Critical Errors

 

 

 

Leaving the Kathmandu airport is the job of an expert flyswatter. My least favorite sales pitch is the one that starts with a “let’s be friends” or, “we’re brothers, don’t you know.” It forces you to either be some level of disrespectful or partially engage in the absurd banter for a few minutes until you have an excuse to dismiss them. But the worst part about it is it forces you to be skeptical and guarded around people who actually are just trying to be nice and helpful, or curious.

I am a hardened want-to-be-nice guy. I like to at least attempt to reset my expectations for each person and greet them as if they don’t have me marked. Few places/times in the world have seriously tested my ability to do that and Nepal did almost immediately, and relentlessly.

I wandered beyond the edges of the airport, tour guides and ravenous taxi drivers following me like zombies for the duration, and waited for my driver. He was a nice kid and having already agreed to a price in the app, there was no hassle, upsell, or trouble. This is why transit apps will dominate the world. Taxi drivers of the third world, you have done this to yourselves. If the technology is crushing your business, at very least stop standing on top and jumping.

I arrived at my hotel groggy, hungry, smelly and frustrated. I was told my room would be ready in 20 minutes so I wandered to find food. I went in the first shop that smelled good. I was greeted by half a dozen men under the age of 30 chewing Pan and in at least their third hour of drinking whiskey. It was 11am on a Tuesday. The menu looked good and cheap. The woman running the place had some English and understood “you choose,” she brought me a plate of Buffalo Mo-mo: dumplings filled with Buffalo meat (or if you’re being uptight about it bison meat) with a side of spicy sauce. It was face-meltingly good. They all seemed to be participating in a ritual Erika had described which is basically a good-natured jockying, testing your mettle and sizing you up through minor frustrations and playful jibbing. I was prepared for it, but in their drunken state and my groggy state, with a desire to not be killed by a pack of dudes I accidentally offended, and not knowing if the water I’d been drinking would kill me, or how to say anything more than “hello and thank you,” with no cell phone to translate, I was struggling to keep up. In my haste to leave, shower and bury myself under an Everest of sleep, I overpaid by about double, mostly because they (intentionally or not) seemed to be having trouble finding change. What was ultimately an extra $1.50 US would absolutely destroy my first days in Nepal. The sense of surprise and excitement could be felt like lightning in the room when I brushed off the amount remaining as a tip. It was a critical error.

Overpaying in a room full of men who have very little to do along with a deep ruthless desire to gouge a westerner, marked me with a bullseye. Gossip game in a Nepali neighborhood is the fucking NBA. I didn’t know it yet, but before I woke up for the first time in Nepal word had traveled for blocks. The next day, in what felt like a different neighborhood I stopped to buy a potato samosa, the woman said “twenty rupees” excitedly and I gave her twenty rupees, she looked at it disgusted and then spat. I asked her embarrassed daughter standing next to her what was wrong and she said “nothing, nothing, it’s ok, go, go.” So I did. It took me the rest of the day to put together what happened, because some form of it happened again and again. Anger, scams, absurd pricing, a chaos of insatiable want and incongruous expectations.

But even beyond the mostly-just-awkwardness of my awful local celebrity, the men started getting more aggressive and it eventually got scary; probably because I made another mistake.

The restaurant where I made my critical $1.50 error was unavoidable to walk past and honestly the woman that ran the place was amazing, I liked her immediately. She participated in good natured jockeying in the same way the men did, but without the desperation or expectation, she was just having fun; and she was so much smarter than everyone else. In general, all the women I met in Nepal were smarter, kinder, and easier to be around than the men. They also seem to really run shit, all the important stuff gets done by women, despite (or maybe because of) what is arguably a second class status.

The same was true in Thailand. So many small businesses and even large operations were really run by women. I think SE Asia is already in the midst of a gender revolution, but it seems clear to me that women hold a great deal more economic power than they know and if they figure out how to wield it collectively, things will change quickly.

Every time I would pass the restaurant the woman who ran it would smile and wave, calm and welcoming. Eventually I did return, to have a meal, try to correct my error and pay appropriately with an appropriate tip. I stayed a while and tried to have conversations with everyone, much of which revolved around trying to understand why I came to Nepal and why I didn’t have a family at my age. Chandri, the woman who ran the restaurant joined while it was slow. She figured out how to use google translate immediately, and was essential in helping me communicate with everyone else. She was sober and having a lot of fun with the process. The men never really figured out how to use even the speaking feature of google translate, mostly because they all spoke over each other and didn’t understand how the microphone worked. So eventually they gave up and just started repeating requests for me to do things however they could with the addition of some poking and increased intensity. “How can I agree if I don’t know what you want me to do?”

Eventually Chandri intervened and helped translate that they were making fun of my bag from Thailand and wanted me to go with them to a factory where they make much better bags at a very good price. They were trying to push me out the door. Chandri quietly showed me a message that read, “you have to ignore this, don’t go.” I wasn’t going to go anyway, but I was grateful for that gesture. When they realized I wasn’t going to walk to a bag factory, or dark alley (or wherever) with them, they just starting begging for money for alcohol. I explained I don’t drink and don’t purchase it either. This reached the end of their capacity to argue rationally, and the scene devolved into something you’d expect out of toddlers. So I left.

But I was grateful to Chandri and I wanted to talk with her more, just without the men around. So I bought some chocolate and asked to take her out on a note I wrote in something that looked like Nepali leaving her my whatsapp number. I learned from our conversations in person that she was my age, divorced with a teen and she seemed interested. And she was. She got back to me immediately and although she was worried about gossip and not having time, she was interested.

My hotel was down an alley and gig drivers in Nepal don’t know how to find things a surprising amount of the time. I’ve learned this is a combination of: it being a long-running and common scam tactic for metered rides that has carried over into gig work as a bid for tips (gig rides are still paid in cash so the agreed upon price can seem low if the driver spent an extra 30 mins finding your particular “very hard to find” hotel), GPS also doesn’t work as well with all the mountains, Kathmandu is in fact an impossibly complicated city to navigate anyway, and there is absolutely a wide-spread inability to use modern technology among the men driving. It is impossible to know a scam, ignorance, or a failure of technology from the others, so it just is what it is.

To help this problem: whenever I needed to hire a ride I would leave my hotel and walk to the busier street. Over the few days I spent in that hotel, more and more men showed up hanging out at the businesses closest to the corner. They called for me to talk, but generally just repeated the things they had already asked for, so eventually I stopped listening. One night I hired a bike pretty late in the evening to meet Erika. It was prime drinking hour and as I walked out to reach my driver the men who had been gathering on the corner, emboldened and drunk, blocked the alley. They were laughing and in a party state, but it was tense. They grabbed at me and tugged at my helmet and wouldn’t let me pass; 15 or 20 of them and more converging, old ladies started yelling at them, they just got wilder. I walked back to my hotel and messaged the driver that I couldn’t get past them. I heard a lot of honking, he eventually got through and insisted it would be fine. He motioned to grab the bar under the seat tightly. So I did. We approached the line of drunk men, locked back in, the driver revved his engine and just drove forward, fast. One of the guys got a hold of my backpack but lost his grip, others just smacked the top of my helmet or back. From a certain perspective, the were just having fun, which is why I decided to get on the bike, but there was no doubt in my mind that it wasn’t far from bubbling over into something more sinister and dangerous.

I returned later that night and only a few of the men remained and they were drunk and tired enough to only muster a few shouts.

Chandri messaged me that she heard what happened and apologized, I guess on behalf of the neighborhood, or Nepal? I told her I was switching hotels in the morning, that I understood the gossip concern and that I’d be happy to send a car for her if she found time to meet but that was really the last time we spoke about it. I imagine that if word got around about her going out with whatever caricature of a westerner I’d become in that small little world of a few blocks in Kathmandu, that she would never live it down. Maybe word already got around. Maybe someone saw the chocolates, or the note. Maybe the foreigner dating a local woman was one trope too far for the angry, drunken men of this neighborhood. All married, several children, drunk and never in their company, making too little money, desperate and dreaming of whatever it is they think I have.

I switched hotels just a mile or so away and like most of the great metropolises of the world, it is like a whole new city emerges every dozen blocks and I never saw any of them again.