The ghosts of Kathmandu

Kathmandu ma bhoot aayo. 

He scared everyone. The little plastic boys you see around in the dumps shat their pants. You could see that. The computer-pasal owners got heart palpitations-- you would have known that if you had the sales details of blood-pressure medications for the day. The pretty rich girls of Kathmandu, with their bright lipsticks and horrible Nepali hugged their boyfriends harder, you could see their fear in the hugmarks on the boyfriends' backs and the hickies on their necks. You would have known that if you had looked at the sales figures for expensive scarves for males that evening. The stores in Durmarbarg and the malls were full of the boyfriends trying to hide the hickies.

The bhoot wanted to stay longer in Kathmandu, take a hike maybe, take some good photos, get drunk, maybe get something going on with the East European ghost he had seen haunting around in front of his haunt, and so much more, but they wouldn't let him. He was just about to begin having fun in New Road before he was spotted and chased away by narrow-minded men and women. Look at the footage the news channels live broadcast closely, and you will realize there were more narrow minded women than the men. And you thought women were stereotypically afraid of ghosts.

They don't accept the ghosts, mostly because they are scared of them. The ghosts exist, of course, that's a scientifically accepted fact. The only creatures that don't exist in the collective minds of the middle class Kathmandu are the gays. They are mythical creatures created by Americans, they do not exist. No one will deny their existence though, because they never existed to be denied their existence. No, I'm not making this up-- ask your mom, and you'll know.

People of Kathmandu don't like ghosts. The become the biggest drama queens when they have a supernatural encounter.

The bhoot tried killing an Avenues TV reporter. The exact cause of the attack on a bystander is not known, but it is a scientifically-accepted fact that they like to attack and kill people for the fun of it. NewRoad has many gods--lot of them foreign-- but it has more ghosts than the gods. The ghosts seemingly always win.

Less than a minute-walk from the latest haunt is Sankata, the remover of obstacles. Extremely powerful, they say. He was busy chillin' out with the bros at the time though, and try to do miracles for the team he's sponsoring, which is why the security lapse.

The Avenues TV reporter lived to see another day, but no one wanted to listen to him. Because you know that once a person has been attacked by a bhoot, he loses his memory, and will deny the existence of the ghost encounter, instead trying to explain away the event with ridiculously rational and reasonable event.

It's a drama, yaar, it's a drama. They are all in it. Trust me.

Bhoots like to hang around in Kathmandu. Kathmandu is like a haunted gaun-- broken and patched up, creaking but alive. Barely there. It's a holiday spot actually where ghosts like  to chill out after scaring people in India and abroad. Ghosts like to have their fun too, you know.

New Road ma bhoot aayo.

New Road is already a scary place to be, even without the ghosts. But ghosts have a long history with New Road-- the ghosts first came in the 60's when the country first opened up to the world. Nepalis already had enough things to worry about before then, we didn't need no ghosts , thank you very much.

The hippies were easily scared-- their pot-addled systems processed things in the most vivid ways, and the Nepali scary creatures didn't really work for them. They wanted their own ghosts and that's the irony here-- people who came to Nepal to escape the ghosts of their societies, brought exactly those ghosts to us. Our defenses were poor, and we were caught off -guard--their ghosts became our ghosts, and the haunts got more frequent. New Road paid the price of prosperity-- for all the increased property prices and the business uptick and all the modernity there was, they had to face the ghosts.

Just look around someday in New Road. It's one haunted house after another, each waiting for its ghost to arrive.