Field of Dreams — page 2

When I woke up the next day the first thing I saw was that shrine, gently luminous in the morning light, and I found myself almost hallucinatorily happy. It was still raining, but life was in full fling all around me. Outside my door the fields stood green, fresh and gleaming in the wet, and a marvelously suggestive vegetable smell reached me—part fertile, part rotten, part bitter, part sweet, past its best but already renewing itself, like a subliminal and oddly comforting text of existence. The river still rushed, but mingled with its noise was the hilarious laughter of children, the shrill merry gossip of Sherpa women, the clatter of pans and the cheerful voice of Sonam, clumping up the outside steps to see how I was.

Was it two nights I spent there? Was it two years? It might have been either, because time lost meaning for me in Chaunrikharha. All the many Sonams visited me in my convalescence, some young and rosy, some extremely old, sometimes singly, sometimes all at once, feeding me roast potatoes and dosing me with a powerful white liquor called rakhsi, which plays a happy part in the Sherpa culture. Strangers sporadically appeared at my open door to peer kindly and wonderingly at me. The rain hissed and clattered on the roof, and the women talked and talked downstairs.

And always, throughout my stay, those serene images of the alcove looked gently back at me, and the candles flickered, guttering when a gust of wind blew through or under my door. I heard not a harsh word. I saw not an unfriendly face. I grew to love the spatter of rain on the roof, and the scents of woodsmoke and vegetables, and the bright inquisitive eyes of the innumerable grubby brown infants invited in by little Sonams to take a look at me.

When I was better, they showed me around the fields and took me to the roaring river and introduced me to the neighbors, who completed my cure with lavish tin mugs of rakhsi. When the time came to resume our journey, a covey of urchins came with us for the first few hundred yards, prancing and tumbling and laughing all around us, providing a properly dreamlike envoi to a transcendent interlude.

For 50 years I have half-wondered if my stay in the somewhere of Chaunrikharka was a purely imaginary enchantment, born by fever out of exhaustion. It was only the other day that, examining a new map of eastern Nepal, I discovered for certain that my momentary paradise had existed, east of the Dudh Kosi River, west of the snow peak Gonglha, due south of Phakdingma—heaven on earth.

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