When I stopped at this little cottage for a breather, she had just prepared the Supla and placed a clean burning coal on top of it. I asked her if I could take her picture smoking it. She declined but gently placed her Sulpa to rest on the wall, pointed at it and said, ‘I know you actually want to take a picture of this.’
Sulpa is a Nepali pipe made of pottery. A coal is used to keep the tamakhu burning in from the top. A wet cloth is wrapped around the bottom as a kind of filter, and the smoke is drawn through that. Sulpa is widely smoked in the far west region of Nepal.
