Chapter 1
A hush descends on the tiny stone courtyard. A footfall, a cough, the beating of a pigeon's wings resound like a thunderclap in the silence. Outside, the jangling of rickshaw bells and motorbike horns belongs to another world.
Without warning, a child appears at an ornately carved window on the second floor. She could be six, eight or nine years old. It is impossible to tell. She gazes sternly down on the assembled foreigners, pouting slightly, looking mildly inconvenienced. Her eyes are huge, exaggerated with thick lines of kohl reaching all the way to her temples. She is dressed entirely in red, her lips bright red; her hair bound up tightly in a topknot; gold ornaments around her neck and bangles on her wrists. Her tiny fingers, their nails painted red, clasp a wooden rail across the bottom of the window with the command of a captain at the ship's helm.
There are awed murmurs and even some applause. The child's expression does not falter. Lowering his voice the guide explains, 'She does not smile. If she did, it would be an invitation to heaven and you would die.'
Just as suddenly, the child is gone, reabsorbed into the shadows, leaving only a flutter of red curtains.
The little girl is Nepal's 'Living Goddess', one of the sightseeing landmarks of Kathmandu, the face in every guidebook and on every tourist poster. To Nepalis she is known as 'Kumari' - the word for a virgin or unmarried girl. She is believed to manifest a powerful Goddess who protects Kathmandu and watches over the country and all its citizens. All-seeing, all-knowing, she is said to have eyes in the past and the future, and to see everything that goes on in the present. She has the power to cure illnesses, to remove obstacles in the way of happiness, to bestow immeasurable blessings on those pure of heart. She is said to punish the wicked with a single withering stare.
I was eighteen the first time I saw her, fresh out of school, travelling with three friends on a gap year in South Asia. For several months in the summer of 1983 we rented a couple of rooms in Freak Street, a fading hippy colony in the heart of old Kathmandu. Our shutters opened on to the southern facade of the old royal palace and, on the other side of Basantpur Square, an imposing three-storey building made of red brick with a deep, clay-tiled roof and wooden lattice windows - the palace of the Living Goddess.
The 'Kumari Ghar', or 'Kumari Chen' - the Kumari House - was a hive of activity, the entrance around the corner in Durbar Square guarded by a pair of magnificent stone lions. Every day devotees would climb the short flight of steps between the lions and, ducking their heads beneath the ornate wooden doorway, carry plates of offerings inside. Across the little courtyard they entered a door tucked away in a corner marked 'Hindus ONLY'.
This was as far as we could go, the building itself being strictly closed to foreigners. But devotees themselves can only venture as far as the Kumari's public puja room upstairs, behind the window where the little goddess occasionally appears for tourists. The rest of the building remains a mystery to them. In particular, we were told, there is one room where no one outside the Living Goddess's inner circle can go. On the top floor, directly above the main entrance, is an elaborate five-section window looking out on to the pagoda temples of Durbar Square. The central section is bronze-gilt and framed by golden dancing goddesses. It is a window fit for a queen. Only the Living Goddess can look through it. Behind it is her throne room, the most powerful place in the whole building - a ceremonial chamber reserved for rituals conducted by tantric priests and attended by the king.
A certain amount is widely known about the Living Goddess. For most of the time, our neighbours told us, she is restricted to the inside of the Kumari Chen. She leaves the building only to attend festivals, a dozen or so times a year. In order to maintain her purity her feet must never touch the ground, so on most occasions she is carried out of the house in the arms of one of the male members of her household and then borne aloft in a handheld palanquin. For three days in September, during the festival of Indra Jatra, she is pulled around the city on a massive golden chariot.
A special female caretaker and her family are responsible for looking after her and preserving the conditions that allow the Goddess to reside inside her. The Kumari's own family lives elsewhere. Her parents hand over their daughter to the Kumari Chen when she is selected for the role, around the age of three or four. Though they can go and see her they cannot embrace her or speak to her. They simply touch their foreheads to her feet like other devotees. She will be their daughter again only on the cusp of puberty, when she rejoins the world of mortals and leaves the Kumari Chen for good.
Another stipulation is that the Kumari must not bleed. If she cuts or grazes herself accidentally - if she suffers so much as a scratch - then the spirit of the Goddess inside her will disappear. So special care has to be taken to protect her from injury. When she shows signs of reaching puberty, before she can experience the blood loss of her first menstruation, the Kumari is dismissed and another little girl takes her place.
This much is popular knowledge. But much of what goes on inside the Kumari Chen is highly secret. The Kumari belongs to a belief system based on esoteric tantric rituals. Rumours and speculations are rife, even among Nepalis who worship her. There are stories of dark initiations at the dead of night: a terrifying ordeal in which the little Goddess walks barefoot through bloody courtyards scattered with the severed heads of goats and buffaloes while men dressed as demons leap and howl in the shadows. She is said to spend the night alone, shut up in a room with ghosts and rats. If the child shows no fear, our neighbours explained, it proves the Goddess has accepted her.
How the Kumari is selected is also a mystery. Some say it is a mystical process, the work of astrologers and tantric priests - like the selection of Tibet's Dalai Lama. Some say she is stripped naked and subjected to an intimate physical examination. There are certain signs the priests are said to look for. She has to be exceptionally beautiful, with radiant 'golden' skin, no blemishes, birthmarks or scars, and no indications of smallpox that, until recently, blighted the complexions of so many children in Nepal. She is said to be blessed with thirty-two lakshina - the physical perfections of a bodhisattva. She has to have the chest of a lion, for example; a neck like a conch shell; eyelashes like a cow; body like a banyan tree; the thighs of a deer; small and well-recessed sexual organs; a voice clear and soft like a duck's. Sometimes, mothers are said to dream of the Goddess when they are pregnant - a sure sign they are bearing a Kumari. Sometimes a snake - generally considered a good omen in Nepal - enters the house shortly after a future Kumari is born.
The child Goddess exhibits almost superhuman patience and poise. She is often required to sit motionless on a simple throne or cushion for hours at a time. Even when she is carried outside in her palanquin her demeanour remains sublimely calm, at odds with the thronging, excitable crowds around her. To westerners familiar with demanding toddlers her placidity is inexplicable. At Indra Jatra, her chariot processions last the best part of a day, during which time she does not touch a morsel of food or a drop of water, or absent herself to go to the lavatory. It was rumoured in the shady cafés of Freak Street that the caretakers use hypnosis, or strong alcohol or drugs - the only way, our hippy neighbours claimed, a toddler can ever possibly be this compliant. One old dharma bum was convinced, not without envy, that the Kumari is given soma - the legendary narcotic mentioned in the Rig Veda.
What happens to a Kumari after her dismissal is also a matter of conjecture. Former Living Goddesses are said to be extremely dangerous and capable of wreaking bloody accidents wherever they go. No one would ever want to marry an ex-Kumari, Nepalis told us. Snakes slither out of her vagina, threatening to emasculate any man foolish enough to try to deflower her. Some, on the other hand, insisted that sex is the only way these degraded goddesses can earn a living and claimed that ex-Kumaris are trafficked, along with thousands of other girls from Nepal, to brothels in Mumbai or Bangkok.
As we settled into life in Durbar Square the enigma of our neighbour became all-engrossing. We dropped in on her courtyard almost every day. Often she would grace us with an appearance at her window but some days we would wander away disappointed. At night we would catch a glimpse of a little figure in red flashing past the windows of her house. Her presence, like an occlusion in the mind's eye, trailed us on our excursions around the valley. We began to see the name 'Kumari' everywhere we went - on signs for shops, banks, travel agents, as the brand name of beauty products. On quiet afternoons in our flat I would write about her in my journal, wondering where she came from, what life was like for her inside the Kumari Chen, whether she was happy, where she would go when she was dismissed, if there was any truth to the darkest of the rumours.
I realized my framework for understanding what she represented was very limited. I found myself likening her to a 'Christ-child - innocent, vulnerable'. 'Perhaps,' I...
