The Day I Saw a Living Goddess

Drums thudded a frenzied staccato in my ear and I pressed my back against the crumbling temple wall to steady myself from vertigo. I looked down at the streets below, swollen with writhing, shouting, torch-bearing crowds. Standing this high up on the narrow terrace of an ancient Newari temple, it was easy to imagine myself a bird, quietly watching the confusion of humanity from a safe perch. But in frenetic Kathmandu, there is no such thing as a safe perch, and there is no such thing as a quiet observer—especially not on Indra Jathra, the festival of the rain god.

The sounds of celebration reverberating down brick-lined alleys had drawn me to this old chowk, or city square, to band together with hundreds of Nepalis beseeching the heavens for the end of monsoon season. As I clambered onto the temple terrace, jubilant worshippers told me if I waited long enough today, I would see a living goddess, the Kumari, with my own eyes.

As the living incarnation of the goddess Taleju, the Kumari is a young girl who is revered until the day she menstruates. Then, the spirit of the goddess departs in search of a new body, and the girl who was once a deity returns to the life of a normal Nepali woman. Kathmandu had a newly incarnated Kumari, and this Indra Jathra was to be her debut. My pulse quickened at the thought of glimpsing a goddess.

On one street, the river of people began to part as a wildly gesticulating body draped in gold robes came dancing over the dusty cobblestone. The figure carried a silver sword and wore a frowning mask crowned by a jet-black mane. This was Indra, the Hindu god of rain. Cymbals crashed, grinning teenage boys beat their drums faster, and the crowds clapped furiously as Indra danced his way to a stage at one end of the chowk. Other masked courtiers bedecked with gold and silver followed Indra onto the stage. There, as Kathmandu’s late-afternoon glimmer deepened into dusk, the deities danced, their rhythmic movements never breaking in the midst of a crushing crowd.

Flaming torches and street lamps lit the square, and I continued to wait. Finally, a round of musket shots and the crowd’s deafening roar signaled her arrival. Inside a wooden palanquin as tall as a house and pulled entirely by young men sat the Kumari, dwarfed by the voluminous scarlet pillows that propped her up. I noticed that the Kumari’s heavily made-up face was the cherubic face of a five- or six-year-old. And she was eating something. I squinted to get a better look as she plunged her hand into a bag and popped something into her mouth. I laughed out loud. The Kumari was eating a bag of potato chips.

Suddenly, I felt at home in the heart of Nepal. Here, strangely enough, a living goddess had made me feel human. I laughed again and cheered, my voice just one in a cacophony of thousands.