Keeper Of The Mountains (11 page)

And of course she went to Bodhnath, the holiest Tibetan sanctuary outside Tibet. The cone-shaped Buddhist shrine, known as a
stupa
, was dazzling in its whiteness, topped with gold and emblazoned with the unblinking blue eyes of Lord Buddha at its base. Surrounded by prayer wheels, it resonated with the sound of their turning, and the smell of lamps floating in clarified butter permeated the air. Elizabeth observed the great number of Buddhist pilgrims milling around the stupa. What a sight: monks in maroon robes, pig-tailed hermits, scholars and peasants crowding to the sacred site, accompanied by the sounds of bells, gongs and horns – and the ever-present smell of butter. It wasn't just pilgrims who thronged the site; Tibetan refugees had flooded into the area after the Chinese takeover of Tibet, and the streets swarmed with fierce-looking warrior figures.

Her new home seemed uncomplicated, peaceful and contented, centuries removed from the hustle and bustle, strife and warfare and rapid rate of change in the rest of the world. Of course, that was not
the case, as Elizabeth would discover. But for now, she revelled in the novelty of making a home in such a foreign place.

While staying at the Royal Hotel, she began searching for an apartment. Within a week she found what she was looking for – a two-bedroom apartment in a central part of town. It had spacious rooms and plenty of windows, three of which had balconies. She was pleased to find electricity in every room although the power was a bit feeble. The kitchen was somewhat spartan, with just a sink and cold running water. The bathroom boasted a small hot-water tank, as well as a flush toilet. This place could be hers for $95 a month. She rearranged the basic furniture, removed the heavy draperies off windows and doors and purchased some brass vases to fill with colourful flowers from her garden. The overall effect pleased her.

To make it feel like home, she had brought a few “essentials” with her from the United States, such as the record albums
My Fair Lady
,
Oklahoma
and
The King and I.
She had her autographed copy of
The Joy of Cooking
and a recording of Handel's
Messiah
. She had also brought a Bible, but joked to her mother, “God knows what reason.” On the practical front, she had a plastic dinner set, some sheets and towels, an atlas, the Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary
, a thesaurus, a condensed paperback encyclopedia, a book on English usage and a Finnish hot plate.

By mid-October she reported to her mother that she had not only settled in, but had acquired a cook, a general-purpose servant, a man to do her laundry and another to tend her very small garden. Her staff was complete. She soon moved on to her second cook, Kumar, who had worked previously for some Americans and spoke a little English. She reported that he was already trained in “our ways of cooking and cleanliness.” She was pleased he could bake bread and sugar cookies, make soup and mayonnaise, keep the household accounts and “do all sorts of things I couldn't possibly do.”

Kumar was soon replaced by Ram Krishna as cook, but he remained to take on other responsibilities. Kumar and Elizabeth had what can only be described as a “difficult” relationship. Looking back, she admits she treated him badly: “He simply exasperated the hell out of me.” According to Elizabeth, he was completely disorganized. This was a recipe for disaster because Elizabeth is extremely organized. She mocked him routinely, but now acknowledges her behaviour was
inexcusable. The simple fact was that he annoyed her, and in return, she was mean to him. Still, they continued to work together for 40 long years. Many of Elizabeth's friends describe her as “very much memsahib,” or someone who thinks of Nepalis as people you hire to get work done. Her cousin's son, Will Kneerim, views her relationship with her Nepali staff as classic 19th-century master–servant style. When Kumar retired in 2003, he thoughtfully hired his replacement, his well-educated and organized grandson Baween, six months in advance in order to fully train him. She appreciated that parting gesture and realized she had underestimated Kumar all along.

Kathmandu at that time had only a couple of shopping streets and few “useful” stores. One was called The Blue Bucket. It was somewhat like a country general store, with tinned and packaged foods. Most foodstuffs came from the markets and street vendors. The choices of vegetables were limited: cauliflower, carrots, radishes, potatoes, onions and garlic. There was a bakery (it still exists) named Krishna Loaf that was the first to bake bread in the valley. Western-style clothing was unavailable, since there was no place to buy it; everything was individually tailored or brought in from abroad. There were no streetlights and few paved roads. Most people walked or rode bikes. There was no international mail service, although there was a post office for domestic mail. Elizabeth sent and received her mail through the American embassy and sent telegrams at the Indian embassy.

It was unusual to see a single Western woman in the streets in 1960. Once, when she encountered some Tibetan refugees on the street near her house, her knee-length skirt and nylon stockings caused them to flee, giggling like schoolgirls as they scampered away. Years later she was chatting with a young office clerk who admitted, “I remember you from when I was a little boy 20 years ago.” Elizabeth initially rode about town on a bicycle, but that all changed when she borrowed a bluish-green, 1952 Fiat 500 convertible. She was thrilled to get out of the rain and it was the perfect size for her. Finally, in 1965, she bought a used robin's-egg-blue Volkswagen Beetle from Prince Basundhara. It was two years old and she paid him $1,500 for it. That car became her trademark in Kathmandu and it was still parked proudly in her garage in the spring of 2004. She drove it herself until 1996, after which she employed a driver.

A
s a young, single, American woman, Elizabeth was embraced by the Kathmandu social scene. Social occasions took place in private homes rather than restaurants or hotels. One hotel she did frequent, however, was the Royal, run by the famous Boris Lissanevitch. This spacious but not very comfortable watering hole occupied one wing of a former Rana palace named Bahadur Bhawan. Most often it wasn't the hotel or restaurant that she frequented, but Boris's fabulous apartment above, the scene of many parties. Of all the fascinating characters she would know in Kathmandu, Boris was one of the more colourful. He was dark and good-looking in a mysterious kind of way, with hair parted straight down the middle. His past was almost unbelievable: he had grown up in Russia, escaped during the Russian Revolution, became a celebrated dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, travelled the world as a performer, launched the exclusive 300 Club in Calcutta and befriended royalty and adventurers alike. While running the 300 Club, he became a close friend and confidant of Nepal's King Tribhuvan, as well as a number of the people who assisted Tribhuvan in overturning the Rana rule. It was this friendship that brought him to Nepal. Now he was in partnership with Tribhuvan's son, Prince Basundhara, running the Royal Hotel, which was sometimes described as “Kathmandu baroque.”

Despite his royal connections and friendships with the most powerful people in the country, Boris had already done a stint in prison for bad debt. Debt was something he was familiar with, since he had an extremely impractical business sense. Shortly after being released from prison, he was asked to produce a series of lavish banquets for the coronation of King Mahendra. Entertaining on a scale never before seen in Nepal, Boris quickly became the centre of the social elite.

His scene also included mountain climbers, since virtually all the expeditions coming through the valley stayed with Boris. He boasted a unique rock collection in connection with his mountaineering friends: a bit of the summit of Everest from Barry Bishop, a rock from the top of Makalu from Jean Franco, and more. In return for high-altitude rocks, he gave the alpinists fruitcake; his famous Genoa fruitcake was standard fare on the early expeditions to all the highest peaks. It was in Boris's apartment that Elizabeth first glimpsed the exciting things that were happening up in the mountains. And it was there that she began to meet climbers.

E
lizabeth supported her lifestyle with two sources of income. The first was as a stringer for her former employer Time Inc., the publishers of
Fortune
,
Time
,
Life
and other magazines. Her job was to research political news and other stories and send that research to New York or the New Delhi bureau so that one of their writers could do a story.

The rest of her income came from the Knickerbocker Foundation, which hired her to send them regular reports on the political scene in Nepal. Elizabeth was uncharacteristically incurious about the work she did for Knickerbocker. During the early 1960s, in many parts of the world and particularly in strategically located Nepal, there was an enormous amount of intelligence-gathering going on – by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and others. This mountain region was considered an essential buffer between powerful nations and had long been a place of intrigue. Every foreigner living in Kathmandu was aware of this. According to the 1967
Facts on File
yearbook, the Knickerbocker Foundation was suspected of being a cover organization for the
CIA
. But Elizabeth remains adamant that if her monthly reports to the Knickerbocker Foundation were used for government purposes and analysis, it didn't bother her. “Why not? What's wrong with that?” she asks. She never thought of her work as “espionage.” She believes it is natural – and expected – that governments will gather intelligence in other countries in whatever way they can. She was happy to help.

Elizabeth's daily routine included listening to the newscasts on
BBC
Radio and reading the
International Herald Tribune
. She began calling on some of the top political figures she had met the previous year and was soon being invited to embassy cocktail receptions. Her network continued to expand. Then the United Nations Association of Nepal held a series of meetings in celebration of the
UN
's birthday, and as a representative for
Time
and
Life
, she was invited to attend. One of her appointments was with Prime Minister B.P. Koirala.

In her free time, she explored the nearby countryside with Jeeps and motor scooters. In mid-November, she embarked on her first trek: 10 days of hiking north of Kathmandu as far as the village of Melamchi. It was definitely roughing it, with long days of walking, steep trails and cold nights. Although she enjoyed herself, she recalls that it felt considerably longer than just 10 days. But the compensations were
numerous: the scenery, which she described to her mother as magnificent, and the people she met, particularly the Sherpas, who were unaware of the political changes in Kathmandu and whose isolated existence included considerable hardship. She was pleasantly surprised at how quickly she became physically fit.

Fresh from her mountain experience, Elizabeth learned that B.P. Koirala (B.P., as she later called him) was planning a trek of his own in December. He was an informal, intelligent and friendly man, and one who knew how to flatter, informing Elizabeth that he thought her pretty. She suggested to his office, and to the prime minister himself, that she accompany him on the trek and do a story for
Life
about how the head of government must overcome all kinds of obstacles to make democracy work. He was enthusiastic and she was hopeful.

All of Elizabeth's well-laid plans vanished into thin air the day before they were to leave, however, for the simple reason that Koirala was no longer prime minister. At noon on December 15, 1960, all cabinet members who could be found (some were in hiding, some were out of the country) were taken into custody on orders from King Mahendra, who had lost patience with what he considered gross inefficiency and erroneous policy making. It was just a year and a half since Koirala had been elected. Elizabeth believed the confrontation was the result of a power struggle between the king and the prime minister. Koirala understood that the king had no intention of stepping back to become a symbolic leader, because that would negate everything his father, Tribhuvan, had believed in.

The king assumed sweeping powers in emergencies, and since he was the one who determined what was an emergency, this was deemed to be just that. He promised to carry out the policies of his predecessor, but to do so scientifically and efficiently, without corruption and without the pressures of political parties. This meant all parties were now banned for an indefinite period. There remained a constitution and parliament, but they were there simply to rubber-stamp decisions that came down from the palace. It was the king who nominated the cabinet ministers as well as the prime minister.

Mahendra adopted a system of government, also used in India, called
panchayat
, essentially a council of five advisors. He released a few politicians from jail and recycled them into the council. Koirala was not appointed, and after being confined to quarters, he fled the
country and remained abroad for several years. Elizabeth now had some really interesting news worth reporting for Time Inc., but she worried about what they would do with the information – would their interpretation of her material make it difficult for her to work in Nepal in the future? It was a tricky situation because on one hand the king was moving his country forward, opening it up to foreign aid and development programs. But he was doing so with an iron glove; the royal palace had become the centre of power. The juxtaposition of his open-minded goals for Nepal and his inward-looking style of rule fascinated Elizabeth.

Despite the delicate nature of the situation, Elizabeth was excited by the fact that this wasn't small-time politics in an isolated corner of the world. Because of its strategic position between China and India, Nepal became skilled at playing the big powers against one another. The king's main goal was to retain Nepal's independence – a feat he managed in part by playing China against India and the Soviet Union against the United States, all while ruling with his own brand of autocracy. As a wire-service reporter, Elizabeth had to stick to the facts, being careful not to voice an opinion regardless of what she thought of the goings-on.