Before the People’s Movement broke out, in early 1990, we would spend the evenings killing time at Pashupati Hotel. Despite its name – which it shared with the temple to Shiva – the hotel was quite run-down. The old signboard that hung above its black, smoke-charred doorway was rusty and well below the standards of the rest of Kathmandu. An address had been scraped off from beneath the hotel’s name, as if the sign had been used on another building.

From the first evening we went there, we could see that the hotel traded in sex. Women arrived after dark to make a living and vied with each other in the murky, cavelike room upstairs. That large communal space was the only real room in the place. The landlord lived somewhere in Tahachal, and he would show up only to collect the rent at the end of the month.

The men who came to exchange their money for pleasure with these women were mostly soldiers from the barracks, policemen, or long-haul drivers who arrived in the valley after dusk. Local hooligans and pubescent boys also came to the hotel to debauch themselves. In addition, a steady stream of townspeople appeared in the afternoons to eat their meals and drink tea; at night, others came to drink liquor. Laborers and alcoholics could all get their fill, and the hotel was usually teeming with bodies.

When my friend and I first began to go there, I was unemployed. This friend was a newspaper editor even though he had none of the skills necessary for his job. He could talk eloquently, but he couldn’t even write a grammatical sentence. I was able to make a living off of his incompetence. I did all his work for him; in addition, I wrote articles, under different pen names, on politics, sports, women’s rights, and the latest films. In a sense, the paper was ghostwritten and edited by me. In return, my friend gave me two meals a day, enough liquor to get drunk every now and then, and the use of his run-down, dirty bed.

The owner of Pashupati Hotel was a Gurung from around Pokhara who drove trucks for a living. A rude man who drank heavily and neglected his work, he had caused almost twenty large and small accidents over the years. Somehow, none of the accidents had killed him. But as a result of them, he’d had to change employers over a dozen times: each new truck owner fired him as soon as he got to know Gurung’s ways.

Gurung was also known to have changed wives as often as he had changed employers. No woman had ever stayed with him longer than fifteen days-except his current wife, who had been with him for over a year. This said quite a lot about her.

Regulars called her Susma Bhauju. She lived at Pashupati Hotel and had been married once before; she’d eloped with Gurung when her first husband was jailed on trafficking charges. At the time, Susma had been operating a Pashupati Hotel in Butwal for about two years. When she moved to Kathmandu with Gurung, she brought the signboard with the hotel’s name on it.

After the People’s Movement started, my editor friend and I began to go to the hotel every day as soon as evening fell, ending up at our lodgings only late at night. The reason for this was that policemen searching for those involved in the political demonstrations often arrested ordinary people walking in the streets. We saw no better way to avoid arrest than by pretending to be alcoholics.

Among the hotel regulars was a poet. He had a long face and slight build and always looked flushed with emotion. He must have had a name, but everyone simply called him “the poet.” The editor and I befriended him, and the three of us soon became a threesome.

After a while, Susma Bhauju joined us, and the editor and she quickly discovered that they were both originally from Arghakhaanchi District. Susma Bhauju was elated-as I suppose any woman in her position would be-to meet someone from her home village. Almost immediately, she and the editor became familiar enough to call each other “didi” and “bhai.” She stopped bantering so much with the other customers, and politeness crept into her manners, replacing her bawdiness. She tried to explain her current situation by saying, “I’m actually not that kind of woman. Circumstances beyond my control brought me to a place like this. It must have been fate. If I was destined for this kind of life, how could I have avoided it?”

It soon became clear that Susma Bhauju despised her husband. One day, she cursed her past, saying, “Fate must have put blinders on my eyes. Why else would I have run off with a monster like him?”

“But doesn’t Gurung dai love you?” I asked.

“Love?!” she cried. “Is there any space in that hustler’s heart for love?”

I goaded her on. “Then why not run off with someone else? Why stay with him?”

“Better to die young than chase a god! What guarantee is there that a man who’d accept a fallen woman like me wouldn’t be more of a bastard than my husband? I’ve already gone through one hell; what’s the point of trading it for another?”

I wanted to continue in this vein, but I saw that the poet had been listening and was overcome with feeling. He looked longingly at her and said, “Susma! The anguish in your eyes is the emotional terrain of my poetry.”

His words surprised and amused the editor and me, but they obviously moved Susma Bhauju. She and the poet took a liking to each other, and Susma Bhauju began to join us as soon as we came in the door. She would sit beside the poet and share a few drinks with him. One evening, after they’d been drinking for a while, the poet said to her, “I can decipher people’s happiness or unhappiness from their eyes. In yours I have read agony, and they have transported me to unknown depths. My soul has gained endless peace there.”

Susma began to sob into her folded arms.

Amused, I asked the editor, “Are all poets like this?”

“I think people with this sort of disposition are attracted to poetry,” he replied.

With Gurung out of town, the romance between the poet and Susma progressed unhindered. Meanwhile, I began to look elsewhere for distraction.

I noticed another woman who worked in the hotel; she was about forty years old and full of energy. During daylight hours, she traded raunchy jokes with the customers, and at night she sold herself to them. Her behavior was quite forward, even for a prostitute. When a customer asked for meat, she would reply, “Cooked or raw?” Right in front of everyone, she kissed men on the cheek if she liked them. She would not even look at men she didn’t like. I named her Jangimaya.

“A fitting name, friend,” the editor said, watching her antics.

“She’s an iron woman,” I quipped. “The man who makes a wife of her will be extremely fortunate.”

“I wonder if you’re beginning to love her?” the editor teased. “Have you begun to see her the same way the poet sees Susma?”

“If I marry, I’ll give first priority to a woman like her.”

“Which means you’d want your wife to earn a lot, like her?”

“What more profitable dream for an unemployed youth like me?”

After many days, Gurung dragged back into town in his battered old truck. He soon realized that his wife had become involved with another man. One night he got drunk and beat Susma until her bones rattled. She cried all night and developed a fever.

When the poet heard about this, he flew into a rage. Before he had even finished his first drink, he cried, “I can no longer tolerate Susma’s suffering. I should either flee the city or else muster up the courage to ask her to marry me.” He went on to drink three times as much as usual.

It was a week later before Susma joined the customers again. When she saw us, she unleashed her hatred of her husband. “I’m not going to spend another day of my life with that monster! If I have to be a whore, why not ply my trade openly in Ratna Park? The hell of freedom is better than the hell of disgrace.” Her eyes watered in anguish. The poet, tormented by her grief, got drunk and began to cry with her.

Unlike those of Susma Bhauju and the poet, my life wasn’t wracked with emotion. Nor was it lucky, like the editor’s. I was just a boy from the far west hills whose feet were sore from walking the streets in search of a job-someone for whom that job had become like a secret I’d never possess. I had scraped by in Kathmandu for four years. During that time, my aged father and mother, who lived in the countryside, survived on the hope that their son would one day become a big man with a house in the city and would take them on a pilgrimage to Pashupati Temple. From time to time I got a letter from them, to which I would respond, “Your dear son will surely succeed one day.” But I felt that it might never come true.

One day, I said to Jangimaya, “People trust you because you’re still young. They see your radiant eyes, and they’re ready to enslave themselves to you. But what will happen when you grow old?” I was actually wondering what would happen to me when I grew old.

Jangimaya replied simply, “I don’t live on tomorrow’s dreams. I live today, I eat today, I enjoy myself today. Tomorrow is in God’s hands. Whatever God has in store for me, I’ll accept.”

“You’re not scared of the future?”

“What good will fear do? It won’t solve any problems! Aaah . . . why be afraid? I’m not just living off the desires of men, or for the price of meat. If anyone really likes me and respects me, I return his affection and respect. I’d give myself freely to someone like that. As for those I don’t like, I wouldn’t sell myself to them for a thousand rupees. God has seen my inner purity, so why should I live in fear of tomorrow?”

As I listened to her, a few rays of sunlight began to glimmer in the darkness of my heart. After that, time passed quickly.

At the beginning of March, when the weather grew warmer, the People’s Movement became more active. Demonstrations broke out, and the government arrested thousands of people. The authorities’ bullets martyred hundreds of demonstrators. The political fervor spread from students, political workers, and intellectuals to working people in villages and neighborhoods. Even local hooligans began to say that the Panchayat system of government was doomed.

By the end of the month, discussions about the Panchayat arose even at the hotel. Impassioned, the poet declared one night, “There’s no possibility that this system will last. Even the strongest dictatorship shortens its life when it plays holi with the blood of its people.”

Jangimaya shrugged. “What difference does it make whether the system stays or goes?”

“I may not know much,” a customer called out from the crowd-he was a soldier from Sorhakhutte jail-“but I know that the king is right for us!”

At this, the other customers started shouting. The poet cried, “I don’t like it when soldiers get too clever! Who said anything about the king?”

Dissension swept through the room. Soon, everyone took the poet’s side. The soldier couldn’t fend off the shrill attacks. He stubbornly finished off his drink and departed.

When we left the hotel at ten o’clock, we were arrested. Whether or not the soldier was responsible for this, we never found out.

The People’s Movement lasted seven weeks, and we spent twenty days of it in jail.

We were released when the three-way agreement to end the Panchayat system was reached. The editor, the poet, and I headed straight back to Pashupati Hotel. We had survived the barrenness of jail and now planned to quench twenty days of thirst by drowning ourselves in liquor.

By the time we reached Kalimati Chowk, it was nearly dark. People were returning home, tired after celebrating the restoration of democracy. We walked through a vegetable market into a narrow alley. It usually took only a couple of minutes to reach the hotel by that route. We hurried along, then suddenly stopped, feeling as if we were lost. The house that had been Pashupati Hotel no longer had a signboard out front, and the dark, smoky doorway was deathly silent.

Distressed, the poet asked a nearby shopkeeper, “Since when did the hotel close?”

“Four days before the curfew,” he replied. “The police said it supported anti-Panchayat activities. They came by every day and pestered the customers to leave.”

The editor and I exchanged glances. We hadn’t thought our former rulers were as foolish as that.

The poet leaned against the wall of the former hotel and started to wail. “Where do you think they went? How is Susma living? Is she still with Gurung, or did she go elsewhere? Will we ever see them again?”

But no matter how emotional he got, no matter how eloquently he expressed his grief, there were no answers to his questions. There was no alternative for us but to turn back the way we had come. By the time we passed through the alley and reached the main street, night had clasped all of Kathmandu in its tight embrace. Pashupati Hotel, which had occupied such a large part of our lives during the dark times, had faded into the past and began to vanish from memory.

__________________________

Translation by Manjushree Thapa. This story was first published on suskera.org, a US-based literary webzine that featured contributions from Nepali writers. Suskera is now in partnership with La.Lit to republish articles from its archives.