There are moments in life when we get to experience freedom. They are rare and fleeting. When they happen, you know. This is because you occupy the instant so completely that everything else disappears. All that you know, all...
Category - Nepal
I am moving house. Again. It happens all too often. As soon as I start to feel settled in a place, I am either struck with a sudden urge to up-sticks and travel or I find myself forced to move house. There is a familiar routine...
I am sitting on the broad steps of a temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square and I am reading a book. The warm glow of the sun has turned the pages to butter, the words to ants, to barcodes. Hawkers and tourists stream around...
Kumari She is a Living Goddess, plucked from the innocence of childhood and placed amongst goats heads, severed and spurting. Thrust before the faithful and the faithless, worshipped, revered, in thick eye make-up she stares at...
In the sun, with a jagged peak emerging high above the horizon, the two of them flow together, undisturbed and liquid. The daughter brushes her mother’s long black hair which tumbles then shimmers like silk, tumbles then...
My legs are dragging. I am barely able to lift my feet. For the last four hours, I have been walking up a winding path towards a ridge that seems constantly to hover just one kilometre further. My only company has been cows and...
It was December and the sun was burning brightly above Kathmandu; dappling, illuminating, and stretching shadowy figures along dusty alleyways. It was warm in the sunlight too, you could tell from the relaxed faces of the...
I think my inner ear may be bleeding. There is, however, no way of telling as I cannot physically pry the earpieces from my ears. Why, you may ask, are my earphones lodged thus deep within my ears? It’s because of him. Him...
This is not an airport, this is a bus station from 1950s England. Just who is responsible for cruelly transposing it onto Nepal? It is a mean practical joke to play on a developing country and not in the least bit funny. It is...