source: Time magazine
FILED OF DREAMS
PARADISE is the stuff of the conventional promise, all sweetmeats and complaisant hour's, and then I certainly have never experienced it. But a nirvana of a different kind I did transiently enter half a century ago, when I was on my way back to Katmandu from Mount Everest, where I had been writing for the Times of London about the first climbers ever to make it to the top.
I was traveling with a Sherpa companion, who had been with me throughout the expedition and had become a friend. His name was Sonam. We had come off the mountain fast, and when we got down into the foothills, I began to feel very ill and weak- the reverse of altitude sickness, I suppose. The monsoon had broken upon us, and the endless rain did not help, but Sonam had a remedy.
'' Come with me to my home village,'' he said, '' and we will make you better.''
The village, chaunrikharka, was only a few miles off our route. At the time i only knew the place by its sound, because i had never seen the name on a map, or read any reference to it. in 1953 i doubt if any European had ever set foot there, and to this day it remains in my mind hardly more than a mellifluous suggestion, with a name that sounds lovely but is the very devil to spell.
Like most Sherpa villages in those days, it was just a cluster of small huts surrounded by potato fields and gardens, with nothing in the way of a focus, no school or public temple- nothing to Nepal Himalayas.
The long room was very dark, and at one end of it was the Sonam family shrine. A dozen small images of the Buddha stood there in an alcove, attended by flickering butter candle; as i remember, there was no other furniture. Everything was woody, smoky, creaky and inexact. Outside the rain fell steadily, and I soon slipped into what I suppose was a feverishly debilitated sleep.
When I woke up the next day the first thing I saw was that shrine, gently luminous in the morning light, and I found myself almost hallucinatory happy. it was still raining, but life was in full fling all around me.
Outside my door the fields stood green, fresh and gleaming in the wet, and a marvelously suggestive vegetable smell reached me part fertile, part rotten, part bitter, part sweet, past its best but already renewing itself, like a subliminal and oddly comforting text of existence. The river still rushed, but mingled with its noise was the hilarious laughter of children, the shrill merry gossip of Sherpa women, the clatter of pans and the cheerful voice of Sonam clumping up the outside steps to see how I was.
Was it two nights I spent there? Was it two years? It might have been either, because time lost meaning for me in chaunrikharha. All the many sonams visited me in my convalescence, some young and rosy, some extremely old, sometimes singly, sometimes all at once, feeding me roast potatoes and dosing me with a powerful white liquor called rakshi, which plays a happy part in the Sherpa culture. Strangers sporadically appeared at my open door to peer kindly and wonderingly at me. The rain hissed and clattered on the roof, and the women talked and talked downstairs.
And always, throughout my stay, those serene images of the alcove looked gently back at me, and the candles flickered, guttering when a gust of wind blew through or under my door. i heard not a harsh word. i saw not an unfriendly face. i grew to love the spatter of rain on the roof, and the scents of weed smoke and vegetables, and the bright inquisitive eyes of the innumerable grubby brown infants invited in by little Sonams to take a look at me.
When I was better, they showed me around the fields and took me to the roaring river and introduced me to the neighbors, who completed my cure with lacish tin mugs of rakhsi when the time came to resume our journey, a covey of urchins came with us for the first few hundred yards, prancing and tumbling and laughing all around us, providing a properly dreamlike envoi to a transcendent interlude.
For 50 years i have half wondered if my stay in the somewhere of chaunrikharka was purely imaginary enchantment, born by fever out of exhaustion. it was only the other day that, examining a new map of eastern Nepal, i discovered for certain that my momentary paradise had existed, east of the Dudh Kosi River, West of the snow peak Gongllha, due south of Phakdingma- heaven on earth.
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