I've been meaning to post this since I was in Nepal a few months ago!
When the music first began, I was worried it would stop before I’d get a chance to document it. K and I were practising in our room. I was itching to finish and race out to the balcony to record this strange occurence. The music was like nothing I’d ever heard--it rose up from Bhanjang as though to the heavens--this blasting Nepali pop. Little did I know I had nothing to worry about, as the music marked the first day of Teej, beginning at 8AM the first day and not ending until the night of the third! Instead of worrying that the music would end, I soon began to worry about my sanity-or lack thereof-as just a handful of songs were roatated at an ear-splitting volume over the next few days--ultimately boring into my brain.
From what I’ve been able to glean, Teej is a Hindu festival for woman which lasts for three consecutive days. During this time, the men supposedly stay home and cook, and the women dress up and go to temples to pray to Shiva for a good husband and/or the health of their families. The married women dress in shimmering red saris accented with green, moving through the streets of Pharping en shimmering masse. In the evening, the women and girls gather together and dance (to said blaring music).
In Bhanjang, the little village down below Karma Chagme’s monastery, two enormous speakers had been set up in front of the shops in the dirt. They stood there, blasting their music through sun, fog and rain. It was the music from these speakers that I heard that first morning (and the next, and the next). Along with the addition of the speakers in Bhanjang, across the street below the school, a tent was set up next to a small shrine. Banners of triangular colored cloth crisscrossed the street.
In the morning, the music was the soundtrack to the villagers going about their daily routines--the women spreading cobs of bright yellow corn, husks and wet sheets on roofs; sitting in the sun combing their freshly washed, impossibly long black hair; dogs chasing small chickens; laundry hung to dry; men standing around.
Throughout the day, the tent slowly began to fill, first with jubilantly dancing little girls holding hands twirling in frilly dresses; then with more and more women, until evening when the tent became a mass of undulating red in the rain, while men and boys looked on.
Sitting on my bed, the music mixed with the sounds of the monastery: the blowing of horns, crashing of cymbals and thumping of drums by the young monks up in the temple. It mixed with the sound of K chanting along to a loudly playing recording of Penor Rinpoche and his monks chanting and playing instruments--resulting in the most horrific cacophony I had ever heard.
Even after K and I had threaded our way through the lush green fields, where dry cornstalks towered above us and rice grew to our waists, where white cranes flew and goatherds tended their goats, to the other side of the valley, we could still here the music! Even as we walked through the neighboring village of Drolod and climbed up scaffolding whose safety we questioned, to the top of the 118 foot Guru RInpoche statue being built, there was still the music’s echo.
Last night, Teej ended with the women down in the tent singing and clapping out rhythms. What did Teej teach me? How lovely silence is! It made me miss the whirring of crickets, the cooing of pigeons, the occasional honk of a horn going down the mountain.
