Only Little Cholera 2

                                                “Rewards a long day's toil
                                                  Pulling into Katmandu
                                                  Smoke rings fill the air
                                                  Perfumed by a Nepal night
                                                  The Express gets you there”
                                                        Rush, A Passage to Bangkok



Kathmandu was named after an ancient three-storied temple in Durbar Square. Legend has it that it was built from a single tree, without any support. In Sanskrit, the structure was called Kasthamandap, or ‘wood-covered shelter.’
Tim and Thomas and I were looking for another, and we weren’t getting much support either. We had already been to the Kathmandu Guest House. The staff there finally found the note that Robyn and Julie had left me, indicating their relocation to the Om Guesthouse. The clerk at the Om said they had moved to the Earth House, so that’s where we headed. There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town; There's a tender-hearted woman and I followed every clue,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
Julie met us on the stairs to tell me Robyn had been ill. We entered to find her still afflicted with the chip butty-resistant Varanasi strain of the flux. I pulled out my new stethoscope, and went to work.
“She’s got diarrhea, Wink.” Said Thomas. Tim just whistled.
“This never occurred to me.” He admitted.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I said.
Tim and Thomas agreed to meet us later, and I had a long shower, a game of Scrabble with Julie, and a successful search for antibiotics through Serendipity for Destiny. They had bought me a present of Bo tree leaves, to commemorate my return from the journey.
Tim and Thomas arrived in the rain, sharp on six, dragging a tall guy with a black beard, red baseball cap, blue t-shirt, and a Kashmiri leather bag in tow. It was my double, Neil, from Delhi, jazzed to have found us, a little despondent because Jan was laid up with dysentery. He said he knew a place, and we went.
Around the corner was a restaurant, named after a short novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, written by W.E. Bowman in 1956. It was a parody of the story of the first ascent of Annapurna. Sir Hugeleley Havering led an expedition to Yogistan, in an attempt to climb Rum Doodle, the world’s highest mountain (elevation 40,000 and ½ feet). The exploration’s physician, appropriately named ‘Prone,’ endured a never-ending series of illnesses. Everyone in our company had also experienced, or was still afflicted with, some form of enteric pestilence or another. We were all in dire need of a safe ingestion site in a stare-free environment for one special evening. Rum Doodle, despite its extreme elevation, or because of it, decorated with pictures from the book, was a staging point for expeditions to Everest, and for us, the end of the Indian famine. There were buffalo steaks and chips and salad, and mile-high apple pie.
Later, back in the warmth and wood and Japanese lanterns of the Earth House, we had a traveler’s jam session, with all the songs that had led us here. And there was Neil’s shaggy dog rendition of the falling sky, starring Chicken Little, Cocky Locky, Ducky Daddles, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, and Foxy Woxy. And they went along, and they went along, and they went along... There was better family for some than we had left, in the congenial kinship of the open road. Despite the wee hours fatigue, Tim was right: ‘They happen only rarely like this.’ We had become the Rum Doodle Society. No one could have taken the minutes from our meeting. Mosquitoes whined, dogs howled, roosters crowed. We slept.
The twisted dusty streets of Thamel threw that high altitude sun square into our faces next morning. The air smelled of freeze-dried shit at altitude. Our eyes squinted up at ornate carved wooden windows and multistoried temple roof struts. Kabuki cartoon eyes, with sinuous eyebrows, watched our every move. Instead of noses, under each third eye of the Buddha, was a corkscrewed question mark, actually the Nepali character for unity, symbolizing the one way to reach enlightenment, through the Buddha's teachings. It is the loneliest number, is it not? Pigeons and cows intermingled with images of gods and goddesses. The benign benevolence of elephant-faced Ganesh looked across to the blood red drippings from the teeth of the larger-than-death Durga bas-relief, with her six arms, potbelly, and fierce compassion. Tantric demons peered at us from masks and shop calendars. Among the monastic courtyards, pagodas and palaces, in this Hindu and Buddhist mélange promise of paradise, tourism was extruded as the third religion. Out of bulging storefront entrances issued enticements, of intricate thangka paintings, carved sculptures, mixed metal bracelets and other jewelry, Tibetan carpets, tall Nepali caps, shawls, Balinese jackets, beads, puppets, bags, herbs, prayer wheels, T-shirts, incense, and posters. One proprietor gave me one that wasn’t actually on sale, an advertisement for a nearby establishment, just down from Lila’s Beauty Parlor.

                                      ‘Let Us Take Higher
                                       Oldest & Favorite Shop in Town
                                       Serving you the Best Nepalese Hash & Ganja
                                       (Available Wholesale and Retail)
                                       Come Visit Us Any Time for All your Hashish Needs’
                                                       Eden Hashish Centre, Prop. D.D. Sharma
           

For if one didn’t have time for more formal lessons in enlightenment, the option of instant mind expansion was also available. And that indulgence would be guaranteed to stimulate the search for the perfect lemon meringue paradise in Freak Street’s Pie Alley. For all your hashish needs.
After I took Jan to the hospital and found her amoebas, Tim and I bicycled out the south side of the Bagmati River, to the third century Mallan city of Patan. Inside the bamboo scaffolding, and along its powdery streets, were over a thousand medieval monuments, Hindu temples and Buddhist vihars and royal palaces, with exotically carved gateways and windows, especially in the main Durbar Square. Witch doctor Jhankris, with their drums and feather hats, had come to bathe under the spouted conduits of the stone water tanks. We returned to play a late afternoon chess tournament with Neil, and an evening of enchilada experimentation at KCs.
By this time, Robyn and Julie and I had decided on a trek, and had chosen the Annapurna Circuit, out of Pokhara.
We purchased seats on the Swiss bus for the morrow, and spent the last day in Kat cycling the eleven kilometers out to Bodhnath, one of the most ancient and largest spherical stupas in existence. It had been constructed by the four sons of Jajima, an apsara in her previous life, but the wife of four unlucky men in this one. Each of her sons was from a different father, a horse trader, a pig trader, a dog trader, and a poultry trader, in that order. She had worked her way down the matrimonial menu.
The stupa the sons built ascended from earth to water to fire to air to space, up through the thirteen rings on the path to enlightenment. Om Mani Padme Hum was carved on the prayer wheels. Thousands of multicolored prayer flags tied to the top, like structural and spiritual supports on a microwave tower, fluttered in the wind, carrying mantras and prayers heavenward. It made perfect sense. Because that’s where we were going.