Kathmandu’s revved-up and turbo-boosted microcosm
Author Rabi Thapa, in his new book Thamel, has weaved an engrossing account of the past and present of Kathmandu’s commercial and cultural centre, Thamel. Presented below is an excerpt.
By Rabi Thapa Speaking Tiger Books
I174 Rs 399 t’s late, but Thamel doesn’t know it. Three months since the earthquake of April 2015, the narrow, wet streets are clogged with Nepalis exiting bars for clubs, weaving in, out and around a stream of dirty white Maruti cabs bumper to bumper. There’s not a tourist in sight. We’re squatting on the stoop of a kebab joint, observing the youngbloods staggering past us, the impulse beating them on to the known unknown. We’ve been clubbing too, but not for us the screaming, heaving voids of OMG, Fire Club and Purple Haze. Those days are past. If we go out at all, it’s to establishments run by friends to listen to music made by friends. We’re only holding this corner of Narsingh Chowk as it’s among a handful of places in Kathmandu that serve food past midnight. The wraps are juicy, the beer redundant, but we feel reckless. We’re not immune to Thamel’s charms.
In fact, I had been visiting N TIO FIC more often. What do you mean you want me to go back to Thamel? I’d wanted to ask my editor as we sipped crummy coffees by Delhi’s Green Park metro a few months previously. I grew out of it, like, a decade ago, and you want me to go sex, drugs and rock n’ roll on you? Sure, I’ve had a drink or five; I’ve smoked a few and whatever else there was on offer. I’ve had my share but I was never too greedy. I was never one of those rockers, those junkies, those dopers, those drunks, those all-singing, all-dancing party bitches. At the end of the day I went home and back to my books. There was always life beyond the moment, because you can’t live in the moment all the time if you want to go the distance.
I didn’t say it. I was as intrigued as I was intimidated by the idea of writing about Kathmandu’s tourist quarter. And once I started going back, once I got talking to people and, once more, paying attention to what was around me, I grew fascinated with the place. I got to work, listening to the stories of a black metal vocalist, a nonagenarian ex-cop in a shop, a rags-to-riches trekking company boss, a recovering junkie, “night entertainment” workers and one very disgruntled hairdresser. Then the bloody earthquake. In the aftermath, Thamel was not the first thing on my mind. 9,000 people had perished in the 7.8M tremor of 25 April 2015. Kathmandu’s heritage sites had been shredded, entire valleys and villages had been buried by landslides, and J and I had been forced to move out of our ruined apartment. For most Nepalis, it was the worst natural disaster in living memory.
A few months on, Thamel was filling up again, though not with tourists. The neighbourhood hadn’t sustained The great Norse myths are woven into the fabric of our storytelling from Tolkien, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff to Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics. They are also an inspiration for Neil Gaiman’s own award-bedecked, bestselling fiction. Now he reaches back through time to the original source stories in a thrilling and vivid rendition of the great Norse tales. Gaiman’s gods are thoroughly alive on the page irascible, visceral, playful, passionate. the wholesale destruction that Nepal’s rural communities had suffered, despite an abundance of ramshackle brick-and-wood residences and teetering, multi-level concrete monstrosities. Its spiritual heart, the medieval monastery in Thabahi, was intact. But later, peering through tin barricades, I noticed that the second, modern centre of Thamel’s identity, the Kathmandu Guest House, had been seriously rolled. Just before the earthquake, I’d been given the tour of the famous “Beatles Wing”. Now I learned that the whole of the original building was to be demolished. If the Liverpudlians had really made it to Kathmandu, no one would know now. And as the monsoon rains began sprouting in the rubble, wooden struts lined every street in the old city like flylines on tents. Gaps appeared where damaged houses had been extracted like so many rotten teeth. The city and country were irretrievably altered, their native architectures replaced first by a patchwork of blue and orange tarpaulins, then shanty towns of tin and salvaged wood and, more slowly, concrete-andbrick pillar structures.
For Thamel, always the physical and moral vanguard of Kathmandu and Nepal, this sort of transformation was par for the course. Several multi-star hotels had been in the works prior to the Great Shake and once the dust settled, construction went on. Thamel didn’t care about what was going on in the rest of the country. I had to learn to care about Thamel.
Can of beer in one hand, kebab in the other, I ignore the drunken banter of my companions and reflect on my assignment. It’s hard work to retain a childlike curiosity in the familiar but now, even the hoariest of haunts have begun to give up their secrets to me. I am not much interested in the cookie-cutter backpackers who ordinarily throng the streets. But the support crew of vendors, shopkeepers, and culinary and travel agents who hold the place together, as well as the street kids, prostitutes and pushers who pull it apart, are a different story. Even as I marvel at how times have changed for Thamel to be full of Nepali teenagers, I scrutinise the material facades around me, peeling them back to what was before — a week, a year, a century, millennia. In my mind’s eye, the faces before me fade, the hordes thin, and a concrete-and-glass nostar hotel morphs back into a tumbledown mansion, which makes way for a dozen brick houses huddled up on four sides of a courtyard, which in turn crumble to paddy fields and bamboo thickets where witches cackle and jackals howl, eventually subsiding into the turbid waters of prehistory.
Now, all these avatars stand before me in a simultaneity of anarcho- architecture, a splatter of signs signalling a revolving, ever-evolving cast of transactors: a thangka seller on the ground floor, sifting seekers of instant karma from Chinese collectors; a momo vendor on the first floor, kept busy by a travel agent across the corridor and the lovely ladies of Monalisha Ayurvedic Massage & Spa in the dim hollows of the second; giving way to a beer garden on the terrace, with its scattershot medley of Guns N’ Roses, Buddha Bar and Maroon 5. Change has come to all of Nepal, but how did it happen in Thamel, a revved-up, turbo-boosted microcosm of Kathmandu?
For Thamel, always the physical and moral vanguard of Kathmandu and Nepal, this sort of transformation was par for the course. Several multi-star hotels had been in the works prior to the Great Shake and once the dust settled, construction went on.