A Little Festival…Celebrating Nepali New Year
The Nepali New Year dawned bright and early our third week in Pharping and Amrit invited all of us volunteers staying at the guesthouse to celebrate the New Year with his family up a nearby hill. Both of the monasteries were closed for New Year festivities; so, without the invitation from Amrit we would have been just four lost souls living in a fishbowl…wait…ack…rather four decidedly white people wandering on the periphery of the familial festivities of the New Year.
Instead, Amrit, Carna, and a team of his Nepali family members descended on the guesthouse kitchen like chickens converging on their morning feed; they were so engrossed in the cooking of the day’s meal that they forgot our breakfast! Amrit shooed us out of the guesthouse after slapped-together breakfast just as the spicy scents of our picnic lunch were wafting through the rooftop kitchen-patio and gave us a hand-
drawn map of the path up the hillside to the huge picnic area overlooking Kathmandu Valley.
We set off on the walk and were soon met by Amrit’s younger cousin who indicated that he would lead us through the dry rice paddies and up the extremely steep hillside. I freaked out about a quarter of the way up the hill and turned around -we hadn’t eaten anything for hours and Amrit didn’t warn us that it was a 45 minute completely vertical hike. Luckily, just as I has half-way back to the guesthouse Amrit pulled up on the motorcycle to zoom me up the dirt pathway that snakes up to the topmost monastery on the hill.
Once everyone was settled in Carna dished up the huge selection of food…and for the first time ever I watched Amrit eat a meal that didn’t include dhal bhat! Our meal consisted of puffed and pounded rice, lightly curried veggies, potatoes, a pav bahji type mix of crunchy toppings and an ice cold beer in a tiny plastic cup.
Our luck didn’t hold for long though and the overcast sky unleashed it’s furry in a sudden downpour that sent us all huddling beneath the
thin covering of some tall trees. After minutes of standing and wondering about a next move Amrit, Carna, and the four of us headed further up the hill in the lightly sprinkling rain to check out the large hillside monastery before the full force of the rain storm descended. We got to the entrance gate of the monastery when another 10-minute downpour trapped about 30 of us under a small awning.
One Nepali guy saved the day by pulling out his guitar and serenading us with an eclectic mix of highly appropriate English songs like Have you Seen the Rain and patriotic Nepali songs like Nepali Ho, by 1974 AD. We latched on to the Nepali Ho song with an instant affinity for the passionate singing of all of the Nepalese in the vicinity as they shouted out the chorus and finished with an emphatic Nepali ho!!, translated as “I am Nepali!!”
Helen's serenading our neighbors with her rendition of "Nepali Ho" - They loved it!
This song was later one of our prime trump cards when we were bargaining with the Nepalese in Thamel and Pokhara. If they wouldn’t lower the price we would bust into the chorus of this fiercely patriotic song and call out our “nepali-ness” at the end of the chorus with as much conviction as we could muster. And it always worked! They ate it up and ALWAYS joined in for the chorus.
As we were wandering back from the monastery to the main group Helen and I took Amrit by surprise by busting out with the phrase tapaai:laai pagal ho. Pagal is a Nepali word with a lot of different meanings apparently. Urmila, our Nepali language teacher in Kathmandu, indicated that we could use this phrase to tell a friend that they were being silly.
Amrit, though, was floored and immediately burst into uncontrollable laughter at the phrase. Although pagal can mean silly in some circumstances it actually means crazy/mad/insane/mentally retarded. So when I told Amrit, tapaai:laai pagal ho he heard “you are going insane,” or in Amrit lingo “you are going to the mad.” This little video clip is Amrit’s reaction to our little display of Nepali language ignorance:
We didn’t let the rain stop us from having a pretty rocking time -it was a weird way to celebrate the New Year though because it is so vastly different from a Western New Year’s Eve celebration. There were no fireworks, no partying, and beyond our picnic lunch the day was very chill and relaxed and all about spending a relaxed afternoon with family…at least in this neck of the woods. We heard a rumor that the Kumari made one of her 13 yearly appearances in the courtyards around Durbar Square. We were away from all of that madness though and safe and sound in the isolation of a remote valley town.
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