Asan is the centre of a past, a six-legged spider luring in Nepalis up and down the crossing routes from India to Tibet. But by the ‘80s, when my mother brought me here to buy vegetables, spices, incense and cloth, I was well on my way to someplace else. And so I remember Asan not as a destination, not as a great medieval market, but as the intersection it is between Jamal – with its jeans and shoes and cycles – to New Road, with its samosas, its icecream, its T-shirts, artifacts of a brave new world.

This was my mother’s domain, as it still is for less upwardly mobile Amas across the city. She doesn’t shop here any more, weighing up tomatoes and eggplants by the pāu, sharpshooting for the hidden worm and battening down the hatches against inflation. Now she shops in the supermarkets, buying veg pack by plasticked pack. These cartographies of consumption, these mental maps, are stilled in a time we all remember, our own Olde Kathmandu, the good old bad old days.

This is not my city now, but I have returned to drag something of my inheritance into the present – the clank and tinkle of devotional bells keeps abreast of the clatter and roar of motorcycles. But this is no more the city of Newars, either. Those who sell us tea, and squat all around the chowk with their newfangled wares of mushrooms, tofu, lettuce, plastic water guns for the festival of Holi – these are from other parts of the country. When I marvel at the sculpture of a fish not far from the temple to Annapurna, the goddess of plenty, a lady standing close by mumbles, “Jal-Phish” – water-fish. Nepali and English, the old and the new, it makes sense and it does not, not at all. I spot a neon sign in the shape of a guitar beckoning to me from one of the radial lanes, and it flickers at me, what are you doing there? Other signs and shouts undermine the romantic cliché of Asan still bandied about in the media and in people’s memories – the medieval market town of a Kathmandu morning, the careworn peasant emerging from the mist under a yoke of emerald greens.

Golden opportunity to learn about Buddhism in a short time!

Happy Holi happy Holi! Sai sai rupiya happy Holi happy Holi!

We take refuge in Paltanghar, a courtyard off the arm leading to New Road (or Basantapur, the temple and palace square of the Malla kings), but not before sighting the tile art of the French artist Invader, a species of Pacman stuck on the side of a century-old edifice. Once within the pigeon-cooed yard, and through to another, we stand before what remains of a collapsed wing, and forget not just Invader, but the whole market, its hubbub melting and fading to nothingness.

Here the quiet cushions us, a dozing dog starts and barks, and I slowly speak of how, when the earthquake jolted me out of my ruined high-rise, I feared for the old city that I so rarely visited. Here people were buried, and many more across the Kathmandu Valley, but the city stands still with the help of wood and iron poles against its listing torso. Those houses that did not make it stand stripped to startling interiors of pink and blue and yellow, and we stand taking pictures of sights that were never meant to be seen. We are all imposters – no person is in his time or place here – and we shield ourselves from what this means by recording our alienation.

Reflections by Rabi Thapa