16th April, 2003. Tuesday ~
Invenio
Francis supervises the hvac – “What’s that?” I asked in my characteristic ignorance – or heating ventilation air conditioning unit at the hospital and has his residence-cum-office in the ground floor of the “small yellow building to the right” of the hospital gate.
“It belongs to the same fellow who owned the hospital land earlier,” he explains. The one that doesn’t look after his dog and lives upstairs.
Tokha Road is on the hill, gently sloping upwards from Samakushi Chowk and curving along a ridge, surrounded as much by newly constructed high rises as vegetable patches. There is still light when I step out, but he insists on me taking his headlamp which is just as well because soon, the place is plunged in a power cut. There aren’t any street lights.
“Do me a favour, go to the store for me.” He directs me to the one with a “Calsberg sign.” No name.
Every shop carries an alcohol display board outside and I’ve to look carefully.
“What would you like to drink?” he asks, then decides on a Chilean vino rosa. The smiling shop owner’s daughter knows Francis well and wraps the bottle of Invenio. The shelves are stacked with shiny packaged food, mostly Indian and Japanese imports, and a wide choice in foreign liquor. This isn’t an expat district, who buys these here?
Over red wine, puffs (not sips) of Darjeeling, black olives married to tomato and local buffalo-milk mozzarella – “of all mozzarellas, mozzarella de bufflone is the best,” he says knowingly – we watch videos late into the night.
Rain has stopped. A dampness stings the air.
It is almost surreal.
Couch
Francis stops Woody Allen’s Scoop midway because he is excited for me to meet Isabelle Vayron.
“I call her among my dear friends,” he grins proudly, the heavy French accent clouding his English. I don’t understand French fluently “so I have to sit with you and translate”; but the video is one of those that transliterates itself, talking of human spirits in an universal rover’s tongue.
Photojournalist and documentary maker Isabelle Vayron’s 5 Continents -10 ans de Voyage sur Terre (5 Continents – 10 Years of Travelling the World) tells, in 58 minutes, the unusual story of an astonishing seeker. It journals her attempt to run herds with cow boys in the Pacific, search for traditional music around the world (Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Mongolia) riding a bicycle – Tour du Monde des Musiques – and document life in Afghanistan travelling on a motorbike.
The mélange of images leaves my tongue paralysed. Her spontaneous combustion of enthusiasm on screen ignites me.
I’ve found Francis Pauwels through couchsurfing. “Sure, come along,” he had replied to my request to shack up with him the three nights before my trek.
“Who does such a thing?!” Brinda, a trek mate, had exclaimed when the topic of hospitality exchange came up. I couldn’t own up, “I just have!” Most of us sane social creatures, finding safety in familiarity, would be alienated by the idea of bringing rank strangers into our homes. Or stepping across the threshold of rank strangers. But to traverse boundaries, by any and every means, is a traveller’s true journey.
As I hit my first couch, the spare mattress in Francis’s office, managing to bundle the garrulous man with his tobacco pouches and pipes to his bedroom at long last, the cynic in me is wondering if all those amazing people were really his friends, did he really know as much as he claims, about South Asian politics and movies, aerodynamics and music, mathematics and climbing.
Was he a self-delusional fraud? Or was he my window to the unexplored, yanked wide ajar?
In the morning, rubbing sleepy eyes, I read the label of last night’s empty bottle. Invenio, it says:
(Latin) v. to come upon, find, discover.
Invenio
Francis supervises the hvac – “What’s that?” I asked in my characteristic ignorance – or heating ventilation air conditioning unit at the hospital and has his residence-cum-office in the ground floor of the “small yellow building to the right” of the hospital gate.
“It belongs to the same fellow who owned the hospital land earlier,” he explains. The one that doesn’t look after his dog and lives upstairs.
Tokha Road is on the hill, gently sloping upwards from Samakushi Chowk and curving along a ridge, surrounded as much by newly constructed high rises as vegetable patches. There is still light when I step out, but he insists on me taking his headlamp which is just as well because soon, the place is plunged in a power cut. There aren’t any street lights.
“Do me a favour, go to the store for me.” He directs me to the one with a “Calsberg sign.” No name.
Every shop carries an alcohol display board outside and I’ve to look carefully.
“What would you like to drink?” he asks, then decides on a Chilean vino rosa. The smiling shop owner’s daughter knows Francis well and wraps the bottle of Invenio. The shelves are stacked with shiny packaged food, mostly Indian and Japanese imports, and a wide choice in foreign liquor. This isn’t an expat district, who buys these here?
Over red wine, puffs (not sips) of Darjeeling, black olives married to tomato and local buffalo-milk mozzarella – “of all mozzarellas, mozzarella de bufflone is the best,” he says knowingly – we watch videos late into the night.
Rain has stopped. A dampness stings the air.
It is almost surreal.
Couch
Francis stops Woody Allen’s Scoop midway because he is excited for me to meet Isabelle Vayron.
“I call her among my dear friends,” he grins proudly, the heavy French accent clouding his English. I don’t understand French fluently “so I have to sit with you and translate”; but the video is one of those that transliterates itself, talking of human spirits in an universal rover’s tongue.
Photojournalist and documentary maker Isabelle Vayron’s 5 Continents -10 ans de Voyage sur Terre (5 Continents – 10 Years of Travelling the World) tells, in 58 minutes, the unusual story of an astonishing seeker. It journals her attempt to run herds with cow boys in the Pacific, search for traditional music around the world (Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India, Mongolia) riding a bicycle – Tour du Monde des Musiques – and document life in Afghanistan travelling on a motorbike.
The mélange of images leaves my tongue paralysed. Her spontaneous combustion of enthusiasm on screen ignites me.
I’ve found Francis Pauwels through couchsurfing. “Sure, come along,” he had replied to my request to shack up with him the three nights before my trek.
“Who does such a thing?!” Brinda, a trek mate, had exclaimed when the topic of hospitality exchange came up. I couldn’t own up, “I just have!” Most of us sane social creatures, finding safety in familiarity, would be alienated by the idea of bringing rank strangers into our homes. Or stepping across the threshold of rank strangers. But to traverse boundaries, by any and every means, is a traveller’s true journey.
As I hit my first couch, the spare mattress in Francis’s office, managing to bundle the garrulous man with his tobacco pouches and pipes to his bedroom at long last, the cynic in me is wondering if all those amazing people were really his friends, did he really know as much as he claims, about South Asian politics and movies, aerodynamics and music, mathematics and climbing.
Was he a self-delusional fraud? Or was he my window to the unexplored, yanked wide ajar?
In the morning, rubbing sleepy eyes, I read the label of last night’s empty bottle. Invenio, it says:
(Latin) v. to come upon, find, discover.
(Here's more to my Kathmandu discoveries on Day 2.)
