On a cool, cloudy Tuesday morning, Shakti Keshari Upadhyay, a coin collector, stops by the Laxmi Narayan temple in Basantapur, looking for a coin minted during the reign of Prithivi Narayan Shah. There he finds an old man, seated on a chakati, surrounded by coins of all sorts. The man, who later identifies himself as Gambhir Dhoj Joshi, whips out an old, rare and rusty coin. It’s a one rupee dabal, but it may cost a lakh or two.

Motorcycles squeeze through the throngs of people. Locals walk by, unaware of the happenings in the small temple. Joshi proceeds to show Upadhyay other antiques: coins from the Lichchavi and Malla era, Roman, Greek and British coins, gold coins, blobs of small silver coins which, at some point in the past had amounted to one fourth of a paisa. Upadhyay looks through them all with a magnifier and in the end, decides on the 1,500 year old Lichchavi-era coins—some of the oldest Nepali coins currently available.

Gambhir Dhoj Joshi, an antique coin trader, carries on his father’s legacy. A few feet beside the Laxmi Narayan Temple where he has setup shop, is another man—Anil Raj Shrestha, who has runs a similar business. “Gambhir’s family has done it for two generations; we have done it for three,” says Shrestha.

According to him, when Gorkha soldiers who returned from India had at the time no means of exchanging the currency they carried. The first “sarafis”—as the traders have come to be known as—were, thus, born and according to Shrestha, “This was a time before banks and money exchangers. We served as both.”

Eventually as Nepal Bank, the first bank in Nepal, took over control, the sarafis’ licenses for trading and exchanging currency were revoked. Afterwards and over time, they turned into repositories of old coins ideal for antique collectors, both foreign and Nepali. Also, these entrepreneurs continued to supply coins to the adherents of a Nepali tradition of laying copper coins in the foundations of new houses—a tradition that continues even today despite the vast change in construction materials and techniques.

Shrestha lauds the practicality of these coin repositories. Gambhir Dhoj Joshi, however, professes that passion drives him, claiming that he has tried his hand at many trades but that he always comes back to coins. “And its working,” he says, “I’m making a living out of a hobby; I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Joshi himself enjoys a personal collection of rare, antique coins. “The fewer they are, the more valuable they become. You would think that the oldest coins, those of the Lichchavi era, would be the most expensive. But they’re not. When engineers excavate the earth to build houses or roads, they find them everywhere—Ghyampos full infact.”

A gold coin is naturally expensive. A rare gold coin, even more. But Joshi values the historical importance of these coins more than their monetary value. A particular coin with a hole in the centre lay on Joshi’s chakati. Joshi picks it up, and explains that these were made out of the husks of bullet cartridges in 2012 BS, through which a bullet had penetrated, making the hole.

Joshi then opens his safe and pulls out some tiny blobs of silver. He claims that the blobs are the smallest coins that were ever made in Nepal, each was called a “daam”. It was so small that the wind would blow it away, hence its name: Phukkadam. According to Joshi, each of these, worth one fourth of a paisa (or one in 400 parts of a rupee), would buy nearly a kilogram of rice when they were minted, and people would complain of inflation if it bought any less.

After accounts of bullets and harsh economies, Joshi tells a tale of vanity. Holding up another coin with impressions of faces, Joshi says that during the era of Bhupatindra Malla in 808 Nepal Sambat, Laxmi Narayan Joshi, the prime minister, had enough influence to mint coins with an image of the king on one side and himself on the other, and so he did. He built several temples at the time. Obsessed with his own name, he built one on behalf of the goddess Laxmi, but named it after himself as Laxmi Narayan temple. Joshi was sitting under one such temple.

“If you track each coin to their past, each is filled with historical grandeur. Some important ones may even be capable of filling an entire book with information,” says Joshi, “Educators often purchase coins in order to teach their pupils about history.  The stories these coins hold are endless. They are the embodiment of Nepal’s rich history, especially of the Malla era, a thriving time when kings competed among each other in order to make their territories beautiful and prosperous.”

From Joshi’s account, it is obvious that he, as one of the coin collectors, pursues the hobby not for the coins themselves but for the historical and cultural value they possess. In fact, an entire organisation has been established for the cause—Nepal Numismatic Society, of which Joshi, Shrestha as well as Upadhyay—the connoisseur who was interested in the Lichchavi era coins—are members.

Joshi and Shrestha would face a purple patch, however, after the earthquake struck in April 25, 2015. Joshi said that he was fortunately away from the devastation of Basantapur when the quake hit, but he had foreseen the impending boom in his business. Ex-clients came back to Joshi and Shrestha, desperate for money, meaning to sell the antiquities back to them. They had no choice, nor did Joshi and Shrestha.

Unmarried at 63, Joshi says that he, probably, is the last person from his family that will continue the tradition. Shrestha professes similar thoughts and mentions that all of his children want to go abroad instead. According to the two, there is only one more trader managing a similar sarafi in Kathmandu. He too, is in Basantapur. The sarafis have long disappeared from Patan and Bhaktapur.

Coins slowly disappear as prices continue to rise. Except for conductors, commuters, and other few traders, most would consider them redundant—an extra weight on wallets. Eventually the remaining three sarafi traders too, will disappear, and with prospects of their descendants continuing bleak, the traditional trading of coins appears to be doomed as well.

But perhaps a few decades down the line, after coins go out of circulation, a curious mind will find a rusty, rare one rupee coin stowed away in a corner, glance at the rough map of Nepal and the impressions of mountains on it and wonder: What was it like back in those days? Perhaps then, another sarafi will be born.