Nepal - Buddhas and Gangsters

 Crossing into Nepal was one of the easiest border crossings so far. I entered from the far southeastern edge, near Bandasa. The "border," if you could even call it that, was barely a suggestion. I could have ridden straight in without anyone stopping me. No real guards, no barriers and just a small hut posing as an admin office, manned by visibly bored and possibly stoned officials.

It was mid-afternoon when I rolled across. I felt relief, maybe even a flicker of joy, to be riding alone again. The southeast of Nepal is flat compared to the Himalayan madness I’d just survived. There’s one main highway that runs the length of the country, and I latched onto it with purpose. The endless twists of India had frayed my nerves, I needed a break from the drama of the mountains.

I let the throttle go light and let the road carry me. The monotony was a gift. Long, straight, hypnotic. The sun began to fall, and the jungle crept closer to the roadside. When darkness fully arrived, I pulled into a small roadside hotel.

The staff looked bemused by my arrival. A dusty foreigner on a muddy motorbike wasn’t their usual clientele. I sat in the corner of their restaurant, exhausted, slightly dazed. I silently nursed my Gorkha beer and dug into a plate of delicious yak-filled momos. That’s when two drunk Nepali men burst in.

They crashed into the table next to mine. One leaned over and slurred with the usual opening:

“Where you from, brother?”

Before I could respond, they’d pulled up chairs to my table. More beers arrived. They introduced themselves as businessmen. Mid-twenties. One had tattoos running up his neck. The other had gold teeth and heavy chains clinking around his wrists. They told me, several times, that they were on the run from a fight in a nearby village and were heading to the Kumbh Mela festival in India the next day. Seeking absolution? Maybe.

More of their friends arrived. Wild stories flew. Laughter, shouting, another beer, another round. We ended up riding Tara into the hotel bar through the main door to the cheers of my newfound "business" friends. It all got hazy. I felt oddly at home with these gangsters and brigands.

Later, one of them said, “Nepal is a poor country with some very rich people,” and proceeded to tell me about his time in an Indian prison. Businessmen indeed.

They gave me a ground-truth perspective on Nepal’s state of affairs. Distrust ran deep. The ruling class was a joke, perceived as corrupt and inefficient. They raved about the new mayor of Kathmandu"Bale"who’d reportedly told the American President to go fuck himself after the U.S. withdrew its foreign aid. Trump had, in one brushstroke, labeled the entire country corrupt and pulled the plug on millions in development funds. But where the American eagle had retreated, the Chinese dragon was already circling—ready to swoop in from the north.

We drank long into the night. Beers, biddies, and wild tales of prison, war, and gold smuggling. The night ended with me riding Tara into the bar to drunken cheers and more rounds.

By morning, I was hungover, slightly on edge, and eager to be alone again. I woke up early and snuck out, leaving my new “business” friends to nurse their headaches. I hit the road east, heading toward Lumbini, the supposed birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the man who would become the Buddha.

The ride took me through the edge of Butwal National Park. I’d read it was home to tigers, white rhinos, elephants. All I saw were monkeys. On a bridge over a wide river, I spotted crocodiles circling below while an otter danced just out of reach, taunting them; an aquatic mongoose teasing a cobra. No tigers, no elephants. I couldn’t believe itI’d been in the Indian subcontinent for over three months and hadn’t seen a single elephant other than the ones carved into temple walls.

The southern plains were brutal. Hot, dusty, undeveloped. Western Nepal felt forgotten people still lived in mud huts, subsisting on agriculture and what looked like antique farming methods. Tourism barely reached these parts, and the infrastructure showed it. I was on a mission though and Vipassana was calling. I cut a straight line through the lowlands. No detours. Nate would’ve been horrified.

Lumbini was a letdown. Flat, overbuilt, full of wheat fields and cheap hotels. The shrines felt hollow. Commercialised devotion. The surrounding area was mostly Muslim villages, small, decrepit mosques dotting the horizon of the sunburnt Nepali plains. It appeared that many poor Muslims, fleeing India’s hardening stance toward their community, had resettled in southern Nepal.

Then, there was Imaan.

She appeared like a mirage, a free-spirited, yoga-toned, Canadian-Indian. We’d met in Rishikesh weeks earlier. She was kind, beautiful, light-hearted. We’d agreed to meet in Nepal. The sex was wild. The connection too much. A disaster in the making.

I tried not to catch feelings. I failed. Her deep eyes, tattooed skin, the way she moved, she pulled me in. And I let her. Again.

She made me feel seen, maybe even safe. But it wasn’t real safety. It was the kind that comes right before the crash.

Why did I do this? Why the constant need for validation from women?

The wound ran deep.

Nineteen ninety-four. South of France. Before everything fell apart, my family had lived in an idealistic, if chaotic version of a dream. My parents were part of an artistic commune, an intentional community that had, in the early '70s, collectively bought a derelict castle with the vision of turning it into a theatre commune. They rebuilt it stone by stone. We were poor, yes, but rich in culture, in art, in community and in spirit. I grew up with music, performance, storytelling. Wild people exploring their inner depths through art and song. My childhood was naked, barefoot, and bright. Surrounded by artists and dreamers. It felt timeless, boundless. So far removed from the structured life of a soldier I would later choose.

After the leader of the community tragically died in a car accident, the group lost its compass. Their guru, their anchor gone. Floating in the hills of southern France without direction, they’d given it all up for their dreams and suddenly felt headless.

My mum was fearless, driven and brave; eventually she became the director of the community. A position that sparked jealousy among some of the older members. Slowly, the place began to bloom again. Students flocked in from around the world. It felt like a creative spring.

But envy turned political. There was a coup it was ugly, personal and bitter. She was ousted. Shunned. That betrayal shattered her. And it shattered us.

That was the rupture. The start of the shakes, the beginning of the end. We were banished from our home, a place my parents had poured their hearts into. Our family disintegrated. The drifting began. Cheap hotels, constant moves, scraping by. What had once been idyllic turned to survival.

That exile marked me. Home became a concept I couldn’t trust. It could vanish overnight. identity? Identity was a costume. A uniform. One day you were part of a tribe. The next, you were an outsider. History had repeated itself. Once a soldier, ousted from my own tribe, now a drifting civvy on a bike.

From that point on, I never truly felt rooted again. Not in a place. Not in a system. Not even in my own skin.

Then, at fourteen, my father left us for one of his students. We were living in a one-bedroom flat in the Paris suburbs.

He was a troubled man. A talented artist with a huge chip on his shoulder. Handsome, charismatic, and all too often reliant on charm to get by. I always felt he resented being a father. He carried pain for what he saw as an unaccomplished life. I wish I could talk to him about it now but Alzheimer’s has him. Those questions will forever go unanswered.

He was gone most of the time, claiming to work abroad. My mother, already exiled from the theatre world she loved, spiraled further. She was broke, bitter, and alone. Their relationship collapsed into screaming matches and silence. I drifted into petty crime, shoplifting, smoking and acting out. Anything to feel seen.

The older boys I hung with bullied me as much as they accepted me. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. A lookout during small robberies. Poor kids chasing brands our parents couldn’t afford.

When the police caught us, everything unraveled. My dad took me in with his new wealthy girlfriend in Brussels. It granted me access to a better education, surrounded by the children of EU elites. From poverty in the suburbs to polished hallways, I became a chameleon. A skill that would serve me well at Sandhurst: adapt, improvise, overcome, and work hard not to come undone.

My mum, meanwhile, fell into forced nomadism couch-surfing in her fifties. No money. No stability. After five years of seeing her once a month at best, she came into some money and moved to Brussels to be near me. That’s when she got sick. I visited her nightly after school, sitting by her hospital bed. I’d been kicked out by my father, living alone in a shoebox flat, dealing drugs at school, and watching my mother slowly die. 

No one told me how sick she really was. They lied. A month later, she passed.

She died in that hospital bed beside me. I woke to my father sobbing and her lifeless body. He never spoke of her again.

 I left Lumbini and rode north, toward the hills. Toward Pokhara. Toward silence. I was chasing peace or something like it. I didn’t know if I could sit with myself for ten days of Vipassana. But I was going to try.

The temperature rose with every mile. March edging into April.

Returning to Pokhara after more than a decade felt like touching something solid. For the first time in a year, I was somewhere I recognised. Somewhere I could stop running. I was going to park the bike and sit in silence for ten days. Actually take the time to feel, to stop fleeing and start feeling.

Imaan and I had agreed to meet there before I went into silence. She flew, I rode.
We spent a few more days together, walking the lakeside, tangled in bedsheets, pretending neither of us was already halfway gone.

When she left to hike the Annapurnas, I felt the weight of it.

Not grief. Just another softness I couldn’t hold on to.