Borderline Erotomania: Lust and Lechery in Nepal

I often wonder – well, not often, but often enough – how it must feel for an actor-director to see his name glitter and flash on screen every few seconds during the credits. Cases in point: Braveheart (Mel competing with Mel), and more recently, Tropic Thunder, which Ben Stiller, in addition to the above, also co-wrote and co-exec produced, and maybe even made love to, on occasion. An embarrassment of riches, to be sure. Don’t these guys feel the least bit embarrassed to watch the scales of fortune tip so overwhelmingly in their favour in comparison with every clapper boy who ever lived? The haves screwing the have-nots again, a million to none.

Nonetheless, I digress (how the hell can I digress when I’ve just started writing this?). Or maybe not. It’s all connected, somewhere. So if you do have time off from your daily dose of Sudoku, just join these goddamn dots, will you? 

It was a cool, sunny day in Kathmandu. I was uncharacteristically sociable this morning, and so I decided to read the newspaper. I swear I wasn’t expecting much, not a cocktail party for sure, and certainly not what I got – my name flashing and glittering (to my 9 a.m. mind) in 12-point Helvetica on the front page of The Himalayan Times.

“Yesterday was the first day of Kartik Nach,” beamed the snippet on the left margin of the page.

My first thought, as you’ve probably guessed, was: was I dancing again in my sleep, and what’s the scientific term for it, and do I wish to be cured? And then I saw light, as revealed by the masthead:

Wed Nov 5, 2008, and below that, Kartik 20, 2065, and finally, Nepal Sambat 1169.

Yes, I am the October Man, my name (which, quite inadvertently, happens to be Kartik, whatever the fuck that means) representing this auspicious month, and the Nepalis are ahead of their time, and ours, if you didn’t know already (this might explain their foreshortened life expectancy). Theirs is a solar calendar based on ancient Hindu tradition; the Bikram Sambat calendar is 56.7 years ahead of the solar Gregorian calendar.

Now I’m not religious, save for the occasional alcohol binge, but this day of our lord, whoever He might be, seemed to dawn like a beacon and lead me to the conviction that I was the chosen one, chosen for the explicitly spiritual purpose of welding myself with the first Nepali lass who’d have me (it wasn’t exactly a mission but I’m not averse to commission).

How did I arrive at this conclusion? Duh. Kartik + Nepal + 69 = Sexy Time, yo. And one more thing I believe in firmly: when in Rome, do the Romans…

Flashback: it’s a rave type of party, a trance festival on the outskirts of Kathmandu, and I’m raving with a Swiss miss. We’ve reached the stage, thirty-sex hours into our acquaintance, when we’re all too comfortable, almost over-familiar with one another’s quirks and needs and idiotsyncrasies, and so we decide to go trawling for a chick to complete the third angle of this rather dubious triangle.

Now you’d think that this should be a cinch at a party where everyone’s letting their hair - and a few other things – down, but no. When I’m not wondering about actor-directors’ ego kicks, I’m perplexed by this apparent paradox in which everyone’s going stark raving mad in every way except sexually, shedding inhibitions but not clothes, making out with the music but not with a fellow human, the dance floor so thick with energy, sensuous and otherwise, that you can feel it pulsing at you, at your loins, from a mile off like a quasar or a supernova.

I mean, whatthefuck? Aren’t we all children of the sperm to start with? And why pretend at freelove and techno-hippy revolutions when you can’t walk the walk, homey. I mean, if I wanted sterile I’d re-read 1984 or move to China. (Wait a minute, I think I did both recently.)

Anyway, so this is what the lady and I have to contend with: another sexually repressed drug orgy. Nobody wants to get jiggy with it. To complicate things further, my new friend – we shall call her Ludmila, because it’s cute – has developed a slight speech impediment owing to certain substances ingested several hours earlier. She has regressed to her amniotic roots, meaning she can mumble in German, maybe even do the baby goose-step, but the Queen’s English, tough titties to begin with, is now another ballgame altogether. You could say this is a particularly British strain of aphasia, and virulent as hell. Ludmila sounds like a stuttering wind-up toy winding down.

            Ludmila: “Ya. Hee. So…we…make…love…no?”

            Victim: “What?”

            Me: “Let me handle this, m’Lud. (To victim) What she’s trying to say is, would you be interested in a threesome?”

The victim’s expression is to die for, several times worth the price of the ticket. She recovers composure soon enough, but it turns out that she, a pert, dishy blonde from Belgium, is not into women. Don’t worry, I coax, you don’t need to interact with Lud, I’ll take care of the both of you. While I’m saying this, I think, did I actually say this, and how the fuck will I ever live up to it? Not now, she squirms, maybe some other time, eh? Strike out. Unsurprisingly Lud has no luck on her own either. So we make do with one another. What to do in Kathmandu, or Kathmandon’t?

Our scouting expedition ended there, but we continued to drool at and comment on beddable objects. I even suggested we hit a few Kathmandu bars together and see what came up in terms of group therapy. When this didn’t bear fruit I suggested we attend a Shower Girl show (Nepal-style striptease), which, at the very least, might infuse some spark or humour into our dreary small-town lives. But by now we were too mired in ourselves, in our burgeoning bourgeois bubble, to really care.

Then Ludmila decided to take a vacation from our vacation and go Vipassana-ing down the slippery slope to self-improvement. Or perhaps she was trying to tell me something. I was beginning to sense a pattern emerging from my failed relationships. On the rebound from me, women seemed to invariably a) embrace spirituality’s sexless solace b) meet that special scum-one c) turn lesbian.

In short, I’d made them ineffably happier by leaving them than they’d ever been within my blessed world. I was being transformed willy-nilly into the Father Teresa of Sex, a serial donor of life and love and freedom, my charity beginning at home even as I chased my dependents into someone else’s.

In Lud’s absence I became the Chosen One (encouraged by newspaper headlines blaring my name) and gradually began to nurture the roving eye once more. My eyes roved, in fact, straight into the daily droves of Nepali schoolgirls oozing sex along the roads like slug slime. Tarted up - stockinged, mascara’d, micro-mini-skirted – and Avril-fied to the nines, they stalked the sidewalks like goth kittens out to capture victims for underground S&M parties.

That darned roving eye again

These demure designer vixens reinstilled my faith in teenage sexuality, lust as the colour black, and Nepali neighbourliness, not in any specific order. They also casually made Britney (in her first video) look like Julie Andrews flaunting nun chic high on the frigid Austrian Alps.

A young Brit, friend and fellow traveller, summed it up gallantly, “It’s the high socks, mate. Not to mention the glint in their collective eye when they walk past you. You’re like, ‘Naughty naughty, you know things you shouldn’t.’”

And so there were fantasies, instead of fantasies about fantasising. I’d heard stories from at least a couple of local boys/men concerning the Nepali girl’s notorious coquettishness, and how this translated into a fatal cocktease of the highest calibre.

“If you so much as kiss them once,” bemoaned a university student I’d struck up a conversation with, “they expect you to marry them and father ten babies.”

Since I wasn’t about to go down that road, I began to mine my reveries all the more; this rich inner space thence became redolent with a sense of personal exploration, a meditative maturity, a million daydreams jostling for prominence and not all involving Manisha Koirala as a Scottish high-school dominatrix in Bravetart.    

The days flew and I found myself crippled by a combination of excessive lust and a fear of unleashing it. Maybe, I thought, if I gave myself a deadline I’d hit upon something or someone faster, and so I decided to buy a ticket out of the country.

A few days later my daydreams shrank to a pinpoint, a single lodestar whose orbit I was dragged into.

Her name had probably been plucked out of The Handbook of the Dullest Female Names in History, something to the tune of Kavita or Bhavna or Shilpa, but who cared? She was a trainee in a travel agent’s office, a prototypical svelte, dark-eyed Nepali lass with JAILBAIT written all over, and even while the fucktarded manager simpered and lisped at me, she sat next to me and worked me over with her eyes. I felt like she was conducting a full body cavity search. The air was so choked with sex I wanted to rip her clothes off and take her roughly, unchivalrously, right there on the floor, but all that this notion succeeded in doing was giving me a rather unbecoming stiffy. Something was travelling north in my pants, I thought, trying to ignore her as she deliberately brushed her hand against mine, or leaned over me to pick up a pen on the other side of the desk.

Two others sat in the room - the male manager and his Delhi cousin who wasn’t too unattractive herself but had just been rendered invisible by a mere trainee. Were they seeing this, I wondered, and how could they not; they just had to be the two greatest actors in the world to keep this charade going. So this was how a poor hormonal Nepali boy got embrangled in a Black Widow’s web for life. I hastily booked my passage to India and slithered out of the room. When I went to pick up my ticket the next day she wasn’t there. I despaired and exulted simultaneously.

While a part of my brain (probably lodged in the scrotal area) still contrived ways to reach out to her (she had access to my number and email, I reasoned, she’d connect like a Nokia-enhanced wet dream), and other libidinal tentacles rippled out at random Israelis and Europeans, I decided to do what any self-respecting psychology graduate-cum-writer would do in my position. Sublimate, mate, sublimate. I began work on my third debut novel, a panegyric to the young female form as seen through an old man’s eyes.

Working title: Ludmila.