Collections of this Kind

The Jade Doorway

I'm not a person who will be much burdened on my deathbed with opportunities untaken and experiences untasted, and yet, nevertheless, I've been alive long enough that even I have accumulated just a few choices untaken that cause me a degree of pained recollection. One such occasion remains strongly with me. It was late April 2015, in Kathmandu, and I had just returned from fieldwork in the foothills of Everest.

I'd been staying in a small semi-subsistence village, lodging with an elderly widow who had lost her son to the ubiquitous migration to the middle east for work, and who therefore had a spare room. Every day, on a moulded clay hearth in the middle of her living space, she cooked me the same meal of bitter herbs picked from the suspiciously fertile slopes below her house; a house which craned out over the steep valley supported on entirely perilous wooden piles. The work was useful, but ended badly for me: in giardia and a fever-dream confinement for what seemed like weeks. This only drew to a conclusion when the local health centre finally admitted there was little they could do for me, and the parallel folk-medicine underground knocked on the door with a kindly offer of ground bone taken from a corpse which had recently been ploughed up from one of the village rice terraces.

I suppose, based on prior experience I don't intend to go into at the moment, I was tempted to try it; but instead I dosed myself up with the last of my field kit, and risked an unpleasant day-long ride along the dirt roads and ravines of Sagarmatha and Gaurishankar back to the capital with twelve other people, crammed into a minivan built for six. Once there, I recovered surprisingly quickly on a diet of yak-butter tea and the civilisation of a hotel room with a shower, albeit a shower slung together with life-threatening wiring. Indeed, by the end of a week in Kathmandu I felt sufficiently well to risk a day's walk to the parkland around a local temple to Mother Kālī and along the Bagmati, where the smell of incense and the charnel grounds of Pashupatinath blew fragrant in the warm mountain breeze.

It was a delightful day of flânerie, but, recuperating as I was, by the close of the day I was still some way further from the city centre than I had planned, and so rather than walk back I risked a taxi, hoping to catch the last of the bustle of that most chaotic of the world's great cities. It was Thursday, and the end of my last full day in Nepal, so I jumped out at my favourite bookshop, Pilgrims1, to add a couple of volumes on the irregular local temple sculpture to the eleven kilos of books I was already somehow going to have to get home. However, as I exited the taxi into the blanketing warmth of the evening air, I was suddenly taken with an extreme tiredness, and I realised I had, perhaps, pushed myself too far, and overspent on my enthusiasm to see the city one last time. It was probably only a kilometre or so back to the hotel, and yet every step was an act of stoic will, with the temptation to fall at the streetside and sleep propped up against some dusty antique façade under the improbable maze of telephone and power wires only staved off by the likelihood of being run over by some errant vehicle, even at that time of the evening2.

The light was going, and the yellow bulbs of the shops were doing little to fight off the darkness, when I spotted the source, even now, of my pang of regret. It was a plain, if sizable, wooden doorway in an otherwise featureless concrete wall; no sign to say what lay therein, and yet the door ajar, and from beyond the most extraordinary praeternatural glow; the aquacious green glow of jade lit from within. Perhaps it was the size of the door, or the lighting, or some subtle atmosphere it gave off, but the whole exuded the feel of the entrance of some establishment, stairs leading down to who knew what dangers. Strangely, despite knowing that part of the city well by then, I couldn't recall ever seeing it there before, or, indeed, the wall itself, which was in a space that, I felt sure, had previously been occupied by a shop front. Nevertheless, they looked well settled and permanent, wall and doorway both.

I stood on the opposite side of the road for a long five minutes, debating whether to enter, before reluctantly, and with more will power than I thought, in retrospect, it might have taken, I dragged myself off to bed. The following day I left Kathmandu, and a few hours later, dear reader, the city was utterly razed by the largest earthquake they had had since the 1930s. An earthquake that destroyed the hotel where I had resided only the day before, and which trapped my fellow workers in an experience that was... well, maybe that is their story to tell. For me, I still wonder, had I gone through that door, descended those steps, been immersed in that deep submarine green glow, would I still be there now? Missed my flight as the long nights stretched out in lost days? Been kept peculiarly safe, or buried forever – or at least until, a hundred years hence, I exited in one way or another to end as ill-fated dust in some apothecary's jar? Who knows? I doubt I shall now ever return to Kathmandu; but if you happen to pass through, and you chance to see that door, wherever it next appears in the city, might you let me know where it leads? That is, should you return.3

23 April 2015