Open Writing

Nepalese locals proudly claimed that they celebrated a Hindu, Newar or Buddhist, festival every week. This was before the Maoist disruptions, and before the king cut communications with the outside world.

One morning as I walked towards a bus stand, a small group of barefoot tribal women snaked their way through the narrow Kathmandu streets, heading in the opposite direction.

A woman stopped, began to dance spontaneously accompanied by another woman playing a small tabula. Just as suddenly, the dance ceased and they continued their casual stroll.

They were in Kathmandu for the married women's festival.

Women come down from the mountains and even from the Terai plains to participate in Teej, the third of three festivals honouring different aspects of the Great Mother, and, by extension, all aspects of womanhood.

This doesn't mean that women are treated any better here than elsewhere. It is women who must carry water for household use, whatever the distance. They also carry loads of grass or wood many times their weight, up and down mountains.

It was pointed out, with irony, that the first all-women's group to attempt the climb up Everest, in a symbolic bond of sisterhood, hired only these tiny women to carry their packs.

During monsoon, a blue-black sky the colour of Krishna's skin overhangs the Kathmandu Valley promising fertility to the fields below.

After the rains, the soil is made ready.

I've watched a water buffalo led in concentric circles for hours by a man knee deep in mud preparing a field. Suddenly, village women appeared carrying armloads of rice seedlings. They hiked up their skirts, joined the man in the mud pudding, bent over and worked in that position for hours singing the chorus in reply to the man's time-keeping song. By evening the black field was transformed into a jade green silk screen, dancing and shivering in the breeze.

The first of these three women's festivals is Gai Jatra, the Cow festival. Followed by Khrisnastami (Krishna's birthday) celebrating the consummation of the sex act between male and female. It always rains on Krishna's birthday because a woman's shape is more visible in a wet sari, I was told. After all, Lord Krishna loved women!

Teej, the third festival, lasts three days. During this period married women relinquish responsibilities to children and husbands. No woman is seen carrying a child. Women bathe ritually in the Bagmati river at Pashupatinath on the third day.

I emerged from a bus and walked into a tableau in scarlet. A pointillist painting in graduated shades of red, deep pink and orange. The blaze covered the hillside at Pashupatinath, where woman sat talking and laughing in small groups, reclining like goddesses, queens, or rare species of exquisite butterflies marked with vermillion tika on the forehead. One this day all women wore their wedding dresses. Red, pink and orange gold embroidered silk saris, Nepali cholos worn with the regional striped sarong , and sequin-embroidered nylon saris of psychedelic brilliance! Wrists encircled in glass churas glittered, their delicate tinkling frightening away all demons.

A benign relaxed attitude prevailed. Some women turned to gaze at me, smiled sweetly and nodded. Only when I got home did I realize that by co-incidence, I was wearing my red silk Tibetan chuba!

© Alma Iris Ramirez