sit with children and chant and bang drums. They "namaste" me when I walk past; I namaste back, keeping my infectious distance.
To my British ear, Kathmandu is exotic in a way that Slough or Birmingham or Milton Keynes is not. Why? It's a long way from home, and it's a Buddhist/Hindu culture, so things work differently. Often, the religions' temples are indistinguishable from one another. People look happier, less drawn and grey. People laugh spontaneously! Stray dogs get free food. It's clean, and no one hassles. On first impressions, I sense that people worship the Money God less than in the UK. They appreciate family instead. Just 9% of people live alone—in the UK 37% do. I am never knowingly ripped off. It's cheap; a pot of Darjeeling tea is £0.90, and a plate of momos is £1.50. The city is so close to the Himalayas that you might see those frosted 8,000-metre peaks were it not for the pollution. (The pollution doesn't help with that raspy sandy throat!). Essentially, it's one of those underrated cities that tourists pass through to buy trekking gear and don't hang about in.
But I'm stuck in bed, listening to the monsoon rattle away. I'm not even rushing around—can't—which is very unlike me. I am lounging and eating two meals a day: granola and yoghurt for breakfast and margarita pizza for dinner. Is that balanced? I don't know. I'm re-reading William Boyd, and he makes me cry. Boyd, you are ostensibly trash, so make me feel better! Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was about a young woman who kept trying to kill herself. It didn't cheer me! And J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy book deserves its own post.
What, I wonder, do people do when they are unwell? They eat not quite as healthy as they'd like, they sleep lightly, and they swallow as if testing for a sore throat—ah! still sore, confirmed. We estimate how much more paracetamol can have in the next twelve hours: 3,000 micrograms. 12,000? A billion? Of course, there is much gazing at the world as if it's a film shown on a cheap LCD screen; it is all at arms reach, disconnected and aloof.
Funnily enough, nothing made me feel better than the second red line on that rapid PCR test! It was real, the symptoms and the aching et al., I thought. Now I can relax. It's not malaria or dengue. "Thank God! It's 'only' covid!". Can you imagine saying that in 2021?!
But who do I celebrate with? A friend messaged to say ‘we all need a bit of positivity in our lives’. Great. Here in Patan on the first floor, I'm not talking to anyone; I'm waiting and waiting and…
I find myself raving! God-damn-it-why-do-I-not-have-the-energy-to-see-the-city-to-party-to-go-running-to-meet-strangers-to-eat-local-food-and-drink-three-cappuccinos-a-day-damn-this-splitting-headache! Bloody, bloody, bloody! In my complaining, which is exaggerated—I’m fine, I have turned, like a drowning man looking for a spiritual lifeboat, to Buddhist teachings for relief.
One teacher is Charlotte Joko Beck, the late Zen teacher, and what she says fixes me better than any paracetamol ever could. She says:
We're always looking for something, waiting for something—for the time which will be perfect, peaceful, better, different, happy. ... But we're not suddenly going to find some mysterious place where all our troubles disappear. Our great life truly is just what we are at this very second. (Listen to the full dharma talk here)
Well, I reflect with the help of Joko's buoyancy aid that perhaps it's good to stop and to be still. Just be. This is it! This technicolour moment is all we have. And our experience is what it is, nothing more or less. In its unique way, it's perfect, incorruptible, transparent, empty, vast, full and luminous. It kind of glows when you look carefully.
It's here right now, with the monsoon filling holes in the pavement and the over-ripe bananas and the fat pigeons cleaning their wings on the temple's golden roof. It's beautiful, with or without a headache.
Still, I'd prefer without; I'll have just one more damned paracetamol.
For more on why I like travelling to cities, here is a post about why secondary cities are totally underrated.
Jorge Luis Borges nailed it: "A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."
your newsletter has been upgraded from “always have a quick read” to “mark as unread, save for a proper sit down”. please continue to inflict challenging things upon yourself !