En Route: Goddesses of Kathmandu

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She said it in a whisper, subtly gesturing at a large, wooden building. It was dark, Kathmandu’s streetlights long turned off, and the moonlight gave her doe-eyed face an otherworldly glow.

“Goddesses live here.”

She kept walking, through the winding back alleys of Patan, and casually explained that in this tiny temple in that dirty alley lived goddesses. Not mythical goddesses, or spiritual ones: living, breathing, human goddesses called Kumaris. Or so she’d always been told.

A Kumari, she explained, is discovered when she is very young, usually around three or four, and tends to be breathtakingly beautiful. Sometimes, she is brought from the far, vivid green reaches of Nepal, from a mountain village that hardly has roads, let alone running water or electricity. Other times, she emerges from a compound off of Kathmandu’s winding, muddy roads, underfed and city-hardened. No matter where she is found, she is brought, wide-eyed and innocent, into the dark chambers of the Kumari temple, her family at her side. Dolled up and pampered, she, along with the other “chosen” ones, witnesses horrible sacrifices and other twisted rituals. The slaughtering of animals. The burning of body parts. Sometimes, even, it is rumored, various forms of masochism. The sort of things at which a little girl would usually scream in terror, but a Kumari, it is believed, is an ancient, wisened soul. What some might see as ritualistic sadism and violence, she sees reverence and holiness. Nothing to cry about.

Some of the girls do cry and scream — they are eliminated, sent back to their ordinary lives. Their families, who bear the burden of their daughters’ shame, follow with faces lowered. They may be seen as failures, but they are allowed to return to normalcy. Kumaris often meet a different fate.

But some little girls remain calm witnesses, sitting with kohl-rimmed eyes and jewelry-laden wrists while blood spatters the bottoms of their saris.  If they last through the spectacle and refuse to scream in the face of horror, they are accepted as goddesses, and brought into the inner sanctum, where they will remain until they reach puberty. They are worshipped and adored, for their beauty and stoicism.

Until they mature, that is. Then their lives, in essence, are over. They rarely marry, for it’s bad luck to marry a Kumari. During their reign as goddesses, they aren’t educated, because why would divine beings need schooling? Often they return to the places from whence they came a decade earlier and live out the remainder of their lives in the celibate bosom of their family.

Nepal is the sort of place where, somehow, a harem of goddesses doesn’t seem entirely out of the ordinary. Where the mountains look covered in vibrant green quilts, textured by rice terraces and farmland swollen with rain, and incense wafts in the air. Yet those moments dissolve quickly: when the garbage speckling the rice terraces comes into focus or the stench of open sewers taints the lingering incense. Or, especially, after ten years of worship, a Kumari is sent home, expired and alone, exiled from the land of magic.

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