Book review: Kathmandu by Thomas Bell

So inimitable is Thomas Bell’s style and his unerring eye for the type of detail other writers might ignore, for fear their narrative might lead to stagnation, that Kathmandu is truly a one off, for I doubt if anybody else is capable of the writer’s bloody minded persistence and his facility for telling it as it.

It soon becomes evident that the extraordinary in the greatest city of the Himalayas may nonetheless be common place, such as the myriad traditions which govern the intricate and — to the Western world — unfathomably cruel caste system, or the very real presence of gods and goddesses, whose expositions by Bell are the equal of the superb The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple.

I flew into Calcutta reading The Age of Kali, a bunch of essays distilling a decade’s travel in India, and whose title is a reference to the Hindu concept of time being quartered into four epochs: the continent is now in the age of Kali, an age — in Dalrymple’s words — of corruption and disintegration, and his book, beginning with the slaughter by untouchables of high caste villagers in the village of Barra, is bookended by bloodshed. Or, at the very least, that is my memory of it.