When a bomb went off near the Gateway of India in Mumbai recently, followed shortly by the collapse of Nepal’s fragile seven-month ceasefire, the headlines in the Kathmandu Post blamed the region’s political instability on the planet Mars.
As with most major events in Kathmandu, wild rumours abounded. The King and Queen had just flown to London for ‘health checks’, but was their timing mere coincidence or had the court astrologer told them something?
Everyone agreed on one thing at least: the alignment of the crimson, bellicose planet was responsible for the political troubles, which stemmed – in Nepal’s case at least – from ‘red’ Maoist rebels. I wonder how the numerous, highly-paid, Western peace-talk facilitators who had been specially flown in to help with the peace process rated their job satisfaction that day?
The week I moved to Kathmandu, back in March, I was struck by how many weddings there were. Cars bedecked with marigolds, preceded by scruffy and exhausted-looking brass bands crawled around the city at a snail’s pace. It was, I soon gathered, the last ‘auspicious’ week for getting married that year, and the astrologers had named a handful of propitious days on which to embark upon a long and prosperous marriage.
Families had been advised to limit the festivities to a day – instead of the usual three – because of the run on caterers. Cynics in the expatriate community wondered whether it was coincidence that the dates chosen neatly missed the impending five-day national strike.
‘Auspicious’ is a word one hears a great deal on the Indian subcontinent. Every undertaking has its own optimal moment – no timing is ever left to chance. Planning to open a shop? Don’t think of doing it on any day but Tuesday. Working with a United Nations agency to reform the judiciary system and set up courts around the country? Make sure you start the project on an auspicious day – the UN officials will surely understand.
There are two places where you can always guarantee a queue in Kathmandu: outside the British Consulate’s visa section, and in front of the Nepal Astrological Research Centre in the heart of the city’s bustling Dilli Bazaar. When a Nepali is born, the exact time of birth is recorded and taken to an astrologer who then draws up the baby’s horoscope. The horoscope will then be used to determine career choices, business decisions and, of course, the person’s compatibility with potential spouses. If a couple’s birth charts are ill-matched, the marriage cannot take place.
In the case of the Nepalese royals, more than one birth time is given to the astrologer and the real time kept secret on purpose – knowledge is power, and if someone knows your future, he is said to have untold power over you.
The court’s soothsayer, Dr Mangal Raj Joshi, is the 20th generation in the line of royal astrologers. The royal massacre of June 2001, when the then crown prince, Dipendra, killed nine members of his family before turning the gun on himself, was as much a surprise to the astrologer as it was to the rest of the world. Whereas the Aides de Camp on duty in the palace that fateful night were duly court-martialled and dismissed from the army, Mangal Raj Joshi still enjoys a privileged position as the royal family’s number one star gazer.
Religious faith and plain superstition coexist as happily as Hinduism and Buddhism in Nepal. Turn any corner on any given day and you’ll stumble across a festival. It could be a puja to ensure the masculine sex of babies, or a ceremony to honour household pets. The belief and faith encrusted in Nepalese day-to-day life is as inspiring and poetic as it is infuriating and occasionally impractical. During the Dasain festivities in October, an animal is sacrificed for every vehicle – even Royal Nepal Airlines has to kill a goat for each plane in its fleet, and daub the nose of the aircraft in the sacrificial blood.
As elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent, only the cows are immune. They meander smugly across the streets of Kathmandu, safe in the knowledge that they’re revered as holy beings.
My favourite sight so far has been the über-holy five-legged cow that sits on the ring road, dressed in a tunic and watched over by her toothless owner. Almost every passer-by bends down to put a ten rupee note on the animals back and touch her head in an act of reverence. Such a freak of nature would have been slaughtered at birth as a ‘child of Chernobyl’ in the West, but here she is super-sacred. Rudyard Kipling was right: ‘The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Kathmandu.’
