Pasupati Hotel

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.