Saturday is a holiday. It is cool to roam around with friends when you don’t have anything special to do on holidays. On one of many Saturdays, Subash, my friend, and I were on the apparent hinterland, the name of which was Bhattidada.

The sky was overcast, and at noon, we reached there. Ten minutes of average speed vehicle ride to the South-East of Dhulikhel gets you to what seemed like a small picturesque paradise perched on the hill. Sadly enough, there were many hells emanating as rustic pubs open 24/7, serving liquors and weeds. Foreigners and locals alike indulged day and night in intoxication, in the semi-conscious state. In one way you could say a door’s threshold separated an idyllic Nirvana from Hades.

Long, curly haired red-heads were all huddled together inside a congested tavern around shot tattered wooden tables and loosely spread rugged mattress. A seemingly millennial meliorist when propped out his head to look up at the glass ceiling just happened to flash the wonderful gushing of the slowly flowing smokes in shapes, first in the ring with thin rims, gradually expanding to form a doughnut and finally wasting into parts to disappear in the dim-lit air. There were stale whiffs, non-dwindling aroma of burnt stuff, dead cigarettes stubs in the ceramic ashtray.

“Heck! It’s extinguished,” thus noted a Caucasian in a permed goatee. Blabbers, gossips and chatters ensued. The rutty denim with its buttock half-seen muddied insinuated his hipster imagery and ultra-libertarianism. A not-so-long-ago befriended Nepali bloke raised a red jug full of white liquor and offered a big round of toast for applause, but all in a nihilistic ambience. “Hell with the politicos, and the same with the strikes.” They were living the present forgetting past, dreaming future to be like just what was then.

A brunette in the mid-twenties left her distaff chunks seated at a slope to the East of the grass-ground and approached the gang in indulging in ecstasy, her footsteps swagigng and joints quivering. Her rubicund cheeks exuded a deep feministic tenderness, still unspoiled by a blatant walk of crusader.

“Boungiorno,” The obvious Italian stereotype. “Boungiorno Principessa.” Retorted the mavericks far flung across the continents.“Do you do drugs, dude?” She was signaling to me even if the answers were from the stoned bambinos. Meters far from the crowd of the crackpots and standing aloof, I were as if unbalanced, and a suspect for the apothecary hopped-up in the job process who beheld me like a spoilsport.