16. Lonely Girl & Good News

I woke today feeling quite miserable,  isolated, cold, lonely, with a "How Could He Do This to Me and What Have I Done as a result" feeling;  guilty about being the sort of mother who is happier in a dugout on Komodo Island than living in the same city as her children.  Guilty because I'm unhappy when locked down; angry at my own stupidity for not seeing what skulduggery was going on under my nose by someone who said he loved me.

Curled up under my thick doonas, I was processing recent comments of people who said that I was "strong", "tough", "brave"; while I was wondering what had happened to my femininity during my battles with the past two years. These are not attributes I'm proud of.  They were developed out of necessity.  My mother told me, many times, that as far as she was concerned, ever since I was two, "there was always a cold wind blowing".  It was, apparently, because I stuck out my tongue at her.

So I've always had to fend for myself: I've never had anyone take care of me, or show me the rules.  My perceived strength drew relationships that depended on me - and thus emptied me.  And my way of coping has been to run away - every time. I run without thinking;  I run without direction.  But I do know that every run I make enhances my life even more, even though I don't know it at the time. I do know this is one of those times: I must be patient.  M reminded me of previous mad sojourns - to Chile, to India, to Komodo Island, when I just TOOK OFF without thinking, and survived the terrors.

If I were to get run over by a rickshaw, or a motorbike, or am disembowelled by a mad cow, or whisked off for my organs, or die of dysentry, or electrocute myself in these foreign lands, who would know?  I remembered then, being in Patagonia, when I'd run out of money as I'd left my credit card at Igauzu Falls hotel, after a forest hike listening to the music from The Mission.  I'd subsequently had to rely on the kindness of a Buenos Aires hotel owner who let me sleep in a dusty, in-the-process-of-being-renovated-room. It was furnished like some post-modern statement about destruction and repair as it had concrete bags on the floor and a door without a lock and a toilet that seemed tacked to the wall.  I lay on the bare mattress, and watched the ceiling fan chopping around, wondering: who would know if the clanking thing fell on my face and decapitated me?  Phones and emails are vital for feeling loved and having a link with the world - when the power is down, it's easy for a mild form of panic to set in, even in a veteran panic buster and sabre toothed tiger battler.  

So I heaved off the doonas.  I looked out the windows to where the sun was rising behind the mountains and casting wonderful warming rays on my bed and on my face. I listened to the chickens carrying on in the yard below, and a rooster making a randy racket, and the non stop bark of dogs;  I listened to the big black birds swoop over the rooftops for their titbits of rice offerings and watched them fly high and free towards the mountains.  I watched morning laundry antics between the satellite dishes. I smelled porridge, and wood fires, and incense.  I saw Nobo coming upstairs with my plate of breakfast, my tray decorated with an orange marigold. 

I luxuriated in a very hot, but short,  shower as finally I'd got the solar/vs electricity format worked out. I looked at the mould on the wall and thought if that was in Italy, it would be framed under perspex as a design feature.  I put on my warm leggings and a k-tart t-shirt and tied my "Sale! Fleas Jackets!" around my waist. I laced on my hiking boots.  I packed my camera and I wrote a note:  I am Susan Storm. I am Australian. My passport no is. My date of birth is. I am staying at. - and put it in my bum bag just-in-case.  I namaste'd the two wonderful people behind the desk. I said 'morning to Shiva and his bushy teenage hair. I walked down the dusty, potholed lane, past the massage parlour and the dark momo food stall, past the toothless Tibetan woman with a gold nose ring, always dressed in red, who sells bottled water from a carboard box for 10rp (1/7th of a dollar).  At the junction of my lane and Thamel's main road which is a clogged artery of rusting metal, diesel, mud, cripples, vendors selling peacock feathers and tiger balm, bicycles, women hauling bricks in conical baskets, knock off dvds and piles of "Special! Pashmina stools!" I stopped a held-together-with-chewing-gum-and-string-backfiring-rustbucket-with-no-meter-taxi, and asked him to take me to Pashupati, where the annual Sadhu festival is being held.  Which Desiree told me about.  Which I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't met Desiree and arrived here a few days early.  Which goes to show.

My stars are beginning to thank the world for delivering D, and despatching him as needed.

I stared through the cracked taxi windows as we crawled through lanes blocked with cows, drugged up child beggars, broken roads and piles of bricks, and thought about the things we take for granted in the western world, and how little we really need. Warmth, food, recognition, water, shelter - how much of it we need is relative. Last night I spent a few happy hours watching a 50c dvd on my mac, curled up under a yak doona;  I'd washed my hair in mid afternoon, a pleasure previously unknown, and dried it in the sun on the rooftop, following the sun as it moved around.  I've worked out the power problems: I charge while I sleep. I've brought as few clothes as I could manage: and I've only worn three items since I've been here: a jacket, tshirt and leggings. I haven't had use for a hair dryer or nailpolish, or curlers.

I've found the supermarket for essentials to make life a little more luxurious:  Ylang Ylang soap in a pump instead of the carbolic supplied by the hotel; a bowl of grapes, mandarins, apples and tiny sweet yellow bananas bought from a bicycle vendor; ginger and lemon tea, crackers and a pot of honey for emergency food rations when it's two am and I'm up writing.  Still can't get the kettle to boil in under an hour. I have a fresh towel every day. I have a sitting down toilet with a view of the mountains.  I have hot water sometimes. I have sunlight.  I have enough money to get out of any situation if and when I need to, from busfare to a jet.  I have made two friends since I've been here and the hotel owners greet me by name.

Life is sweet.

I'm disgorged from the taxi into a river of people, through which I have to wade and stumble, jostle and nudge.  I'm supposed to meet Brigit and her entourage;  it shouldn't be too difficult as we would possibly be the only people who aren't garlanded, painted or draped in sunset colours.

Amputee, Pashupati, 2.3.2011

The entrance to the temple grounds is thronged with vendors selling marigold garlands, rudruksha beads, incense, plastic necklaces, Nepalese fabric purses, yellow scarves with Hindu calligraphy and pre-made offering leaf-bowls.  Hindu prayers blast over the loudspeakers. I'm sucked in with the crowds. I happily pay my 500rp for Foreign, while Local pays 25rp.  Whitewashed, stoned Sadhus are lined up against walls, in squares, or walking with their tin buckets for donations. Wild eyed, dressed in orange rags, dreadlocked to their toes, they are a fabulous sight.  I start taking photos, real photos, for the first time in years. 

I'm immersed in what's happening in the camera.  I take on a different personality.  No longer off balance, as I have felt since D's departure, where I could have sworn a limb was amputated, with a genuine truly lost feeling, I am steady as a rock. My moxie returns.  I am laughing. I am hot. I am creative and confident. When I first arrived, I didn't want to pay for photos.  Now I'm brazen. I cash 100 rp into tiny bits of crumpled, rotting, pink 5rp notes and I hand them out like candy. And I realise that the reason I didn't want to pay is that I would have to interact.  I had forgotten how to interact during That Time. I've been feeling invisible, just a cloud that floats through days;  never noticed.  I'd always Before drawn looks from people;  my Scottish red haired colouring, my green eyes, my curvy body, my well aligned nose and teeth. I'm not tall,  but I have developed an energy and power that enabled me to ride those rather than rely on my looks, and a canniness that has always delivered me from danger.  

For a long time, since D's D day, that hasn't happened.  I've shrunk. In stature, morale and confidence.  I looked at myself in the reflection of a begging bucket:  I am various shades of grey, some stained with egg, threads pulled, bulky, ill fitting.  Who am I now?  I was always exotically dressed in hand embroidered Suzani's from Afghanistan, or magnificent silver jewellery, or gossamer silks and hand loomed linens.  I was proud to be individual, and unusual,  of standing out, of being able to be identified in a crowd, a restaurant or an airport.  I look like a bloke.  My hair is tied up. Big boots, fat pants, big jacket.  No makeup, no blush to my cheeks, no female energy, no sexuality or femininity. No wonder I was almost trampled in the melee.  But wait, I'm still here!  Under this blokey look is a Shakti, a Parvati, a Tara, waiting to blossom again. I need to find my inner Goddess and dance with her as I did before D.  To walk with moving hips and use my assets.   I hold eye contact.  With the Nepalese women, first. Who smile, big, toothless smiles, and crinkly eyes. I stand closer to men than I have for a very long time, too scared then that my healing bites would be scratched and I'd carry on bleeding to death. 

I'm surrounded by drama, by excitement, by noise, colour and light.  I seek my photographic subjects through dust kicked up by thousands of people.  I engage.  I smile, I laugh, I hand out crumpled money.

I know that my photographs will be good.  I know that I will have a life again, without D.  That I will walk steady, and strong; and bugger the cold winds blowing. It's okay to be strong, and tough, and brave. But the blokey image doesn't work for me, now that I understand what I was hiding, and why. 

Sadhu at Pashupati  Ganga Festival 2 March 2011

Rudruksha Shiva at Pashupathi Festival

The Sadhus are smoking ganga like it's going out of fashion.  It's offered, by smiling men with bongs as thick as their thumbs, but I don't want or need it. I'm high, higher than I've been in so long, I'm floating on air, I feel like dancing; wait! I've probably inhaled it by proxy.   I tried to be cool once: G fed me some cookies and I was off the planet and paranoid for weeks - or so it seemed.  The air is so dense with ganga it feels as if I'm wading through it.  I walk around the temple in a daze, taking photographs, breathing in all this cacophony of life. My memory prickles: I've here before, in 1989, on my first Nepalese trip, just after I'd run away from my husband, who didn't want to travel and I wanted to see India from the heights of the Annapurnas.  The temple is also a cremation ground. What a place to begin my own reformation.

Cremation ghat at Pashupati

I stay for a hours, eventually just sitting on walls between piles of colour.  I catch another rustbucket back to HBH, where I lunch with Bridgette in the sun. My yoga teacher doesn't turn up: and Natasha is still in Pokhara.  So I go to Kaldi's for a steamed, not fried momo, for lunch; a free wifi setup.  Everyone sits at their own table, wired to their laptops, chatting to the rest of the world, locked in their own spaces, sipping their expressos or lemon tea.  I watch them. It's so isolating. We're all here, in this amazing place, with so many adventures to share, but we have an insane obsession to facebook the rest of the world.  I leave. I buy a soft pink silk skirt.  The goddess is returning, thread by thread. I smile at tourists. I get looks, good ones.  Later I bump into Bridgette and her mad dog and mad child who are all really not mad but free spirited;  we eat on torn worn cushions under candlelight at Orfu; then watch sitar, tabla, flute and an instrument that looks like a guitar at New Orleans. I'm so happy, some tears drizzle down my face.
My life is turning.

And!

The universe continues to rain blessings on my thorny head.

Remember when I put a business card in the bucket at a travel expo in Perth, just before I left? When I was holed up in Perth's awful heat with nothing to do except bask in some air-conditioning? 

Well, I received an email. It notified me that I'd won a trip.  To which I replied, I don't believe you, you need to call me.  The phone rang.  Here, in the abode of the gods, in the 15 minutes all the technology aligned to inform me, that, Yes, it's true.

I HAVE JUST WON A 9 day TRIP FOR TWO TO THE PACIFIC, INCLUDING RETURN AIRFARES, in October.

WHOO HOO!!

I'm taking my beautiful friend Dawn, because she protected, nurtured and fed me through Perth dramas.  And because she's really cool to travel with.  Now I have to find cruise gear!

I feel happy, oh so happy.

THANK YOU universe!
And thanks to my Mac for having enough power and wifi to give me the good news. 

Now, back to making more Sadhu music.

Gotta go.