Top Photo: goat sacrifice to Durga, the fierce form of the female divinity. Its blood is being sprayed straight onto a rice mill to bless it. Courtesy of Alden Towler.
Photo at Right: me winning a bootleg Diesel T-Shirt at the Bhorjyang village raffle! I'll say it again: at least I didn't win the goat.
Dashain, the biggest annual holiday for most Nepalis, is in its final throes. After all the animal sacrifice and feasting, these final days are more like a hangover than anything: quiet (everyone's still out of the city, staying at their home villages) and full of headaches (everything's closed).
Jumping at the chance to get out of the valley for a few days, I went with my friend and roomate Alden Towler to celebrate Dashain at a village in Khavre district, on the invitation of some friends of ours from the local fruit and juice shop. Their family, like many in Nepal, is large and extended family, with seven adult siblings each with kids. Being neither genealogically astute nor on top of the complexities of Nepali kinship terminology, I had no real chance of keeping everyone straight. Be that as it may, on Monday morning Alden, myself and 15 or so of the family all piled into a reserved microbus and headed for the hills. Through the pockmarked roads of the city, the horrendous smog of Koteshwor, past Thimi and Surya Vinayak and out, through Banepa, Dhulikhel, out into the country. Originally Alden and I had hatched a scheme to walk to this village over the course of two days, having heard from our hosts that it was a mere hour's walk from Dhulikhel. Manageable. Hence our surprise when the micro continued on another hour and a half past Dhulikhel--it would have been a hell of a walk. When we finally did disembark, the hike up to the village of Bhorjyang, though a mere trifle by local standards, was enough to satisfy my restless legs. We waded across a river in pairs, small children clinging to parents' backs, then switchbacked up a hill jutting up at an angle of at least 50 degrees. We kept climbing for another 40 minutes, through scrubby, rocky ground hosting clumps of lemongrass, amalaki (amla) trees, baby pipals that will provide blessed shade for the next generation of villagers. Past the scrubby hillside and into more inhabitable terrain, we found ourselves in the midst of fields--buckwheat, peanuts, mustard (for oilseed), kidney beans and other legumes climbing last season's maize stalks. Rice paddy at stages from green to gold, getting close to mature. Fruit trees lined the rocky footpath: luscious cherimoyas and small, tangy yellow-green guavas this time of year. A couple of family members showed me some useful wild plants: a bitter flower used to treat fever, another low-growing mint-like plant, also bitter, for jaundice, some small red berries, sweet and astringent, for diarrhoea. Also a weirdly ubiquitous shrub that didn't produce any food or medicine but whose stalks, properly snapped and drawn out, can be used to blow bubbles. We moved aside to let villagers carrying enormous loads of fodder pass us on the narrow trail. It's rare in Nepal to see ruminants on pasture; land level enough is terraced for fields, so the remaining steep hillsides become the source of foliage that's cut and carried to goats, cattle, and water buffaloes at least twice a day. Some of these villagers gave us sidelong looks, and some seemed to avoid our eyes. The kids, meanwhile, stared unabashedly but without malice at these tall white interlopers.
We arrived at the house of our host family just before dusk. Like most of the village houses, it was three stories, built of stone and plastered on the inside with red earth. Few windows, earthen hearth. First floor for living and for goats and chickens (on one side), second for sleeping, third for storing crops (hundreds of dried ears of maize). The roof was of closely-fitting tiles, though many neighboring houses had thatch. Since our hosts were wealthy be local standards, they also had a small solar panel powering a fluorescent bulb, and they had built small addition consisting of a toilet room below and a tiny extra bedroom above. Our quarters. The room was high enough for me to stand up in (always a question), and had a bed with a couple blankets on top of its plank for a mattress. A little wider than a twin, and we were to share it. Notions of personal space are one of the first of Western cultural conceipts to go out the window.
As soon as we came in and greeted the patriarch and matriarch of the family, we all feasted on fruit and were soon served good hot daal-bhaat. Everything we ate the whole time, except for spices, salt and tea, came from the family's fields: rice and soupy kidney bean daal; pumpkin, bitter gourd, iscoos, mustard greens; blisteringly hot achars with nutty little seeds (not sesame) ground up with tiny jeera khorsaaani (little "cumin peppers"). And meat--but that's still to come.
Like everyone in the village, our host family was Tamang. Tamang is an ethno-linguistic designation, referring to a few hundred thousand hill dwellers of Tibeto-Burman stock. They are mostly Buddhist but like everyone in this part of the world have been assimilated into the caste system--to the extent that they won't accept water from the Kamis (untouchable blacksmiths) who live down the hill, and that they celebrate Dashain. I was somewhat surprised and definitely happy to see that Tamang identity, at least in Bhorjyang, is thriving: our family spoke more Tamang than Nepali, leaving Alden and I scratching our heads. When a language goes moribund the first sign is amongst the kids, who from an early age will preferentially speak the more dominant, prestifious language to the exclusion of their ancestral tongue. Like English on a global scale, Nepali is such a 'predator' language throughout the eastern Himalayan foothills (in India's Darjeeling district and Sikkim as well as in Nepal itself). But here in the village some of the kids didn't even speak Nepali, though the schools would remedy that soon enough (and do their best to discourage Tamang). The teens were proud to be Tamang, as evidenced by their musical preferences: a single tape of Tamang hiphop was blasted on infinite repeat from our house. It wasn't so bad, the first 18 times through: old-school simplistic rhythms and rhyme schemes against a melodic female vocal-laced beat. The only respite, except for the nighttime hours, was another tape of Hindi film songs and a couple tracks of filthy Southern rap that none of the Tamangs could understand. Alden and I exchanged smiles, shrugs of disbelief.
The only thing I knew about Dashain coming into it was that it's a festival honoring the fierce goddess Durga by spilling blood in her honor. Sure enough, our first morning in Bhorjyang we wandered forth amongst the homesteads and stumbled upon a group of kids, mostly, clustered around a great water buffalo tied to a post. It's not fair to say we stumbled, I suppose, since our host father had impressed on us clearly enough that today we would watch them 'cut' the big beasts. As the designated slaughterers made their last-minute preparations, little kids clung to my pant legs, afraid to look but too curious or horrified not to. As for me, I had slaughtered chickens in Vermont, dozens of them, and even a goat once, though that was hard. This was to be a ritual, a cultural practice. I expected a certain amount of ceremony, so the great arcing first blow with an enormous curved blade almost caught me off guard. The great beast seemed to startle, make some half-noise: and it's neck was missing a great wedge, and a dark red glistening mess was popping out grotesquely. The second swing hacked deeper, almost through, and the animal fell. Another few seconds and they had the head off, the blood draining into a big pot, the feet still kicking. The sheer essential violence of the act hit me hard, and I found myself breaking a cold sweat, my heart racing. I walked away quickly, away from the brutality of that scene, nauseous. I'd heard of Hindus sprinkling water on a sacrificial animal so it shakes itself in supposed assent before its death, but even that paltry religious justification was lacking here. The men seemed gleeful. In the past my objections to eating meat have had to do with considerations of sustainability and the appalling way most animals are raised, and I have mostly made choices to eat meat only when I thought it was ecologically sound. This situation fit those criteria, yet I couldn't imagine wanting to eat that hulking form, collapsed there in the dust. A visceral, as opposed to an rational, reaction.
But this was Dashain, the one time when everyone feasts on meat they can't afford to eat most of the time. The butchering proceeded into the afternoon, with teams of men first covering the buffaloes with burning straw, scraping and scrubbing them, then removing the limbs for further dissection. Every organ was saved, including the small and large intestines, which were squeezed of their liquid contents by hand. The shit mixed with blood at the UNISEF-built community tap. Our family received a sixth of a raango (male buffalo), including our share of each organ. By mid-afternoon we were being fed chunks of liver mixed with red pepper and salt, hunks of belly fat merely singed in the fire, still chewy. I didn't eat much, but there was no question of refusing to share in this family affair. And anyway, what else would I have eaten? There were no vegetables that night. The colon was stuffed with fat for sausage, and the rest of the muscle meat cut into strips and hung to dry over the fire.
When the men weren't buthering beffalo or giving/receiving tika from family members (another Dashain ritual), they could reliably be found in the stone yard in front of my host family's house, gambling. Card games would continue into the night, with thousands of rupees changing hands. Even fields and the small pieces of family gold would change hands with some regularity, I heard. No wonder microcredit organizations target the women of the family: in most of rural Nepal, at least, is it they who make households run, who cook and clean and cut ghaas for the cattle, and who make sure there is some money set aside for clothing, salt, soap.
A bizarre highlight of my third day in the village was a raffle whose prizes consisted of (in order of ascending value) a large Coke, some T-shirts, a topi (hat worn by most Nepali men) a cassette boombox, a pressure cooker, a cell phone, and a castrated goat. I bought two tickets for 50 rupees a pop, one for me and one for Alden, and let him have his pick. Mine was #046. The drawing was preceeded by endless speeches on village development and politics, broadcast by means of a fuzzy microphone setup, and which captured almost nobody's attention. Finally the crowd gathered as the drawing began. I was weirdly prescient that I was going to win, and even debating with myself what I would do with a goat. Not kill it, surely, at least not then . . . sell it, maybe? Raise it on our rooftop in the city? Out of the hundreds of tickets, my number was indeed pulled: I was the proud owner of a brand new bootleg turquoise Diesel T-shirt. I got up on stage in front of the assembled village, had my cheeks and shoulders smeared with vermillion powder, shook some hands, and claimed my prize. Someone asked me to put it on, and I did so, smiled for a camera, Namaste'd to a cheering crowd. Truly surreal, but at least they didn't ask for a speech, and at least it wasn't the goat!
One nice Dashain tradition was the swings built out of bamboo and thick rope and set up at a couple spots in the village. The swinging radius was high, and peopled played "ping" standing up, so it was a bit wilder than your average school playground. Unforunately I didn't get much chance to partake, as starting soon after the first round of feasting I got sick. Predictable enough, given the combination of factors I was exposed to: I drank untreated, unboiled water the whole time I was there, and then ate too much at the biggest feast night after an afternoon of gnawing on lard and chucking away the rinds. At least now I know what giardia is like: the foul sulphurous burps (like buttered popcorn, I thought, in the middle of a miserable night), epigastric pain, diarrhoea, vomiting. But lest my gentle readers think I'm abandoning my Ayurvedic understanding in favor of protozoan explanations, let me say that mere exposure to this nasty little critter isn't enough to make one sick. Alden was drinking the same water as me for days, and didn't have as much as a hiccup. It takes a weakening of the body's defenses to let the giardia organism get a foothold in the lumen of the small intestine, which happens when one's agni (digestive fire, the Ayurvedic term for the body's digestive capacity) becomes low. In such a case you can't digest everything you've eaten, and the lucky little flagellate steps in to finish the job and cause a ruckus in the process. Looking Giardia Lamblia up on wikipedia today I even saw a reference the fact that Giardia generally becomes chronic only when gastric acid secretions are low. Aha! I thought. Confirmation.
After my second sick night (I had recovered in the intermittent day but then caved in to the family's urgent desire that I eat dinner, with nasty results) the poor family was worried enough to take matters into their own hands. Baa woke me up early in the morning, sat me up, and muttered some words while gesturing and finally blowing on and around me in short puffs of air. This is a way of dispelling spirits, commonly identified throughout Nepal as culprits in stubborn or bizarre illnesses. Timilaai bhut aayo, he said. A ghost came to you. Well it ain't my worldview but after the second round of such treatment (and not eating anything for the rest of the day) I did indeed recover in time for the arduous trip back to the city.
Back down the hill we went, my dehydrated body shaking a little on the steep slope under the weight of my pack. Across the river to the road, where we waited for hours for a microbus back to the waystation of Banepa. One last bout of the hiphop tape, burned into my memory forever as the soundtrack to those wretched giardia nights. In Banepa we climbed onto the roof of a packed bus and hung on to the rails as it sped through the cool night air, a mad feeling of exhilaration taking hold and spreading, I thought, through the crowd up there on the bus roof. I had wind-whipped conversations with 3 different Nepalis, hurriedly typed their numbers into my cellphone, before hoping off and sharing a cab for the last leg back to Bhatbhateni, which is starting to feel like home. Alden and our closest friend in the Tamang family, Rajan, who is off to work in Dubai in a week, leave today form the village, taking the long way back on foot as far as Dhulikhel. I'm only a little jealous. Mostly just glad to have my appetite back, and not to have to raise any goats on the roof.
