An interlude at Kagbeni
When the unkempt fakir appeared on screen at Kathmandu’s Kumari Cinema Hall featuring Kagbeni, the eerie chant that attended him as he solemnly sat with the two protagonists in a cave freaked me out completely. It wasn’t so much the unsightly old man as the chant itself that was chilling. But horror holds a strange fascination for people (some more than others), belonging as it does to the realm of the forbidden. And though the chant stirred tremors in my chest, it rang in my ears for long afterwards and roused my curiosity to the point that a stopover at Kagbeni on return from Muktinath was inescapable. After all, is liberation (Mukti)–the crowning glory of a life of piety to which all souls allegedly aspire–really possible without a taste of the forbidden? Does appreciation of the good and divine merit itself without the fear of the bad and evil? Antitheses are what make the world interesting and so we took a detour into the narrow, coarse and parched stretch of road leading to the village.
The driver was a flirtatious fellow. He stopped the vehicle next to every female with ruddy cheeks, unwashed hair, and full hips. A brief chat was inevitable and the girl would scan the inside of the jeep furtively, spot my younger brother as the only other male in it, and giggle bashfully. His wife, a feisty young New Yorker, laughed loudly in amusement at the timid admiration of the local girls for her husband. The lines of embarrassment were quite pronounced on his forehead and he would urge the driver to move on.
He finally parked the vehicle at some distance and let us explore the place ourselves, uninterrupted by his penchant for pauses. The walk was a relief from the brutally bumpy ride and the sight of trees swaying in the wind was most gratifying. The leaves had turned different colours by then–red, orange, yellow, and some remained green still. The many moments of walking through New England’s streets lined with maple trees ripe with the rich autumn colours—a prelude to Halloween’s night of spooks and scares—inundated my mind. The Kali-Gandaki river followed us in tandem down below. At the shallow edges of the water, people were busy washing clothes and would occasionally look up at us. There was no curiosity in their faces—only vestiges of a life lived on harsh terms which time had softened and made malleable.
Locals were few and tourists even fewer. We walked deeper into the village, feeling with our eyes its houses of mud and slabs of stones unevenly put together. How did people manage to live inside such misshapen constructions? What were their daily lives like within the uneven walls? Did they think of worlds beyond its confines? If they did, what were those worlds like? There were narrow paths between each house where even the scorching sunlight of a waning afternoon did not penetrate. We peered into those dark alleys, trying to get a glimpse of the unknown faces that would, we hoped, glance back at us. The petrifying silence of the village and the blank stares of those who sat on the broad lanes leading to a local temple was unnerving, almost infernal.
And yet, just beyond the river was the vast openness of the Himalayas that gave you the impression that Heaven, whatever it may be, lay across them and somewhere up there in the summit, the three-eyed Mahadev sat meditating. Religion-enthusiasts may pounce to rectify that Mahadev sits on Kailash and not just any mountain, but I will suspend with the rigours of religion and let Mahadev meditate at the summit of the Dhaulagiri Range if he so chooses.
The priest at the doorstep to Muktinath had instructed us to sprinkle water from the 100-plus spouts of the holy Kali river to cleanse our sins. I managed only 50 or so as my fingers began to freeze and my veins went completely numb. “Persevere,” screamed the others at the temple, their brows cringing with disbelief. “You don’t want to return a sinner from here. What is a little bit of cold and pain if it means the Lord will deliver you?”
I returned half a sinner with deliverance a forsaken promise. But what intrigued me more than getting rowed onto the shores of salvation from those droplets of water on my head was another of his religious diktats. “Store the water from the spouts and disperse some of it into the river at Kagbeni. It will flow back to this same spot and others will use it again from here,” he said with an air of authority that was hilarious without his intending it to be. But here was a man who knew exactly what he was talking about, and I envied the jingle in his voice with its clarity of purpose.
Back at Kagbeni, we climbed down the stairs that led to the Kali-Gandaki. I stood at the edge and watched my mother pour some of the water back into the river. It flowed with the currents, blending in without a trace. As I walked back into the village and through the stillness that had frightened me earlier, I felt a strange sense of fascination, akin to the one I had for the fakir’s background music. The vehicle was ready just as the winds began to rail at the windows and we were back on the bumpy road back to Jomsom.
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