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Stuart B Campbell

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Khatmandu

There’s a God at every corner, tikka-red,
in Khatmandu and everywhere you look
there’s a demon looking too:
it’s you! It’s not just paranoid superstition;
it’s true: pilgrims still crawl around
Swayambhunath and saffron
robes abound, but in the Social
Welfare Centre there are lepers and yet
more lepers and Victor Mature
cannot be found in this biblical-proportioned
epic, turned video-nasty on bad-trip-acid, as
the frazzled freaks on Freak Street will tell: you
are searching for Nirvana (man!), though
the porticoes of hell may stop you
in your tracks (like Pashupatinath: where Guy Fawks
garden bonfires slowly crisp the dead to dust),
there are facts of life and dying which must
not be shunned, or forgotten, or declined
in the forests, in the valleys, in the mountains
we’ve come to climb; every summit, like every
life and everything is sacred, related
through right views;
that’s why there’s a God
at every corner, tikka-red, in Khatmandu.

 

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