Problems with People by David Guterson Page A

lens while they drank from a swimming pool. Soon they were nearer, sitting on bins and picking through them with careful fingers, or parked on their asses and licking salt from foil bags. The troop kept coming, the adults deliberate, the young ones gadding in and out, circling. They cruised between the chalets, turning over every bin they found, so close now that he had to retreat inside and watch through a window. One came to the pane and looked at him impassively; he took a dozen pictures of its intricate face as it assessed him with detachment colored by disdain. He wanted to call to his sister to come see, but it was better to let her rest for now, because the good part of her life, at this stage, was rest; everything else left her worn out and agitated. Then the baboons were gone, followed by a pair of meerkats interested in leftovers, andafter that by employees of the Golden Leopard, black men in uniforms with name tags on their shirts and plastic bags in hand, who silently—so as not to awaken the tourists in the chalets—righted the bins and picked up the rubbish. He took pictures of them, too, because what else could he do in his situation? What should he do, beyond that?

Politics
    The strike began. He went to the lobby with the intention of arranging a taxi to Patan Hospital, but none, said the concierge, were available. Literally, none. So thoroughly unavailable that, if you wanted to leave the country, you had to walk to the airport. And, in fact, a lot of people were doing that, with hired porters carrying their luggage. Nepal was shut down—no banks, shops, cars, trucks, no goods coming in or out of Kathmandu, nothing happening, nothing moving. “How long is this going to last?” he asked the concierge. “I have somewhere I have to go this morning.” But the concierge just shrugged and smoothed his eyebrows. “Outside is not good,” he warned.
    He took matters into his own hands. His ex-wife, a journalist—technically she was still his wife, because they hadn’t signed divorce papers yet—had been traveling in the remote east when the car she was a passenger in veered into a bus, killing three people and injuring sixteen, and now she had twenty screws in her pelvis. Her spleen had been removed, butthere was concern about tetanus. Erring on the side of caution, he was going to have her transferred to a Level One Trauma Center in Delhi, and that was why he had to get to Patan this morning. Strike or no strike, he was headed there to fill out paperwork and start things moving. In other words, unlike a lot of the Hyatt Regency’s guests, he wasn’t in Nepal for a trek in the mountains, a rhododendron tour, or a bird-watching expedition—but there was no point in telling the concierge this. So instead he found the “business center”—three battered Dells around a corner from the reception desk—and Google Mapped the shortest walking route to Patan. Seven point eight kilometers—not quite five miles. Two hours at most. With a bottle of water, a hat, and sunscreen, walking would be his answer to this strike. He printed out the map, got his water bottle, hat, and sunscreen from his room, returned to the lobby with these things in hand, and, waving at the concierge, left.
    His map, he soon found, was misleading. He wanted, first, to get to the Ring Road—a straight shot, according to Google—but in truth the indicated route, beyond the immediate pale of his hotel, was a maze of muddy alleys full of flies, dog shit, mangy curs, garbage, and—most immediate of all—poor people. The area was called Boudhanath, and according to his guidebook it was full of Buddhist monasteries. Sure enough, he saw monks walking around. The big point of interest in Boudhanath was its gargantuan stupa, which, according to the guidebook, contained relics of the Buddha. That explained the many shops—right now, all with metal roll-doors down—under signs indicating that they sold things for tourists, like Buddha