Away on Business

Sorry for Shocking World (cover story in Japanese travel magazine)

Business travellers have the habit of downplaying any enjoyment that might come with their
work, muttering, Oh, all right I suppose, when asked how their last trip went. This, of
course, surprises their colleagues and others who don't belong to what they see as a very
privileged caste.
But one of the truths of business travel, aside from the fact that most of it is very
mundane, is that you do find yourself in some remarkable places (though still confined to
mundane tasks) and sometimes you have to admit it.
I'm writing this in a meeting room at the Intercontinental Hotel in Colombo, awaiting
my next client. Just beyond the window the Arabian Sea is a translucent shiver of white jade
to the horizon, crisscrossed with ageing freighters silently drifting on the swell and awaiting
entry to the old Colombo port. If I were writing this for a different sort of publication I would
go on about the nutmeg and copra laden breezes rippling the seas on their equatorial passage
from Africa, about the ships anchored in the roadstead and use that Conradian term at
the end of their mystery journeys from afar; I would even quote from Baudelaires
Linvitation au voyage: On the channels and streams, See each vessel that dreams, In its
whimsical vagabond way , and maybe from John Masefields Cargoes: Stately Spanish
galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shore,
With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts .
In reality it is unlikely that I will even leave the grounds of this hotel to cross the
avenue to the sea-shore.
Just last November I was in Kathmandu, a fabled destination, and one that for me was
a bit different as I hadn't been there for 22 years. Then I stayed in D-Square Lodge, a damp,
mud-floored rat-run. Where did I stay in November? At the Sheraton; from unspeakable
squalor to 5 stars in two long decades.
Here is the story of my recent stay.
Wing-Commander Deviprasad, retired and living in Darjeeling, met me at the airport
and accompanied me to the hotel. My first impression, through a squalling downpour, was
that Kathmandu had stretched hugely, as if bits of ramshackle Indian towns had been blown
up in the monsoon season and dumped in ruins when the winds were exhausted.

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 For two days and three nights I was incarcerated in the Sheraton. Wg Cdr Deviprasad
and his local batman had arranged such a procession of potential clients at 20 minute
intervals that we stopped only for brief meal breaks. Outside a steady rain and gelatinous fog
made the world disappear. I felt as if trapped in a sunken luxury liner, living on a diminishing
supply of air. But I knew that beyond the marshlands of the atmosphere outside the windows,
the stupendous Himalayas stood and would be revealed when the wet season was cleared
away by the first sharp winds rumbling across the high desolate plateaux of Tibet and down
the viaducts of glaciers to the valley.
At breakfast each morning we saw a couple of young Australian pilots who came and
went, working for a local airline; like birds from a distant shore they were a sign of life
beyond the shipwreck, of hill-towns like Tumlingtar and Lukla and far-away monasteries
hidden in the fastness of mountains to which I trekked through a golden autumn of lightness
and life all those years ago.
Inoculated against such reveries, Deviprasad droned and ranted about this chap or that
imbecile, or the clots at such and such a company and this or that embassy. The worst were
the B-Deshis, vermin who had imprisoned him for some offence committed by his fool of a
Sindhi business partner who fled like a weasel on a DC-8 to Karachi. Amongst multiple
indignities, the greatest was being walloped with the very lathies that Deviprasad's
company itself had provided, as he was then in the business of supplying bamboo and rubber
instruments to the Bangladeshi armed forces and police. The devil take all of them, he
fumed, blood pressure peaking, the scuttling mice of the lowlands.
Back in the business centre my interviews went on; I might have been in Ankara,
Surabaya or Taipei, although I admit to a surprise in seeing so many Nepalis of a class that
scarcely existed two decades ago people educated in boarding schools in the hill stations of
India like Dehra Dun, Mussoorie and Shimla, and now working in family businesses worth
lakhs of rupees. Few would ever have been beyond the Kathmandu Valley, other than to
school in India, and certainly not northwards into the remote world of villages perched over
precipitous ravines, tiny, intricately terraced fields and tumbling rivers of barely melted snow
that assuredly existed out there beyond the streaming rain.
This life went on for 50 hours. On the morning of my last day, Deviprasad said I was
free. At ease, men! he roared at me and his quaking local officer, there are no more
interviews!

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 My flight to Bangkok and Singapore was in the early afternoon so I decided to go to
the ancient Durbar Square in the centre of Kathmandu to see what had become of it.
Deviprasad, the complete businessman, had no wish or need to step out of the hotel.
Once in Durbar Square I was enveloped in a domain almost unchanged since the
middles ages. This was the Kathmandu I remembered: the lines of half-clothed wizened
porters squatting in the mud with their ropes awaiting a load, bells ringing in gloomy, smoke
and incense choked temples, grubby school children squealing as they tumbled out of cycle-
rickshaws, and Freak Street, still with its shops stocked with second-hand rucksacks and
travellers' gear, handicrafts from the sixties, incense and hand-made jewellery.
I didn't find D-Square Lodge, but there were several like it, constructed of bricks
about the size of dominoes that are ancient when they are made, termite devoured window
frames and doors made for hobbits. There is of course a richer tourist about these days, as
well as those who've always been on Freak Street French and Swiss in their late 50s,
thinning hair in dreadlocks and wearing Indian clothes, bargaining for some chunky bit of
silver or coral or a Tibetan bell with a ponderous intensity, and occupying for hours on end
the available space in a minute chi shop, inhaling a murky air composed of charcoal particles
and yak bone broth.
Being in a suit, I stuck out in this crowd like the Freak Street relics would at a
conference of auditors. But I was away on business, with only a couple of hours for the
nonsense of sightseeing.
Pursued by a man trying to sell me a kukri, the savage, curved Nepalese knife, I
walked towards a temple so as to mount the stairs and survey the vista from above. As I
stepped through a little crowd I felt a splash of something on my trousers and shoes. There,
right at my legs, a man was sawing the head off a goat with a kukri, backwards and forwards,
while the wretched animal wriggled in his grip. Blood spurted again into my shoes. I leapt for
the stairs and climbed, the other knife wielder behind me. Seeing how handy a kukri could be
though I had always imagined they were the perfect implement for a swift beheading, thus
the fearsome reputation of the Gurkhas whose victims were rarely goats I began bargaining
with the seller.
By the time I had bought the knife, the goat's head was perched on the ground with a
little candle set in between its horns on a nest of incense. The body was being drained into a
cup by giggling children.
This was my days sightseeing and shopping.

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 Travelling back to the Sheraton, my taxi became entangled with a funeral procession,
so that I arrived at the hotel with no time to change.
I rushed to the airport in a sizzle of sweat, mud and blood and boarded a flight that
then remained on the ground for two hours whilst a technical problem was resolved. I felt that
the person in the seat beside me was not sure of me at all, reeking and dishevelled, whilst I
was worried that I would not make my connection in Bangkok for Singapore.
As it happened I made the connecting flight but my luggage did not. From touch
down to take off in Bangkok took 15 minutes which I think may be a record for a person and
too fast for suitcases. All I had was my briefcase, and, astonishingly, a half metre long knife
wrapped in newspaper.
I reported my missing bag at Singapore airport and then went to the Regent, where I
felt the icy judgements of the check-in staff as they surveyed my dirty cotton suit, dried gunk
on my shoes, lack of luggage, and hideous weapon.
The next morning I had meetings to attend. The blood had stiffened on my trousers
and shoelaces and although I bought a shirt, underclothes and toothbrush, the impression was
still one of a feral person, someone who might do something not allowed in Singapore, like
ordering a sandwich combination that wasn't on the menu or producing children who
wouldn't grow up to be accountants.
Marvellous, isn't it?, I said to Samantha Ho, our representative in Singapore, I still
can't get over the fact that you can be in the mud and mire of a medieval market place one
morning and in an airconditioned nightmare the next.
Indifferent to the Henry Miller reference, she shivered, gazing at me as if I were a
halal butcher, and replied, Why anyone would want to go to those primitive places at all is
quite beyond me.
Sorry for shocking world, Samantha.

This story was first published in Panorama in 1995

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