A Moveable Festival

Or, The Only Jew In Kathmandu

I’ve grown to love the rain here, the way it paints the trees a crisp, dark green, washes the cobblestones, patters on tin roofs. I love watching the low, wispy clouds play up and down the hills, or sit on the peak like a fluffy, capricious hat. I love when it pours so hard that the roads become rivers, winding their way to new destinations. And I love breathing the watery air, imagining each droplet absorbing a grain of dust as it plummets downward, capturing and returning the earth to where it came from. During a summer which has been one of the hottest in memory, in a city which is among the most polluted, rain cools and rain cleans.

As for school, perhaps a short anecdote will paint an accurate picture. The other day, in grade 5, I had to step in as my co-teacher started hitting a student on the head for writing the wrong answer on the test we’d given. Nothing about this is an uncommon sight: teachers regularly walk around during tests correcting students’ answers, even when they didn’t ask a question (begging the question, what, or who, is the test for?), and students often receive physical punishment for incorrect answers.

I approached as she corrected his answer, only to find that the student had written the right answer in the first place. I had to explain to my co-teacher in front of the class that the text stated the two friends were “like sisters,” so the answer to the question “are they sisters?” is no, because they are like sisters but they aren’t actually. My co-teacher then had to return to the other students whom she’d given the wrong answer to and tell them to change it back.

There’s a further level of confusion here beyond the linguistic, since in Nepal it’s culturally normal to refer to cousins, friends, or sometimes even strangers using words rendered in English as “sister” or “brother.” This disconnect means that, despite my middling proficiency of classroom-specific Nepali, an exact translation wouldn’t completely clarify the situation. Even if my students (or my co-teacher) actually do understand the words on the page, the meaning still might not be clear until the culture, as well, has been translated.

If this experience—from the teacher giving answers during a test, beating the student, being wrong about the answer, leaving me to sift through layers of English and Nepali understanding—doesn’t sum up my experience teaching here, then I’m not sure what will.

As a final note on school, I’m also finding that boundaries between students and teachers are a little different from what I’m used to. For example, teachers are required to wear our ID card necklaces while at school, but the cards have our phone numbers printed on them, and last week I caught two sixth grade girls copying down my number into their notebooks while I was checking their homework. When I took the notebooks away, they cheekily smiled and showed me their hands, where I saw my number was also written. My co-teacher asked why they needed my number, and they said that it was to call me to ask questions about homework.

There is a growing sense (though one that has yet to be confirmed) that the hardest is over. Festival season, which is more of a general concept than a specific and defined span of time, is upon us, having begun about two weeks ago, and ending in about two months. I would love to say that festival season is some sort of deep gut feeling brought about by subtle changes in everyone’s demeanor, but the truth is that it is really clear from every external sense. Getting woken up by drums and cymbals at 6am? That’s festival season. Aunts and cousins in your house every few days? That’s festival season. Incense in the air, special foods for dinner… changes in demeanor are likely, but also probably due to the plentiful days off dotting the calendar during these months.

Some festivals are celebrated by all, some only by certain castes, some only in certain areas, but holidays are usually given to everyone, and it seems to be every week these days. Hindu holidays, Buddhist holidays, local festivals, father’s day, it’s all happening now. And the bigger celebrations—Dashain and Tihar—are right around the corner, meaning almost a month off for many people who go back to their villages to celebrate for weeks. Despite our vastly different cultures, I don’t think it’s by chance that the Jewish high holidays overlap with these major festivals: it’s the harvest season, the beginning of the most beautiful time of year in Nepal and many places, and there’s something in the slowly cooling air that just makes you want to celebrate.

Kirtipur celebrates holidays on its own time, which appears for now to be about a day after everyone else, and has a few special local celebrations as well. Two weeks ago brought Bagh Bhairab jatra, which celebrates a Hindu temple in Kirtipur dedicated to Shiva’s most fearsome incarnation (Bhairab, or Bhairava) in the form of a tiger (bagh), believed to protect the city. At the top of the temple, hard to notice if you don’t know they’re there, hang the 250-year-old swords of Newari warriors who fought to protect Kirtipur from Gorkhali invasion. Their loss was a key moment in the unification of Nepal, but—as the swords less than delicately indicate—Newari pride is still strong. I walked up from my house to watch the celebrations and found the tide had come in to Kirtipur, bringing a sea of people from Kathmandu, swirling around the temple like a whirlpool.

But, being the local that I am, I have learned not to walk to festivals. Here, the jatra comes to us. It starts with a distant crashing of cymbals, and slowly builds until we can see them turn the corner and come towards us. On nearly every holiday, there is a moving procession, sometimes carrying a deity on a sort of decorated palanquin, always playing very loud music, traveling around the city in a loop which brings them by every temple. There is a small Buddha stupa on one end of my street and a Hindu shrine on the other end, so all I have to do is sit on the stoop with the Newari grandparents who are my neighbors and have become my friends. And I finally understand the music: though deafening at close range, it’s both a celebration and a call; even up in my room with the door closed, I can tell when the jatra has arrived outside my house.

When the jatra arrives, they usually put down the palanquin and stay on the street for a minute, where people will play music and dance, and many residents come out to give puja. People take photos and videos, and there is often food and drink being handed out to the members of the procession and anyone else on the street. My host father can usually be found running around, offering the musicians a large metal teapot filled with a specific rice alcohol which I was told “helps them play music better.” My grandma brings a plate with some uncooked rice and a banana and perhaps some other items to make offerings to the deity. My younger brother watches, entranced, and practices his dance moves in the street after the jatra has moved on.

How’s that for convenience culture? Even the festivals here are moveable (both in the physical and calendar sense, one notes). Every neighborhood here spirals outward in fractals, the same corner stores selling the same snacks, candies, dish soap, laundry soap. Shops with dry lentils and rice laid out and a shopkeeper to scoop them, women sitting by blankets covered in bright seasonable vegetables, men wheeling bikes with fruit stacked high in a chain-link cage mounted on the back. A tea shop, a hair salon, a printer, a butcher, a tailor, all on every street. There is no need for massive grocery stores, department stores, online shopping, when all the daily items are where the should be, a minute from your door.

And should I need to go further, I have recently eschewed the buses for the convenience and speed of ride-sharing apps like Pathao or inDriver (the Uber and Lyft of Nepal). Within minutes, I can be on the back of a total stranger’s motorbike (or scooty, if I’m lucky), hurdling at a moderately dangerous speed towards the other side of the city. Standard protocol indicates that drivers call after accepting a ride, to confirm your location and sometimes your destination, and answering these phone calls has become one of my favorite activities. I have my Nepali spiel down to the point where I’ve had multiple drivers ask me if I’m Nepali or tell me they thought I was Nepali on the phone. One driver memorably kept asking me throughout the ride, and refused to believe that I hadn’t just given the phone to a Nepali friend to answer for me.

But these rides have proven to be much more than just rides. Because they’re motorcycles and not taxis, the drivers tend to be average Nepalis, often on their way somewhere and looking to make a few extra bucks. Rides sometimes turn into conversation hours, either in English or Nepali, and I’ve met lots of really nice people this way, often from nearby, since they usually either pick me up or drop me off at my house. In fact, one of my first Nepali friends who’s not a member of my family was originally my driver somewhere. We had started talking as we rode, and it turned out that he had moved to Kathmandu just three months before and was also looking for friends. We exchanged numbers, and now we hang out nearly every week, going for rides or playing table tennis (known as TT here), and we’re trying to put together a futsal team.

I’ve found one other little glimmer of community, in the form of music. Another friend of mine, Pushpa, has been working for a few years in the Tahnani neighborhood of Kirtipur, running an all-women’s group which sings and plays traditional Newari music. They often gather in the evenings, so I’ve started stopping by twice a week after my Nepali classes, since the timing works out perfectly. Sometimes there are drums or flutes, and I have even been allowed play around on the harmonium in the community center where they rehearse. It’s an odd but charming instrument—a sort of small piano with an accordion pump in the back and a beautiful wheezing noise—and I clumsily follow along as they sing. But it is a gift of music, and that is invaluable.

Last week, walking through the Kirtipur dusk to Tahnani, I arrived to find that the harmonium had been taken for repairs, and there were no drums or flutes. It was just a dozen Newari women sitting in a circle, singing their songs. They had already begun, but they still welcomed me in warmly, smiling and offering me printed lyrics so I could follow along. One song was about the Bagmati River, the sacred waters that flow through the Kathmandu Valley, an area which has been inhabited by the Newari people and their ancestors for millennia. Jaya jaya bagamati, the chorus began, and as it repeated I began to softly join in, barely understanding the Newari words but letting the beautiful and unfamiliar tune flow through my mouth.

There is a power in joining voices, one that I don’t comprehend but feel. Raising my voice in song with others brought me a sense of belonging and community that I haven’t often gotten here. I didn’t understand most of the words besides bagamati, but that’s not a new experience for me having grown up going to synagogue and singing there in a language I didn’t understand. The beauty of a group of people uniting through their voices is that it is what a linguist might call a speech act, the result emerging not from the content of the expression but the action itself. That is to say, it is not the meaning of the words which are sung but the singing of the words itself that creates the community.

Singing together, I let the words wash over me, cleaning me like the once-clear waters of the Bagmati, bringing my own sadness and joy to the surface. I thought about the holy rain-swelled river, heartbreakingly polluted, and the valley around it, the people who continue to come here, the unbelievable growth and change this place, these people, have seen. The Bagmati is no longer the river it once was, capable, according to legend, of turning all it touched to silver. But the people are still here, with their music and their culture, and perhaps that is where the true power lies after all: not in the waters which are praised, but in the people who are changing themselves, and their community, through their praise itself.

This essay was original published by Oren Karp on his Nepali Dispatch blog and is posted here with permission from Oren Karp.

The picture of a Lakhe dancing for spectators in front of Bagh Bhairab temple was provided by Oren Karp.