We were on our way down to Swayambhu Chowk. It was a wide black topped road, opposite of the jungle path we had climbed up. It was pretty hot in August and so at the Khaja Ghar we ordered a glass of Kodo Raksi each. They said, drink this and if you walk out in the sun and try and get some rest, you wont stand up again. We thought, well okay.

We were discussing the Gumba we had gone up early in the morning toand had been more or less disappointed about. None of us were Buddhists in social standing and didn’t follow it per se. Still I suppose, we all had our expectations.  So the primary question was,had we been wrong with our ideals? Had we been wrong in imagining all the stereotypes that can be related to a Gumba up in a hill– peace,serenity, prayer flags, old and young monks and anis walking about thinking things? Maybe, because the first thing we saw soon as entering the huge set of gates was a coffee shop and under it, two shops selling everything from Lays to stationaries.

Aanis were acting as keepers of the enterprises and up inside the coffee shop a popular Hindi song was playing–a particular club favorite some years before.All this beat our ideas to dust–at nine in the morning the shops were just about opening and the song was blaring at its loudest. To add to that, the place was seemingly made host to a good crowd of Saturday travellers looking for a place just on the fringes of the valley for a day out. The usual ‘couples’ section of Saturday crowds also had a strong presence.

G dai was furious about all this: “What was that, yaar? What wasthat?” He was referring to the song. “A Hindi, club song in a place of meditation and spirituality, a coffee shop! What next, Aanis serving coffee?!”, he was visibly taken aback.  ”I don’t see what is so wrong with it all though” S said, “You are a Brahmin but don’t wear your Janai all the time, or even hardly, ever.

Nobody said religion should be followed to the text book.” There was a point to that. But I was not satisfied. Sure, religion has a different interpretation to each individual follower and doesn’t  require text book adaptation.

Yet there was something that just felt wrong about what we had just witnessed. I reflected if I had become, one of those tourists, who seeks to gratify his own ideas of something of a foreign experience and is disappointed when everything doens’t turn out his way. That could be a possibility,but isn’t it  fundamentally important for a place of religious undertaking, having publicly announced so, to keep up with some set of the ideal interpretations.

I understand, that everything needs sustenance and more so if  it is a private undertaking (I suspect that it was). Yet in spite of that, business venture just feels like an idea opposite to what I thought Buddhism is about. And even if I were wrong on my interpretation, I think it looks very wrong on the premises of a Gumba itself.

Later at the Khaja Ghar we came to learn that the premises of the place, was these days open to limited time and days primarily because couples had started to throng it and had been up to “things”. There was now good monitoring apparently, with someone following and keeping an eye on each set of love birds. All of this sounded very sad to me.This whole context, this monitoring and supervision that were now needed, the whole environment.

The management looked good at the place, but the practicality of that very management was upsetting.

Somebody said, “maybe someone can advertise the place by saying- real Aanis serve coffee here”. And someone added, “maybe then, the Aanis would need to act like Aanis”. “Imagine then, someone getting fired for not looking enough like a real Aani”. It was a depressing thought.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.