Stories Told

Nepal is a land filled with stories.  They swirl around like the wind and permeate the souls of the people.  Over the weekend we visited two temples.  The first, a towering white-washed mount topped with a golden eye is Buddhist.   It is called the Boudhanath and legend says the gods demanded a suitable sacrifice to end a long drought.  When the drought failed to end after several sacrifices the king decided he himself was the only worthy sacrifice.  He instructed his son to go to the site at dark and sacrifice the shrouded figure, decapitating it with one single stroke.  When the son removed the shroud he learned he had killed his own father.  To atone for the sin he built the Boudhanath.

The second temple was Hindu and place near the top of the mountain.  We wound through villages on a narrow road and arrived at the Chungunaryan.  The oldest stone carvings in Nepal are featured here and date back to 746 A.D.  The story is told that a farmer had a cow that would give no milk.  When he followed the cow he learned a small boy living in a tree would come out of the woods each morning and drink the cow’s milk.  The farmer thought the boy was an evil spirit and cut the tree down.  Unfortunately the tree housed a trapped deity who was killed.  The temple was built in atonement.

Every festival in Nepal boasts a similarly entertaining story and when I told my staff yesterday that it was an American holiday they immediately asked what the story was.  Truthfully, I don’t know the story of Halloween and I’m not sure it would matter to me.  I tried to explain this to my driver but he seemed ultimately confused by my lack of background information.

Nevertheless, when I explained that we would be building a pirate ship in the back of our car for "trunk or treat" the driver and gardener embraced the idea enthusiastically.  Each person contributed design ideas.  I spent hours trying to explain what a pirate was and even pulled up pictures on the internet.  In the end we all agreed, “A pirate was a scary man on a ship.”  We were all very proud of our finished product but when I walked out in my pirate costume with JAC dressed as a miniature pirate they seemed thrilled.  

In two years we will leave and I wonder what will be said about the crazy American dressed like a pirate.  Almost daily I find something strange about Nepali customs, but a girl dressed in an eye patch for a holiday without a story must seem so odd to them too.