Meet the cello girl

Rain pelleted the windshield furiously. Iva Maharjan dashed down the footpath and slid into the backseat of the taxi, next to me. We were about to be stuck in Kathmandu traffic for exactly two hours and I would ask her a question on which our time would pivot.

Iva goes by the name “the cello girl” on her WhatsApp ID. I had always wondered if the title had more to reveal.

“Yes, I play the cello,” she flashed a demure smile. The cello is a stringed instrument, used in various genres of music. It is also known as violincello. I had never met a cellist before!

The cello isn’t the instrument Iva has always played. When she was 11, she started to learn to play the violin.

“My cousin-brother (Sabin Munikar) had set up a music institute in our house so my father asked me if I was interested in learning the violin,” Iva recalled. Her father, Babukaji Maharjan, a music enthusiast himself, plays the dhimay and the flute. He has been the biggest force behind Iva’s music journey.

“If my father hadn’t dropped me off to rehearsals, I wouldn’t be here.” I teared up when Iva said that, as I thought about my own father always holding the light for me.

When Iva first learned to play the violin, it was very hard.

“It’s uncomfortable and painful in the beginning because you’re not used to putting your hand like that and holding the stick in a certain way. It is also difficult to press on strings, hurts your fingertips," Iva said as she showed me the dead skin on her fingers. "But it was a part of the learning and never did it feel like I didn’t want to do it. I liked being known as someone who could play the violin.”

While the violin became attached to her identity, it was only in 2017 that her instrument really found her. Iva is part of the Nepal-Norway project, which had donated three cellos to Nepali music groups. 

They had the instruments but no players. It was then that her cousin asked her if she wanted to take up the cello. Although not a cellist himself, he taught her how to hold it and where to place her fingers.

“I started to practice based on the theory I knew from learning the violin,” Iva said. 

It was difficult for her to make the transition at first. The violin is in the treble clef and the cello is in the bass clef and so there were different notes on the staff notation to navigate. Yet, a month after picking the cello, Iva played in an orchestra.

She had her debut performance in 2017 at the British School, where she played the senior for violin and the junior for cello: “At that time, my mentor told me, play what you can and leave what you can’t. Just stay focused on the staff notation because you need to know where you are in order to pick the notes that you can play. It was quite simple at that time.”

Iva has continued playing the cello after that.

“I liked the fact that I didn’t have to hold my hand up anymore. For the violin you have to do that. I could sit and play. I liked the sound. When it’s just the violin, the sound can be quite high pitched. With the cello, it balances it out. It also gives it a more fuller feeling.”

As I watched Iva smile and talk about her music, the stillness of the traffic and the fury of the rain had somehow started to wane from my mind. Thinking about Iva in the midst of an orchestra brought a simple and real comfort. She brought out her phone and showed me recordings of her performances.

What also attracted Iva to the instrument was that it was a unique thing to do. There are currently only a couple of known cellists in Nepal and Iva is the only one performing in public. More recently, Iva has formed a string duo with her friend Phoebe Shrestha on the violin. The duo have presented to audiences in Kathmandu.

For Dasain, Iva and her friends released a video, in which she plays the Malashree dhun. It stoked audience interest in the instrument as noted in comments.

“People love it when we play these kinds of songs because they’ve only seen them played on traditional instruments,” Iva said. Outside, the traffic had started to stir.

Iva receives a lot of attention on the streets because of her cello--a 5'2" girl, bearing a 48-inch, 4X4 instrument in her arms. “People are curious what’s in the bag because it looks so big. They think it’s a guitar. But when they see it, they don’t know the word ‘cello’ so they just call it a big violin,” she laughed.

Iva also teaches violin and cello: “Most musicians in Nepal teach music at multiple schools to sustain themselves as musicians. It is a bit of a hustle to get from one school to another sometimes.

Currently, she has many students learning the violin but only one learning the cello. The student doesn’t own her own instrument. It has mostly to do with the inaccessibility to a cello-- the instrument is large and the cheapest costs close to 70K and has to be pre-ordered and shipped to Nepal. The one Iva plays was donated by the Norwegians to The Kathmandu Youth Orchestra, of which she is a member.

The group starts rehearsing a month or two ahead of the orchestra and plan to do a show every year. Iva described the group as “just a bunch of musicians getting together to make music”. Since the orchestra is not able to support the players, they have to find work elsewhere, which also means the orchestra doesn’t always get a full set of musicians at times of performance.

Iva's job is unique, and rewarding when people come up to her after a performance. She feels the cello has become a part of her identity now. “I would not like to leave it [the cello] behind. I haven’t thought about what life would be if I was not playing.”

It continued to pour. We had finally covered six kilometres and arrived at our destination.

Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.