Dakshinkali Temple

It was Saturday, the Hindu Holy Day, and the last day of the Nepali month of Ashadh – prime time for a goat sacrifice. It’s about a 45 minute drive from Kirtipur to Dakshinkali, the goat sacrificing temple. We called a taxi. The taxies here are essentially refrigerator boxes on wheels, with barely enough room for 4 average Americans. We fit 8, plus the driver and one goat.
It was raining when our clown car arrived at Dakshinkali, and the mud and blood were flowing like wine. The temple sits in this eerie valley, right near a small stream. The sky was filled with crows, pigeons and doves. The goat sacrificing line was about 3 hours long, and there were hundreds of goats on rope leashes and a few dozen chickens and ducks, held by their wings or feet. There were many Brahmin priests offering blessing and tikas – for a price, of course. One particularly nice old Brahmin lured me in, and gave me a tika for 10 rupees. As our place in line got closer to the temple, I started to see fresh trails of blood and many headless goats being carried by their feet away from the religious slaughter house. The most prominent smell near the temple was that of burning incense and butter lamps. It was quite overpowering, even outside. I didn’t actually see a goat get sacrificed, just the bloody aftermath. The whole time we were there, Hindu prayers were being blasted over a scratchy loudspeaker. After our goat was sacrificed to the goddess Kali, we waited again while it was butchered.

At the butcher hut, the headless bodies of the goats and chickens were dunked in a giant metal kettle of boiling water, with a fire burning underneath. Some goat heads were roasting in the flames. The bodies were retrieved with sticks, and the hair or feathers were removed. The white, naked carcasses were then cut into smaller pieces – legs, abdomens, chests, necks. The internal organs were removed and cleaned – all parts of the goat are eaten – and the remaining portions (legs, etc.) were placed on a wooden chopping block made from a tree stump. There, they were hacked to pieces by a bloody butcher with a machete. The smell coming from the butcher hut was slightly nauseating – the irony smell of blood, cooking meat and feces, and of course, burning goat hair and chicken feathers. After our goat was handed to us in many small, black, plastic bags, we all crammed back into the refrigerator box – all 8 of us, plus the driver and the goat (now in plastic bags) – and puttered back to Kirtipur, where we feasted.

Planting Rice

We were on the tail-end of a heavy rain that lasted about a day and a half. The rice fields were flooded, and it was time to plant. The Cornell Nepal Study Program (CNSP) has a “small” field in which they grow rice, or dhaan. (Later in the year our group will harvest the rice).

Some of the CNSP staff had already started when Kamal and I arrived. We took off our sandals and stepped into the field. The mud was about mid-calf deep, and the consistency of pudding. Before we started, one of the women came over and put rice shoots behind our ears, and gave us mud tikas. We had to use small hoes that were about two feet long to break up the hard mud into clumps, and then step on them to break them up – rice grows best in very loose mud. We took a break for a snack – potato achaar and Tuborg beer. It was legit beer…cold and carbonated. Kamal didn’t drink beer, because he’s a Hindu Brahmin. After the snack, we returned to the field to plant the rice. A few shoots at a time, the rice is planted by pushing the roots down into the mud. The whole ordeal is really back-breaking work – we were bent over the entire time. I was so exhausted and frustrated towards the end, because there were ants biting my ankles and small beetles burrowing into the mud that was caked on my leg hair.

It’s a very humbling feeling knowing how hard it actually is to plant and grow rice by hand. It’s also a very rewarding feeling knowing that your hard work is going to pay you back with food in a few months. Most importantly, this was one of the few times when I felt like a local – filthy and bent over in a field, alongside Nepali men and women.

The Buffalo and the Goats

Kamal is one of the guys that I’m living with this summer. This past week, his mother and aunt stayed at our house. They are both Brahmin Hindus, always wearing saris and tikas. One evening, Kamal’s neighbor, an overweight Newari woman (an ethnic group in Nepal, particularly prominent in Kiritpur), came over. The three women wanted me to take their picture. After I took it, Kamal looked at it and burst into to laughter. I couldn’t figure out what it was about, and finally he said in English, “The Newar is fat, and the Brahmins are thin. It’s a buffalo and two goats!” I laughed nervously, hoping he’d stop, but he went right ahead and told the women in Nepali (none of the women understand English). They all laughed and the Newari woman hit Kamal jokingly.

I found it very interesting that he had no self-restraint in what he was saying about the weight of these women, specifically in relation to their ethnicity. Whether he meant it as a joke and they knew it, I’m not sure, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard a Nepali comment about someone’s weight, appearance, occupation or ethnicity in ways that, for the most part, would be socially unacceptable in the United States.