Millennia have washed past since Manjushree cleft the valley with his flaming sword but it was only last winter I made my way to Chobhar, dropping onto the ringroad to Kirtipur through a forgotten side road out of Sanepa. Except for the burgeoning numbers of concrete residences spilling out the centre and filling up all the wrinkles and folds of the valley, in evidence in this southwest corner too, Kirtipur appears forgotten as well.

We drove past the battered, tattered gates of the national university, then up the hill to come upon Taudaha (past the tiny, painted, bamboo cottages for young lovers, the signpost sporting a nubile, barely clad maiden belying its claim to be a Family Garden Resort), an asymmetrical large pond where a giant Nag is believed to lurk (a semi-divine escapee from Manjushree’s draining of the Valley waters), in reality a winter stopover for avian tourists.

This day of dreary, cloudy early Magh the depleted waters sat stolidly amongst worn hillocks upon which perched our little restaurant. But the looming olive mountains to our back surveyed that rarest of things in the Valley today – space. Today, scores of wild ducks floated on Taudaha while large black cormorants weighed down the two bare trees on the tiny island to the left.

After the birds had chirruped their evening roost, we drove over to the gorge itself, heralded by an all-too-familiar stench. That Bagmati, viewed as a springing fall down the face of Shivapuri (even the mountain can barely be made out through the winter smog now), makes its inglorious exit here.

There’s something classically wrong about this view out the Valley. You tread onto the narrow suspension bridge, and look down to see what you have already wrinkled your nose at – the black waters of Kathmandu’s river, swirling with white effluent. You dread what you might see if you gaze too deeply into its viscosity and step back off, smiling weakly. If ever there was a photo op over a river, this is one to put on the bilboards, except this dystopia straight out of a comicbook is not some imagined nightmare, it’s Nepal 2008, the ancient temple of Jal Binayak perversely framed by the rusting hulk of the Himal Cement Factory on the one, the Bikhumati on the other.