The Low Door in the Wall

Yesterday afternoon, Neville, Thomas and I walked up to Patan Dholka or Patan Gate just 10 minutes from our house. There are lots of shops there in narrow, crowded, chaotic streets, mostly small dingy shops selling scarey things. There are a couple of butcher shops and these are the scariest shops of all. They are small, dark, filthy looking cubbyholes with tables out the front on which are spread shapeless hunks of raw meat. And you know that meat was walking around with a heartbeat until it met its fate at the back of the shop probably only hours before.

At one point, a small truck and a four-wheel-drive came up the narrow street heading towards one another. Instead of one pulling off to the side to let the other past, as would happen at home, they both kept going until they were almost literally jammed up against each other. The solution? Beep your horn. Everything, motorbikes, people, dogs, came to a stop waiting for these two vehicles to sort it out, but no one gets angry, or abusive, they just stand and wait. Slowly, inch by inch and with about an inch between them and on either side, they moved forward until they got past each other and then everything started moving again.

Opposite one of the scarey butcher shops is the Patan Bookshop and amazingly, like all bookshops in Kathmandu, they are exactly like a bookshop at home: clean, organised and selling all the same books you get anywhere else. Neville wanted something to read, so we went in and browsed around. There was a small corridor leading off the inside of the shop and we looked through it and noticed a table with four chairs around it. We ventured down the corridor and poked our heads in to see several more tables set up. The thing that struck me first was that there was jazz music playing quietly, not the jarring Indian music you here everywhere, and there were modern style artworks on the walls. What the…? Then we noticed that beyond this room was a lovely, clean looking courtyard where there were more tables. We walked through the first room and into the courtyard where we were met by a smartly uniformed woman, who greeted us in hushed, reverent tones, and excellent English. We asked to see a menu, she replied, ‘Of course,’ and showed us that there were 5 different menus: breakfast, snacks, drinks, wine list and dinner. And the first thing we saw on the menu? Australian sirloin steak! Didn’t we just step off a street where there was rubbish and feral dogs everywhere, and where they were killing animals and selling the meat on tables in the open air? Where there were dirty looking vegetables being sold in an open-air market by the road and you need a mask to breathe the air? And where everything is brown from the thick coating of dust?

We had found the low door in the wall and, like Alice in Wonderland, had made it through to the beautiful garden. The woman, the maitre ‘d, pointed to a door on the other side of the courtyard and told us there was also a bar in there. Be still my alcohol-starved beating heart! So we went over and pushed open the door and found ourselves in a room with muted lighting, comfortable couches and tables and the bar along one wall with a plasma screen TV mounted above it showing a soccer game. We walked back into the courtyard and went up to two western-looking guys sitting at one of the tables. "Is the food safe to eat here," I asked them and they replied that, "Yes it was safe and that it was all really good." They also told us about several other restaurants in the area, one of them The Red Dingo Café, originally owned by an Australian, which is also really good.

I just need to point out here that when you live in a place like this, anyone who looks like they come from a Western country is automatically your friend. That’s why Henk, the Dutch man from next door, has invited us to dinner on Sunday.

What else could we do now but have a drink. Oh bliss! So Thomas, Neville and I sat in the beautiful, clean, ordered courtyard with a beer, a glass of wine and a cranberry soda, and marvelled at this stroke of good fortune. We then entertained each other reading bits out of the Kathmandu Post about the people standing in line outside the passport office, refusing to use the toilet (which costs money) and, instead, pissing in the street and being punished by the police by being made to pull their ears and apologise in the hope of making them feel ashamed. Make sense? Of course not. This is Nepal.