Teej

Its Teej time here. Teej is a Nepali Hindu holiday celebrated by women over 3 days. As I was told, single women celebrate that they may find a good husband and married women celebrate the life and well-being of their spouse.

The festival combines fasting and feasting (the latter of which I partake in happily) and women wear red and dance to celebrate.

Ladies at a Teej party - Red!

On the first day of Teej, the women often gather in the evening at a matriarchs home, where they eat all their favourite foods, including Khir (Nepali rice pudding). On the second day, married women fast and often go to the temple where they dance and celebrate Shiva. As a Nepali friend told me, the married women pray to Shiva and fast for their husbands to live a long healthy life. In the evening, the women do Puja and wait for their husbands to allow them to eat, at which time the women will have water or milk.

My foray into sari-wearing

"But the men aren't invited to the parties, so how can they tell their wives?" I asked.

"Oh, Ali-Ji, nowadays they just send a text!" Said my friend. Ha.

I was fortunate to be invited to two pre-Teej parties on the same day, one for parents at the kindergarten, and the other for the teachers and staff. I went to both. Unfortunately, I had a difficult time coming up with something red, as the outfit I wore last year would no longer fit over my protruding belly. So what to do? Buy a new outfit or get one made or..... wear a sari! perfect, as a sari can be wrapped to fit any size belly.

Thank you to Roma and her daughter who sourced me out a beautiful sari borrowed from a relative. And it was no ordinary sari, but a red, luxurious, bejewelled, spectacle that was given to the borrower by her father  on her wedding day. Clearly, wearing this would be an honour.

After a hot and frustrating process that involved 2 helpers, many safety pins, and at least 45 minutes, Roma and her daughter had me adorned.

U being adored

Even U got to wear red, and was fawned over by her many admirers at the kindergarten.

The parties were lots of fun, and included singing, dancing, and of course - feasting. I relished the opportunity to socialise with many of the teachers at the Kindergarten who I see frequently but rarely outside of school. I think they were impressed with my (rather bold) move to wear a sari. As a pregnant foreigner I definitely did not blend in. !

I admit that when my friend first explained the principle of the Teej holiday to me, I was initially shocked and dismayed to hear that the festival women celebrate was not about women at all, but about the husbands who they had or hoped to have. Of course this would be my western, feminist, agnostic identity shining through...

However, in my (albeit limited) experience of Teej, in witnessing two parties, and talking with many women who celebrate the festival, it seems to me that it has become a space where women come together, in an unrestricted and free sort of way, to dance and celebrate as sisters. Really beautiful.

celebrating Teej

...and we're back

It's been awhile since the last post. An embarrassingly long while, actually. And after travelling back to Canada for an extended vacation this summer, I realised how many people were interested in reading our blog. So, I'm back online and will try to not give up after one or two more posts.

In order to cover all the ground I missed in the last 10 months, I will have to break up all our news and Kathmandu excitement into smaller, flashback type posts.

News item (and post) #1: In April, we moved out of our lovely flat and into a HOUSE. This is our house:

Ganesh shrine beside our gates

We loved the house at first sight and were swayed by the many windows, the out-of-the-way community feel, and the fact that not only was the living room a former yoga studio (complete with an Ohm symbol still on the wall), but the house gates are located right next to a Ganesh shrine.

Ganesh is the elephant-head Hindu deity who, according to wikipedia, "is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom". Could we find a home with better Karma??

a glimpse of our garden

Reasons for move:

1. We wanted a garden.
2. Ironically, a house plus garden would actually be cheaper than our all-inclusive-still-kind-of-living-like-a-westerner-style flat
3. More news, our 3 in Kathmandu will soon become 4. More space is therefore needed. After all, where would the grandparents stay when they come halfway around the world to babysit??

We were so excited to move from a space that we had grown out of and began to feel more 'local' moving into a mainly Nepali area. Unfortunately, within the first week of our move, these are the things we discovered about living in a house rather than an all-inclusive-still-kind-of-living-like-a-westerner-style flat:

1. Cockroaches. Big, creepy, very un-North American cockroaches. I know, I'm a wimp. But really - they look like this:

I have now have had my toes tickled under the bedsheets at 2am by a cockroach, found one in my water glass in the morning, and boiled one in my coffee. BOILED COCKROACH COFFEE.

2. Unlike Toronto, Water doesn't just magically 'arrive' in your taps. (Clearly, one would think they know this). At our house, we have a 10,000 litre underground cistern that is supposed to be kept filled by water that comes flowing underground from the city. After moving, we learned that although we pay a monthly bill, the city water hadn't come in 4 months. So, in order to get water (not drinking water - tap water, showers, dishes, cleaning, laundry etc) we have to call a private tanker that winds its way down our tiny street then two Nepali boys drag a hose to our cistern and fill it up for about 15$. This lasts about 10 days to 2 weeks.
Wait! I'm not finished. Once there is water in the cistern, we then have to turn the pump on to pump the water to the rooftop water tank which takes about 30 minutes to fill. No water in the tank means no water in your house. And no electricity means no functioning water pump. With a load-shedding schedule that got up to 12+ hours a day without power in April means a person needs to be on the ball when it comes to water. Thank goodness we have a fantastic didi who mostly takes care of it.

Custom, locally made mango furniture in our former yoga-studio living area

3. Furniture. We moved into a house that had nothing but curtains. Western-ish style furniture to our taste doesn't come easily or cheaply and its been a slow process to furnish our house. We finally decided to enlist the local carpenter who made our table to also custom make us many pure mango wood items including an Ikea-copied kitchen island, a beautiful bookshelf and a very high, very unique, very hard bed.

and 4. The Ganesh Shrine. Not that we don't feel privileged living so close to a place of spiritual worship, but in Nepal, paying homage at a shrine tends to happen in the early morning hours. And, like almost all places of Hindu worship, our Ganesh shrine comes equipped with a bell so devout Hindus can announce their presence and invoke the deity. Our bedroom window is about 10 meters from said bell. Needless to say, we tend to rise early now....

Despite the challenges and a long settling in process, we are becoming accustomed to household life in Kathmandu and we have come to LOVE our house (bell and all), which we now call 'home'.

Oh, and it has a guest room! Visitors welcome in exchange for a few hours of babysitting...