Discovering Stupas

Um, the U.S. Capitol Building looks a bit like a stupa.

I didn’t intend that comparison.  But when I look at my blog today, there it is, quite hard to miss:

A broad dome, surmounted by a square, topped with a tapering tower.  (Though the tower is gold, and prominent eyes are painted on it.)

And then you scroll down the page to the previous post… and find a stack of rectangles, surmounted by a broad dome, topped with a tapering pillar.  In white marble, in D.C.

In fact, though you can’t see this in the previous stupa picture from the last post, the broad dome of a stupa in fact commonly sits on a stack of rectangles/squares.

I sincerely doubt that the style of one really influenced the other.  People do, after all, like to make things by stacking shapes–snare an American child, a Nepali child, a Japanese child, and a Somali child, and give them all a pile of blocks, and just watch them all go to work happily building things by placing one shape atop another.

Still, the juxtaposition is amusing.

The Capitol Building didn’t even get its completed dome until Lincoln’s presidency.  The stupa I’m currently featuring, on the other hand, is undoubtedly several centuries old–although I am having a frustrating time trying to get any solid information about it.  I THINK its name is Kathesimbhu, or Sheeghal Baha, but that’s from combining snippets of clues from some pictures on flikr, a google search, and a stray entry in wikipedia.  I really need to go find my map, and see if it’s marked.

The most important point at the moment is that stupas are built to be three-dimensional mandalas.  And mandalas could easily lead me into an entirely different post–just, for the moment, accept that a “mandala” is a diagram formed by concentric circles and other shapes, with each color and shape in the diagram (or stupa) laden with symbolic meaning.  So the stack of shapes, and the bright colors, are not random, but carefully planned for a specific purpose.

They’re utterly shocking in the middle of Kathmandu.  Less than an hour after we first stepped off the plane, as a friend drove us to our new house, my husband and I simultaneously dropped our jaws and peered out the window, and kept peering out the window long after the shock had passed out of sight behind us.  Then we poked each other and said, “Did you see that?  Was that really…  That looks like the pictures!  And it’s just sitting there!”

I now know that was the Chabahil stupa, a relatively small and unimpressive stupa down the road from the stupa we visited yesterday, Boudanath.  But Boudanath is set off from a road leading away from the city, whereas Chabahil now happens to lie right on the busy Ring Road, very close to the Kathmandu Airport.  So it’s the first one most new arrivals see.

A few weeks later, we confused a taxi driver while searching for a specific restaurant in Thamel, so utterly that we ended up a few blocks south of Thamel.  When we gave up and decided to hike back north, we stumbled on the undetermined-name stupa for the first time.  Though we didn’t have the camera with us at the time, I captured the sense of the place during our second time passing it–which happened to be the same day as our major walk around Kathmandu Durbar Square.  Again, as we wandered north to Thamel, and as the neighborhood began to look familiar, we suddenly glanced to the left.  And instead of this:

A typical street in Thamel. Yes, it IS typical for the cars to almost be running over people. After a while you don't even notice it anymore, whether you're a car or a people.

We saw this:

Um, not your typical Thamel sight?

Seriously, THIS:

Radiant with fresh paint--Note the painters.

And we stared a bit, and then walked around and snapped many pictures.

Nepali of the Day:

taasbir kichnu:  to take pictures

rang:  color

changirangi:  multi-colored

ghumnu:  to wander

haami:  we

wadee-padee:  around

Haami stupa wadee-padee ghumyau.  =  We wandered around the stupa.

Ma changirangi stupa-le tasbiir kichay.  = I took pictures of the multi-colored stupa.

Happy 2 Month Anniversary, and Over 1000 Hits, And…

Mauph Garnus!

I’m afraid it has again been a while since I’ve written a post.  And I can’t blame it on the internet this time — I’ve just been busy or exhausted.

In my last post I wrote that our stuff had gotten here.  We spent several days unpacking it, and we’re still straightening up the house even now.  It’s nearly done…

But meanwhile we’ve done other things, too.  I thought at the end of last Sunday that I could write a week’s worth of posts just about that day.  I still could, and might.

Meanwhile I’m distracted by today.

This evening we went down to Thamel to pick up some paintings we bought last Sunday and left to be framed.  They’re AMAZING — the artist is very talented.  His style is mildly impressionistic.  We were first drawn in by his painting of a tiny shack on a snow-covered mountainside, with taller peaks in the distance — a cloudy mist obscures the entire landscape, so realistic it seems about to pour off the canvas.  Then we discovered he’d painted another work of matching size and color and style, except of people in two small boats setting out on a misty lake.  And picture number three seemed the perfect fulcrum to place in the middle of the other two long paintings.  It’s smaller, more of a square, and depicts the sillhouette of a heavily-laden yak in the middle of crossing a rickety bridge over a cavern — still in the same eerie mist.

Yes, pictures are worth more than words.  We’ll unwrap & hang up the paintings soon — I’ll take pictures of them then, to post.

On a related note, if you’re visiting Kathmandu, and you go to Thamel, find you way to the 21st Century Art Gallery in Seven Corners.  It’s well worth it.

Seven Corners?  The area, on the …. west side (I think) of Thamel… in any case, just head straight in from the entrance by the King’s former palace and turn right when the road dead-ends by the Barnes & Noble Book (sic!).  Then, if you pay attention, you can notice the road zagging seven times in a row around (7) sharp corners.  Voila, Seven Corners.

Now, if you’ve ever spent time in the DC metropolitan area, you may know of another Seven Corners.  There it’s not just a line of 7 zags–oh, no!  Instead, there are honestly seven separate roads that all converge on the SAME spot.  The traffic lights there are the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.  The traffic always has minor jams, and beeping horns; really, looking back, I’m amazed traffic moves through that intersection as well as it does.  There are several places where there’s only space for two cars between a row of stoplights separating the rival roads.  Some lucky people get to go straight through; others have the choice of not just right or left turns, but right-sharp or right-forward or left-sharp or left-forward turns.  The angles are just extraordinary.

The art gallery here nestles in one of the zags.  While considering the paintings, we spent a while staring out at the motorcycles zooming around the corners or the cars slowly beeping along or, most commonly, the wandering people.  And I realized something:  while the traffic in Kathmandu scared me when we first got here, now I think that when I return the traffic back in the US will positively terrify me.  Blood and bloody ashes, they drive so fast!

And in the US you can’t exactly duck out into the middle of the road and calmly hold out your palm, low, near your waist, in a stop gesture, and expect all the cars (and motorcycles) to obey.  That irratated me to no end when I first got here; now I’ve realized it’s just the way pedestrians get around.  My husband has been doing it for a while.  I did it for the first time today, when I was hurrying across the main road into/out of Thamel with the heavy painting.  And the traffic was already mostly stopped, anyway, all the drivers leaning on their horns in protest of a jam around the next corner, so the on-coming drivers resigned themselves to waiting an extra 30 seconds to scoot forward instead of taking advantage of the meter-long gap forming between them and the car they followed.

One more thing–for the first time today, I saw real Kathmandu cats!  I did glimpse one kitty while we were at Bhaktapur; I’ve glimpsed another one or two while we drive up and down the main roads, always in the distance and rapidly disappearing.  But today, while we waited for the shop owner to wrap up the paintings, I flipped through ECS, the leading expatriate magazine here — and glimpsed a blur shoot by my feet, from one open wall of the shop to the other (as I said, the store’s built into a corner — it actually only has two solid walls, and a pillar at the opposite corner to hold up the roof).

I blinked.  “I think that was a cat!  Or else a really large rat…”

My husband added, “It’s a white one!  And it’s over there!”

He pointed the opposite direction, and I was confused, until I watched the brown one I’d glimpsed go darting through with the white one after it.  And then it paused in the middle of the shop, and in a split second I wondered how the shopkeeper would respond to seeing a cat in the middle of his fine paintings store.

The cat froze, staring up at us with wild eyes.  In the same moment I noticed it wore a collar, and the shopkeeper glanced up from his wrapping and said, “Oh, that’s the neighbor’s cat.”

He made a sound between his teeth, a kind of “ttsshh” that I’ve heard other Nepalis make to various animals, dogs and cows and even goats; I’ve yet to figure out whether it’s supposed to be a shooing or summoning sound, though I suspect the former.

The cat started a little, then finished observing us and went to sulk on the front step of the shop, twitching its tail and staring out at the traffic with much the same mild interest as we must have displayed a moment before.  It was quite a pretty cat — a mottled golden brown, with sharp features, so that it reminded me of an Abyssinian.  It was quite skinny and on the small side, with yellow-orange-green-tinged eyes that were a little wild, but its evident ease with not just people, but strangers, proved it was happy enough.  When it discretely turned its head back enough to inspect us, I carefully blinked at it.

The cat’s eyes widened more, and it involuntarily jerked its head a bit; I’ve learned this is the cat equivalent of a start.  I read years ago that to blink at a cat is a way to tell it “I love you;” since then I’ve read other sources that interpret the gesture as sending more of a message of, “Hey, I can take my eyes off you for a moment; I trust you; and I’m not staring at you, planning to attack you; you can trust me, too.”

I lean toward the latter explanation as better depicting what goes through a cat’s mind.  After all, cats don’t need to blink to keep their eyes moist, and usually don’t, unlike humans; it makes sense they could develop meaning behind the simple movement.  And they clearly interpret the motion with a strong meaning; I’ve seen multiple cats start that exact same way when I first carefully blink at them, and I know my own pet cats always snuggle closer and purr louder, and start returning the slow blinks, when I blink at them.

In fact, the first time I ever intentional blinked at one of my pets, the same day I first read that the gesture could have meaning, I did it to an elderly cat I’d had for years.  And immediately her eyes widened, and her ears perked, in an expression that I can only describe as shock.  For a long moment.  And then, slowly, carefully, she relaxed and returned the blink — and then turned her face clear away.

So maybe that first book’s interpretation was right.  I’m not sure you can find a closer parallel in non-human relationships to the awkward moment when a usually distant family member suddenly says, “I love you.” and the other member, startled, replies with a careful, “I love you, too.”

In any case, today’s cat then glanced away from me, too.  It didn’t return the blink.  But its muscles relaxed some, and it stopped discreetly peering at us.  Instead it just cocked its ears toward the traffic, until it abruptly took off down an alley after something that caught its interest.

See?  I still like to write.  There’s plenty more to say about life in Kathmandu.  I have more pictures, too.  I intend to return to posting more regularly — then, hopefully, my novelist tendencies won’t spill over to my blog!

Novels are going well, by the way.  Six and a half still unpublished.  (Sigh)…

Nepali of the day:

mauph garnus:  I’m sorry!  Excuse me!

painting:  painting

pasal:  store

mahongo:  expensive

sasto:  inexpensive

dherai mahongo:  way too expensive

kati rupiyaa:  how many rupees?

yo kati rupiyaa ho?:  how much does this cost?

yo:  this

tyo:  that