Kathmandu is the place to contemplate life’s mysteries

Deborah Lindsay Williams finds a serene spot to share some sad news with her children.

A Tibetan Buddhist monk puts up prayer flags in Kathmandu, Nepal. Narendra Shrestha / EPA

Last week I saw Mt Everest and our cat died. There was no causal relation between the two, except that we found out about the cat on the same day we flew from Kathamandu on the hour-long flight that offers tourists a bird’s-eye view of the legendary mountain, whose name in Nepali is Sagarmatha. From the plane, the mountain looked unassailable. It seemed impossible that somewhere below us, climbing teams were struggling to the summit; the mountain’s icy serenity seemed like a rebuke to human aspiration.

I am in no way tempted to trek up any but the gentlest of mountains. I am a walker, not a climber; I am content to allow the summits of mountains to remain shrouded in mystery, so that flight to Sagarmatha will be as close as I get to any snowy peak. In fact, I don’t even like to camp: humankind invented screened porches and indoor plumbing for a reason, it seems to me, and there is no reason to deny ourselves the pleasures of either.

Staring at the mountains through the windows of the small plane, however, I felt the same thing I’ve felt when I’ve walked in the Empty Quarter. The immensity of the desert, its implacability, reminds me of the relative insignificance of humankind in the universe. It makes sense, somehow, that most of the world’s great religions arose in landscapes that inspire awe: what better prompting do we need to contemplate our place in the world than to see ourselves next to the vastness of a desert or the cloud-strewn heights of a mountain?

Even without the mountains to prompt me, it would have been difficult to avoid such metaphysical questions in Kathmandu. The city invites philosophising and reflection: shrines and temples mark even the most derelict corners of the city; monks in maroon robes mingle with tourists in the cafes; prayer flags flutter across rooftops like holy laundry.

All of which is to say that if a person has to tell her children that their pet has just died, Kathmandu isn’t a bad place to have that conversation. Our cat became unexpectedly quite ill in late August and the prognosis was guarded at best, but I’d hoped for some kind of miraculous recovery, for the cat’s sake and, if I’m completely honest, for my own. If the cat died, it would be the first death that my children would be old enough to experience fully, and I knew they would be devastated. And who wants to be the bearer of devastation?

After the call from the vet about the cat, I had a brief internal discussion with my cynical self, who muttered something about it being ridiculous to mourn for something that lacked opposable thumbs, that it was just a cat, for goodness sake. But when confronted by the palpable misery of my children, the cynic admitted she was wrong and in fact got quite misty-eyed herself. My children asked all the questions that any of us ask when we lose what we love: why this creature, why this loss, why can’t it be fixed, why did it happen? I had no answers, or at least no answers that helped to staunch their tears.

What did help, a little, was walking around the giant Buddhist stupa, or shrine, in Boudhanath, a neighbourhood in Kathmandu. Buddhist pilgrims in search of enlightenment come from all over Nepal (and elsewhere) to circumambulate the stupa and spin the prayer wheels that line its base. The stupa’s white dome curves up to a gold cupola painted on all four sides with the Buddha’s eyes, which gaze over the city towards the distant mountain peaks.

We joined the pilgrims in their moving meditation around the stupa and got lost in the sounds: feet shuffling on pavement, voices murmuring mantras, prayer wheels clacking as they turned. The chanting seemed to lift our grief a bit, wafting it upwards like the breeze that lifted the prayer flags draped around the gleaming dome, whose graceful white curve seemed to invoke the sharper curves of Sagarmatha. That’s what rituals do, isn’t it? They connect us to something larger than ourselves, almost the same way that oceans and deserts and mountains do. And perhaps that’s where the impulse to climb mountains or traverse deserts comes from: the need to assert one’s importance in the face of grandeur.

I suppose some might think that conquering something would be a better cure for grief than meditation. But I don’t think so. It’s not conquest that matters; it’s connection.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon