Sandalwood Ganesha

Oakland via India, 1984-1996

Ages ago, the great Hindu scribe Valmiki, in a spell of divine inspiration, was composing the great epic Ramayana. His pen raged so rapidly across the page that it burst into flame. Ganesh, patron of writers, witnessed the conflagration. To keep Valmiki’s momentum from faltering, Ganesh snapped off his right tusk and tossed it to the scribe as a quill. Valmiki powered on, and the Ramayana was completed.

During my first visit to Nepal in 1979, I frequented a small temple in Patan. The modest brick structure housed an ancient stone Ganesha, his trunk worn smooth from centuries of caresses, his forehead painted with colorful devotional powder. I fell under the spell of Ganesha, and joined the locals ringing the tangled clusters of bells hanging above the elephant god’s head.

When I returned to Nepal in 1984, I took a room in the Chhetrapati Guest House and unloaded my “portable” Smith-Corona, the best manual writing machine of the era. Day after day I drummed on the keys, until one cold, cloudless morning when I found myself staring at a blank page. My hands hovered uselessly over the letters, my thoughts frozen.

At that moment I heard the faint and mournful strains of a blues harp, coming from somewhere in the guest house. The distraction dissolved my writer’s block. My fingers fell back into the groove, typing to the music. A page or two later, I left my sunlit deck to find the piper. The hallway was dim, and the unmistakable aroma of hashish emerged from the stairwell. A man with dusty blonde hair sat on a step. Next to him was a smoldering pipe, carved from bone. He lifted it in invitation.

The bluesman, whose spontaneous recital had rebooted the rhythm of my typewriter keys, was another young American traveler named Steve. Like me, he wasn’t just passing through. Steve had a fellowship to study Ayurveda from the Nepali masters. We spoke for hours, sharing our enchantment with life in Kathmandu.

Those first magical visits to Nepal are far behind me, but this carved sandalwood Ganesha—a gift from Steve— left a tusk in that world. It still evokes a chaotic cacophony of apple sellers and temple bells, lowing cows and rickshaw wallahs, drifting clouds of incense and hashish: a magical time and place in my life when every sense was heightened, all encounters were holy, and the friendships forged would last a lifetime.