Autumn
The weather in Lakeside was perfect. The rains had ceased, more or less, humidity had dropped and the heat was gone. It was time for long trousers and a woollen jumper, a fine merino one I had brought from Australia, in the cool nights. The peaks of distant mountains were finally clear without their monsoonal cloud cover, mosquitoes were less numerous and the air was refreshing.
I hired a friendly lady as a guide; she had pretty good English and a lifetime’s knowledge of the area. She also needed the money as she was bringing up a child on her own with irregular support from the father who had been working overseas for years. They were gradually losing contact and her chai and trinkets business was barely providing renough to pay the bills.
We visited temples, the old town, the area around the foreshore known as Damside, nearby Sedi Village and the biggest shopping centres which had certain items that were unavailable elsewhere. She dinked me on the back of her scooter if we were staying around Lakeside but we took taxis if we were going further. I don’t think she had a bike licence and she was worried about the traffic police who sometimes had a strong presence around the main roads. The traffic was slow which made it a little safer but there were a few speedsters and the occasional crazy bus drivers who saw the quiet streets as an opportunity to open the throttle and save a few seconds here and there. They roared past trailing clouds of diesel smoke and were a danger to everybody.
There was some humor in living above a massage spa. I was coming and going three or four times a day and Westerners on the street, and perhaps some locals, noticed and looked askance, assuming I was a sleazy old Australian sex tourist. It didn’t look good, in a sense, but the girls were fine to live with and I became friends with the doormen. There was a general store downstairs and restaurants almost next door. I shrugged off the disdainful glances from haughty tourists. You can’t worry about what people probably think.
It was in this apartment that I experienced a few earth tremors, two of them minor but the third one quite scary. As I was on the third floor the building swayed quite widely and shook and then shook and swayed simultaneously, testing the flexibility of the reinforced walls. I heard shouting from downstairs as the girls began to panic. It went on for a few minutes but then passed, mercifully, and we breathed easily again. That quake cost a hundred lives in an unfortunate village fifty kilometres to the west.
I wasn’t making any progress with my studio but I was playing regularly and enjoying all the music around. Things were starting to look good, better than I could have hoped. The problem with the studio was the right accomodation. I hadn’t found anything yet that suited all my purposes. It also took a while to figure out if a place was right or not. You had to live there to find out, at least I did with my limited knowledge of the culture. While it wasn’t impenetrable, the real Nepali culture was not immediately accessible to strangers. I was continually learning new things about the world around me. It was good, but it was a challenge and I was getting tired of challenges. I just wanted to settle down, relax, and create. It is not a gift that is granted too readily. I would have to earn it.
Around this time I developed a hernia in my right groin. At first it would pop out and I would push it back in but then it got worse and I had to hold it in with a belt. It was getting to the point where an operation was needed soon or there could be an emergency. Walking was becoming risky and running out of the question.
As far as I could make out there weren’t any well-equipped hospitals in Pokhara. There might have been in Kathmandu but most conversations I had on the subject came back to the logical option; a trip to India where, it was considered, there was a wealth of modern technology and experienced surgeons and a much higher standard of medical care, if you could afford it.
It was November and my visa was about to expire. I would be able to get a new one in the new year so a trip to India for a couple of months would be convenient. Winter was approaching and Pokhara would be pretty cold without a fireplace.
My Indian visa required me to enter the country by air at a designated airport, so I chose Bengaluru. I had spent time in north and central India and I had heard much about the south that intrigued me. Winter would be the best time to be there. I visited a friendly travel agent in his shop on the main street and began to make arrangements.
The visa situation was, as usual, complex. My present one for Nepal, which had been granted in Birgunj in May, had been for three months, extended by two at the office in Damside, just near Lakeside, for a hefty fee. I would have to leave before the extension expired in late November but I could return any time in the new year. Details were changing monthly as Asia rushed to open up to tourism as the dangers of covid were suddenly downgraded from dire emergency to life as usual. Many Asian countries were offering automatic ‘arrival visas’ to anyone who turned up. Some were free, typically for a month, which could be extended to two. If you got a three moth visa you could extend it by three, I think. It was hard to keep track of all the rules. There was an understanding that suitcases would not be searched in order to speed up the whole process. It made sense as no one was smuggling anything much by suitcase and there was efficient machinery to detect dangerous items. There was facial recognition at many airports and they took fingerprints and body scans too. In Indian airports soldiers with machine guns were never far away.
In the Indian Immigration department a year was measured from the time of your previous visa while in Nepal it was a calendar year. I would be able to return to Nepal in January, 2024. There were also evisas which were not the same as tourist visas although they were designed for tourists. I had passed through India in May on a one month evisa, of which you could only have one per year, so I now had to apply for a tourist visa which would be for six months of the year but not for more than three months at a time. I applied for the Indian tourist visa online and received it without any trouble. I had to specify where I would arrive in India, from where I would leave, and in which hotel I would stay there. Some of these details could be changed at a later date. There also three phone numbers required. One of them, I think it was my Indian phone number, didn’t exist, but the official in Bengaluru Airport gestured that I had to write something, it didn’t really matter what, so I put my Nepali number.
I booked two flights, one to Kathmandu and another, the next day, to Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore and now the Indian silicon valley, the centre of India’s computer industry which has been thriving since Indians wrote a third of the old internet, having excellent backgrounds in maths and providing a cheap source of labour.
Just before I left a wild leopard was found to be living in the forests near Bengaluru and was on the loose for a week. It attacked two people who were trying to catch it before they shot and mortally wounded it. It had been living on stray dogs off the streets and although it had not attacked any people at that stage it was causing mass panic. In Nepal there were also attacks by big cats and fifteen people had died in the last four years. It was not always a safe, predictable environment in Asia, there were many variables.