Kyanjin Gompa video-view

The Last Days of Yellow House

Walls are splitting and crumbling
And paint’s peeling through the cracks
The air’s thick with hash and bullshit
The light thin like melted wax

The rooms ascend to the penthouse
The bathroom is five floors below
The owner’s doped out in the pink room
Even he has decided to go

Kumar, the sleepy-eyed fixer
Migrates to an available place
Subsidence and time and neglect
Distorts Lord Bhairav’s face

Giulia the tattooing artist,
Maps the city with coloured thread
Danielle the Vipasana drop-out
Meditates in front her bed

Andrea the futures consultant
Spends the time before he is off
Waiting on a Laxmi-fix visa
With his laptop and charas cough

The drunk gem-cutter is Australian
Hides behind sunglasses and tan
To Taiwan with his cashed-in pension
“To buy the Chinese machine, my man”

The ghost of Carlos haunts Freak Street
Fleeced tailors still wait for their cash
Krishna woos Radha on cinnamon
Calendar bitch has hidden the stash

Simone the Acid Italian
With his ketamine, blotters, and wife
Flies over the full moon at sunset
Takes the trip that lasts his whole life

Street kids sniff glue from old milk bags
Porter shouts ‘pachaas’ in his sleep
Three women gossip by prayer wheels
Rubbish piles high the street

Durga’s devotees are now doubled
They file down the festival street
The Taleju temple is now open
The menu is full of dead meat

They’re killing ducks and chickens
They’re killing buffalo and goats
For the insatiable thirst of the goddess
They’re severing necks and throats

Sadhus pose for ice cream photos
Guns are policing the crowd
The kukri blade is lowered
The buffalo’s neck is bowed

There’s blood on the roads and pavements
There’s blood on the temple’s floor
For the insatiable thirst of the goddess
They’re going to kill some more

Balachaturdashi Festival

For one night, on the Balachaturdashi festival, they come to honour the dead with fire. At the Pashupatinath temple near Kathmandu, Nepali's from across the country come to pay their respects to their deceased family members. From dusk to dawn they tend fires and butter lamps, keeping the flames alive in rememberance of the dead. As I approached the temple complex - dedicated to Shiva, the god of destructuion and reproduction - funeral pyres cast glowing orange reflections in the Bagmati river. Hundreds of yellow firelights flickered between the temples, as family groups huddled around the commemorative flames. The place seethed with people and I was caught up in a crowd entering the temple compound from the river. Inside, the place was full of people keeping their fire vigils through the night. Amidst the firelight, music was played, bhajans (religious songs) were sung, incense was burned, and the intermittant clang of the temple bells sounded across the crowd. At dawn, devotees take satbeej (seven different seeds of rice, barley, sesame, wheat, gram, maize and millet) and scatter it on the earth in the belief that departed souls attain salvation from the cycle of life and death.