A long day today. We started off with breakfast at Patan Dhoka, the gate to this old royal city, newly painted with colourful figures, then ventured to an artist’s studio set off the main road in an unusually green and treelined street. We were let in by a student who called the artist, Lok Chitrkar, who very kindly gave us a cup of tea and chatted to us about his work. He is a self-taught thangka and paubha painter who has some of the most refined work I’ve yet seen (granted, almost all the rest I’ve seen has been from the tourist souvenir shops, each with its resident ‘lama’ seated in the windown, painting mandalas from a photocopy). It immediately made me reluctant to buy anything that was less good quality, though of course I can’t afford his work. He showed us the mandala he was working on, and had been working on for 23 years – he thought it would take another year of full time work. We talked a bit about his traditional and less traditional work, the former requiring great study and rigid adherence to type accompanied by careful and considered flourishes and changes only where they were permitted. And the latter bringing traditional techniques to new subjects, allowing new movements in time and space – the former, for instance, through pigments that would oxidise, and the latter through new movements for Nepal’s already very mobile figures.
He belongs to a caste of painters, as his name suggests, and spoke of growing up with his entire family painting for temples, festivals, marriage paintings on doorways, healing paintings on the body, and only realising in his teens that this was art which others considered separate from life. It made me think of how most of us keep art separate from how we inhabit the world, as an add-on, a good-to-have, rather than woven into life. It seems to be woven into so much life here, at least from the outside.
We then took a taxi to Kathmandu and walked through the Durbar, where the effects of the earthquake are so vivid. That and the political earthquake of nearly two decades ago, the royal massacre that eventually led to the end of the monarchy. Then battling through Thamel, which was profoundly unpleasant and a relief indeed that we are not staying there. Patan is much more lovely and even the souvenirs are of a higher class. We ended, exhausted, at a Tibetan restaurant for lunch. It’s a hearty cuisine, one of poverty and extreme climate. We were joined here by a foreign woman who lives in Kathmandu and is a friend of a very elderly woman we intended to visit due to a long-standing family connection with the Gentleman Friend. The foreign woman turned out to be absolutely lovely: clear-eyed and caring even for a rather difficult woman.
Then we took a taxi to Bouddha where the old woman, whom I can only call the Seeker for she has never found what she is looking for, has a room in a monastery. She is the only woman aside from the cleaner (who clearly doesn’t count) and is cared for by the monks and a stream of young trainee nurses, most of whom she sends away in tears. She is frail, blind, deaf and discontented, a very wealthy woman who has been looking for something all her life and has not found it. And, perhaps, never will for she is 95. It was a difficult conversation as she is an intelligent and independent woman who is aware of what is coming and aware also of all that she has lost in mind and body and, I suspect of what she has not found. There was a dog in the room which was very affectionate to me, came and put its head in my lap and nuzzled my hand. I allowed it, thinking it was a pet, though I don’t much care for animals, until I was told by a fellow visitor that it was a stray seeking shelter from the rain. The feeling of being unclean, already present from having touched the dog, only multiplied. Well, it was a sweet creature, and very well behaved.