April 9th, 2019, 10:33 am

A* is a nine-year-old boy dressed in a red jumper and blue pyjamas with snot dripping from his nose and a red truck held carefully in his hands. He runs around and round the platform of a newly restored building(?) pushing his truck excitedly singing “The wheels of the bus go round and round”. An elderly man sits next to the platform on the ground with a meagre display of wares- some local vegetables- misshapen cucumbers, tomatoes with chilli paste. He cleans the vegetables with water from an old plastic bottle and stirs up the chilli paste. Two local guides are showing groups of tourists and photographing them next to various idols and sculptures. Young children keep passing by- hopefully they are on their way to school. The guide is talking about the temple now. A* walks up to me, fascinated by my careful watching of him and he realises I am studying him. He asks me if I am drawing anything nice- to which I have no answer, only a slight pang of guilt. After a minute of casual exchange, he gets to business and asks me for money and I refuse firmly. He is bored now so he disappears behind the gate of the square for a bit.
A* returns and offers a ten rupee note to the old man and gets some salad. Having been refused money by me, he walks up to me to show off his newly acquired food cheekily with no hard feelings. Two young men in their early twenties sit on the platform now. In the background somewhere, reconstruction is happening. A stockpile of sand and aggregate lies carelessly next to the Sri Padma Secondary School.
A man dressed in a dark blue uniform with a face mask and a cap sweeps the rainwater that has collected in the undulating crevices of the paving in the square. His long-handled broom makes a swish-swish sound. He stops to help a Buddhist monk take a selfie and then reorients him on his way. Another worker is dressing stone pieces- the clinks of his chisel rhythmically and reassuringly in the background and the sharp sound of stone cutting can also be heard in the background.

A new temporary territory is created around the temple by loosely assembled bamboo poles and aluminium corrugate sheets that separates this site as “work” from the rest of the square. The props for the National Art Museum are in two neat rows and they demarcate an invisible line as well, though this line is regularly breached as various people make offerings to the Vishnu idol. Why is one deity stained red and not the other? According to a casual encounter I had with a local guide, who watched me watching him for a while, this particular deity is Narsinghmahadevji and once someone prays to one deity, everyone follows.

So many daily professions are being supported in the square, from building, rebuilding, guarding, watching, feeding, vending, guiding. I look at this square as the workplace of all these people and suddenly the square shifts. It becomes a performative exercise, where so many actors simultaneously must enact out their roles in order for the square to become heritage. Otherwise, it is merely a collection of old things- some beautiful, some quite mundane and the square is simply a pathway and a crossing between other destinations. So many buildings are closed- locked and inaccessible- without the guards guarding them- who would even know that they are important? Without the guides to dramatically knit stories of valour and craftsmanship how would the hapless tourist know which buildings needed to be photographed more carefully than the rest? Indeed, the local teenagers who sit on the hundreds of levels in the squares, taking mindless selfies, no longer care which heritage building is in their backdrop. As long as the light is good and the angle is right, everything is beautiful.

The Durbar Square is now a workplace but its also the local hangout- sitting is an activity taken seriously in urban Nepal. Old men sit, young teens sit, everyone is watching everyone else, or just sitting and taking in the sounds, watching the dogs break into the occasional fights over territories.

A guard and two other friends just brought in seven chairs and four desks and arranged them in a semi meaningful way. I notice they follow loosely a section of a hexagon that one can see in the paving. I can’t tell what this line means. Some army (?) men walk towards the desks. Some event is being arranged, though I don’t yet have the familiarity to just go and ask.
I start watching the reconstruction of the temple in front of me again. I remember it vaguely from a previous trip- it was a nice temple, I think I have a photograph somewhere. It completed the skyline- pagoda, column and Nagara temple are so quintessentially Nepali to me as an architect as they probably are to every single foreign architect. Of course I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the temple or which God it was dedicated to and even now- when I can simply get up and go around to the large poster sign- I don’t. Instead I am fascinated by the rubble- can I even call it that? What becomes rubble and what is ‘building material’? Who makes these choices? Do these choices differ from place to place? Who decides what to discard? This is not the fancy anastylosis I read about- I don’t see any expert cataloguing each stone. There are just three men who don’t seem to be even talking to each other, each has his own role. One man just shaved off some edges of a stone that may or may not have been part of the original- I cannot tell. New bricks are kept within the territory of the reconstruction and I have only seen grey river sand, not ‘earth’ or mud- so I wonder what ‘traditional’ practices are being retained. Does it matter? Not to these three- they seem to be making small decisions all on their own. Small or momentous- depending on what this building is.
These three men are invisible, much like the guy with the broom and the guards. They have been working since morning- noisily. Only an occasional tourist will photograph the rubble and then they may accidently feature in the photograph. Otherwise, they are not heritage- no guide is pointing to them and explaining what is going on.
Children play in the square with minimal supervision using the many steps and plinths as hiding and running places. Where are these children from? Its hard to tell the tourists apart from the locals sometimes, because none of them are really interested in looking around them at all this world heritage, but only in annoying the pigeons and the dogs and occasionally an adult with pleas for cotton candy or other more pressing needs. Of course, their adults are easy to tell apart. The tourists will chide their children but also buy them whatever is being sold, but the locals neither scold nor reward.

I move to Taumadhi after a particularly insistent pair of guides annoy me into giving up my comfortable perch. The chariots are being assembled for the Jatra in the Taumadhi Square. A different version of construction/ reconstruction, assembling/ disassembling but the rituals are much clearer here. There is probably something to the whole everyday versus the specialised ritual.

Taumadhi was always dominated by the Nyaptola Temple for me- that’s all I really remembered from before- and why not- it is so towering, so massive and imposing, its hard to take in anything else. Yet now I finally look at the ground. So many plinths and platforms. Some plinths have become part of the ground, while other plinths and remains are sacred. There is a religious hierarchy at play here- but right now I have no way of discerning its logic.

I don’t stay here very long. I head up to the café for some refreshment and watch everything from the balcony of the Nyaptola Café. But I am tired now, so I head back through the Durbar Square. The event with the chairs is now almost finished- something municipal is underway- some lectures and sermons are being given to a scattered and disinterested audience. I am not even mildly curious about this, so I attempt to walk back to my hotel- only I have forgotten which route to take. I somehow end up a kilometre in the wrong direction crossing the Dattreya Square but too distracted to take anything in.