Nepali Times

“Why Nepal? Why do you come back?” I’ve been asked often. I falter, unable to formulate anything neither consistent nor convincing. Disorder. This ‘why’ lies in a nebulous angle of my mind, elusive but dense.


I realise a certain match between my own disorder and the one that defines these towns and villages where I keep coming back, season after season. A certain match with this territory that does not know the void and where auspicious stones have been erected in the few places that were left virgin by the secular hustle: this territory that appeases me.




Descending from the airport each time I return, shaken up by the traffic jam and the insane driving, suffocated by the racket, the lead and the nitrates, I simply slip into a world where I already exist, soothed in the shadow of its chaos. A world in which I feel recognised. A glance, a dog, a twisted line of ragged walls, a pond, a ladybird on the half-open window of the car, a butcher’s shop on the pavement, the spasms of a bus, the light burn of the tea on the lip. I receive them as solace.