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

Atom. Heart. Mother —and dead daddy

PART I

Every old man I see

In October-coloured weather

Seems to say to me

“I was once your father.”

Patrick Kavanagh

36 YEARS TODAY

Nowhere in Hell, Barcelona, 29^th of August 1989

On the first day of Life without your father in it, your mother fumbled with the keys at the door of the flat. It was fuck o’clock and the sky was menstruating and the doorknob was bruised, the clanking as hopeless as the end of most things.

Overall, her clenched fist was spilling droplets over the laminated fake floor. She was holding his crucifix-pendant so hard that she would crush the tendons of her left hand, not that you noticed it.

It was the first sleepless night of your life, and before seeing her dishevelled hair, pink eyes and the red stained floor you already knew. Her handbag looked like a dead rodent and the foyer of the tiny apartment felt like a desert: there was no air or electricity, let alone flowers.

You stared at each other like two petrified cactuses, and then you hugged. Your sisters woke up and saw the reversed Pietà. The youngest smiled, the oldest cried out loud.

It was the 29^th of August of 1989, and it was your birthday and your mother looked at your younger sister and said: “Dad just went to heaven.”

It was the first and last conversation you would ever have about him.

The younger would go on believing that her father was “on a business trip to Heaven,” until she started getting bullied for saying it aged fourteen.

ATARI TEENAGE RIOT

You became a teenager on the same day most adults started looking at you with sorry eyes, muttering the words behind their mouths: “he is the eldest of the jobless widow.” It was infuriating to see how useless and condescending were grown-ups at dealing with the grief of a fatherless family.

They would awkwardly pat the scruff of your neck before uttering the same useless word: “Pobret (poor thing in Catalan).

You became pyromaniac; you would burn shoes, balls, shirts, drawings and exams upon hearing the humiliating adjective. Nobody seemed capable of relieving your blazing angst except your grannies, the main silver lining of orphanhood if you happen to have one. And you were blessed with two: Angela and Peace.

DMT: THE EMPTY

Nowhere in Nepal, August 2025

“Brains you have my friend, but the heart is mine. Such is my plight. I am lost in the emptiness like the emptiness.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (Nepal, 1909-1959)

You had an accident last week. You were drifting in zero gravity when the chords of the oldest Veena instrument on Earth brought you back to life. You met the performer, an unpredictable and prodigal woman named YesNo.

She saved your life and asked you to join her Nepali music tour as a guest writer. You would have become her shadow if she had asked you too, so you said yes disguising that you were already on your knees and drooling.

Before the accident you had been traveling the verses of Prasad Devkota, the grandfather of Nepal’s contemporary poetry.

He made you feel like a Buddhist astronaut travelling the Himalayas on DMT. His verses grasp the transient nature of life with the same laconic splendour of Wabi-sabi, the Japanese Zen Buddhist notion of imperfection and decay outlining the cruel miracle of life and death.

CRASH B.C, Nepal, 2025

Devkota not only broke away from the Sanskrit oppressive influence on Nepali language but also brought it to unforeseen landscapes of lyric sorrow and martial redemption, as if blueprinted in the icecaps of the canonical mountain range.

You can only wonder how accurate the translation might be, but the reading experience is the closest to collapsing on Annapurna’s altitude syndrome ever conveyed in words or drugs.

You were under his influence when you became immortal and died.

Now Here: Pharping, Nepal, 29^TH of August, 2025

Today is your birthday and daddy’s anniversary again. You have been 50 years alive and he has been 36 years dead, and you wake up in a paradise guesthouse overlooking the outskirts of Kathmandu oblivious to the date.

The air is crispy and the pine forests are encircling you like an army of matured broccoli. It is like an environmentally friendly ambush of vegetables, fruits, birds and flowers whose names you would never learn.

You have slept in a wooden cabin next to YesNo’s house on stilts.

She was born circa ten thousand kilometres away from your personal Hell ten years after you did, and 390 years after her instrument.

You are writing this piece on the porch of your cabin when she comes out of her house and plays a note. The valley is facing north and the sun is climbing the hill from behind like a ghastly Irish light, until the Veena breaks darkness with its usual bioluminescence.

THE FIRST NOTE IS THE DEEPEST

The note pumps up the chest of a bird of extensive tail; its chirping is seamlessly tuned to the Veena.

YesNo plays a second note with her eyes closed. The bird follows, and the gig goes on for ninety seconds that feel like two thousand years or a Devkota’s line.

After the recital, the sun comes out in glistening fractals and YesNo says that it was her granny.

“What?”

“The bird, idiot,” she says. “The bird was my granny.”

Her name was Lil.

She Wabi-sabi life under the snow of last April.

YesNo had lost her mother early, so granny also became her silver orphan lining.

She walked her to the great beyond knowing that she would do an Alexander McQueen job after burying her.

Except plans never work the way you think, not even the perfect crimes. Granny would find a way to spare her an early check out.

ANGEL AND PEACE

Nowhere in Barcelona’s Hell, 1989

It is the last summer of Life with your father in it. Granny Peace has cooked lunch. Daddy looks like a bloodless Tanatos. His eyes are livid and there’s foam in the corner of his lips. He is staring at the piece of chicken like a psycho, holding his knife tight, before slaughtering it accordingly.

Granny seems scared and whispers his name, and you can make the gleam of a choked tear in the corner of her eye.

Your dad looks up in disbelief and produces an Aphex Twin smile, and you decide that it is the right moment to say that you are going out this afternoon with your two friends from the apartment block.

“You are not going fucking ANYWHERE. NO FUCKING WHERE, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU ARE.”

You are ready to stand up to him, but it feels like challenging a morbid heroin addict, so you just say, “I wish you DEAD!”

His eyes gleam maddeningly one last time.

He stands up holding the knife and he seems determined to stab you. Your granny also helplessly stands. It feels like being in a B-movie going SNIFF.

And then daddy loses his balance, collapses and starts having seizures on the fake floor, and the movie becomes a traveling sequence on metastasis.

Horror emoji.

FEAR OF SPOONS AND ATOMS

Granny Peace says: “GO TO THE KITCHEN AND GRAB A SPOON!”

You freeze. Is she going to fight the knife with a spoon?

“Hurry up!”

You hesitate. You go to the record player and put his favourite record on, Pink Floyd’s Atom. Mother. Heart. You stare at the cow in the cover wishing to find a way to disappear through its unfathomable pupils.

Wish denied.

Granny Peace looks like Granny War. She shouts out loud: GET THE DAMNED SPOOOOON!

It is the first and last time that you’d see her shouting.

You run to the kitchen like a zombie cow, so awkward and heavy.

You grab the spoon, bring it to her and she sticks it between his palate and tongue.

You will only learn later that it was an epileptic fit.

He would go and meet your death wish right after the ambulance.

The vinyl would spin like a broken record perpetually.

NOW HERE, NEPAL, APRIL 29^TH 2025. 7:30AM

LIL BIG LIL

Granny Lil had taught YesNo music, faith, love and altruism, and before exhaling her last breath told her that she would come back to life as a bird.

“She has shown up every day since April the 3^rd, but it is the first time that she agrees to sing along.”

You are speechless. YesNo is crying. You are not. She walks to your cabin and gives you a hug. It is the least petrified hug in the history of your stiffened embraces. You feel like a flooded cactus, she is a blooming lotus flower.

She says “happy whatever the fuck day” and gives you a folded A4.

It is a mandala commemorating time, death, and probably life and destruction, and you can see your father’s face in it.

You feel a knot in your stomach. It might be something, perhaps a feeling. You ignore it and then hear a distant bell and you look up and you see that there is a lopsided field on top of the pine forest, a clearing of grass under a biblical light where there is a massive cow grazing like a suicidal goat on a cliff.

You look at the mandala and then at the cow again. It is the Swiss looking cow that you have ever seen in Asia. Something breaks in the corner of your eye. It might be liquid. It is the cover of Atom. Mother. Heart. You start crying. YesNo does not.

“Thank you dear,” you say.

“Stop saying DEAR! It makes YOU so helplessly old! Get your shit together. We are going to meet the Snake Master and she is going to untie your damned orphan victim knot.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)