In a brief moment of respite from frenzied essay-writing while also trying to fix my laptop which keeps crashing (ahhhh the lazy lazy life of a student eh?), I watched the Nepal Tourist Board CD we were given in our information pack when we enrolled.
It was replete with very pretty pictures which I have to confess did make me stare out of the window into the pleasant garden at the place I’m staying, and dream of spending my enitre budget in one big mega-trek to the Himalayan mountains and lakes, or to the southern jungles and rivers.  But after reality dawned, one particular slide from the slide-show stuck in my mind:

“More festivals than there are days in the year”, it said over a picture of a square filled with people celebrating something, somewhere in Nepal.

And you know what, it might well be right…

I once lived in a city, Brighton, in the UK, which claimed a church for every week of the year, and a pub for every day (priorities people) but nothing in my experience comes close to Nepal.

We’ve had a festival this month (so far), Tihar, which lasts 5 days (more on this one later). Then last month we had a festival called Dasain, which went on for about 10 days (and there was power ALL day EVERY day – yey!). And I think there’s more to come.  Phew! 

Although I have to confess I largely avoided the Dasain festival as one day in particular involves massive goat-death in the forms of sacrifices to the Goddess Kali. In fact, I think only the cows are safe because if a family can’t afford a goat they buy a chicken, which then is killed in the goat’s stead. For several weeks before and certainly the immediate days before the sacrificial day, there were little conglomerations (is that the collective noun for goats? Somehow I doubt it, its probably more like ‘bleats of goats’ – of which more later) of adult goats on the roadsides, huddled at the end of 2 – 3 meter tethers, chewing surprisingly calmly on the grass nearby. Perhaps they were unaware of their fate. I certainly hope so.

And I did think I had avoided all of the carnage by carefully walking the long way around to home and etc. But when I came back home from Uni one day and set my bag down with a sigh to get on with some quiet reading, the houses next door beyond the garden wall revealed themselves to be occupied by people celebrating Dasain, because what I heard next was the plaintive bleating of what sounded like one quite young and very lonely goat.

Blaaaaaaaaah.    Bleeeeaaaah.      Bleeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaahaaaaahhh!     Blaaaaeeeeeeeh…

All afternoon and into the night.  Oh dear.

‘ Course, next day, nothing.  Just a very sad silence.

I had a few moments of hatching a madcap scheme to rescue the little creature and set it loose in my landlord’s garden but, apart from the former owners, I would have my landlord’s irate missus to deal with. She works really hard on the garden, and as we know, goats eat everything…. Ah le, what to do?

So I did the only thing I could do and joined people at the monastery who did an all day Puja (prayer ceremony, for want of a better word), for the departing animals that they not suffer too much and achieve good rebirths.

This could be said to be a perfect example of the symbiosis between Hindus and Buddhists here in Boudhanath. While on the one side, the Dasain festival, an indelible part of the national psyche, was being celebrated in part to provide protection for people by sacrificing lots of animals; across town in all the Buddhist monasteries that day you had Buddhist ordained and lay people praying that these same animals had as little suffering as possible in the ending of this life, and also in the next.

Difficult. And please, note that it is NOT for me to judge anyone here, at all, it’s just how things are, sometimes.

I do wish I could have rescued just that one little goat though.

Namaste….