Without notion of direction my feet place themselves one in front of the other, side stepping androgynous deities, hopping obstructions, falling upon incomprehensible surfaces. Languages clutter and separate in the ear. Tourists blur inside the eye as they flee fossil vendors and money changers, or move hurriedly toward raucous parades of fanatic Hindus tooting horns behind celibate butts of horse-drawn goddesses. Clouds loosen from snow peaks, anchor themselves to pagoda tops. But the city goes about its business in dust.

All afternoon it has been wanting to rain. Despite the changing bells, the offerings of fire and the chanting monks, no moisture falls. Behind the painted wheel of liberation a monkey smiles. A flat sow rubs her snout against the decaying boundaries of her pen. Lard boils in the sun. A lotus wilts on Parvati's throne. I aim for the mosquito on my arm, slap myself instead. The world is occult, filled with prophecy, pathos, an air of pulverized light.

In the butcher district an eyeball stares from the sidewalk. Meat cutters sleep on mattresses wedged inside half-slaughtered carcasses. Lanterns, knives, towels mirrors, framed goddesses hang from cows' ribs. Clear plastic bags are filled with shining intestines and miscellaneous hooves oozing jelly. Mama's Pie Shop, next to Third Eye Travels, is splattered with blood from last week's festival. A sign in Tit Tits Tea Parlour reads: "Fresh Milk lassies."

One sees the ochre villages and checkered fields from the air, descends into a jeweled green landscape from the clouds, and expects an impeccable fairyland of clean-swept cobble, beauty without meanness, the purity of snow and fresh air, rose gardens and merciful icons. But it ends at the airport, right after the customs inspector rummages through your belongings and, either by mistake or as a deliberate joke, stamps your hand instead of the passport.The taxi man crams seven of you from every part of the world, each speaking a different language and holding a different political card, into a midget automobile, and off you go smoking down the pot-holed tarmac towards the inner city. Immediately the fairyland breaks down.

The taxi pulls to a stoplight behind a cartload of bleeding goat heads. An old baba, with a head like a water pump and a face of twisted leather, walks along fanning incense on live coals in a cavity of his slumped chest. Through emblematic trash heaps in dead-end alleys, a dwarf picks her way.

Everything is static, in electric standstill. As if the movie reel had snapped. As if a roofless cathedral had suddenly collapsed on a congregation waiting for the moon to catch up with the sun or mill wheels to synchronize with astrological predictions. A breeze blows but the banner strung between police station and public library does not move:

SPEAK THE TRUTH
PERFORM YOUR DHARMA
DO NOT FAIL FROM SELF STUDY

A child in bright pink underpants plays hopscotch, blowing a Nepalese pop tune through a leaf between her lips. My hand circumscribes the clouds, the old baba, the child, the smoldering trash heaps, and ends on the chin of this strange human animal who embraces mediocrities, feels emotion, watches the world dissolve and recompose.

In every direction the city leaps its skin, devours hills, coughs a yellow smog line before the dreamy Himalayan peaks. Bamboo scaffolding, cement buckets lashed with rope, fresh planks cut and spliced into the geometry of human need. Impossible not to feel every inert beam and post as once breathing entities waving their branches in the sun. Brick houses, brick courtyards, brick temples, brick offices. Bricks heaped in sagging dump trucks, bricks on backs of women. Bricks piled under the bat-infested trees surrounding the King's palace. How many trees to fire one kiln load of brick?

Who was it that asked:"If the world is so beautiful, why are we not beautiful in it?"

Vishnu's bell is cracked by an earthquake. The Fire Goddess happily guards her intimate curves. The Muslim mango man climbs towards heaven on a sword. The Hindu saint undresses a thin-bloused punk rocker with his all-seeing third eye. Black market gem cutters cultivate plastic where there should be sapphire. Tanners screw their noses over putrid hides. The balls of a gentle beast are castrated under transistor radio playing the national anthem while an air force of flies prepares its attack.

The daydream is mortal. Our identities temporal, interchangeable. My eyes follow shifting moments, discover a metaphor in the child's kite soaring upward so fast as to become invisible, then taking an unexpected nosedive into a high-tension line new to the city's outskirts. The afternoon crinkles like collophane. Tailors whir their bobbins, embroider while-you-wait Om signs. Clouds build in front of dreamy peaks, then part to reveal the same summits metamorphosized into jagged fangs ready to devour the world of human hustle and startling taboos. We, who maneuver to the best seat, the quickest nirvana, the highest profit, the perfect island.

A sign points to the Temple of the Living Goddess. A child of premenstrual age with khol-darkened eyes and crystal crown who, I am told, might be possible to see. But when ushered into the dilapidated courtyard below her half-curtained window, I find that only for a hefty baksheesh will she appear. Better, and for free, are the erotic maidens celebrating the eternal play of procreation carved high on roof supports over the city's open-air shrines.

Across the rickety bridge over the Vishnumati River, the city ends. Hills and fields begin. Crickets chant acoustical signals in terraced mustard greens. A cement mixer burps as its motor turns. A house is being constructed from the materials of another being torn down. A family is spread between them both-lighting hearth fires in one, going to bed in the other.

A footpath zigzags like a slow through cabbage plots and poinsettias toward the thick woods of Swayambhunath Hill, its top crowned by a huge stupa whose gold tower is painted with Buddha's omnipresent eyes. Festive yet imposing, they scan crops, overlook human activities, keep track of kingfishers, make sure the cows are fed. Over births, weddings, deaths, funerals and very connected ritual, they preside. Staring upward at the great stupa, I see a spiral of calligraphy under those powerful eyes. Calligraphy that to the Nepalese means " One" but to the westerner looks like an upside down question mark. An appropriate symbol, in a land where euphoria and the grotesque are inseparable.

- Brandi is the author of the book "A Question of Journey", considered to be one of the best travelogues on India and Nepal.

A QUESTION OF JOURNEY: TRAVEL EPISODES - INDIA, NEPAL, THAILAND AND BALI
J Brandi
Book Faith India, 81-7303-180-0
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