On the fork where the Patan roads meet
Before walking to the bridge which lies over a comatose Bagmati, where the roads sleep broken and muddy,
crawling with indifferent slime, where the roads twist and turn like a woman in shimmering pain, whispering desperate groans that don't make it to Kathmandu Post or Nepali Times,
he stood like a sage weeping tears of deaths and dimes screaming in pain at his own desperate prophecy. Near the feet of an unknown martyr, standing in a rumpled garden,
scattered by dust and fumes of reluctant dinosaurs pretending to be buses from Patan Dhoka,
the shops stand lined up like well-mannered deaf and dumb kids waiting for their school bus in the pale winter sun.
The shops sleep or lazily wink on holidays,
the seedy shadowy street tea shop where mobikes and men come to rest and drink beer and lime, chatting with girls lazing or resting on the brawny arms of souped up two stroke machines,
next to the shop which sell sad pizzas in the dark, for customers haunted by fast food come-ons.
And there in serene gloom sits a bookshop for unknown Pilgrims waiting for unwary men with time to slaughter and kill,
hoarding books on the dead and the dying as white tourist fingers lay obscene hands on coffee book Kamasutra,
and people in grimy shorts who search, with the vacant sockets of their tired vacation-fed eyes, looking for mystics and rishis on the pavements and walls of Patan.
They have come to search for the East in paperback book covers of ancient travelogues and ritual sex,
books wrapped in careful but dusty plastic covers,lying close to incense and candles in earth mother jars.
And there, I found as I was told I would, I found my brother I had come to kill, as he stood in a naked corner of the roads rolling down to the Bagmati,
he stood rolling a cigarette with his cold, bare hands waiting for the smoke to fill the hills and the alley of his own mind.