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"Last December, I got an e-mail from my editor at GQ. A 15-year-old boy in Nepal had supposedly been meditating for the past seven months without any food or water. Would I like to look into this?\n\nI went online. The boy's name was Ram Bahadur Bomjon. He was sitting in the roots of a pipal tree near the Indian border. The site was being overrun by pilgrims, thousands a week, who were calling this boy \"the new Buddha.\" He'd twice been bitten by poisonous snakes; both times he'd refused medicine and cured himself via meditation. Skeptics said he was being fed at night behind a curtain, that his guru was building himself a temple, that his parents were building themselves a mansion, that the Maoist rebels, in on the hoax, were raking in tens of thousands of dollars in donations.\n\nI e-mailed my editor back: I was pretty busy, what with the teaching and all, besides which Christmas break was coming up and I hadn't been to the gym once the preceding semester, plus it would be great to, uh, get an early start on my tas.\n\nThen we embarked on the usual Christmas frenzy, but I couldn't get this boy off my mind. At parties, I noted two general reactions to the statement Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.\n\nOne type of American\u2014let's call them Realists\u2014will react by making a snack-related joke (\"So he nally gets up, and turns out he's sitting on a big pile of Butternger wrappers!\") and will then explain that it's physically impossible to survive even one week without food or water, much less seven months.\n\nA second type\u2014let's call them Believers\u2014will say, \"Wow, that's amazing,\" they wish they could go to Nepal tomorrow, and will then segue into a story about a transparent spiritual being who once appeared on a friend's pool deck with a message about world peace.\n\nTry it: Go up to the next person you see, and say, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.\n\nSee what they say.\n\nOr say it to yourself, and see what you say.\n\nWhat I said, nally, was: This I have to see.\n\n\n\nAustrian Airlines is big on hot rolls. Red-clad ight attendants continually tout their hot rolls in the accents of many nations, including, one feels, nations that haven't actually been founded yet. (\"Hod roolz?\" \"Hat rahls?\" \"Hoot rowls?\") The in-ight safety video is troubling: It's animated and features a Sims-like guy with what looks like a skinless, skeletal death's-head who keeps turning to leer at a slim Sims lady who keeps looking away, alarmed, while trying to get her long legs tucked away somewhere so Death can't see them. Later she slides down the emergency slide, holding a Sims baby, Death still pursuing her.\n\nAncient Mariner\u2013style, my seatmate, a Kosovar, tells me about a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand that left a childhood friend of his on a hillside, \"cut into tiny pieces.\" During the occupation, he says, the Serbs often killed babies in front of their parents. He is kindly, polite, awed by the horrible things he's seen, grateful that, as an American citizen, he no longer has to worry about murdered babies or hacked-up friends, except, it would appear, in memory, constantly.\n\nStory told, he goes off to sleep.\n\nBut I can't. I'm too uncomfortable. I'm mad at myself for eating two roolz during the last Round of Roolz, roolz that seem to have instantaneously made my pants tighter. I've already read all my books and magazines, already stood looking out the little window in the ight-attendant area, already complimented a severe blond ight attendant on Austrian Airlines' excellent service, which elicited an oddly Austrian reaction: She immediately seemed to nd me reprehensible and weak.\n\nOn the bright side, only six more hours on this plane, then two hours in the Vienna airport and an eight-hour ight to Katmandu.\n\nI decide to close my eyes and sit motionless, to make the time pass.\n\nSomebody slides up their window shade and, feeling the change in light on my eyelids, I am lled with sudden curiosity: Has the shade really been lifted? By someone? Gosh, who was it? What did they look like? What were they trying to accomplish by lifting the shade? I badly want to open my eyes and conrm that a shade has indeed been lifted, by someone, for some purpose. Then I notice a sore patch on the tip of my tongue and feel a strong desire to interrupt my experiment to record the interesting sore-tongue observation in my notebook. Then I begin having Restless Leg Syndrome, Restless Arm Syndrome, and even a little Restless Neck Syndrome. Gosh, am I thirsty. Boy, is my breath going to be bad when this stupid experiment is over. I imagine a waterfall of minty water owing into my mouth, a waterfall that does not have to be requested via the stern ight attendant but just comes on automatically when I press a button on the overhead console marked minty water.\n\nThe mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terried man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure and Thus Perfect Nation\u2014and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satised.\n\nI know this. But still I'm full of desire. I want my legs to stop hurting. I want something to drink. I even kind of want another hot roll.\n\nSeven months, I think? The kid has been sitting there seven months?\n\n\n\nWe arrive in Katmandu just before midnight. The city is as dark a city as I've ever seen: no streetlights, no neon, each building lit by one or two small bulbs or a single hanging lantern. It's like a medieval city, smoke-smelling, the buildings leaning into narrow unsquared roads. It's as if the cab has been time-transported back to the age of kings and squalor, and we are making our way through the squalor to the palace, which is the Hyatt. A garbage-eating cow appears in our headlights. We pass a lonely green-lit mod ATM kiosk that looks like it's been dropped in from the future.\n\nThe Hyatt lobby is empty except for rows of Buddha statues: a maze with no guests. The Business Center manageress not only has heard of the boy but is also of the opinion that he is being fed by snakes. Their venom, she says, is actually milk to him.\n\nI go to bed, sleep the odd post-trip sleep from which you wake up unsure of where, or who, you are.\n\nI throw open the curtains, and there is Katmandu: a sprawling Seussian city where prayer ags extend from wacky tower to strange veranda to tilting spire-of- uncertain-purpose. Beyond Seuss City: the Himalayas, pure, Platonically white, the white there was before other colors were invented. In the foreground is the massive, drained, under-repair Hyatt pool, in a eld of dead, dry Hyatt grass, and a woman tending to the rst of an endless row of shrubs, in a vignette that should be titled Patience Will Prevail.\n\nI take a walk.\n\nThe level of noise, energy, and squalor of Katmandu makes even the poorest section of the most wild-ass American city seem placid and urban-planned. Some guys squat in a trash-strewn eld, inexplicably beating the crap out of what looks like purple cotton candy. A woman whose face has been burned or torn off walks past me, running some small errand, an errand made heartbreaking by the way she carries herself, which seems to signify: I'm sure this will be a very good day! Here is a former Pepsi kiosk, now barbed-wired and manned by Nepalese soldiers armed for Maoists; here a Ping-Pong table made of slate, with brick legs. I cross a mythical bleak vacant lot I've seen in dreams, a lot surrounded by odd Nepali brick high-rises like a lake surrounded by cliffs, if the lake were dry and had a squatting, peeing lady in the middle of it. Averting my eyes, I see another woman, with baby, and teeth that jut, terrifyingly, straight out of her mouth, horizontally, as if her gums had loosened up and she had tilted her teeth out at ninety degrees. She stretches out a hand, jiggles the baby with the other, as if to say: This baby, these teeth, come on, how are we supposed to live?\n\nOff to one side of the road is a strange sunken hollow\u2014like a shallow basement excavation\u2014lled with rows of wooden benches on which hundreds of the dustiest men, women, and children imaginable wait for something with the sad patience of animals. It's like a bus station, but there's no road in sight. Several Westerners huddle near a gate, harried looking, pissy, admitting people or not. A blind man is expelled from the lot and lingers by the gate, acting casual, like he was not just expelled. What's going on here? Three hundred people in a kind of open-air jail, no blind guys allowed.\n\nI go in, walk through the crowd (\"Good mahning how on you I am fahn!\"), and corner a harried Western woman with several mouth sores.\n\n\"What is all this?\" I say.\n\n\"Soup kitchen,\" she says.\n\n\"For\u2026?\" I say.\n\n\"Anybody who needs,\" she says.\n\nAnd there are many who need: 200, 300 people a sitting, she says, two sittings a day, never an empty seat.\n\nThis, I think, explains the expelled blind man: He came too late.\n\nLife is suffering, the Buddha said, by which he did not mean Every moment of life is unbearable but rather All happiness/rest/contentment is transient; all appearances of permanence are illusory.\n\nThe faceless woman, the odd-toothed woman, the dusty elderly people with babies in their laps, waiting for a meal, the blind guy by the gate, feigning indifference: In Nepal, it occurs to me, life is suffering, nothing esoteric about it.\n\nThen, at the end of a road too narrow for a car, appears the famous Boudha stupa: huge, pale, glacial, rising out of the surrounding dusty squalor like Hope itself.\n\nFor the full article, pick up the June issue of GQ.\n\nGEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of In Persuasion Nation, which was published in April by Riverhead Books. He teaches at Syracuse University."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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