The tableau is all too famliar. You walk out into the streets at the end of the day, no longer marvelling at the incongruousness of a city of pedestrians on the move. You see the occasional bicycles, and then a motorbike, which signals to everyone that the day of enforced unproductivity is coming to an end. Still, a mother admonishes her rubbernecking son at the Kupondole junction, where a cluster of useless riot police still remain, watched by a mixture of criminals and innocents: ‘Don’t look at them!’
Across the river and left onto Tripureswor, I am sure some fragmented profundity can be gleaned from the group of squatting men commenting on a group of squatting monkeys. But in truth I am not interested today in the affairs of either my sapien or simian relatives. I’m headed to the ghats around the Kalmochan and Tripureshwor Mahadev temples.
Being native to the Kathmandu Valley is by no means equivalent to knowing all its neighbourhoods, old and new and somewhere in between, and I’ve been making up for a northern bias ever since I moved south of the river. It’s relatively recently that I’ve explored the 19th-century temples of Kalmochan and Tripureshwor Mahadev and the ghats that line the Bagmati River. When better to open up new parts of the city than on a bandh day?
The Kalmochan temple, commissioned by the powerful Prime Minister Bhimsen Thapa shortly before his downfall, and completed by his eventual successor, Jung Bahadur Rana, isn’t really frequented by devotees. This has much to do with its inauspicious beginnings. Not only did Bhimsen Thapa commit suicide in prison (unable to bear the shame resulting if, as threatened, his wife was paraded naked through the city), the temple is rumoured to be where Jung Bahadur cremated the nobles whose massacre he’d orchestrated at Kot. The structure itself, in a domed Mughal style, is only remarkable for the massive, ferocious brass griffons that adorn its four corners. Monkeys bound around the site, as do street cricketers making use of the flagstoned open space around the restored temple.
Linked to Kalmochan, but obscured by the concrete shrubbery lining the road, is the impressive three-storied pagoda of Tripureshwor Mahadev. Commissioned by Bhimsen’s long-running business partner, the Regent Queen Tripura Sundari, this derelict site too attracts the kids of local residents more than anyone else. The temple itself appears to be in decent condition, but the buildings surrounding it have either completely collapsed or are close to doing so. There are plans to have the site modified to accommodate a children’s home; for the time being the stone images of Shiva’s manifestations, scattered across the brick courtyard, hold sway.
Even more interesting than the temples themselves are the decommissioned ghats behind them. If you can ignore the black ribbon of the Bagmati, the jumble of vegetable gardens, trees, shrines and residences lining its north banks are more atmospheric than any green space in the city. With the wind blowing the right way, you can imagine how the sand and water must have sparkled from ghat to ghat, a full 100 metres wide and more. If ever the Bagmati is restored, it would be in part to resuscitate the natural and cultural beauty of the ghats.
Past the football fields below the ghats, I walked through a ramshackle settlement and wondered if they would meet the same fate as the slums east of Thapathali. Here there were kirana stores, lanes weaving amongst simple brick sheds, and a woman cooking rice on an earthen stove. Recrossing the river over the new bridge, I watched a group of young boys puzzle over how to retrieve a football from the river without touching the kalapani, then sat observing twos and threes munching on roasted corn, oblivious it seemed to the bandh. Cycles whizzed past, an old farmer watched me tramp by, and a black bull mooed belligerently. Men and women on foot, everywhere, in the cooling evening. And then a car tooted its way through, a pick-up rattled past and slowly, it seemed, the city returned to itself.
