Change In Plans

Greetings, unexpectedly, from Kathmandu.  This short post is about the disruption of today’s trip to the Maldives, and what we plan to do next.

Our plan was to fly from Kathmandu to Delhi, from Delhi to Colombo, Sri Lanka, and from Colombo to Male, the capital of the Maldives.  Connections were tight, and it would be a long day (four separate countries), but it seemed feasible.  

When we arrived at the dreary Kathmandu airport early this morning, somehow all of our flight reservations had been cancelled.  Our local travel agent and our U.S. travel agent (who we woke up in Houston) had the reservations confirmed on their screens, but the screens in Kathmandu said “VOID.”  We were at an impasse.

India (the person) and I had been having a lot of second thoughts about our trip to the Maldives anyway.  It is tremendously expensive (eyepopping) to gt there and stay there, and we would only have three full days on the islands.  It also required three additional flights in obscure countries, and yesterday’s post-bird-collision emergency landing in Nepal left us a little rattled.

We decided to change our plans, and to go to Cape Town early.  We are on a late afternoon flight to Abu Dhabi on something called “Etihad Airways.”  It is the official airline of the UAE, so we assume it will be fine.  There are so many Nepalis working as laborers in the Gulf States that it is incredibly easy and cheap to fly there from Kathmandu. 

We have a flight to Johannesburg at 2:30 am, and should be on the beach in Cape Town by tomorrow afternoon.  

Back in June, we decided to refer to the overall trip  ”a change in plans.”  Goodbye Nepal, sorry to miss you Maldives, hello South Africa (by way of Abu Dhabi).

Greetings, again, from Kathmandu.  We have had another unbelievably full day of exploring the Kathmandu Valley.  This post is about the most interesting part of that day, watching the rich pageant of life (and death) from the banks of the Bagmati River, next to the Pashupatinath Temple.

BODHA STUPA FROM MONASTERY ROOF DECK

We started the day by visiting the ancient Bodha stupa, which used to be a simple, enormous white dome in the shape of Buddha’s inverted begging bowl.  It now has a bronze superstructure, and prayer flags attaching to its steeple from all directions.  The stupa area is surrounded by pilgrims’ rest houses (some converted into shops and hostels), so it is completely cut off from the noise and activity of the streets.

As we looked out at the stupa from the sunny roof deck of an adjacent monastery, we could hear prayer music and the ring of prayer bells.  We saw and smelled hundreds of yak-butter candles and lamps, and watched Buddhist devotees worship and spin prayer wheels.  I was overcome with a great sense of tranquillity and happiness.  This is exactly what I would have hoped to find in Kathmandu.

After leaving the stupa, we went back toward the Pashupatinath Temple, where we had the sunset walk on our first evening in Kathmandu.  This time, we approached the temple from its western side, walking up a long hill and through an ancient deer park.  We descended steeply toward the holy Bagmati River, walking through a group of orange-clad old holy men, lazing in the sun.  It was hard not to stare at the leprous sores and the lost fingers and toes on some of these ash-covered sadhus.  

We walked down a long set of broad stone steps, and stopped when we were still about 20 meters above the river.  This put us at about the same height as the temple gates, across the narrow valley.  There was so much to look at and think about that we sat for almost an hour, and could have stayed all day.  Here is what we saw:

• Directly beneath us, on our side of the river, a three-year-old girl was having her head shaved with a straight razor by her parents.  They were sacrificing her hair to some deity. Tallulah told me several times, “I do not want you to shave my head.”  She did tell me that it would be OK if we shaved Zola’s head, however.

 NEWLY SHORN THREE YEAR OLD GIRL

• One level down from the barbering family, construction workers were hand carrying load after load of rebar to a construction site at the river’s edge.  Amidst all of the other action, they weaved gracefully through a small crowd of Nepalis and foreigners.
•  Just below the crowd and construction site, the Bagmati River itself flowed gently by.  It is shallow enough that a man with a rake was pushing charred wood, waterlogged flowers and other post-cremation detritus into the downstream current.  The river is considered very holy by Hindus (it is a tributary of the Ganga), but has gotten so polluted that the Nepali government has banned all bathing in it.  
   
• Although Nepalis seem to be obeying the bathing ban, an enthusiastic group of Indian pilgrims was not deterred.  They showed up suddenly on the steps (ghats) of the far bank, and jumped in the water.  Men in loincloths, and women in sarees, scrubbed themselves thoroughly and drank from the river. 

 ENTHUSIASTIC INDIAN PILGRIMS

• Only five meters downstream from the happy pilgrims, a mourning family sat on the steps next to a flower-bedecked corpse. The departed had already been through the pre-cremation rituals at the riverside: face and mouth washed with river water, feet washed, rewrapped in a sheet daubed with red vermilion, and covered in chains of marigolds.  Now the family was waiting for an “auspicious time” to start the actual cremation.  A pyre had already been built on one of the cremation ghats a little further downstream.  Unlike what we saw at Varanasi, women were mourning at the cremation site, and it seemed acceptable to cry.

 MOURNING FAMILY AND RECENTLY DECEASED

• Farther downstream, there were already two cremation fires burning on the ghat platforms.  A third fire was burning smokily, right at the river’s edge, but that was to dispose of accumulated rubbish from recent cremations.  These cremation ghats are relatively far from the temple steps, and until recently would have been used only by lower-caste Hindus.  The ghat nearest the temple was reserved for royalty, with the next nearest for Brahmins, and the next nearest for Kshatriya, etc.  Now they are allocated on willingness to pay.

CREMATION GHATS IN USE

• One level up from the bathing and cremation ghats, there is a kind of hospice, with multiple doors leading right out to the river.  ”Breathing your last” by the Pashupatinath Temple is supposed to absolve you of all sins in this life, and increase the chances of going directly to Nirvana.  As we watched, medical personnel dragged an oxygen tank down the temple steps and into the hospice area.

ZOLA WITH TWO NEPALI SADHUS

Namaste from Kathmandu!  We have had an unbelievably full and interesting day here.  Any notion that Nepal would be “just like India,” has been completely undone.  I will try to write about our day in a later post.  This short post is mostly focused on the Royal Kumari, the living goddess of Kathmandu.

As we are finding out, Nepal is unique in many ways.  In some “fun fact” uniqueness, Nepal has:

1. The only national flag that is not rectangular.  Nepal’s flag is two red triangles stacked on top of each other like little pennants
2. The only Maoist national government (elected or unelected) in the world.  They have only been in power for a few months, so it is too early to figure out whether this will be a good thing.  The monarchy was such a disaster that the bar is set pretty low.
3. The only time zone which is 45 minutes off the rest of the world.  If it is midnight in London, it is 5:45 am in Nepal.  Indian Standard Time (where it would be 5:30 am) was slightly confusing, but NST is maxing out our math skills.

Nepal is also unique in having a tradition of “living virgin goddesses,” in many of its cities.  The most important one lives in Kathmandu, and is known as the Kumari Devi, or the Royal Kumari.

For many centuries young Kathmandu girls have been carefully selected to act as Royal Kumaris.  No one seems to know exactly when this tradition began, estimates range from 1300 AD to 1750 AD, with the most frequent guess about 1550 AD.  Also, no one knows precisely how the tradition started, although the myths all involve a Newar king who somehow offended a powerful Hindu goddess.  Questions of origin aside, these pre-pubescent living goddesses are entrenched deeply in the culture and religion of Nepal.

The Royal Kumari is believed, literally, to be a living incarnation of the goddess Taleju. Taleju is the “wrathful” manifestation of the goddess Durga,  and Durga, in turn, is one of the many manifestation of the goddess Pravati. Pravati is the wife of Lord Shiva.  And to think that people say Hinduism is complicated.

The living goddess is selected at the age of 3 or 4, and serves until she starts menstruating.  Her role as goddess is: to live away from her family (in a small palace called the Kumari Che); to dress in elaborate red costumes and theatrical makeup; to wave to occasional visitors down in her courtyard; to receive important priestly and royal supplicants; and to be paraded around Kathmandu in a chariot a few times each year at important festivals.  Aside from the festivals, she does not leave her palace during her +/- 8 years on the job.

WAITING FOR A WAVE FROM THE GODDESS - THE MIDDLE WINDOW ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE PICTURE IS HERS

New living goddesses have to be selected roughly every eight years.  If you thought that the admissions process for Manhattan private schools was tough, you will feel comforted to see the extremio ad absurdum of the Kumari Devi selection process.

• Prospective kumaris are drawn only from a specific caste of Buddhist gold- and silversmiths, known as Shakya.  Choosing Buddhist girls to become a Hindu goddess is only slightly strange.  Also, they must live within a small and strictly defined area near the center of old Kathmandu.
• Prior to reaching puberty, and long before getting married for real, most Nepali girls go through two symbolic weddings.  One wedding is at age 4-5 to a fruit called the bel (a type of apple), and one wedding, at age 11-12, is to the sun.  A prospective kumari must not have gone through either of these symbolic weddings, as they would somehow reduce her purity.
• The few little girls who meet the basic selection criteria are subjected to a series of tests.  As I understand it, these tests include:

1. A physical examination, which is theoretically a 32-point check against ancient criteria of godliness (”strength of a banyan tree,” “voice as soft as a duck”).  In reality, it sounds as though the girls are checked for birthmarks, scars, crosseyedness, and any other mortal flaws.
2. A character test, which involves watching the sacrifice of some number of animals (somewhere between 12 and 108 animals); seeing their decapitated heads with candles attached, in a darkened room; and not screaming for Mommy.
3. A spirituality test, in which the girls are shown a line-up of identical sets of red “living goddess outfits,” and are required to pick out the clothes which were actually worn by the retiring Royal Kumari.  Apparently a similar spirituality test is used in selecting the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama.
4. A matching of horoscopes between the king and each prospective goddess. This is likely to change with the Maoists now in power.  In September, the new Maoist government appointed its first kumari -not a Royal Kumari, it was out in the provinces.  It isn’t clear how the selection process changed, if at all.

Once the new little Royal Kumari is identified, she is ensconced immediately in the Kumari Che, and has a pretty weird and isolated life until she reverts to being a normal mortal about eight years later.

All four of us thought that the idea of the Royal Kumari was pretty strange.  When we visited the Kumari Che, though, the kids were tremendously excited to find out that we might get a glimpse of the living goddess at her window.  Because we had seen Queen Elizabeth waving from her car when we went for the changing of the guards in London in June, Zola could not stop making excited comparisons between the (relatively modest) Kumari Che and Buckingham Palace.

Summoning the goddess was simple.  Our guide, Sangeeta, shouted up to the window in Nepali, “Kumari, please come!  Please come, Kumari.”   Eventually a very cute little three-year old girl toddled into sight.  She was dressed in the red and gold goddess outfit, and had the classic dramatic kohl outline round her eyes and sweeping up to her ears.  The tiny living goddess waved twice without smiling, and toddled back away from the window, presumably to finish her breakfast.  I thought Zola was going to burst with the glory of it all.

Unfortunately, it is forbidden to take pictures of the Royal Kumari, so we didn’t capture the moment.  It was an experience that was so bizarre and special and unexpected (particularly because I haven’t read any Nepal guidebooks yet) that it set us up for an amazing day of exploration.

ANYONE SEEN A LIVING GODDESS AROUND HERE?

Greetings from Kathmandu, Nepal.  We arrived here from Delhi at about 1 pm, navigated our way slowly through the immigration and customs processes, and got to our hotel in time to take a long walk before sunset.  We are delighted to be here.

As many people had told us, the descent into Kathmandu is quite spectacular.  After flying past the snow-capped Himalayas, visible in the distance, the plane descended rapidly into a valley surrounded by low craggy hills.  Suddenly we were over a flat spot, and then on the ground.  After several days of melting heat and humidity in Kerala, it felt great to step out of the plane and into the crisp mountain air of Nepal.

We are staying at a beautiful small hotel, called Dwarika’s, on the east side of Kathmandu (www.dwarikas.com).  Dwarika’s is a compound of old brickwork Nepali buildings, which have been restored with great care over the last 38 years.  The founder started by just trying to preserve old teak woodcarvings (”an asylum and hospital for the care of wounded masterpieces in wood”), and built a beautiful oasis of craftsmanship in the middle of the city.  It is a special place.

TALLULAH AND DAD TRYING TO GET A HAIR OUT OF HER MOUTH DURING OUR WALK

We met our local Nepali guide, Mrs. Sangeeta Thapa, and went out for a walk before sunset. The Pashupatinath Temple is close to Dwarika’s Hotel, so we headed in that direction.

Pashupatinath is a temple to Lord Shiva’s “peaceful incarnation” as Pashupati, the master of all animals.  It is described as the most important Hindu temple in Nepal.  The temple itself is closed to non-Hindus, but we managed to peek in before being chased away (gently) by a security guard.  We saw a large golden statue of Nandi, Shiva’s signature bull, from the doorway.  Apparently there is also black four-headed Shiva/Pashupati statue inside.  

We got a very good early feeling about Sangeeta, our new guide, as she kept Zola’s and Tallulah’s rapt attention for nearly ten minutes, explaining just to them about the temple and the statues.  It was great to see how much Zola has learned about the Hindu gods and myths, and to watch him ask detailed questions about Shiva’s incarnations, and Nandi’s powers.  He understands this part of South Asian history and culture a whole lot better than I ever will. 

We walked up a series of steps behind the temple, past a few smoking garbage fires, and then up a broad dirt path into an open area.  This little park also has religious significance, but I didn’t quite catch it.  There was a huge revival tent, and a ceremony being conducted in Sanskrit (which no one speaks), and then translated into Nepali.  It reminded me of the movie, “The Passions of the Christ,” which was acted in Aramaic, then sub-titled in English.  

There are more beggars in Kathmandu than we saw generally anywhere in India.  All four of us were pretty  disturbed to see a boy of about 12, lying curled on a blanket in the park, with a begging bowl in front of him.  The boy seemed to be suffering from some horrible neurological illness, and was crying and shaking and moaning loudly.  Sangeeta explained that he is frequently lying on that spot, and that he has not been abandoned.  His mother leaves him there, hoping people will put money in the bowl, and she hides nearby. Despite the explanation, I felt powerless, and shamefully cold-hearted, and shocked, and sympathetic, and concerned for my own kids, all at the same time.  An awful combination of feelings.

We walked back down the hill, avoiding the direction of the cremation platforms on the Bagmati River for the time being.  We went into an old complex of five shrines, called Panch Deval.  The shrines have been turned into a strange dormitory/hospice which is packed with very old Hindus who want to die next to the Pashupatinath Temple.  Sangeeta’s description, as we walked up, made it sound pretty morose place.  To my surprise, we were greeted with vocal enthusiasm by the thirty or so old folks who were socializing near the gate. They seemed particularly happy to see Zola and Tallulah, and could not have been more cheerful and welcoming.  I would think that the big stacks of cremation-pyre firewood in the central courtyard would reduce the levity, but I would be wrong.

Finally, we walked back through the dark streets to our hotel.

We were only out for a few hours, but it gave us some early sense of the city and the people.  My initial impression is that Kathmandu is much less crowded than the Indian cities that we saw, but it is also considerably poorer.  Nepalis really seem to like burning garbage: there were little fires all over the place. I read somewhere that “fire is considered sacred.”  The old buildings are beautiful, all unmortared red brick and carved teak.  And the mountains around the Kathmandu Valley are spectacular.  

We are looking forward to really starting our visit tomorrow morning.