‘There should be plenty there. Whatever you don’t use, you can keep.’
Shooting another worried glance at the security guard, Sonam quickly placed the money in the side pocket of his suit jacket, his cheeks flushing.
‘When I said I would help, I did not mean you should be handing me money in the middle of the Embassy!’ he hissed. ‘Let us leave now and I will send news later.’
Out on the steps of the building, Luca offered him his hand. ‘Don’t worry, Sonam, this will all work out fine.’
Sonam slowly shook his head. ‘Mr Matthews, I just hope you are not getting yourself into trouble. The Chinese are not to be messed with.’ Buttoning his jacket, he walked down the steps and started back in the direction of Thamel.
Luca watched him dodge round a cow lying in the gutter and then turned his gaze back across the street. A gaggle of grubby children had collected around the taxi. Bill was leaning out of the window, in the middle of folding a piece of scrap paper into a leaping frog. Luca walked up to the car and lifted one of the children out of the way.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to the child’s curious, upturned face. ‘Bill, we’re done. Let’s get out of here.’
He signalled to the taxi driver and the car rattled into life. Bill quickly handed the half finished frog to one of the young girls then reached into his pocket to produce a bundle of filthy rupee notes. At the sight of the money, the children all started shouting. Thin brown arms shot through the window and he started cramming notes into each open hand. The children’s excited faces pressed against the glass of the driver’s door and only stopped pushing forward when Bill leaned back and turned out his pockets to show that they were empty.
‘No more, no more,’ he shouted, and put his hands together in the traditional Nepalese salute. ‘Namaste!’
As the taxi pulled away to join the main flow of the traffic, the children all put their hands together, their echoing cries of ‘Namaste!’ soon drowned out by the noise of a car backfiring somewhere down the street.
‘Good way to start a riot,’ Luca said, looking over his shoulder at his friend.
‘I know, but the little buggers have to eat, don’t they?’
There was silence as they both turned to stare out of their respective windows. As they passed under the mass of overhead banners and edged further into the narrow, crowded streets of Thamel, Luca thought back to Sonam again and wondered if he had done the right thing. If there were two things that kept the city of Kathmandu moving, they were bribery and gossip. The problem was that one tended to lead to the other.
‘Everything OK with the permits?’ Bill asked, leaning forward between the front seats.
‘No worries,’ Luca said, flashing him a reassuring smile. ‘Picking them up later at the hotel.’
‘Great. So no problems at all?’
‘Like I said, everything’s sorted.’
Luca bent forward and rummaged in a small leather bag at his feet. He picked out a rolled up piece of photocopied paper, a little battered round the edges. Swivelling round, he handed it over to Bill so that it partly uncurled, showing the corner of a pyramid-shaped mountain, intricately illustrated.
‘Let’s go for a pint at Sam’s. There are a few other things you should know about this mountain.’
Chapter 17
It is said that a giant ogress lies under the land of Tibet, held hostage by some rather clever urban planning. Like Gulliver and his Lilliputian captors, temples were constructed over the giant’s limbs, pinning her to the earth and preventing her from wreaking devastation throughout the holy land.
Over the heart of the beast was built the Jokhang — greatest of all the Buddhist temples.
Having ditched their bags at a hostel and taken showers, Luca and Bill now stood looking through a crack in the Jokhang’s giant, gilded doors. In the chalky evening light, the gentle sound of chanting rolled around the temple.
Both men watched mesmerised as men, women and children brought their hands together above their heads and, with eyes screwed tight shut and hands clasped together, lay flat on the ground, extending their arms towards the Buddha within. Without order or symmetry they stood up and repeated the process, again and again, for hours at a time. To prevent them from wearing down the skin on their hands, small bits of cardboard were tied around their palms. Like a million crickets rubbing their back legs together, a rasping noise bounced and echoed off the stone walls.
‘Amazing,’ murmured Bill. ‘To have such belief.’
‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Luca, his eyes following the constant flow of movement.
He looked up to where thousands of lines of criss-crossing prayer flags fluttered in the breeze high above them. They were tied from building to building, across lamp-posts and guttering, any place where they might catch the wind. Each patch of coloured cloth was emblazoned with Buddhist sutras and pictures of wind horses. As the fabric flapped in the breeze, the horses were said to be carrying the prayers up into the heavens.
Luca counted five colours to the flags, and checked again. He knew of the four sects of Tibetan Buddhism, each one with their own distinct colour, but had never heard of blue representing one of the orders. Perhaps it was another sect that had previously existed and had now fallen by the wayside. Or maybe there was a whole other strand of Buddhism out there he had simply never heard of. He shook his head. He had always found the enormous scope of Tibetan religion bewildering.
Walking away from the great doors of the temple, the men passed round its back, following hundreds of others along the well-trodden pilgrimage trail of the Barkor. The buildings to either side were high, hemming in the narrow streets with walls made from thick blocks of ancient stone, whitewashed in the traditional Tibetan style. Market stalls lined every inch of the streets, cluttered to overflowing. Everything was for sale, from army surplus military jackets to yak-bone prayer wheels, old Tibetan scrolls to plastic cutlery sets.
The vendors stood behind their tiny stalls, sipping yak-butter tea and occasionally heckling one of the passing devotees. There were hundreds of pilgrims, moving in a steady flow around the temple. Each held a prayer wheel of varying size. The top half of the wheel was attached to weighted beads that were spun round in a constant cycle to release a series of holy words written within. Some hung nearly a meter long, requiring a support hanging from the owner’s belt and great circular arm movements to get the momentum going.
Bill and Luca were passing the first of the market stalls when three small children, dirty and with cardboard still strapped to their hands, approached. Giggling and talking rapidly amongst themselves, one of them walked up to Luca and pulled on his arm. He crouched down, smiling.
‘Hello, guys.’
One whispered something to the next who hesitated for a second before leaning forward and gently pulling the blond hair on Luca’s forearm. He looked amazed to discover it was actually attached.
‘Of course… Tibetans don’t have any body hair,’ Luca said, glancing up at Bill, before turning back to face the children. ‘If you think that’s bad, kids, look at this.’ And, leaning forward, he pulled down the top of his T-shirt to reveal a patch of hair at the centre of his chest. The children squealed in delighted horror and retreated backwards, hugging each other. The same boy who had made the original discovery stepped forward again and pointed at Luca.
‘Po,’ he said simply, then ran off to the temple doors closely followed by his friends, all shrieking with laughter. Bill and Luca looked at each other blankly.
‘Any guesses?’