Fresh from the Gokyo trail, alternating between explications of myself (to bemused locals) and my country (to curious phareners), the latter peppered with exhortations to try the tongba! the chhyaang! – imagine my indignation once we’d twistered ourselves around a mini-table on the rooftop of the Anacha bhatti to be told yes, we’d get our sekuwas, our egg baras, our alu ko achar and our kachela, but there was no chhyaang. Eh? What’s that? No chhyaang in a bhatti?
So it was true! That dwarf of a Home Minister was really getting on my nerves now. The dance bars? The footpath people? The casinos? They don’t sell anything I want. But moonshine? Are we to be condemned to drink shite Nepali lager and worse Indo-whisky at the expense of our homegrown and well, well-tested local brews?
Still, the view of the Krishna Mandir flush in front of Anacha is superlative. It’s one thing to be craning about with your camera while motorbikes vroom you away, another to be sitting back admiring the intricate stone figurework washing down some crunchy, spicy sekuwa with a bowl of…?
It was time to move on. Indeed, it was incumbent upon us to get to the bottom of this sorry business. Where was the chhyaang? No less than a bhatti crawl would do. We paid the sahuni, stoutly surrounded by her wares, a pot of money, and a large flat tawa on which she turned half a dozen egg baras over while shouting at her charges.
We crossed Patan Durbar Square in the fading gold of the evening, arrowed for Chasal, where, my pharen-local friend informed me, a classy bhatti awaited, buffalo testicles at the ready. But just as soon as we’d dipped into one of the alleys we espied a hariyo parda. We peeked in – a tiny, grimy cove sucked us in. Steel bowls of chhyaang were quickly doled out under the smiles of the regulars. Thin, but plentiful. Indifferent plates of chewy meat made their way towards us. In a circle around the stove a family conversed in Newari as they ate and drank, the littlest of all cradling her own littlest plate of meat. And what plopped from above? A starling, peering out her mud nest on the blackened rafters.
A few more twists and turns in the dark we burst upon the Chasal bhatti, an altogether grander, dozen-tabled affair housed in a roofed-in courtyard, replete with posters of stupas and tigers reclining before waterfalls. More birds, hens this time, cleaning up under the tables. The chhyaang was altogether richer, the meat yet enticing after all our labours, and the ambience, classic. Here the men of Nepal drink and eat and talk and laugh.
I’d love to tell you how to get here. Only I don’t remember. Try Chasal Chowk next to Patan Durbar Square. This would be my local if I were local to Patan. Where’s yours?