This Monday is lord Shiva's birthday, you know, Shiva the destroyer. We will go to Pashupati temple, to witness the strange festivities.
The Sadhus will be there, they will have walked a very long way to give Shiva some milk.
They walk all the time.
There is something so simple and beautiful and comical about the milk. There are a lot of other things they do, but the milk is the thing which sticks in my mind. I ask people about Shiva Ratri often, it's intriguing because everyone has something different to say about it. Most of the younger people talk about how it's the day when everyone smokes ganja.
I have trouble writing the word 'ganja' instead of 'weed' or 'grass', it just seems so, I don't know. Such a range of names are available for this innocuous herb, each name defines the speaker of the name more than the herb itself. Marijuana, every syllable pronounced with care, comes with the image of a man in a suit, holding the offending item at arms length. Ganja comes with dreadlocks, the sound of Bob Marley, devotion not only to the drug but to the culture. But that's the word they use here in Nepal. It's in the lonely planet phrasebook and everything. गाँजा.
The older generation just say that it's Shiva's birthday, and talk about the milk and the other things, other people say that it's a day when a lot of tourists go to Pashupati to look at sadhus and get stoned.
Two friends have just left, returned to Germany to get on with things. It feels like a significant loss to our little friendship circle, those two who were up for anything. A late night walk home and here they are with another friend, sitting high above the ground, in the earth-chomping part of an earth mover, somehow they had convinced the driver to take them for a spin. There is one of them, at the Newari new year's (which falls in November) celebrations, commando-crawling at a snail's pace across the stage behind a traditional Nepali singer, in front of hundreds of Nepali revellers.
It is sad that they are gone, sad and inevitable. We all have other plans. Some of us must continue our studies, some have plans to do travelling puppet shows across America in caravans led by donkeys. I must go back to Australia and see my new nephew/niece, witness my family's encroach into this new territory, the new generation.
Two more weeks, less, in this media art collective and then it's off again to a new house. Hopeully this one I can stay in for longer than a month. It is in the Newari part of town, old stonework and woodwork, intricately carved into many shapes, some religious, some whimsical. Narrow roads built long before the idea of cars, the houses' grey stone walls looming up and marginalising the sky, and then opening without warning, to reveal temples, shrines, other oddments. A real Indiana Jones style place. The owners of my flat are really friendly, they don't talk much English, they make their own Raksi (Nepali moonshine), and their son's band has a rehearsal room downstairs. It will be great to have a change, to be forced to speak more Nepali, and spend less time in those parts of Kathmandu which are becoming increasingly infested with Western Christians. To my Christian friends, I'm sorry. I've just deleted a large tirade against Christians in Nepal because if I have a problem with others zealously imposing their poorly-corroborated beliefs upon people who are in no need of them, then I would do well to keep my own views under my hat. The turbulent river of pro/anti Christian debate is hard to avoid these days, and anyway, it seems futile to argue with logic about something which resides in faith.
Awkward silence. How to bring this back to a suitable conclusion, how to tie it together? Shiva Ratri, sadhus, old men on the bus who touch their hand to forehead, chest, forehead, chest, forehead, and so on, as we drive past a certain shrine. Buddhist monks with iPhones. The unconfident, bespectacled, and comb-overed man in my conversational English class, who talked about being a guerilla fighter for the Maoists and helping to overthrow the royal family, his stories completely at odds with his appearance, only his small, focussed, granite eyes, giving weight to his words. This place is changing, we can all see it, we are all excited, and at least a little bit scared.
The Sadhus will be there, they will have walked a very long way to give Shiva some milk.
They walk all the time.
There is something so simple and beautiful and comical about the milk. There are a lot of other things they do, but the milk is the thing which sticks in my mind. I ask people about Shiva Ratri often, it's intriguing because everyone has something different to say about it. Most of the younger people talk about how it's the day when everyone smokes ganja.
I have trouble writing the word 'ganja' instead of 'weed' or 'grass', it just seems so, I don't know. Such a range of names are available for this innocuous herb, each name defines the speaker of the name more than the herb itself. Marijuana, every syllable pronounced with care, comes with the image of a man in a suit, holding the offending item at arms length. Ganja comes with dreadlocks, the sound of Bob Marley, devotion not only to the drug but to the culture. But that's the word they use here in Nepal. It's in the lonely planet phrasebook and everything. गाँजा.
The older generation just say that it's Shiva's birthday, and talk about the milk and the other things, other people say that it's a day when a lot of tourists go to Pashupati to look at sadhus and get stoned.
Two friends have just left, returned to Germany to get on with things. It feels like a significant loss to our little friendship circle, those two who were up for anything. A late night walk home and here they are with another friend, sitting high above the ground, in the earth-chomping part of an earth mover, somehow they had convinced the driver to take them for a spin. There is one of them, at the Newari new year's (which falls in November) celebrations, commando-crawling at a snail's pace across the stage behind a traditional Nepali singer, in front of hundreds of Nepali revellers.
It is sad that they are gone, sad and inevitable. We all have other plans. Some of us must continue our studies, some have plans to do travelling puppet shows across America in caravans led by donkeys. I must go back to Australia and see my new nephew/niece, witness my family's encroach into this new territory, the new generation.
Two more weeks, less, in this media art collective and then it's off again to a new house. Hopeully this one I can stay in for longer than a month. It is in the Newari part of town, old stonework and woodwork, intricately carved into many shapes, some religious, some whimsical. Narrow roads built long before the idea of cars, the houses' grey stone walls looming up and marginalising the sky, and then opening without warning, to reveal temples, shrines, other oddments. A real Indiana Jones style place. The owners of my flat are really friendly, they don't talk much English, they make their own Raksi (Nepali moonshine), and their son's band has a rehearsal room downstairs. It will be great to have a change, to be forced to speak more Nepali, and spend less time in those parts of Kathmandu which are becoming increasingly infested with Western Christians. To my Christian friends, I'm sorry. I've just deleted a large tirade against Christians in Nepal because if I have a problem with others zealously imposing their poorly-corroborated beliefs upon people who are in no need of them, then I would do well to keep my own views under my hat. The turbulent river of pro/anti Christian debate is hard to avoid these days, and anyway, it seems futile to argue with logic about something which resides in faith.
Awkward silence. How to bring this back to a suitable conclusion, how to tie it together? Shiva Ratri, sadhus, old men on the bus who touch their hand to forehead, chest, forehead, chest, forehead, and so on, as we drive past a certain shrine. Buddhist monks with iPhones. The unconfident, bespectacled, and comb-overed man in my conversational English class, who talked about being a guerilla fighter for the Maoists and helping to overthrow the royal family, his stories completely at odds with his appearance, only his small, focussed, granite eyes, giving weight to his words. This place is changing, we can all see it, we are all excited, and at least a little bit scared.
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