Thupten arrived at the Kathmandu airport, grabbed his duffle bag from the conveyor belt and walked right past the security check. There was a huddle of people waiting to put their bags into the scanner, and at the sight of him they gripped their rusty carts and shouted at the security guards, 'Oye! Ke ho esto? Wake up, security!' But the skinny men didn't stand a chance at stopping Thupten. Instead, they just sat on their wooden stools, mouths agape as the strange longhaired man barrelled by with his duffel bag. Was he Chinese? Japanese? He didn't even look back! He just stomped by, right towards the sunny glass doors where a hundred greeters waited for loved ones, though Thupten knew none of them waited for him.
As he passed through the barricades, a dozen or so drivers swarmed around him, pulling at his shoulder straps and pointing him towards the parking lot. He settled on a wiry, flannel-shirted kid – 250 rupees. It was lower than the next price by a good deal but Thupten still couldn't believe he was paying so much. Ten years ago, with 100 rupees in your pocket you could have circled the whole city and bought a glass of bitter homemade raksi with change left over to flirt with passing girls.
Leaving the paved roads of the airport, the taxi burrowed into the mess of the city and the heat met Thupten with a vengeance. He wiped his face with his shirt that stank from the many hours of flight and shook his head. New sweat quickly formed on his forehead as the taxi was caught in a three-way jam involving a truck and a jeep trying to bully a rickshaw out of the way. Thupten's mouth was parched; he could now smell his own stench – something the airplanes' air conditioning had masked, and he could feel the exhaustion break through. This place…this place was paying him back for leaving years ago.
'Pull over here,' Thupten said, seeing a row of stores. He went up to the counter of a shop bursting with . As he stared at the contents, he found he could remember some of them – Wai-wai and Rara noodles, Nabisco biscuits – but many seemed like new brands. He had not expected there to be new brands. He asked the storeowner for a bottle of water from the back of the fridge and then got back in the taxi, relieved for the first time to be heading home. But as he unscrewed the bottle's cap and arched his neck back to drink the cold water, the driver said, 'It will be 400 rupees now, because we stopped.'