The Rose & Thorn
a literary e-zine

Reaching for the Roof

We stand in the crowd scanning the slew of minibuses parked around us. They are swiftly collecting passengers: mothers with babies, grey-haired crones, teenage boys wearing cool shades, old men in traditional topi hats. . . . They all know which bus to board and the buses are rapidly filling up.

"Nagarkot?" we ask a driver.

He indicates 'yes' and we climb up onto the roof and get as comfortable as we can. After a month and a half in Nepal, Assaf and I have got used to riding on the tops of buses. We initially started doing it for fun, for the experience, but after a few rides and having observed the sardine-like situation inside the buses we agreed that conditions on the roof were probably at least as appealing as those inside.

Nagarkot, a resort town in the Kathmandu Valley, is a popular tourist destination as its location affords a panoramic view: an unbroken line of Himalayan peaks, lying like a diamond necklace suspended in the sky. With only three days left in Nepal we are going to say goodbye to the mountains.

The road from Bhaktapur to Nagarkot climbs, twisting, up through rice fields. We are sharing the roof of the bus with eight or so men, one of whom is quite old, wearing a grey suit, a topi hat, and a pair of snazzy new trainers. He appears to be a deliveryman, responsible for a large square pane of glass, which is wrapped in newspaper. The positioning of the pane of glass on the roof of the bus is, understandably, a topic of constant concern to the man, particularly as he is sharing limited space with a small crowd including a couple of well-meaning yet incautious local lads. The old timer eyes them warily, shifting the pane of glass as far away from them as possible. At one point one of the young men jumps up and lurches precariously to the other side of the roof in order to hang over the edge and shout something down to the ticket collector. The patriarch's eyes widen in fright as the youth's careless limbs graze the glass. Old-mister-snazzy-trainers hugs his precious burden desperately to his bosom.

Periodically, in between rearrangements of the pane of glass, and at moments when the two boys are fairly settled in their positions, the old man carefully takes a single cigarette from his breast pocket. He looks at his watch and then longingly at the cigarette. Consulting his watch again, he puts the cigarette back, patting the pocket protectively. This man is on a schedule.

Assaf and I are settled on our bums with our legs drawn up before us, at the rear of the bus roof. The prettier of the two local lads is relaxing in front of me, leaning back against my legs. Noticing this, Assaf taps on the boy's shoulder and offers him his own legs to lean against. The young man obligingly changes position. I am amused by what I interpret as a sweet yet unnecessary act of chivalry on Assaf's part. I wasn't bothered by the guy leaning on me; on the roofs of buses in Nepal everybody does whatever they have to in order to anchor themselves down and get comfy (on the way from Dumre to Besisahar a toothless old man had hugged Assaf's legs companionably for two and a half hours).

I whisper to Assaf that I hadn't minded the lad's proximity. Assaf replies that it isn't a question of whether I minded. It may have been acceptable to me, but in Nepal men do not lean on strange women's legs. In other words, leg-leaning may have had very different connotations for the boy than it had for me. I see his point and shut up.

It is a bright and cloudless day and it's fun to perch on the roof of a bus, ascending a winding road, looking down on green rice fields. We stop next to a dilapidated café and the two young men get off and wet their Bob Marley bandanas (strangely, one of the most popular fashion accessories among Nepali men). Thus refreshed, they climb back onto the roof and we continue.

We ask the lads if we are nearing Nagarkot and they tell us it is a bit further to go. Soon we arrive at their stop and they leap down. They wave to us as the bus drives on, calling "Goodbye!" and "Have a good day!" Soon after that, the bus terminates at the entrance to the town. We climb down and immediately seek out the mountains. They aren't hard to find.

Dazzling, impressive and hallucinatory, the peaks seem detached from everything. Their snowy caps reach up to kiss the blue canopy above while their slopes melt into azure shadow. There is something beautiful and terrifying in contemplating these mountains and it is easy for me to understand why Hindus consider the Himalayas to be devatma: God-souled. Their sheer height and vastness, their power (through avalanches, freezing temperatures, altitude and the like) to regularly extinguish human life, at once overwhelms and fascinates me, awakening an impulse to scale those heights, to reach for that blue canopy, to brush my fingertips against the rooftop of the world.

It being lunchtime, we start searching for a diner where we can get some eats whilst simultaneously admiring the peaks. This proves to be much more difficult than it would seem in a town that more or less owes its existence to the panorama and the tourists it brings. We find a café that seems pleasant and has black-tied waiters and a good view, but one glance at the menu convinces us that this is a café for posh people. They are charging twice as much for everything as we are used to paying.

In another, considerably less posh eatery, near the bus stop, we ask if we would be allowed to dine on the roof, roof gardens being quite the thing in Nepal. "Yes!" the owner nods enthusiastically, whereupon a teenage boy draws aside a sheet hung up as a curtain. We follow him up ten flights of stairs to the roof, which is, well, a roof: rather grimy with a waist-high wall around the edge blocking the view and an awning overhead blocking the sun. The young man insists that it will be no problem to bring up a table so that we can sit among the solar panels, next to the water tank. We decline.

We conclude that this is not really the tourist part of town and that if we are looking for roof gardens we will have to head further in. This we do, passing some grocery shops and a school, and following a path through some woodland. On the way, we see a shack calling itself 'Save the Money Café.' It sounds like our cup of tea but unfortunately there's no view and, anyway, the place is deserted.

We arrive at the part of town with the hotels, of which there are many: towering and brightly painted with hundreds of rooms and attractively designed interiors. They are also devoid of tourists. It may be the end of the season but it's hard to imagine any of these places securing a full house no matter what the time of year. Ironically, the bright colours add to the depressing atmosphere; I feel as though I am surrounded by a troupe of sad and grotesque clowns.

We go into a few guesthouses, surprising the staff, some of whom are gushingly eager to please while others seem annoyed at being unexpectedly disturbed by an actual customer. Arriving at one hotel, we climb to the roof and look for the mountains. In front of us is not a chain of snowy peaks but another guesthouse. Perched at a slightly higher altitude, it looms down on us like a heavily made-up pantomime dame.

We descend the stairs and make for the outsize Krusty ahead of us. A few other buildings stand between us and our goal and this doesn't seem like such an obstacle at first until we realize that there isn't a direct route between them.

Here I must pause to explain that my boyfriend, Assaf, is a famous short-cut expert. Whenever we take a country walk I brace myself for the excited shout, "Oh look, a short-cut!" and assume correctly that five minutes later I will be wading through a raging torrent or attempting to hack my way through dense prickly vegetation, eyes to the ground, nervously searching for snakes and scorpions and making a mental note to invest in a machete before our next excursion.

On our trip to Nagarkot Assaf's short cut, through slightly less fraught with natural dangers, has more chance of getting us arrested and thrown into prison on suspicion of being foreign spies. My boyfriend leads me directly across the governor's back garden.We don't, of course, realize where we are until we round a corner and come face to face with a surprised gardener.

"What do you want?" he demands, astounded.

"Oh," responds Assaf, nonchalantly waving his hand in the direction of the towering hotel, "we're just trying to get through to that guesthouse over there."

"You can't come through here!" the gardener exclaims. "This is the governor's house!"

"Oh, really?" Assaf asks innocently, "Sorry, we didn't know. So, how can we get to the guesthouse?"

The gardener tells us that we'll have to go back the way we came, almost all the way back to the wood and then walk along the main road. We thank him, apologize profusely for trespassing and turn back.

As we trudge along I'm beginning to feel hungrier and hungrier and when I get hungry I get grumpy. I try to share Assaf's amusement over our unintentional encounter with local government but it's hard when the sun is beating down, my stomach is hollow as a drum and my energy levels do not feel equal to climbing another flight of stairs.

When we finally reach the hotel we interrupt two lads at their card game and ask if it would be okay to have our lunch on the roof. They reluctantly escort us up the iron stairs of a fire escape to a bare concrete platform. Yes, there is sunshine and there is the panorama but—

"Look!" points Assaf. Shining brightly on a rise between us and the mountains is . . . another guesthouse. "That one should have the best view!"

My hunger-weakened body droops at the thought of another trek and I am beginning to feel like Alice in search of the elusive looking-glass garden but I'm not particularly enamored of our current location and the stony stares of the two card-playing boys are enough to impel me back down to ground level.

Arriving ten minutes later at the Shangri-la of hotels we find ourselves in a beautiful garden looking out and up towards the Himalayas. I pore over the menu searching for something cheap, no-nonsense and deep-fried. What I see are dishes like steak au poivre and poached cod Mornay. The prices are well beyond our means.

We flop into wooden chairs in the garden and stare at the view. I try to appreciate the scene while at the same time informing Assaf that I am about to die of starvation. Assaf gives me some Bonbon biscuits and half an orange and then challenges me to stop whining and come up with a solution. I elect that we go back to the posh café that we saw right at the beginning, not to eat in the café itself, but because nearby there was a small bakery with the entrancing aroma of donuts emanating from it. If deep-fried pakodas aren't on the menu at least I can stuff myself with baked goods. Assaf is agreeable to the idea and we head back.

Twenty minutes later we are sitting on a sun-warmed wall with the mountains before us, attacking a cake. A stray dog with three legs comes by and we give her a piece of brownie. She lies down in a sunbeam next to us. We all gaze at the Himalayas. Enduring, majestic, they traverse the horizon, watching over us impartially, detached from the pettiness and discontent of the world below. We stay there and stare until the light grows golden, hinting of late afternoon. We say goodbye to the mountains.

There is a bus waiting for us at the junction. Someone has lit an incense stick. A familiar song echoes faintly up from the valley. The sky darkens. The bus driver settles in his seat. He appears to be about twelve years old.

Standing on the corner, Assaf and I peer at the steep and winding road, which glimmers faintly before us in the half-light. We study the bus's roof. We consider the driver. We contemplate each other. We take our seats inside.

About Author:
Emma Leavey is a Londoner currently living in Israel, where she teaches English. This essay is the fruit of travels in Nepal, which spanned the final months of 2005, and is Emma's first attempt at travel writing. Emma has had poetry and short fiction published in Megaera, and poetry published in M.A.G, Poetry Super Highway, and The Rose & Thorn.

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