Notes On Brutality And Cultural Relativism, Or: What's On The Drinks Menu?

Yubaker plays Nepali heavy metal music on his mobile phone as we bump along in a van through the dull, blue-grey dawn. It sounds like a low-fi Iron Maiden with the lead singer wailing in Nepali over whining guitars. Past the morning bustle of the Kalimati vegetable market, past an oddly anachronistic Playboy Whiskey sign. Up through the hills and trees – a soft and hazy approximation of the Santa Monica Mountains but with temples. Dammit, cold shower this morning cuz the generator wasn’t on yet when we got up at 430am and now winding and wending to a Hindu temple, we three vegetarians apprehensively expect that we just might witness the sacrifice of a goat. Go, Cultural Relativism, Go! That’s an abandoned cement factory, bombed-out and in a state of remorseless decay, and I can’t help but think again and again that this is not our past but our future. Blade Runner after the BOMB. (Note to self: Buddhist science fiction film). The buses and water trucks are decorated with righteous iconography and poems – poems writ large on a tanker truck! The impetus to write poetry on automobiles denotes a decidedly Un-Western perspective and in the villages women in saris shower in the open air and men in trousers and sweater vests brush their teeth at the side of the road. We drink sweet tea in a dirty parking lot. We breathe cold air that smells like campfire and sunbeams. We walk past the beggars and the vendors along the path to the hollowed ground. But Jesus Effing Christ the temple is wild and brutal! Barefoot on cold damp tiles and tika powder and – no joke – blood, yes BLOOD running across the ground and only the smell of burning incense, everywhere burning incense that bleats out the odor of so much death, and all the while Yubaker texting on his mobile. The music is nice when it whirls but… Where are the Buddhists? Or the Jains? Gimme my people cuz I can’t handle the liquid and the violence, I think I’m going to be sick, yet even in the face of redlined ritual, home is still a distant simulation. What’s the idea, here? I do feel sick. And then I feel sleepy. And we all wash our feet and maybe try not to think about it. Finally, today’s big lesson comes at dinner: NO POWER. NO BLENDER. NO COCKTAILS.