Palpasa Café

Wagle's Nepal is split between a capital of cafés, galleries and easel painting and a countryside torn by the Maoist People's War. A painter named Drishya moves through Thamel, the old Durbar Square and the hill above the valley, then travels west into the war zone where he meets Palpasa; the violence he witnesses there follows him back to Kathmandu. The map runs from the city out to the mid-western hills that were the heartland of the insurgency.

Drishya

Thamel

The city

The painter's daily round begins in the tangle of streets that has been Kathmandu's tourist and café district for decades. It is where the artist talks art and politics over coffee, and where the easy cosmopolitan life of the capital sits at an odd distance from the war in the hills.

Drishya's Kathmandu

explicit Thamel is named in the novel; this marks the centre of the tourist quarter, its warren of cafés, bars and galleries.

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Drishya

Kathmandu Durbar Square

The city

The temples and palace courtyards of the old city give the painter his subject and his sense of place. This UNESCO-listed square of pagoda roofs and carved wood is the heart of the Kathmandu that Drishya paints and argues over before the journey west.

Drishya's Kathmandu

explicit The old royal square is a real, named landmark of the capital; coordinates mark the palace complex at Basantapur.

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Drishya

The painter's studio

The city

Much of the love story turns on the studio where the painter works and where Palpasa, newly back from years in America, sits for and spars with him. The novel keeps the address vague; it belongs to the working artist's Kathmandu of rented rooms near the centre of the old city.

Drishya's studio, Kathmandu

inferred Wagle gives Drishya a studio in Kathmandu but no fixed address, so this sites it at a representative point in the central old-city artist quarter near Kantipath.

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Drishya

Swayambhu

The city

The stupa on its wooded hill looks out over the whole valley, a vantage that fixes the capital in the mind before the story leaves it. From up here the painter's Kathmandu is a bowl of brick and haze, calm above a country sliding toward violence.

Above the valley

explicit Swayambhu, the ancient stupa on the hill west of the city, is a named Kathmandu landmark; coordinates mark the main stupa.

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Drishya

The war reaches the city

The city

The book opens and closes with the painter back in the capital, and with news that he has been seized by security forces and has vanished. The violence he witnessed in the hills has followed him home, and the safe distance the city seemed to keep from the war turns out to be an illusion.

The Kathmandu frame

inferred The novel's frame is set in Kathmandu but names no single spot for Drishya's disappearance, so this marks a representative point in the central city around New Road and Ratna Park.

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