An Excess of Red Rice

Today, for the first time since arriving here in Kathmandu valley, I was able to see some himalayas! I was sitting on the neighbour's rooftop sipping on some ayla (a quite unneccessarily strong local hard liquor) and eating Newari snacks as the sun was going down, when there past all the familiar green hills to the north were some white peaks poking up behind the pink fluffy clouds. Hooray! A clear sign that the rainy season has come to an end and that the great sunny days are becoming a more permanent feature. The mountains looked much bigger and much closer than I would've thought possible after the last few months of clouds and haze hiding them from sight.

This comes at a perfect time as the days of Desain, Nepal's greatest festival of the year, are drawing to an end. For me, Desain has meant the past week off of teaching and a chance to get caught up in the electrified spirit of everyone looking to celebrate every day to the fullest extent possible. Beforehand, one friend explained Desain to me by saying it's the time of year when everyone wants to have money and spend lots of money and seek maximum enjoyment so that by the end nobody has any money left and must work for an entire year to recover enough money to enjoy the following Desain in the same way. At the time I found it mostly humourous, but now I see how well that summarized it.

Some main features of the festival include children flying kites, friends gathering together to win each other's money in various card games, visits to all elder family member's houses to receive tikka (the red clumps of rice placed on the forehead), goat sacrifices, the closure of almost all shops, an absence of vehicles on the roads and a whole lot of dancing and singing. I happily took part in all of this and had been thinking there couldn't possibly be a better time to be in Nepal. As it turns out I may be wrong about that as Tihar, the festival of lights, approaches in just a few weeks and is said to be in a lot of ways even more fun. Because Desain is the biggest festival, it's the time when everyone will go to be with their families if possible. This means over half the population of Kathmandu vacates the valley for their home villages. But by Tihar, everyone will have returned back to town and it sounds like will involve bigger celebrations rather than individual family and friend gatherings.

The 10th day of Desain is when the tikka is given. This can be quite a long procedure given the size of most families here. I went with my adopted parents to Buwaa's elder brother's house. When we arrived there were about 12 assorted uncles, cousins, sisters and other relatives there. First the youngest girl in the family, who is considered "Kumari" (living goddess) and in this case was a very cute 2 year old granddaughter, gives tikka to the eldest. Tikka consists of the red rice clump as well as some oat grass strands put in the hair or behind an ear and usually a gift of a banana or apple along with perhaps 10 rupees. The eldest can then procede to give tikka to all the other family members in order of oldest to youngest. This is then followed by the 2nd eldest giving tikka to all those younger than him. This continues down the line so that tikka is received from everyone who is older than you and results in a rather massive globule of rice on a person's forehead (particularly one as extremely young and youthful as myself). This of course was followed by eating much goat meat and other delicious foods and was essentially all repeated later on when many more family members arrived.