We spent the evenings before the People´s Movement in that hotel, killing time. It wasn´t much of a hotel, despite its name: Pashupati Hotel. Even the signboard that hung above its black, smoke-charred doorway was rusty, sub-standard, and ill-matched with the rest of Kathmandu. The address on it, beneath the hotel´s name, had been scraped off; the board had been used before, somewhere else.
From the first evening we went there, we saw that the hotel traded in sex. The women who sold their bodies came after dark and vied for some earnings in the dark, cave-like room upstairs. That was the only real room in the house. The landlord lived somewhere in Tahachal and came only at the end of the month, to collect rent.
The men who came to exchange their money for some plea¬sure with these women were mostly soldiers from the barracks, or policemen, or drivers who had arrived in the valley after dusk. Local hooligans and impressionable, newly-teenage boys also came to the hotel to debauch themselves. The hotel also attracted a steady stream of people who came to eat their meals and drink their afternoon tea, and, at night, to drink liquor. Load carriers, workers, cart pushers, and alcoholics came, had their fill, then returned to the city. The hotel was usually teeming with people.
When my friend and I began to go there, I was unemployed. I lived in the lodgings of this friend, a newspaper editor who had none of the skills of an editor. He could talk very eloquently, but he couldn´t write a correct sentence. I thrived on his incompetence; I did all his newspaper´s work by myself, and wrote, under different pen-names, about politics, sports, worn en´s rights, and the latest films. In a sense, I was the paper´s underground editor. In return for my work, I got two meals a day, enough liquor to get me drunk every now and then, and a chance to sleep in a much-used, dirty bed.