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!)