Teej Time

Last year, we arrived in Nepal a few days after Teej, making it the last Nepali festival I have yet to experience. A Hindu holiday celebrated in India and Nepal, Teej is a commemoration of the marriage between Shiva and Parvati. Traditionally, Teej was a festival in which married women prayed for the wellbeing of their husbands and unmarried women prayed for a good husband in the future, but more recently Teej has also become a celebration of female expression. Women fast until late in the evening, consuming only water, fruit, and/or yogurt as an expression of devotion. And they dance—a lot.

My extended family began to arrive the day before the first day. With my four sisters, brother, mother, two aunts, sister-in-law, and four children, it was a pretty full house. That night, the dancing lasted until around 1AM, according to my family. I wasn’t feeling well and slept through the whole thing.

The next day, around noon, all the females of the household emerged donning red saris, flecked here and there with shimmering patterns of green and gold. Each woman had pinned up her hair with a golden crescent moon clip. Their forearms were decked with chura, round bands of red and gold. The married women had braided red rope into their hair, and many wore their mongolsutra, a necklace with a gold pendant that husbands give to their wives as a wedding gift. The younger girls looked pristine in their new dresses, their hair and makeup done special for the occasion.

After a prom-like succession of photo poses, preparations began for the puja materials. Grains of rice were separated from their husks with a conch shell. Bags of were filled with barley and wheat; others with bananas, guava, and other fruits.

The various bundles assembled, we walked leisurely (movement is difficult in a sari) toward the temple, crossing the river on foot. At least a dozen motorcycles, each with three young men packed onto the seat, whizzed by—they were heading east to watch the celebrations, my family informed me. My new flip flops, which I’d purchased in Kathmandu just a few days earlier, broke halfway to the temple, forcing me to walk the rest of the way semi-barefoot.

The temple was largely unoccupied when we arrived. While my family set about preparing the leaf plates with grain, coins, fruit, and flowers to perform the puja, I set out towards a clothing shop up the road.



I only walked a few meters, however, before a short, benign-looking middle-aged man called me back. He claimed to possess “superglue.” Never having seen superglue in my village, I skeptically followed him to his house. After a few minutes, he emerged with a little plastic bottle of what did indeed appear to be superglue. “Where did you buy that?” I asked in surprise.

“Malaysia,” he said. “I only have two bottles left.”

“I can’t take it.” I said. “You might need it.”

He smiled. “I saw that you were having difficulty, and it made me sad. You’re our guest. Please, let me help you.”

A man offering his precious glue to a complete stranger—such is the generosity of Nepali culture. We sat beneath a tree and he applied the glue between the two halves of the flip-flop. Then he proceeded to do the same to the other. “If you don’t get them wet, the glue should hold,” he said. We let them dry for a few minutes, and then I put them on. They were good as new (probably better, in fact). He refused my offer of payment, but I insisted that I would reciprocate his help some day.

A large crowd had gathered by the time I returned to the temple, with a “band” to boot. Mostly women, they sat encircling a small area where, turn-by-turn, individuals rose to dance. The roughly 30-second progression at these gatherings is always the same: someone started chanting, the band picked up the tune, and they went through three cycles: slow, then medium-fast, then frantic. Everyone’s dancing style varies a little bit, but after awhile it all kind of seems the same.

After a few hours of sitting in the sun, and watching the repetitive display, I excused myself and headed home. So ended my Teej, for the moment.

Two evenings later, I was watching a movie in my room when the singing and drumming began. After my movie ended, I went outside to see a crowd of at least sixty women in saris sitting in our front yard. The dancing wasn’t over. I sat for a while cheering on the participants, and, after some prompting, even danced three rounds with one of my host sisters. As it grew late and the routines grew monotonous, however, I discreetly ducked out and went to bed.

My host brother returned one day reporting that he had consumed three kilos—or approximately seven pounds—of goat meat (he’s pretty fat, but I still have a hard time believing it). Another relative confessed, when I visited him at school, that he was sick and hung-over after several days of late night drinking.

Having experienced the full festival cycle, I’ve now got a pretty good feel for what a Nepali holiday entails: families get together, dress up, slaughter an animal, do some puja, eat sweet and oily food, dance, drink, and be merry. When you boil it down, ignoring the animal sacrifices and god offerings, not that different than American holidays.