The Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett Read Free Book Online Page A

the
farang
backpackers who moved heavily with their towering burdens which must have contained clothing for six months and medical accessories for a year. Some had aluminum tent poles sticking out. Quite a lot of them were single women or women traveling in pairs, both young and middle aged; Nepal was supposed to be safe, all the guidebooks agreed. I saw clones of Rosie McCoy. At the same time Nepali women in traditional dress (mostly saris, although a lot wore tapered pants under a long upper garment) were rushing in and out of shops and carrying groceries wrapped in gray paper, or cooking over gas burners in the open doorways of their medieval homes, taking care not to jostle the bony cows who also emerged to enjoy the evening. Then there was the music.
Om mani padme hum
boomed out from CD stores along with Robbie Williams and Ravi Shankar, and one cornershop never stopped with the deep-throat, low-note Tibetan chants which formed a kind of long-wave whale chorus to the whole zoological moment. Of course I was thinking,
Tietsin
.
    I woke just after dawn, took a stroll around town, refused marijuana five times—only because I was meeting Tietsin—and gave some money to the woman still holding the dead baby; so maybe the baby wasn’t really dead. When they came for me, the elderly nun from Bodnath to whom I had given money and whom I had thought decrepit was in the back of the minivan. She smiled warmly and mischievously. The driver seemed to be Nepali and didn’t speak. “We’re going to a lecture on Tibetan history,” she explained with a smile in perfect English.

7
    I had been shown into some kind of forum which had already started; indeed, it seemed on the point of finishing. The top floor of the teahouse had been converted into a meeting room with maybe a dozen chairs, eight of which were occupied by youngish
farang
who looked like backpackers. I had no choice but to sit at the back and listen.
    Doctor Norbu Tietsin had a trick of throwing back his head and rolling his eyes all the way into the sockets, which might have seemed comic in a lesser figure, but with him seemed slightly sinister, like watching someone enter another dimension—or go into a trance.
    He was more than six feet tall, in his sixties, very robust and muscular, and wore a battered parka-style coat, unzipped. He spoke English perfectly in what he himself later would describe as a UN accent, i.e., it contained hints of Oxford, estuary London, New York, and Sydney, with more than a little Scandinavian precision in the vowels—but had a ten-dancy to morph into Brooklyn at odd moments. He possessed a wispy, untrimmed gray beard that billowed under his nose and gray hair drawn back in a ponytail. Like a seasoned professor, he needed no notes and, when he was not looking out the window, limped up and down in front of the audience with his hands in his pockets. I was inclined to attribute his handicap to frostbite, though in another country one might have assumed gout.
    “Captain Younghusband was the first white man to invade Tibet,” Tietsin was saying. “Lord Curzon encouraged him and gave him themoney, which, like most of the income of the British Indian Empire at that time, derived from the sale of opium. He slaughtered thousands of monks with his killing machines in the charming Anglo-Saxon way.”
    The crippled giant paused for a moment and coughed. “But we didn’t mind the ambitious captain too much. We were already used to the cruelty of the Chinese, and as someone said,
When you know the scorpion you don’t worry about the toad
. He did invade us, however, and the karmic price had to be paid.” Tietsin took his right hand out of his pocket and raised it. The hand was no more than a stump, frostbite having eaten away at all the digits except thumb and forefinger. He brushed his brow with it, sighed, spared me a glance as he swept the audience, then said, “So we in turn had to invade him.”
    He stopped in mid-flight with his stump