Life and Death in Kathmandu - Nothing compares to you

Life and Death in Kathmandu... Whenever I am here I feel myself moving through different layers of reality, entering a magical land. First it is the eternal and commerical "smack hash mushrooms massage?" and the "Nice dreadlocks, Madam" of Thamel, where all the tourists are. All the sudden I am falling into a rabbit hole. Seeing the white rabbit disappearing in the distance, following it, stumbling over wonders and magical smiles.

Kamala died of tuberculosis at the age of 28 in 1998, the year I was here last. Kamala was a Tamang tribal woman and the most beautiful woman in the world, with cheekbones to put hangers on, the perfect cafe latte skin, the fine limbs of a dakini and eyes that would defeed an entire armee with one gaze. Her black hair would have make an Arabian horse jealous. When she entered a room in old rags, all other women would turn black and white, diamonds turned into tacky rhinestones, the Queen of Sheba had arrived, a dark and sinister angel. Having been a child prostitute since she was 13, she knew of the power she had over men and women but I don't know if she was aware of her great beauty and charisma. She was without any vanity. Her self-destructiveness and her addictions lured her into dark places, abysses of cynicism and self hatred. She could hardly read and had never heard of Frida Kahlo. In the months before her death she cut her beautiful hair all off in a mad frenzy and started to wear a man's suit, only to look even more stunning and just like Frida in one of her self portraits, after Diego had betrayed her with her sister.

I was not there when she died, I left before. Our last week we spend in her house with a group of Tamang tribals, her extended family, friends, servants. We were all sleeping on the floor in the living room, one big pile of people, babies next to old women, drinking bear and watching Hindi movies. I got the lice and a vivid idea how we had lived once and what he had forgotten about being with each other, naturally.
It is impossible to forget her, not only for me. We used to lie on her bed, rolling around giggling, comparing who was wearing the whitest panties and who had the prettiest nose. I wanted hers and she wanted mine...

When things went worse my friend Viva told me that her body blew up to huge proportions but her legs and arms were still skinny. It took her friends forever to squeeze her into a taxi, but no hospital would take her in anymore and they sent her back home.

She still visits me in my dreams, looking at me silently with the face of a Mayan scultpure..... She never speaks.


Ani Karma Sangmo, another friend, a Buddhist nun from the Tibetan boarder is also dead, also tuberculosis, 32 years old.