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.

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.