We had spent the day visiting several much venerated and visually impressive Buddhist and Hindu sites in and around Kathmandu. But the experience that keeps returning to my thoughts again and again several days later is this ….
We had arrived in Pashupatinath, Nepal’s most important Hindu site – devoted to Pashupati, Lord of All Animals, Protector of Animals, associated with Shiva – its temples and cremation ghats sited along the holy Bagmati River, now green-black with pollution and mountain run-off. We pass Shiva figures red with the tika powder fingerprints of the devout. Someone has placed a sprig of evergreen over Pashupati’s brow. Pilgrims, mourners and tourists are offered garlands of marigolds, incense, conch shells, beads, glass phallic lingams, ancient-looking coins ... gifts for the gods, karmatic amulets and bric-a-brac.
The sign on a low-rising red brick building, factory-like in outward appearance, names a home for the elderly poor. Opposite, groups of old women, seated and folded in saris, talk together, waiting, we are told, for vacancies in the bricked “home.”
The old and the poor arrive here towards what they feel is the end of their lives. Family members bring their dead to be cremated. And now tourists by the bus load are brought to view the activities of this holy place and the passing of life through death to life. The sacred here is also a spectacle. I find myself embarrassed and fascinated.
Across the ‘holy’ fetid yellowgreengrey river, smudgy funeral pyres, tended by men in white, smoulder against an ashy blackened world of brick and metal scaffolding. On this side, at the edge of death, holy men counsel grieving parents, partners and children. Fortune tellers sift the detritus of pieces of string, flowers, remnants of clothes, rice kernels and other food stuffs. Fake photo-me sadhus, in their faded orange robes and ash-treated dreadlocks and faces, look the image of wisdom for the tourist photographers and their rupees. Earlier a grey bearded holy man (real or fake, it is impossible to know) berates a woman who has taken his photo but not given rupees to his out-reached hand. An elderly stooped woman, clothed in worn, faded rags that might once have once been red or maroon, reaches out her long weathered palm.
Then I notice it ... a metre or so from my feet … a small mound of twists and flaps of grey-brown rags, filthy, left here by someone for later use, or simply dropped and forgotten. Then I think I see the slightest movement, then hear the faintest moan, indecipherable but vaguely verbal, an appeal. Then – all this in one long quick moment – one fold in the rags seems to stretch and reach towards my feet. Another moaning appeal – sounds so distantly suggesting words, making me unsure, anxious. But yes, it is a human, voiced call, indecipherable but I get its meaning – an appeal for money, for help, for recognition.
The voice makes me look, the rag mound makes me look away. Disturbing, uncanny, this speaking rag heap ... not possible to associate with what I have thought of until now as human being.
Is it/he/she an amputee, a dwarf, so emaciated, a limbed human now twisted back around itself like those rags? I resist accepting that that so faintly intelligent moan, that plea, can be human, that a human can be reduced so totally, like refuse that might be swept up and thrown into a refuse can this very night. But there she, there he is, undeniable. I feel queasy, look there and look away again, stop, hear that voice, close my eyes, still see that rag heap, walk again but not towards the voice, further on, away, still hearing that appeal. And still hear it now, days later.
And I sometimes wonder … what was it like, inside that sensate rag heap, to see that well-dressed passerby, another of many, to call out, to see how he slowed down, hesitated, stopped, stared, curiously voiceless, hesitant, then walk on?
