Rashmila Shakya was Royal Kumari from 1984–91. Having graduated with a Bachelor of Information Technology degree, she works for a private company as a software developer.
Scott Berry is an American author. His notable works include A Stranger in Tibet.
The Living Goddess Kumari is a Supreme Goddess... and She does not undergo any lessons or teaching. She also does not have any playmates. Her caretakers keep a watch on her day and night.
From, Siddhi B. Ranjitkar:
Kumari, the Virgin Goddess
Very little light comes in through the traditional, carved wooden windows of my bedroom in the morning. They face in towards the courtyard, so there is little sound either, even though the square outside by this time is full of the honking of early morning rickshaws, the swish of the long brooms of the sweepers, the bells of the temples and the chanting of priests. I hear only the vaguest echoes of all this, as I see only the palest reminder of the sun. But no one ever has to wake me up. I look forward to opening my eyes every morning and seeing all my dolls looking at me, for I have arranged them around my bed the night before.
Once I have greeted them, I make the long trip to my own bathroom, around a corner, up the steep stairs to the next floor, and down a passageway, where I find my red towel and red toothbrush. Already others are stirring, and I know that when I get back to my room Fufu, or “father’s sister” (whom I think of as my mother, even though she really is my father’s sister), or possibly one of her daughters Durga or Sita (usually Sita) will be there to help me dress and put up my hair. Dressing is something I can do well enough by myself as long as it is not a festival day, but I enjoy having my hair combed out and put up, even though it is pulled so tight that sometimes it hurts.
“Hold still, please Dyah Meiju,” she warns as she pulls it up into a bun on the top of my head, and then puts a red ribbon around it. “Now for your aajha.” She carefully applies kohl around my eyes, and then in two sweeping curves to above my ears. I will not be able to rub my eyes all day. With her right thumb she puts a red tika on my forehead between my eyes, and I am set up for the day.
By now it is breakfast time. I always enjoy breakfast because it is a meal I can share with others. Meals including cooked rice are considered special, so I must eat them alone on a raised platform in my own kitchen in the back of the palace. Since breakfast is only tea and deep-fried bread there is no restriction on where I have to be or whom I have to eat it with, and as a result it is an informal and enjoyable affair.
“Dyah Meiju, your teacher is here!” a woman’s voice calls. That must mean it is 9 o’clock, for the teacher arrives from the school next door at that time. After finishing my tea, I go back to my room where he is waiting. The building is now astir with children getting ready to go to school.
“Dyah Meiju, the priest from the Taleju Temple has arrived,” comes another voice. “It is time for Nitya Puja.” This is always done around 9 a.m., but since the exact time is not important, sometimes – if the priest is late – my lesson can begin before the puja.
“Which one?” I call out.
“The young one.” The one who gets on my nerves. The Acahju, or chief priest, is a dignified, elderly man who commands respect by his manner, so that there is no question of any nonsense with him. But the younger, stouter, priest, seems always to be irritated about something, and frequently loses his temper with everyone, except me of course.
I see one of my playmates hurrying by in her school uniform, and point to the stairway where the priest will leave his puja bag after taking out the items he will need. She smiles back in understanding. Not only does she have to do whatever I want her to do, but this is one of our favourite, often repeated, games. As soon as the priest is in the puja room with me, she will hide his bag.
I go into the room called the Singhasan, the one with the golden window looking out onto the street, and sit on my golden throne with seven nagas protecting me while the priest sits on the floor offering red powder, rice and flowers to my feet, and lighting small lamps, as he worships the human embodiment of the goddess Taleju for about fifteen minutes. This puja also includes the indistinct chanting of secret mantras and the performance of secret mudras, or hand gestures. Since not even I am allowed to know these, he covers his hands while performing the gestures. He will not offer me a tika, for he is allowed only to touch my feet. Only the women of the family are allowed to give me tika. Though the same ceremony is repeated every morning, and I no longer pay attention, I never get bored or fidgety, but simply sit there in my stony-faced way. I know that I am a goddess, that this is the way a goddess is treated and this is the way she behaves.
I know that I probably won’t start my lesson now, for this is the time when worshippers usually come, and for the past week the same woman and her son have been here. The boy is about 6 or 7 years old, perhaps 2 or 3 years younger than I am, but he has still not begun to speak, and his mother has brought him every day in the hopes that I will be able to cure him. Most of my devotees have children with problems, particularly illnesses, so that I know I am important to children. I also have no doubt that I will be able to help him. Of course the mother does not ask me directly for what she wants, nor do I speak directly to her. Instead I remain seated on my golden throne while she pours a small amount of water from her left hand over my feet into her right hand then drinks it. She repeats this, but this time offers the water to the boy who also drinks it. In the distance I hear with satisfaction the priest fuming and shouting about thieves and missing puja bags, but I force myself to concentrate on the task at hand, for it is my duty to try to help the boy to speak.
Since it is a weekday, I hope that there will be no more worshippers so that I can finally begin my lesson. The teacher has only been coming for the last year, and every day our lesson is interrupted in this way, but I have discovered that learning can be fun, and I want to catch up with my playmates, all of whom go to the Nawa Adahrsa School next door in Basantapur Square. “One more worshipper this morning, Dyah Meiju,” says Taba, the man whom I regard as my father.
Actually I am ready for this one because the family of the supplicant has paid for everything necessary for a chemma, or forgiveness puja and Taba has made all the arrangements, having first asked me if there was anything I would particularly like. A pale and ill-looking young man comes into the room with his family and looks at me hopefully. I know that I will be able to cure him if I want to, though since he is not a child, I am not particularly interested.
It seems he has unwittingly got himself into trouble with me. It is not the first time I have seen him, for he is a journalist who came to do a story about Kumari. It happens all the time and I always enjoy these visits because I get to hear yet again the stories about the Goddess Taleju and King Jayaprakesh Malla, or of Prithvi Narayan Shah dreaming of Kumari just before he conquered the Kathmandu valley. It is not that this young man actually wrote anything bad or untrue, but when the article appeared, his picture was inset above mine. Although I was entirely unaware of this, it was apparently enough of an insult to Taleju Bhawani as personified in me, that the poor man began vomiting blood. This puja is to ask my forgiveness so that he will be cured. No wonder he looks anxious. If I do not accept his puja, I can make things even worse for him. I have heard the story of an elderly priest who offered water to my predecessor, who stared hard at him before condescending to drink it. He died on the way home.
I am first offered chocolates and the red toy car I had requested. More importantly I am offered sagun, which consists of a boiled egg and a dried fish which are placed in my left hand, and a silver tumbler of raksi, the strong distilled spirit of the valley, which I hold in my right. Each of these items I touch to my lips to show that I accept the offering, to the visible relief of the young journalist. The raksi burns my lips pleasantly.
There was no question of my not accepting his puja. Though children are the only ones I really care about, I have no hostile feeling towards anyone, not even the irritable priest whom I enjoy tormenting, and am happy enough for him to be cured.
At last my long-delayed lesson can begin, though by now it is nearly 10 o’clock, the time when my teacher always leaves. I go back to my bedroom and sit opposite him on the floor with a small table between us. He is a very old man, tall and thin with thick, black-rimmed glasses that seem almost an extension of his black Nepali topi. Like the priest, he is dressed in the traditional Nepali Daura Surwal. He is not very energetic, or, it would seem, very interested in the lesson. But in a way I am lucky to have him at all for there is a belief that it can serve no purpose to attempt to teach a goddess, who by definition already knows everything. There is an even more discouraging legend that anyone who tries to teach a Kumari will die. But he does not seem afraid. In fact he hardly seems conscious.
“Not much time,” he grumbles in Nepali in his thin, wheezy voice. My families (both of them) speak to me in our Newari language of the Kathmandu valley. Since I had started Kindergarten before becoming Kumari I had made a start in Nepali, as all school children do. The old man is a Nepali teacher, and this cannot help but be useful to me, but he is expected to teach me other subjects like English and Mathematics as well. “Would Dyah Meiju be so good as to multiply 17 times 14?” he asks.
“Two hundred and thirty-eight,” I answer mechanically; hoping he will come up with something a little more interesting. His mathematics lessons consist of making me memorise the multiplication tables up to 22. My eldest sister Pramila, who visits me occasionally, but not often enough that I feel really close to her, says he should be giving me word problems, whatever they are.
“Yes, well that’s good,” he mumbles, sounding as if he is about to fall asleep. “Now, would Dyah Meiju kindly copy out these English words?”
I open my notebook and copy out a few words, taking special care to reproduce them exactly in all their elegance, for the letters are beautiful and exotic to me. “What do they mean?” I ask. He looks blank. “Are they really words? What do they sound like?”
“Time enough for that when Dyah Meiju has learned how to copy them. Mustn’t try to run before we can walk.” Even at nine years old, I suspect that he will not tell me because he just does not know.
Outside in the distance, a school bell rings. “Time to go,” he mutters struggling to his feet and forgetting to give me any homework. It hardly matters, for we will probably be interrupted again tomorrow.
My duties, such as they are have finished for the day, and I go in search of playmates. The house is large, made up of many long narrow rooms and passages much larger than the house where I spent my first three years, though I have no real memories of that. There are many children here, for Taba has two married sons and plenty of nieces and nephews. Enough of them are my own age that it should not be difficult to find someone to play with, and in fact until a year or two ago it never was. But in recent years they are all at the Nawa Adahrsa School, the one my teacher comes from.
Going from one long room to another, then down several passageways, and finding no one but my “big brothers” Gautam Dai and Mahendra Dai,1 their wives and sisters, all of whom are much too old to play with, I decide to play with my dolls. I have a large collection. Some are dolls that have been bought in stores and have been offered to me by grateful devotees whose children I have cured, others are rag-dolls I make from bits of red cloth and discard when I am finished with them.
What should I do? Perhaps make a sari or a dress for one of them, or should I set them up in family groups? I decide on the latter and begin dragging them out of my room and setting them up in the side room that runs from the back to the Singhasan puja room, on the opposite side of the courtyard from the kitchens. Soon I have a big pile, and then I begin sorting them out so that some can be eating, others cooking, others still sewing and gossiping. Most are girls, blonde and pale-skinned, though I do give them red tikas to make them seem more familiar. Their eyes shut when I lay them down. Sometimes one of the girls has to pretend to be a father doll, but there are plenty of babies, including one which never leaves its basket, and a couple of rag dolls. I bring out my little stove that another worshipper has given me, and all its miniature pots and pans. Everything works, and I have even learned how to light the little coal stove. Taba and Fufu have not been happy about this, fearing that I might hurt myself, but seeing that I was careful, they have let me go ahead with it.
“The sun is in the right place. Perhaps Dyah Meiju would like to have her bath now.” It is Sita, one of my “sisters” who usually helps me with my bath. Actually Dyah Meiju would rather play with her dolls just now, but I know that at this time of year, if I don’t have my bath when the sun is shining in the window, it will be cold and unpleasant, so I reluctantly leave my dolls and follow Sita to my bathroom. The winter sun streams in the window which overlooks the back courtyard with its quacking ducks. No one but the family has access to this courtyard. It wouldn’t do to have Kumari drying herself in the sun where she can be seen by just anyone.
The water in the bucket has been heated, and it feels pleasant as it is poured over me. I could manage my bath by myself, but no one has ever suggested this, and besides, I will need help with my hair and eye make-up when it is finished. It feels good afterwards to stand in the sun wrapped in my red towel until it is time to get dressed and go to lunch. This time, since I will be eating rice, I go and sit on my solitary platform in my own kitchen, while Fufu places a tray of dal-bhat-tarkari in front of me. This consists of hot cooked rice, potato curry, a mixed vegetable curry, and (what my eyes have searched for first) a spicy pickle made from tomatoes. “I’m glad to see that there is tomato achar today,” I say a trifle haughtily and self-righteously.
“Oh yes, Dyah Meiju has no need to worry.”
Last week I was served a lunch with no tomato achar, and refused to eat it until Fufu had gone out, bought tomatoes, and cooked them up into achar. I simply sat there until two o’clock when I finally got what I wanted. Dyah Meiju always gets what she wants.
The long afternoon stretches before me. My playmates are still in school, and I drift first to the front windows where I look out onto Durbar Square and the people passing by. There are rickshaw drivers hoping to get a foreign tourist, ragged, barelegged porters smoking a cigarette after carrying a heavy load, another staggering under the weight of a refrigerator strapped to his forehead. A Newari farmer carries vegetables in two baskets suspended from a carrying pole across his shoulders. Country women in colourful red saris are sitting on the steep steps of the Narayan Temple gossiping, while the occasional taxi blasts on its horn. Children my own age run around, some in blue or maroon school uniforms, others in rags. A little drama unfolds as a man on a motorbike almost knocks a man off a bicycle, but it all ends in smiles and laughter. A man with a tie and a briefcase, making his Nepali topi look incongruous, hurries across the space in front of my temple like his life depended on it. What can be so important? A woman I recognise is trying to sell little bags and necklaces to the groups of foreigners coming in my direction, and is using her little boy to get their sympathy.
My view is limited since I am not supposed to stick my head right out, but though I can see only the white Ghadi Bhaitak part of the Palace, where the King and his family wait for me on the first day of Indra Jatra, and three temples, it is really the people who interest me. Some are richer than me, most are not nearly so well off, but they all have something I do not have: they can all go where they want. I wonder, with no way at all of solving the puzzle, whether the ragged urchins playing tag have more interesting lives than mine. I try to imagine myself in their place, but it is just too hard.
I shrink back a little from the window so the foreigners will not be able to see me. In a few minutes, after the trinket lady finishes with them, I will probably have to show myself to them from the window in the back. My eyes go up to the window of another temple across the square where I see the lord Shiva with his arm around his wife Parvati. Like me they are looking out of a window and down at the square, but they are even more trapped, for as wooden images they cannot even leave their window. Then I hear one of the women of the house call, “Dyah Meiju, some foreign visitors.”
It is not an order, for no one orders a goddess around, but I understand that because they will leave an offering on a small pillar in the courtyard, I have a duty to show myself at the window, just as I understand that I have a duty not to smile when I am there. Sometimes it is a bother, if I am playing with my dolls or dancing with the other children, but just now I don’t mind. If I am not doing anything else and I like the looks of them, I might appear even if they have not left an offering.
Going back through the room where my dolls are still as I left them, I put on my serious Kumari face and step to the window. Sometimes the foreigners applaud, some of them do Namaste, and some just stand and stare. Sometimes I stay longer than others, depending on how curious I am. Where are they from, I wonder? Why are the women dressed so strangely? Is their hair that way naturally? Most of them, men and women, have cameras around their necks, but I know that if they point them at me I should step back. I wonder what country they are from, and wish I could just shout down and ask their Nepali guide. What is that country of theirs like? Would my teacher know if I asked him? Will I ever visit it? And what do they make of me? Don’t they have goddesses in their own land? Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just ask them whatever I wanted? Of all of them, the ones I like most are the ones I am told come from a country called Japan. They always applaud when I come to the window, and something in the way they look at me makes me think they understand me.
A little hesitantly, and without any real hope, I look down to one corner of the courtyard. No, as I expected they are not there. It has been about two years since I have seen them, two foreign girls a little older than me, dressed like Nepali girls in grubby salwar khameez. For a long time they came every day, sitting and looking up at me and smiling when I appeared for the tourists. Then one day when no one else was around, I called down to them that I had a ball, and why didn’t we play? Of course they could not actually come in since they were not Hindu, but Taba, Gautam and Mahendra decided they could come to the bottom of the steps while I stood at the top and we could throw the ball back and forth. Sometimes they threw me sweets, and at others I would throw down some of my offerings. We could even talk since they spoke some Nepali.
But that was years ago. Just who they were or where they were from I never learned. Kids don’t talk about things like that when they are playing ball and eating sweets. Will they ever come back?
Having seen enough of the palace square for the moment, once the foreigners have gone I wander into the kitchen used by my guardians. This is separate from my own, for everything of mine is used only by me, and food can only be prepared for me in my own special kitchen. The reason I like the family kitchen is because the window looks right out on to Nawa Adharsa School at right angles, and I am almost close enough to touch the children in the classrooms. I can almost tell what subject they are studying from what they are writing in their notebooks. Of course not everyone is writing intently. Some, especially the boys, are misbehaving, throwing things at one another, or annoying the girls. Occasionally I hear the rough voice of a teacher, a teacher more energetic than mine, bringing them to order. It looks like fun. In fact at the moment, it looks a lot better than standing around waiting for everybody else to finish school.
I wonder if I can get away with feeding the fish without Gautam Dai noticing. I know he says it is bad for them, but everyone likes to eat, so why not fish? Hoping that he is in the little shop that he runs next to Kumari Che, I sneak to the back of the house where he has a nice aquarium full of colourful fish, but just as I am reaching for the food, I see that he has noticed me and has followed me. He must have come back for lunch. “Now, Dyah Meiju,” he says, gently taking the box of fish food from my hand. “The fish have already been fed today, and you know that you might kill them if you give them too much. Let’s go check on the birds.”
He also likes to keep pigeons, and there are a lot of ducks as well. Knowing that I can eat duck eggs, but not chicken eggs, my devotees often offer baby ducks to be raised in one of the back rooms of the Kumari Che around the small back courtyard. I like the baby ducks, but lose interest in them as they grow up. For one thing, they smell bad. For another, one of my 32 perfections is to have a voice “as soft and clear as a duck’s.” Not very flattering. But there happens to be a fat puppy waddling around which I pick up and cuddle, somewhat to Gautam’s consternation.
But I now hear the noise of children returning, and hurry up to the long, narrow rooms occupied by the family on the first floor to listen to the news of my playmates’ day at school. They look a little uncomfortable as I join them, for when we are together, the word of the girl in red is law. “Go ahead,” I tell them after they have all touched my feet. “Don’t stop. I want to hear about your school.” Normally I just sit and listen since I have nothing to contribute, as they talk about their lessons, complain about the naughty boys, and go on about who is friends with whom. I hear that a girl named Dilmaya got top marks on the English test, but a boy named Bikas was jealous, and he pulled her hair, so the teacher made him stand in the corner for the rest of the day. It is all a world away from mine, though the school is so close by. No one else seems to be learning the times tables up to 22. Maybe only goddesses do that. One day I will go to school, I’m sure, but just now it is very hard to imagine. Besides, when they talk about the short tempers of their teachers, sometimes I have my doubts.
Two girls, a little older than my playmates, come and join the group, though first they bow and touch my feet. My big sisters. Thin and rather intense, Pramila is already beginning to look like a young woman, and to act like one as well. Surmila, a year older than I am, is a lot more jolly and carefree. I ignore them. It is not that I don’t like them, but I have never really figured out how they treat me with the deference and respect other outsiders do, or should we act like I have seen other sisters acting?
“Come sit with us, Dyah Meiju,” suggests Surmila, the bolder of the two. I run away to my dolls.
The other children never come to play with me, but have to wait for me to come to them. Just now I want to be alone, so I take my little stove and go to my own kitchen where it is safe to light it, since I feel like making some snacks for my dolls. As the newspaper and wood chips light the charcoal and the stove heats up, I put on the tiny kettle and cut up a potato. This is something else that my guardians were not happy with at first, worrying that I might cut myself, but seeing that I was skilful enough not to do myself any harm, they gave in and let me have my own way. Eventually I wind up with something that is supposed to be tea and fried potatoes, which I serve to my dolls. It would be nice sometime to do this for real people, and to see them actually eat and hear them say what a clever cook I am, but of course I am not allowed to do anything for anyone else. After my dolls have finished with them, I usually give their snacks to the family, but am not sure what they do with them.
“Dyah Meiju, foreigners.” I am busy feeding my dolls, and do not want to go, but I know it is my duty. It is no problem not smiling this time. I positively glower.
Afterwards I interrupt two of my playmates from a game of karom in one of the back rooms, and have them come and help me feed my dolls. Recently I have been spending a lot of time with my dolls, and I know that my playmates are bored with them, but what is that to me? After a few minutes, they grow restless. “Would not Dyah Tata perhaps like to join in our karom game?” one suggests shyly. Only my playmates in the temple address me as “goddess sister”. I am not in the mood for flipping disks of wood around a board and trying to get them into the holes in the corners, and I can force them to do whatever I want, but it is more pleasant playing with happy people, so I give in with the air of someone doing them a big favour.
“Tea time.” My dolls have had their tea, and now it is my turn: roti or maybe fried potatoes and a sweet. Since cooked rice is not involved, I do not have to have my tea on my platform, and so I can sit around and talk with my playmates or whomever else I want to talk with.
After tea I find my mother waiting in the back room. Much more important as far as I am concerned, she has brought my little brother Sarbagya with her. He is now a fat toddler about two and a half years old, and before my mother even has time to touch my feet, I grab him and spin him around. He is my favourite of the family, by a long way, and while he is here I will not let go of him.
At last my mother, who is not much taller than I am, manages to get under him to touch my feet. Of course in a normal Newari family, a child bows down to touch his or her parents’ feet, and this act of homage paid to me is something that makes it difficult for me to think of her as my mother. She then confuses me even more by ceasing to treat me as a goddess and chatting about my health (I am always fine) and about how my sisters are doing in school. Pramila is doing brilliantly as always, and is making everyone proud as the others try hard to emulate her. As with my sisters, I am not sure how to behave. The family always makes me feel terribly shy. Like my sisters, she wants me to sit beside her, and since she has brought my brother, I acquiesce, keeping him on my lap.
I enjoy her visits more since he was born. I used to be so shy with her that I found it easiest to just ignore her, though even as a small child I could see that I hurt her. For some reason, even when she was pregnant with my brother, I began to feel closer to her (though this did not happen when she was pregnant with my youngest sister Sunila just a year before) and once he was born we were both just crazy over him. For her it came as a tremendous relief after five girls to finally have a boy, and since the previous Kumari’s mother had also had a son while she was in office, I got a lot of the credit.
Dinner, like lunch, is a solitary affair, but not particularly lonely. From my platform as I eat my dal-bhat-tarkari (and of course my tomato achar) I can not only hear the members of my family, my guardian family that is, chatting away and joking about events of the day, but I can see some of them as well. Their dining room is right next to mine, and I can even join in the conversation if I want.
After dinner I feel like company, but my playmates are doing their homework. I could make them form a little band and sing for me so I could dance, the way the star does in the Hindi and Nepali movies, but not wanting to chance the unhappy looks I get from both them and their parents when they cannot refuse, I go upstairs to where there is a large, glass-covered portrait of King Mahendra, King Birendra’s father and predecessor. I use this as a mirror, and dance some of the numbers I have seen in Hindi and Nepali movies, imagining myself as the heroine. When I get bored with this I return to my dolls. They are still arranged in the long room opposite the kitchens, so I gather them all up in two or three trips and take them to my room. They will be my company when I curl up between my red sheets, and I arrange them so that whenever I wake up I will find them looking at me.
Everyone is tired now, and before bed-time we usually gather in the long first floor sitting room overlooking the courtyard to watch television. This is something new in our country, and everyone is quite fascinated by the pictures on the small screen. As the goddess, I get to sit right in front of the screen so that no one can block my view. I am so amazed that I hardly ever remember what I have seen except the dancers in the films. If I were not a goddess, sometimes I think I would like to be a dancer.
Before I go to bed I go to my bathroom and wash off my eye make-up. Then one of my “sisters” comes to take down my hair and help me out of my red dress and into my red pyjamas. I am not really supposed to add any personal touches to my room, but she overlooks the dolls.
It has been a day much like any other, though there are occasional variations. On the 10th day of some of the Nepali months one of a group of five priests called the Pancha Buddha perform a special puja with me called Dasami Puja. These are five priests of the Bajracharya caste representing the “Five Buddhas” that are seen everywhere in the Kathmandu Valley: particularly painted over doorways and on stupas, large and small. Each of them has his own colour and, when on a stupa, each faces one of the cardinal points, except for Vairochana who is usually considered to be at the centre (though on some of the larger stupas, like Suwayambunath, he faces just south of east). One of their human representations comes every morning to Kumari Che for a puja in a special room called the Agan Kota, but the only one that involves me is Dasami Puja. I can never differentiate between them, and think of all of them as “Guruju”.2
On a Saturday, a holiday for everyone else, I will be busier with worshippers – there might be twenty or more – and there will be no shortage of playmates since there is no school that day. I have little to do during the day, everyone looks up to me, and hardly anyone ever tells me what I can and can’t do. But sometimes I am lonely, and of course I am always looking forward to those 13 occasions during the year when I get to go outside my temple.
1 Dai is Nepal for elder brother.
2 Books and articles always say that they are involved in the Kumari selection process, but as far as I know, this is not true.