Nahar Marga
Nahar Marga was a small street in Jarebar, a kilometre from the lake. It was close to the remnant forest which accomodated the monkeys I had seen at my first place in Lakeside. A family of about fifteen creatures who had lost their habitat to the encroachment of new housing and now raided the neighbourhood hobby farms with some desperation as their survival was threatened. There were young still attached to their mothers’ breasts and all ages up to the large elders. When they raided in numbers the people would come out banging pots and pans and wielding long bamboo poles trying to protect their crops. Dogs would bark and run around but they stopped short of directly confronting the monkeys which were far more agile and intelligent. They preferred to take cover behind their humans or race off to a safe distance when the simians snarled at them.
The dogs were of a type popular in the region, short legged with woolly coats. They were rarely aggressive. There were big dogs in Nepal but not many in town and apparently well controlled. Some tourists were bringing their pets with them and contributing to the local fauna. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Some had a tendency to bring their problems with them and there were now social media pages devoted to lost and underprivileged canines and cats.
I had found a nice place for my studio. The apartment was the whole first floor of the building with two balconies, a lounge room, kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms, of which one became my studio and storage room. There were no noise issues and the owners downstairs, who were warmly friendly and obliging, enjoyed whatever music they could hear emanating from my rooms. In turn I could hear the lady singing Nepali songs as she pottered around the yard, a wonderful pleasure for an old musician.
Kalpana was coming around for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple more in the evening. She was cooking and cleaning and also spent a fair few hours on the couch which seemed to have been built for her. She loved that couch. She didn’t have such luxuries at home. She would recline with her mobile phone tuned to a video channel upon which, she assured me, all Nepali women could be found. They put up movies of themselves miming to popular songs in special settings, such as the foot track at Phewa Lake, and admired each others’ work. They wore traditional costumes and performed dances they had learnt in their youth, often in provincial villages.
It was easy to keep in touch with Australia and the whole world as there was wi fi everywhere; in every hotel, apartment, cafe, airport. There was news of war in several countries and a continuous stream of bad news from Australia. It seemed like the country was tearing itself apart. Home invasions, of which I had had some passing experience, were shocking. A blind woman had been invaded fifteen times. Murders of women were portrayed luridly and pinned to news pages so you saw them every day for a month. Cars and trucks driving into houses and other places like schools, seemed to have become common. It looked bizarre.
Distance made it stark, I assumed, but it looked like Australia was breaking down and no one was aware of it happening. I wondered whether I should start saying something about it, and whether I would be regarded as a traitor for so doing. Probably would, I thought. It was a delicate matter criticising one’s own country from overseas. I reminisced of everything I loved about my mother country, but so much of it was gone.
An alarming number of friends had passed away in the last few years and I was regularly hearing of more. One day there were two. I wondered how life expectancy was calculated when so many Australians were dying in their sixties and earlier. Half of the musicians I had played with were gone. And one of the best I had known was homeless in her seventies, living in a van. It was, in some ways, grotesque.
Internationally there were new and eerie phenomena like the swarms of drones mysteriously appearing around critical locations. No one knew where they came from or what they were doing. They were invisible to radars and surveillance and were often reported by head-scratching civilians. Rumours were spreading about motherships and incipient invasions. Wars continued to rage and one nation was always involved. As in 1984 images of the supreme bogeymen were teleported into everyone’s homes and darkly told of the wickedness of the spectral enemy. Prime Ministers of various countries would appear in the media simultaneously expressing coordinated policy positions but one didn’t know who was pulling the strings. How did they all know to say the same things?
Playing regularly at the Blues Club was getting a bit mundane as interest in the blues waned. As usual there were small crowds in obscure bars in back alleys and large audiences only in the big places, on the main drag, where cover bands blasted their cacophonies over the heads of inattentive patrons. There were some good nights, though. An Aboriginal friend passed through town and showed the locals what a good blues bass player sounded like. Mick was feted warmly by the Nepalis and I think he started to see the charm of the place. He met a few people, claiming that he had forgotten all the songs he had known and knew nothing about playing bass. He gave nothing away, as usual. He was planning to take his Phillipino girlfriend to Australia but was told she would need to travel to some other countries and get some stamps in her passport before she could be allowed in. Later, after travelling to Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, her application was knocked back. They said they weren’t sure she would leave.
My online chess career was taking a battering. Every time I had to change residence, which was often – about twenty times in eighteen months – my playing suffered and I lost a hundred points. When I recovered I knew that my mind was more settled and had overcome the distractions and traumas of transience. Then I could begin to savour and enjoy the surroundings.
In Pokhara I was able to watch cricket matches from around the world on a big screen with a pizza and a local beer. It was in one of the many restaurants where I had become friends with the staff and was sometimes the sole customer. On rainy nights they had incense burning to repel the mosquitoes. Sometimes Kalpana and her 13 year old son came along. They loved pizza and it was a rare treat for them. The son was especially enthusiastic and usually took home a doggy bag as well. Afterwards I would make a dash in the dark on the back of Kalpana’s scooter or I would take a taxi home.
Many people offered to help me find a visa that would allow me stay longer but that created confusion as I heard all sorts of stories about Westeners who started cafes, married locals, bought into real estate, volunteered somewhere and arranged study visas to learn the language. As usual the regulations were in a constant state of flux. Even competent lawyers came up with ideas which no longer worked. There was a newish law which stated that any foreign man who married a Nepali woman more than twenty years younger than himself would not receive residence or any entitlement in Nepal. All loopholes had been covered but of course new ones would appear.
As the monsoon approached I realised I would probably be travelling for a while until I could get another tourist visa in the new year. There was one viable option; I could get a study visa in a language college but then I would have to live in Kathmandu. I didn’t want to commit to that. Although I had friends there I would have to live near the college and wouldn’t get to see them much. Next time I would put more energy into organising a visa. If I started a small comany I could stay, but there were different rules for different types of companies. Those involving internet technology were favoured as were export businesses. Otherwise large sums of money had to be invested but again there were other approaches, such as staggering the funds in peculiar ways which I didn’t understand and as usual the complexity of the matter was beyond me and made my brain hurt.
Anyway I had something to keep me occupied; the writing of this book which I hoped to finish by the end of the year. Thailand was a convenient destination and I was intrigued by neighbouring Laos. Vietnam was another friendly option where I felt I could have a small role playing piano in bars someday, something I would have enjoyed immensely. There was a lot of simple piano music being played in bars there and it was the kind I liked, and could play. Simple, lyrical, melodious, it was right up my alley.
Thailand had changed its rules and most foreigners could now simply arrive and have their passport stamped for a small fee. Or perhaps there was no fee. One would find out at the airport but it made travel a lot easier knowing that access was made as easy as possible as nations began to compete for the tourist dollar in the post-covid doldrums.
Once again Bimal organised my tickets, and after a twenty four hour delay for bad weather – it had rained heavily all night – I left for Kathmandu and a small hotel for the night. At the airport an attendant offered to help me and then publicly shamed me for only tipping him a hundred rupees for a minute’s work. On arrival in Bangkok in the the evening I was misdirected by an airport spruiker to an expensive hotel where the cafe staff immediately ripped me off with the old Thai trick of pretending I had given them a hundred baht note and not a thousand, as I had. That one cost thirty dollars and rudely reminded me of where I was and why I had to stay alert. Airport syndrome had struck again.
I was out of that hotel as soon as possible and onto another flight to Chiang Mai which had certainly changed since my last visit.
Travels to Nepal 