Patan, where I am living, is home to the Rato Machhendranath Festival, the longest festival in Kathmandu. Machhendrenath, whose statue spends half of the year in Patan, has powers over rain, so this festival is a plea, at the beginning of monsoon season, for generous rains.
At the beginning of the festival, Rato Machhendranath’s statue is placed on a giant (like towering over buildings giant) wooden chariot and pulled around Patan for a full month. Sometime before I got to Nepal, they started pulling the chariot around Patan. I first went to see it a few blocks away, in a busy intersection full of people selling everything from samosas to bedsheets. People were lighting candles and praying as motorcycles tried to make their way through the crowds – a fairly typical scene of religion mixed with the big loud mess of everyday life.
The chariot’s final destination was right outside of my office, so my coworker Anisha and I went to see the procession on its final day. As expected, it was a complete zoo of a million people pushing and crowding and waiting for the very slow procession of this huge precarious statue. Power lines had to be removed to let it through, and I was surprised it didn’t crash into any buildings as it wobbled through the narrow streets (this has happened in past years). In front was a guy who was trying to get the crowd riled up about something, I will probably never know what, and groups of drunk men and (hopefully not drunk) teenaged boys pulled on ropes in what I assume was an attempt to keep the whole thing upright.
The chariot moved about a block per hour, so we left to get momos before the chariot had made it all the way to our corner.
Here are some pictures:
No comments:
Post a Comment