Anyone who lived in Kathmandu in the late 80s or the early 2000s has most probably ridden, or at least seen, the black Bajaj auto-rickshaws, famously known as kaalo tempo (‘black tempo’). Small but loud, the diesel-engine three-wheelers chugged out smoke like Fidel Castro smoking a fat Cuban cigar. These little things with a handle-bar for a steering rattled and shook as the drivers maneuvered them through Kathmandu's nooks and crannies, their mechanical meters cackling with a ring, showing the cost of the ride as they moved. And the sound they made, like a half-horsepower water pump overdriven to go deep boring—they didn’t even need horns to shoo the pedestrians away.
These are from the memories I have. Otherwise, not much can be found on them. At least not in the written form. But there are people who have fond memories of the kaalo tempos of Kathmandu. I remember riding them from my bus stop at Gyaneshwor to my hangout at Bhatbhateni during my school days (circa 2000). My friend Bardan and I—He refuses to use his last name because he's given up the “thug life”. And so have I—paid Rs 15 for the ride every day and without the risk of being seen loitering about in school uniforms; we didn’t mind paying the money. The kaalo tempos were cheaper than taxis and with the leather curtains attached to the soft-top leather bodies, they were completely opaque when put down, and gave us that obscurity we desired.
Poster of Nepali Babu
“Rs 11 is what I paid for my ride from Saraswatithan, Lazimpat to the Radisson Hotel,” Jackie Taylor, APEX’s own expat columnist recalls. “I totally miss them. They were fastish, cheap and easy,” she adds. “Not great in the rain though. But then the roads were better back then.” When asked if she had any photos of these tempos, she replies, “I doubt as a normal person anyone would be taking pictures with a tempo. Do you take photos of taxies?”
If only I knew they’d soon be gone. If only we had phone cameras and Instagram back then. I might have a few photos with the iconic Tuk Tuks in Bangkok though. Now I realize that the kaalo tempos were for Kathmandu what the Tuks Tuks are for present-day Bangkok. A means of transport that Thailand has been able to commercialize and merchandize.
Another expat Glenice Tulip, who has lived in Kathmandu for 18 years over a period of 30 years starting in 1986, shares her own memories of the black tempos. “When I first came to live in Nepal, the black tempos were my preferred mode of travel,” she says. “The down-side of course was that they were uncomfortable, under-powered and smelt of the fuel they used. Many times I had to get out and help the driver push the tempo up a hill. Trav-elling in them at night was also haz-ardous, as they had very dim lights, and were open to the elements. Still, they were cheap and always available.”
She narrates a few incidents with black tempos during her stay here. One of them is from between 1986- 1990. “One cold and windy day, I was huddled in a tempo while the driver went to pay for fuel. Sud-denly a dirty hand appeared at the front, not realizing I was there, and attempted to open the ‘glove box’ where the driver kept his money,” she recalls. “I wasn't having that so I slapped the hand hard; the owner screamed like a stuck pig just as the driver appeared.
The driver thanked me and tried to give me money which I wouldn't take, and he wouldn’t take any mon-ey from me. I left the fare on the seat when I got out.” Tulip also has a story of watching a speeding tempo disappear into a large hole in the middle of the road, and then found lying upside down like a dying bee-tle, stuck in mud. But the story is too long to narrate in one go.
Singer, actor and filmmaker Asif Shah remembers the kaalo tempos as the “Nepali Babu” tempo—made famous by a film of the same name released in 1999 with Nepal’s own superstar Bhuvan KC playing a tem-po driver. “It was Tootle for us back then in terms of the price,” he says. “I still ride them whenever I am in Mumbai. Reminds me of the old days in Kathmandu.”
There also was a clever hack that Shah says worked for him every time he took the tempo. “If you pressed the wire leading to the meter pretty hard, the numbers on it changed slower and thus the fare came cheap-er,” he says. (Wish I could turn back time). I tried getting in touch with super-star KC to talk to him about his expe-riences on kaalo tempos. “I’m in an important meeting, I’ll call you back raja,” he told me. Thrice. He never returned the call and then stopped answering me altogether. Well, the superstar life ain’t easy it seems.
Banned because of the ‘pollution’ they caused, and displaced by EVs called ‘safa tempos,’ the lively lit-tle three-wheelers vanished from Kathmandu’s streets. But the mem-ory of them will probably remain in the minds of the Kathmanduites and expats who took them to go around the city. We still get to see the auto-rickshaws in Delhi, Mumbai and other cities of neighboring India, but the ride is never as joyful as it was riding them through the streets of Kathmandu.
