As a child growing up in Kathmandu, I was once given a set of Batman and Robin dolls and instructed to give either one to my favourite playmate and friend Victor. We were kindergartners, and while I fully understood the mythology of Batman and Robin and that they both fought on the side of good, I devised an alternative story. I gave Victor the Robin doll, and invented a game which involved Batman and Robin apparently fighting to the death. Yelling, “Die, die,” and “Boom, boom,” and “KAPOW!”, the vocabulary of warfare I had picked up from the comics, I made them enemies and I made Batman win. Victor, the sweetest playmate I have ever had, took it all in good humour, although I do seem to recall him saying at one point, “are they really supposed to fight?” At the end of the day, he went home happily with his only slightly battered doll.
This was Kathmandu in the early 1970s, when I was very, very young and lived in a time and place that I have since tended to colour with a tinge of nostalgia. Cat Stevens, who was not yet Yusuf Islam, had popularised the idea of the place with a song that both misspelt and mispronounced its name: it's spelt “Kathmandu,” not “Katmandu,” and is pronounced “Kahthmandu,” not “Catmandu.” I was, even as a child, strongly aware of the mystique of the city – how could you miss it, in the eyes of the enraptured and immensely stoned hippies who wandered around like grungy flies floating around the temples and stupas that dotted the landscape?
