The Future—Lumbini in Tow

When they said REPENT REPENT I wonder what they meant
-Leonard Cohen, "The Future"

Lumbini is what this is supposed to be about, but Lumbini is so inconsequential, there is really not much to write about.

What I did notice was the enduring trip aboard a mini-bus through the winding hills of the Kathmandu valley that dropped sharply to the flat Terai plain, which is what you imagine India to be like, because, well, it is India. The lower part of Nepal, before it gets scrunched up into the Himalayas, is a continuation of the northern plain of Uttar Pradesh and Gangetic Plains--a hazy, sun beaten and Monsoon-washed flat pancake of land that is the grain basket for Nepal.

But this bus trip! I had the seat between the driver and the passenger seat, my legs knit together in an uncomfortable pose for the 9 hour journey of 200kms.

As you leave the Kathmandu Valley and its affluence, you enter a surreal world you thought only existed in dioramas at the local museum of civilization. There are people that live in mud huts that get washed away regularly at the first rains of the monsoon season (which is maybe a week away). Women sweep dust into the air, which settles quickly in their houses. Chickens, goats, pigs, Brahmin cows and oxen crowd together with humans on a small bit of land they live on--all huddled together in a time-honored method of survival. It's hard to imagine what life must be like for them, for it surely seemed difficult.

One thing that catches the Western--or modern-- eye, is the lack of sanitation--something I noticed in India many years ago and it came up again here in the subtropical Terai. They put fresh cow dung around the entrances of their homes to sanitize them; a cut is treated with a handful of mud. They have some insights into first aid that the regular couch potato who accidently jams his big toe at the fridge door while reaching for a beer and that bag of sour cream 'n' onion flavored chips might not be familiar with, but to the couch potato, it seems utterly disgusting--but I ask, who has survived longer--the folks in the mud huts, or the folks in Cleveland? As Henry Miller (Collosus of Maroussi, 1941) wrote:
~

Power fades away in ugly decrepitude, leaving little vulture-like knobs of manifested will here and there to indicate the ravages of pride, envy, malice, greed, superstition, ritual, dogma. Left to his own resources man always begins again in the Greek way-- a few goats or sheep, a rude hut, a patch of crops, a clump of olive trees, a running stream, a flute.
~

I expected to spend two days at Lumbini, but there were mitigating circumstances that had me leave about 10 hours after I arrived. First was the agonizing hour and a half 22km local bus ride from the crossroads at Bhairawa to get to Lumbini. Again, I was jammed beide the driver, who constantly leaned on his horn to move the goats, cattle, and people off the ugly little dirt road. Once in Lumbini, you wouldn't think this was a place of any interest at all--there are no real monuments or special things about the place where the Lord Buddha was born--it is no Bethlehem or Mecca--or Niagra Falls for that matter--you can't even buy a postcard there. A few ruins, Ashoke's stupa saying it was here that Buddha was born, and the Maya Devi pond: Maya Devi was Buddha's mother, and she took a dip in this pond just before leaning up against a tree and dropping Buddha on the ground from her womb (that was the fashion for giving birth at that time--it has no reflection on her social status--which was a high ranking Brahman and wife of a king).

Another reason for a short stay was that the hotel wanted $15 US to stay the night, although they had no electricity or water--and I had to negotiate to say that $15 was an outrageous amount of money to pay for a room with not one facility available. So I got it down to half price recall I stay with a Tibetan family and pay $2 a night in downtown Kathmandu for comparison) but at 5 am got up and paid and was on my way. I snapped a few pics (to be seen soon--I go to Bangkok today) and hitched a ride with the first bus to Bhairawa. I got out of the bus, it still being a fresh morning before the pounding sun and heat took over, and thought about eating breakfast until I saw this absurd sight. There was this boy in his teens, crouched low on their haunches --like Asians tend to do when they are waiting around-- and his hair was shiny black and ruffled. Then I looked at his hand, or where his hand should have been! Instead I saw an outline of a human hand that was black and crawling with something. When I looked closely, the boy's hand was covered with flies--thousands of flies--so that no skin was visible.

I really had no way to react to this sight. It was so bizarre I just passed him. A thought came to photograph him, but then a sense of propriety said, "no, that'd be wrong." Funny how some sort of knee-jerk training on how we should behave came to mind. Then I thought about what to do, thinking I might do this or that to help the boy, but they were fleeting, and I carried on. I have no feeling about whether I did the right or wrong thing--all I did was watch contact (passa) and see how memory might deal with it. Unmoved, I continued on, but the image remains with me.

It was at that point I had had enough of this surreal Terai, and thought a city-boy ought to head on back to the city.

I have more to write, but time is tight, and I'll report more as it descends into my pores.

Finally, I thought this bit from Henry Miller (1941) was a useful and appropriate piece to end this missive:
~

I stopped a moment to gaze at the window of a bookshop. Conspicuous was a volume in Greek of "Twenty thousand leagues under the sea". What impressed me at the moment was the thought that the world in which this fantastic yarn lay buried was far more fantastic than anything Jules Verne had imagined. How could anyone possibly imagine, coming out of the sky from another planet in the middle of the night, let us say, and finding himself in this weird community, that there existed on earth other beings who lived in towering skyscrapers the very material of which would baffle the mind to describe? To see even fifty or a hundred years ahead taxes our imagination to the utmost; we are incapable of seeing beyond the repetitious cycle of war and peace, rich and poor, right and wrong, good and bad. Look twenty thousand years ahead: do you still see battleships, skyscrapers, churches, lunatic asylums, slums, mansions, national frontiers, tractors, sewing machines, canned sardines, little liver pills, etc, etc? How will these things be eradicated? How will the new world, brave or poor, come about? Looking at the beautiful volume of Jules Verne I seriously asked myself the question-- how will it come about? I wondered, indeed, if the elimination of these things ever seriously occupied our imagination. For as I stood there daydreaming I had the impression that everything was at a standstill, that I was not a man living in the twentieth century but a visitor from no century seeing what he had seen before and would see again and again, and the thought that that might be possible was utterly depressing.
~

Indeed, how do you see the future?