NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – NEPALESE CAPSULES: EPISODE II

The Obnoxious Steals the Show

You wake up —Nowhere. May 2025

You remember a few things. One of them is not nice. The second gives you hope before giving you a heart attack, and the third is a massive, irreparable stroke.

Your backpack is staring at you from the other side of the room. The room is dark. Buddha has a little altar amongst the rubble, the dust, and the mattress where you might have slept or not.

Your backpack is famously and obnoxiously purple and it is smiling at you.

I mean, WTF… It is giving you the eye!

Early Late

It is early in the game and you are in your last stages, so you have nothing to lose, do you?

You walk straight to the backpack, staring at it all the way, and you ask: “Are you flirting with me?”

The backpack can’t possibly believe it. If it had hips and boobs, it would go after you, you’d be sleeping in jail tonight.

Your backpack is special and you know it. What you don’t know is that your backpack has fancy dreams when she is a French lady.

You can call it a fetish thing. The backpack would probably agree.

How can you not possibly love the effortless style, the solemn, glorious gait, that precise way of walking around like they own the place, dropping those irresistible vowels that get inside your temples, on the back of your wrists, tickling them with waves of pleasure, future sexy bombs that would shell your vigil with mouth watering fantasies, right before you fall asleep, while you lay ecstatic invoking them, those incredibly classy creatures claiming glamour without even thinking about it, without caring, the utterly sensual articulation of the most irrelevant things, the sophistication of it.

The obnoxiously purple can only possibly dream, and probably won’t get anywhere close to it.

But as previously mentioned, the rights of backpacks amount to another essay, perhaps a long saga exploring belonging and destitution, caring and abandonment.

Excruciating Layer

“Are you flirting with me? For real?”

The backpack has never been properly listened to before. The narcissist might need another century to realise that he can actually talk to her.

What a narcissist for Christ sake. Sometimes the backpack nicknames herself; it takes on gender identities. Olive and non-binary she/he/he/she fuck you from Paris are her personal favourites.

Truth also is that Olive Parisian fantasy has been repeatedly ambushed and downgraded by the narcissist tendency to fall into the least pleasant gutters of every nice place he finds himself in.

He has a magnet for toothless characters and fancy Dukes; aristocracy and rubbish; gold and basements. Jesus.

The amount of flimsy words that the backpack has picked up along the way would nauseate her ancestors’ big packing time.

Nowhere, Everywhere, and beyond the spaceships of the Gates of Orion

The backpack has seen a lot of things, and many of them are not necessarily unpleasant. There have been a few stunning valleys, some imperial hills, the Fansipan being the backpack personal favourite, even though the year Olive lived there she did it like a beggar, always thrown on the ground of whatever room the narcissist was living in.

Olive remembers four decent places, before moving to the House of Pain, where the narcissist joined a demented combo of young British millennials, for two weeks that turned into a year.

The youngest and the largest had a self-winding watch that had belonged to Churchill, and one of the cuntacts on his phone was Lady Diana’s second unfortunate son.

The youngest had a fancy name and the inevitable convoluted surname attached to it. He had seen pure breed horses, castles, spaceships, VIP lounges, cruises; and overall he had seen his relatives engaging in nasty billionaire back-stabbings, clearing out millions from each other with broken bottles and mouths full of a hatred that had a foamy quality to it.

The youngest had seen empires crumble overnight, and beyond everything else, he had learnt that when your family has a Coat of Arms, you have to put a crazy amount of effort to neglect or destroy your privileges. Swarovski and incunabulum, precious stones, earrings, opioids, carnivorous plants, watches, shoes, even his socks had cost daddy a fortune.

The Not that Young Ones

The other two bastards had a more accurate understanding of what a council state was. They parked their 1970s motorbikes in the hall of the shared house, and destroyed dishes when drunk, or left them to rot away after obliterating the kitchen.

They didn’t necessarily like each other but they were young and wild, and they thought they were immortal.

They built a back garden. The three of them, working side by side like the dream of anarchy. After finishing installing the floorboards they threw a party. They got incredibly drunk, and found themselves entangled in an orgy, and one of the council states boys paid a back visit to Buckingham Palace, and the doors of heaven gloriously opened, and Buckingham Palace was overflowing with lust and blood and saliva and wails of joy.

THP

The narcissist, in some astounding effort, finished a book in the house of Pain.

It was a book about himself, obviously.

Olive had been neglected before, but during writing seasons the abandonment went of the roof —and quite fucking literally.

But beyond all that, the real miracle is that the backpack is still here after 25 years of unsolicited world-drifting, blundering about Barcelona, Dublin, Montevideo, Mendoza, Salta, Amed, Ubud, fucking Vienna and Goteborg, even Älhmut ; and then all the way to China again; plus Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Hanoi, Sapa, Hoian, and even Kytakyusha next to Fukuoka, in Japan, by far the best place the backpack has ever seen.

How neat and clean was every room, how quiet and shiny: Olive’s personal space has never felt greater.

Now Here, Pokhara, Nepal, May 2025

But hands down to Nepal, though. What a country. Even though Olive —AKA the backpack— doesn’t recall, or perhaps just once in the Andes, under the furious Zonda wind, to have swallowed such a demented amount of dust.

Nepal is still oozing the rubble and the many long sized fissures and cracks that the 2015 earthquake left strewn across the whole land.

But, dust apart; this has been some unexpectedly good country for Olive so far.

The narcissist has just rented the best room in a long time. It is up a crooked hill dotted with incommensurable flowers and wonderful birds, pine, apricot and avocado trees, plus lush plants of blooming red and purple flowers whose names the backpack has never learnt —let alone the narcissist.

Freedom for Me

The last few days have been a bit of a chore, but today an angel has fallen from heaven. After leaving me secluded in a dark room for days, the narcissist shows up.

He is in some kind of frenzy, likely a writing assignment for his travelogue, the best thing, except for the airports and the damned cargo that Olive has been through in a long while.

The narcissist has been engaging in random conversations with locals a lot. One had the best record collection and homestay in the city of Pokhara, the second largest of the country. It rests at the bottom of a massive lake that extends endlessly towards the beginning of the Annapurna mountain range.

Olive prefers Pokhara rather than Kathmandu. The air is cleaner and the other backpacks are less damaged. Or at least that it was she thought, before spending the last the five nights in a stinky basement surrounded by auld timers, in a fetid luggage room.

But today Olive, the obnoxiously purple, has found herself moved by the humble care she has been given without noticing.

Saint Narcissist

The narcissist shows up and puts the confinement to an end.

Olive is mounted on his back again, seeing the world from top of his shoulders, even through the most reckless cycling.

At this stage Olive knows quite accurately how to figure out his volatile disposition. She has a good vantage point to read all his texts and to listen all voice mails. Without going any further, this morning he was in a drama queen mood, a narcissist favourite.

He wants to write about being white middle-aged Western waste, about the meagre earnings and piling assignments, which he finds very difficult to keep up with because he is convinced that nobody reads anymore.

Olive knows that is not true, although it is clear that most people prefer not to read the half imagined adventures of a middle aged White narcissist, right?

Bloom Self Garden Grenade

Okay. For all his narcissism, he can write about other writers or even turn me, Olive, the backpack, into a character. I have to be grateful for that, am I not? At least I can express myself, destroy the third person and include this sort of stream consciousness that I’m lashing on you, whoever you are, right now, now here.

Puddles

Last night the narcissist showed his IG to his latest neighbour, a dark lion from the land of Jesus. She can’t live where she was born anymore. It is unbearable, the main syndrome all expats share: a bittersweet inclination towards disengagement from a lurid, often sinister backdrop they would prefer not to visit again.

All that and the thrill of surfing the edge of a boat called Freedom.

The dark lion is a joyous, generous person, that has given the narcissist two massages for his fucked up back, and cooked for him and even fix him a couple of glorious ginger teas since they met, a couple of days ago.

I have been witnessing the whole charade stuck inside a suffocating chest of drawers full of underwear.

The narcissist is not the greatest at dealing with random acts of kindness. So, as a backpack, what you want is for the narcissist to be himself, to move around and hook up with people, as he does anywhere he goes, relentlessly.

May Day

This morning, after spending part of last night talking about his puddle photography with the dark lion, the narcissist wakes up early, grabs his bike and cycles the countryside.

It is one of my favourite hours —strictly speaking as a backpack.

The dew is still sparkling on the edge of most leaves, and the lake is so quiet and blue and dark, a neatly flat, perfect surface for the narcissist to re-engage with his puddle photography.

The Angel of God

Two minutes later a bike pulls in on the same ditch where the narcissist is taking photos with me hanging off his back. There’s a Nepalese guy looking at the narcissist, who recalls the face but not the occasion.

The other guy says, “French, right?” and my carrier says no, no, no like an overly dramatic French man.

Lucky bastard! For all the times I dreamt to be the Parisian Olive, and not a single fucker has asked about my background. I could be a French backpack, I’m FUCKING PURPLE!

The guy says something else and then the narcissist remembers:

“No shit, we were both up in the hills, right? Dee P is your name right?”

“You got it.”

“Fuck. I thought you had fallen of a cliff. I was told you were gone. Can I hug you?”

I had never seen the narcissist showing such unrepentant empathy. It is touching. My zips are dripping.

They hug, and Deep P says that he lives up the hill, in his family farm.

Lemongrass T

Deep P says that his family has been living here for three hundred years and also that he knows by heart the last five thousand years of the history of the country.

“Do you want to come? I can make you an organic lemongrass tea.”

I can’t believe how fucking lucky the narcissist is. He doesn’t need to do anything but think about himself in order to draw the unlimited attention, generosity, and care of everyone he meets.

And the fucker is still paranoid.

You! Hey You!

In any case, right now, right here, Deep P pops in out of nowhere and fifteen minutes later he tells you that he was twelve when his dad died and asks about yours and you say “also twelve.”

You both stop walking the mud. Deep P points at the damaged cornfield. Last night’s storm claimed most of it. I tell him last night was my father’s death anniversary and he almost chokes, then smiles and cries.

Heaven

He raises his hands to heaven and says: “YOU ARE MY BIG BROTHER! I’M YOUR LITTLE BROTHER! And then he prays for our dead dads, and says he knows they are both in a better place.

Maybe not compared to this moment. But to all the rest in general.

Deep People

Deep P asks my age.

I tell him.

Then he asks my name.

“Harper God.”

“You are big brother, my man. I have a homestay. You can stay with me. I will introduce you to my granny. She is 94 and smokes two packs of cigarettes a day while working for six hours at the farm until I have to stop her. Can you believe it?”

Olive and Old Leaf

I meet her a hundred metres up the road. She is unbelievable.

The narcissist’s back sweat is soaking my underbelly. But that’s the last thing you might remember upon meeting her.

Padma is her name.

Pride eyes, wonderful red handkerchief, and brilliant scythe hanging off her centurial hand.

I bow. He says “my grandma is your grandma all this is yours: this is your home, your farm every time you come to Nepal.”

(TBC)