A casino had just opened. Power blackouts occurred daily. In the tourist quarter's shops one now saw as many Kashmiris, refugees from their own upheaval, as Tibetans. No longer was Kathmandu quite the place I remembered, and yet every familiar feature gave me a kind of happiness. The bats hung upside-down in those very same trees across from the palace.
Home is still there, now muffled beneath new layers of experience.
In 1994 I stopped in Nepal in March on my way to India, and in July on my way back to Bangkok. Throughout these months I followed the story of the long-looming U.S. invasion of Haiti in the International Herald Tribune , USA Today , and the Indian papers and magazines. Inexorably and to my horror, a country I took personally was becoming a daily news story worldwide. Just how small the world had become came home to me the day in Srinagar that I read in the Hindustan Times about the new military-installed Haitian president's having declared a state of emergency. Even in a remote mountain valley with problems of its own in the far north of the Indian subcontinent, I could not get away from Haiti.