hotel kathmandu

A walk about town earlier this year on the sixth day of the southern strikes that closed the Valley down, snapping posters of Prachanda-for-President, ‘victims’ of the US Embassy’s DV immigration scheme, the ruins of the old Malpi College and the abandoned Hotel Kathmandu, the funky fusion of the Jhiljhile Kumari temple, crumbling Krishna Pauroti and chaotic Chabahil before I stretch my legs all the way down to Chakrapath where it hits me the comic-graphic nightmare of Kathmandu by way of the grey river, the black volcanic tyre dust of the road curving down and past Dhumbarahi where cruising along the drains of toxic green sludge a-chock with black, white and blue plastic bags and the dusty shells of water bottles and everything else besides there’s two dead dogs, one kalo-seto tate-pate as if kicked into the bushes the other brown and swoll and red-collared, and a film of dust over everything, everywhere.

Is this the Kathmandu I grew up in? Is it any different for me to be anywhere else I am familiar with and feel the casual alienation I feel here, too? I rarely walked here, BMX bandits we were thrilling past on our way to another game of follow-the-leader and bang-bang, what cared we for the new Shankha Park that fades there its walls plastered with red slogans manufactured up the road at the Youth Communist League office behind its protective barricade of bamboo pilings and commie-speak? I ground my way down to Chakrapath past the curving lines of idling vehicles ending at the pump closed till the morrow who knows what brings?

Meantime Mother has been attending her own revelations:

‘UN ko earthquake ko seminar ta horror movie hereko jasto hundo raicha!’

(the UN earthquake seminar I went to was like a horror movie!)

nagdaha buzz

a limber out of the dustbowl across the river from Dhapakhel led us to Nagdaha, another body of water surrounded by low terraces of green and yellow, another pocket of peace that couldn’t help but remind us of Taudaha-by-Chobhar. Part of the pond sectioned off as a patch of grassy wetland where waddled wild ducks and coots and white storks, and in the early evening joined by swallows swooping to meet their reflections. Facing onto the water we shared a ragged garden with other picnickers – the usual assortment of lads, familiers and couplets at the corners, speaking of what? away from the disapproving darts of self-professed loved ones. We tasted tongues (jibro fry) and guzzled beer, and Bikash lumped out luscious, spicy has ko chwoela picked up in a earthen brick eatery I’d never had picked for anything but demolition, to temper the light daze of the day.

Thence to the bar Bikash runs, Buzz. The novelty stemming as much as from the unlikeliness of the locality of Jawalakhel as from the bar’s cosy neighbourhood feel and warm tones. We balanced on the barstools and made merry, though what the rest made of us drunken knaves is doubtful enough.

A second sober visit confirmed my instincts. A large grave Buddha dominates one wall and is reflected in the opposite mirror; stylised paintings of women’s faces fill the walls around wooden chairs and tables with elegant bamboo coasters. Buzz is up the road to St. Mary’s, opposite the bonus branches of New Orleans, and a little further on, Roadhouse Café. There’s a couple of restaurants about as well, and with Quixote’s Cove set to lay out its literary wares in the next couple of months, I run the grave risk of abandoning Thamel altogether.

Who’s Nhuchhe?

Listing to interminable, reactionary rambles on the quagmire of Nepali politics, I sit shrouded in my own darkness, list in the flickering flames we draw on, amused only by the idea that this Baluwatar space, once most likely the seat of a minor noble in Rana times, also served as the headquarters of the royalist Janashakti Party, before its modern-day incarnation as *Nhuchhe’s Kitchen: The Organic Bistro. Where last year I sip-supped on laligurans juice (a little tar, refreshing, and awfully nationalistic) and organic buff momos from Kavre, presumably reared with much tender care before being dragged off to the slaughtering grounds in the Valley mooing Jai Bajrangabali Mata Ki Jai Please Toot and Have A Nice Day!

(*since incarnated once more as a Thai & Organic restaurant!)

conversations with women

A conversation overhead (as I stopped, amused, opposite the tailor’s shop off New Road where, in big bold white on red a sign sums up in English and Nepali what clients should expect: Humour)

Lady (with long protruding teeth): haina haat haalera najiskinus na bhanya.
Leda (nondescript): ey ke bho ta ni
Lady: aimai sanga haat halera jiskinu hunna k. logne maanche ra swasni maanche chuttai basnu parcha.

And another gem from Pashupati. As I began distributing old wrinkled notes to old, wrinkled ladies on the way out, after being prompted by me mum, two robust looking ladies in dhotis and shawls approached me. They couldnt have been more than 40. ‘Ey babu hamilai pani dinus na!’ I gave them a weary shake of the head. ‘Maile ta yaha budi aama haru lai po dina lageko, tapai haru la kaaha ho ra?’ To which one rejoined: ‘Hami pani magne ta ho ni!!!’ I laughed, and stepped into a pat of fresh dung. They laughed.

manjushree galchhedo

Millennia have washed past since Manjushree cleft the valley with his flaming sword but it was only last winter I made my way to Chobhar, dropping onto the ringroad to Kirtipur through a forgotten side road out of Sanepa. Except for the burgeoning numbers of concrete residences spilling out the centre and filling up all the wrinkles and folds of the valley, in evidence in this southwest corner too, Kirtipur appears forgotten as well.

We drove past the battered, tattered gates of the national university, then up the hill to come upon Taudaha (past the tiny, painted, bamboo cottages for young lovers, the signpost sporting a nubile, barely clad maiden belying its claim to be a Family Garden Resort), an asymmetrical large pond where a giant Nag is believed to lurk (a semi-divine escapee from Manjushree’s draining of the Valley waters), in reality a winter stopover for avian tourists.

This day of dreary, cloudy early Magh the depleted waters sat stolidly amongst worn hillocks upon which perched our little restaurant. But the looming olive mountains to our back surveyed that rarest of things in the Valley today – space. Today, scores of wild ducks floated on Taudaha while large black cormorants weighed down the two bare trees on the tiny island to the left.

After the birds had chirruped their evening roost, we drove over to the gorge itself, heralded by an all-too-familiar stench. That Bagmati, viewed as a springing fall down the face of Shivapuri (even the mountain can barely be made out through the winter smog now), makes its inglorious exit here.

There’s something classically wrong about this view out the Valley. You tread onto the narrow suspension bridge, and look down to see what you have already wrinkled your nose at – the black waters of Kathmandu’s river, swirling with white effluent. You dread what you might see if you gaze too deeply into its viscosity and step back off, smiling weakly. If ever there was a photo op over a river, this is one to put on the bilboards, except this dystopia straight out of a comicbook is not some imagined nightmare, it’s Nepal 2008, the ancient temple of Jal Binayak perversely framed by the rusting hulk of the Himal Cement Factory on the one, the Bikhumati on the other.

on the bhatti trail

Fresh from the Gokyo trail, alternating between explications of myself (to bemused locals) and my country (to curious phareners), the latter peppered with exhortations to try the tongba! the chhyaang! – imagine my indignation once we’d twistered ourselves around a mini-table on the rooftop of the Anacha bhatti to be told yes, we’d get our sekuwas, our egg baras, our alu ko achar and our kachela, but there was no chhyaang. Eh? What’s that? No chhyaang in a bhatti?

So it was true! That dwarf of a Home Minister was really getting on my nerves now. The dance bars? The footpath people? The casinos? They don’t sell anything I want. But moonshine? Are we to be condemned to drink shite Nepali lager and worse Indo-whisky at the expense of our homegrown and well, well-tested local brews?

Still, the view of the Krishna Mandir flush in front of Anacha is superlative. It’s one thing to be craning about with your camera while motorbikes vroom you away, another to be sitting back admiring the intricate stone figurework washing down some crunchy, spicy sekuwa with a bowl of…?

It was time to move on. Indeed, it was incumbent upon us to get to the bottom of this sorry business. Where was the chhyaang? No less than a bhatti crawl would do. We paid the sahuni, stoutly surrounded by her wares, a pot of money, and a large flat tawa on which she turned half a dozen egg baras over while shouting at her charges.

We crossed Patan Durbar Square in the fading gold of the evening, arrowed for Chasal, where, my pharen-local friend informed me, a classy bhatti awaited, buffalo testicles at the ready. But just as soon as we’d dipped into one of the alleys we espied a hariyo parda. We peeked in – a tiny, grimy cove sucked us in. Steel bowls of chhyaang were quickly doled out under the smiles of the regulars. Thin, but plentiful. Indifferent plates of chewy meat made their way towards us. In a circle around the stove a family conversed in Newari as they ate and drank, the littlest of all cradling her own littlest plate of meat. And what plopped from above? A starling, peering out her mud nest on the blackened rafters.

A few more twists and turns in the dark we burst upon the Chasal bhatti, an altogether grander, dozen-tabled affair housed in a roofed-in courtyard, replete with posters of stupas and tigers reclining before waterfalls. More birds, hens this time, cleaning up under the tables. The chhyaang was altogether richer, the meat yet enticing after all our labours, and the ambience, classic. Here the men of Nepal drink and eat and talk and laugh.

I’d love to tell you how to get here. Only I don’t remember. Try Chasal Chowk next to Patan Durbar Square. This would be my local if I were local to Patan. Where’s yours?