Going by definition, a Ring Road is a road or series of connected roads encircling a town or a city. A lot of cities are encased by their own ring roads and Kathmandu too has its own motorable border, known locally as the Chakrapath. Kathmandu’s Chakrapath connects most outskirts of the Valley to the city centre. Today, the Ring Road is as much as part of the city’s identity as the hills that surround the Valley and its many historic temples and neighbourhoods.

As someone who only moved to Kathmandu for higher education after my SLC, I vividly remember the first time I travelled through the Chakrapath. Seated alongside my mother in a taxi, we had travelled from Kalanki to Ekantakuna that day, making a long half circle on this circular road. A boy from a village who had never seen such wide roads in my life, or travelled at such speed—that too seated in a comfortable taxi-I remember being absolutely awestruck. How easy life must be for people in Kathmandu I had thought; look at those tall buildings huddled in an endless cluster; all the people moving around so busily, everywhere! I was so enamored, I remember my mother telling me to close my mouth. I had been gaping and gawking in awe.

Eventually, I would travel the Ring Road a countless times as I began to live and study in Kathmandu. And with time, I changed, as did my perspective on this once magical road. Now, every time I travel the Ring Road, I see it for what it is—the roads are claustrophobically crowded, the air dense with dust and pollution. In a way, the Ring Road has come to represent all the hardship an ‘outsider’ has to live through trying to make it in the Valley—it is a mirror that vividly reflects the gaping disparity between those that have it all and those that are struggling to make even the most basic of needs meet.

One can understand how cruel life can be in the Capital if you make one circumambulation of the Chakrapath. At various chowks you will run across barefooted children holding laminated A4 papers begging from those in shiny SUVs. Others are not begging but are equally desperate trying to pawn off their wares of water bottles, Kurkures, bedsheets, or corn. The sidewalks too are lined up by street vendors looking around wearily for their next customer—whatever they are selling caked in a thick layer of dust. Ring Road makes you realise that life here in Kathmandu is not as straightforward as you once dreamed it would be as a bright-eyed teen migrating here for the first time; it is in fact more tangled than the knotted up wires that dangle dangerously along the roads.

For me, the Ring Road represents the other side of Kathmandu. It is a Kathmandu that you will not find at Durbar Marg or the Durbar Squares. The Ring Road is where the salt of the earth live, and sometimes die.

In the years that I have been in Kathmandu, I have changed, and so has my perspective of Kathmandu. Kathmandu, and particularly Ring Road, might not be that shiny city on a hill that it once was, but it still has a certain peace and calm about it—not literally, of course, but figuratively. Travelling on the Ring Road on a crammed public vehicle, you are strangely all by yourself. And looking out at the people who are struggling to make ends meet is a reminder that at least you have it better than countless other people, that someone would give up a limb and a half to be in your position. Travelling on the Ring Road might be the most hellish part of your day, but it can also be one of the most inspiring; it is all, I suppose, a matter of perspective.

Thapa is currently studying Civil Engineering at IoE, Pulchowk Campus