The place where the crows die
NEPAL | Thursday, 15 May 2014 | Views [361] | Scholarship Entry
One month before I saw Sagarmatha, my grandfather died.
But the mother of the universe revealed nothing as I stared her in the eye, standing silently as an obsidian pyramid beside the dominating peak of Lhotse. She had nothing to say on that question of life and death, only that she clasped the bodies of those who had died in her arms to her heart of stone. The sun reflected bright white off peaks that hung in the blue sky like starched morgue sheets. Prayer flags tied in decaying mounds next to an old plastic sign. Everest Base Camp.
The grief I had nurtured exploded with my sense of achievement; I wept large, cold tears. The salt of the drops burned my raw exposed face. While others whooped in happiness, clinked tea mugs and shook hands, I sat there thinking of all that I had lost.
In Kathmandu I watched Nepalis cremate bodies on the banks of the Bagmati, wrapping their loved ones in orange satin and setting them alight until the cloying smell of ashes rose above Pashupatinath Temple. My grandfather’s coffin was wheeled quietly into a cremation chamber behind a curtain, as All Things Bright and Beautiful played to a softly sobbing audience.
Like Orpheus, I turned back to the outpost of Gorak Shep, translated from Nepali as “the place where the crows die”, a reference to the lack of living creatures at high altitude. The rhythm of my footfall interspersed with visions of my grandfather’s face, ragged as the spire of Ama Dablam.
At Gorak Shep, a natural cemetery had formed from hundreds of stone piles. I finally understood why the Himalayas are littered with Buddhist cairns, the stupas left to remember the dead. I too longed to leave my grief in a place I would never return to.
After dinner, I wrote his name on a piece of paper. In the waxing evening, I layered rock upon rock over my note. In time the paper would disintegrate, but the rocks would remain. I prayed my pain would disintegrate but the memory remain. The warm lights of the teahouse welcomed me back, as a glimmer of heaven in this land of the dead. I slipped into a shallow sleep, interrupted by my heart demanding more of the thin air than I could breathe.
The next morning, the plywood window frame captured a landscape of snow. White sky, white fields, white mountains. If you asked me to find where I left that paper, I could not do so. It remains hidden, an absence in a field of anonymous rocks. I left my sorrows under a rock in Gorak Shep, the place where the crows die.
Tags: 2014 Travel Writing Scholarship - Euro Roadtrip
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