Nepalese Peace Pagoda 

THE SPACES IN BETWEEN

A play on the book title The Places In Between, how clever of you darling, he thought wryly as he sat in the Chinese run guesthouse where each morning he took advantage of the their efficiency and their internet to get some work done.

Now, as so often, he was waiting for the electricity to come on. No computer Sir. No power. Low backup.

Sometimes he sat in a half built café on the opposite side of Buddha Park. It was being guarded by the heir and other unexplained relatives. He watched sheep being herded down the dusty road; and asked where they were going. Muslims, came the response.

Here everything was about Buddha. Buddha Laundry. Buddha Phones. Buddha Air. Buddha Digitial Photo Edit Shop.

Back at his own guesthouse, a quarter of the price but without the facilities, a group of 40 Nepali pilgrims had arrived previous evening, turning the place into a crowded venue.

The electricity was off, as usual, but there was a dilapidated bus parked in the forecourt, and people everywhere. Some of them were preparing to sleep on the roof of the bus. The heir held him by the arm outside the gates and said, clasping his other hand over his heart: “I love you but I have another.”

“I know,” he responded, smiling.

Lines from other stories kept breaking through; an “Aek Aek” amongst the cry of the crows as they rose through the startled trees.

Here in Nepal, close to the Indian border, old women still smoked, their wrinkled faces peering out at the world through the sheaves of their traditional costumes.

Always, always, there was another way out.

“I deceive very much.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

But old stories worming through head were just that, old, and while some things might need to be worked through and resolved in his ancient brain; there was much about the passage of time to distort the harshest of memories.

“Their assets should be stripped as the proceeds of crime, Scumbags in Black Mercs. Good name for a band, Scumbags In Black Mercs. Lowlife.”

Lines like these went crawling through his brain, through the enveloping heat.

Every time he looked back he just shuddered.

The tasteless, cruel, vindictive, ruthless, genuinely unpleasant people he had left back in Bangkok were no doubt going about their own sunny days; ripping off more sucker tourists, preparing for an evening of fun and intrigue.

The cruelest hoax, the most damaging lies. They hadn’t cared how low they stooped; as long as they got him. But they were playing to the wrong audience. They were playing to each other.

Manipulating public opinion is easy, ask any propagandist.

Particularly when that public is uneducated, untraveled and willing to believe the worst about the foreigners they despise.

Here, in Buddha’s birthplace, there hadn’t been time for the hatred to develop. Children still beamed at him in the street, greeting him with a cheeky “Namaste, how are you?”

Outside the white building slung over the stone marking the spot where Buddha was born and the ruins of an old temple which surrounded it, in the Sacred Gardens, a sign quoted the Buddha. Hatred cannot be healed with hatred. It can only be healed with love.

By the time he and the heir reached the Nepali Peace Pagoda the pink water lilies in the outlying pond had already closed up their flowers for the night.

The bush and the forest were changing colour, the sun already below the horizon, the cries of the monkeys starting up. Time for a bedtime story. Once upon a time there had been a thing called hope…

Once upon a time he hadn’t cared what happened, as in, shoot me now. Suicide by police. It was a phrase familiar to every Western officer; it was part of their training. In Thailand they were too stupid, too set on their own vendettas, to know or care.

Now, almost two months later, he was the one who cared. After circumnavigating the giant pagoda three times he returned to where the heir was waiting beside the lily pond.

Now he cared. He watched a flock of crows rising through the trees.

The heir pointed out a golden carp.

Now he cared.

But he would never forget.