<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20230228150232/63fe10b79c7e80680e0da4aajpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1440" height="1800"/><figcaption>Photos: PRATIBHA TULADHAR</figcaption></figure>Wait is like a big hole. An empty space to live in until.How long, no one knows. But in that space which is empty, is everything. In it, is the feeling of uncertainty, as well as forever. Uncertainty=Forever.In that space, is the voice of your parents, muffled as they discuss matters that must not be heard, once in a while, amplified over the sound of the hoover and the blender.“No!” says Baa. Not what I mean.“Okay, okay,” says Maa.And the feeling of uncertainty gets interrupted, delayed and even forgotten for a moment. What lingers is the sound of the hoover and the washing machine and the blender-- and other sounds the household is made of.“Life must go on,” says Baa.From the quiet of my room, I repeat after him, my lips forming the sentence in silence. Life must go on.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/memory-of-a-conversation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Memory of a conversation</a>, Pratibha Tuladhar…There are a bunch of things I carry with me in my heart. One of them is you. It is nothing spectacular for a memory, but it is still a place to hold within the emptiness.You are made up of a thousand chords in that emptiness and each when strung, makes my heart pick up a different kind of beat. When I think of the horrible things about life that I might have to reveal to you, my heart pounds, making me draw one hand to my chest and say, “stop”. Life must go on.You are also made up of soft sounds.I think of the afternoon in the sun, when you swiftly lay your heart before me and said, eat! The soft sounds of eating, when one opens the mouth, encloses a spoon between the lips and the teeth come down to do their job. Between the tongue and the teeth, the eating is done and you become a nutty pulp of nourishment for my being. You taste like childhood, like Maa’s cooking-- the only culinary that counts.Are you happy, you ask. I smile. Feed me more, I say. You smile. And it is the sound of a thousand monarch butterflies, flapping their winds softly against the start of Spring.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/of-anger-and-love/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Of anger and love</a>, Pratibha Tuladhar…Go turn your face towards the morning sun. It is when we are most adequate-- in the mornings, when our face is turned towards the sun.We were married to the sun, remember? All of us. And each of us were raised to believe in eternity. Life was going to be as eternal as the biggest star in the sky, nourishing us by the day, receding by night to allow sleep to lull us elsewhere.Being transported to that elsewhere was again, full of promise. In it were words, sometimes trapped in the ether, caught by you in the centre of your palm and then pocketed. Good things come from promise. The promise of another meeting. Just as the sun makes a promise to us every twilight-- the exact point when it will begin again at daybreak. How childlike this thought of promise and continuity! And yet, it is the image my mind lingers at-- one day at a time now.…<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20230228150232/63fe10bc9c7e80680e0da4abjpeg.jpg" alt="" width="576" height="1024">Some days, my heart is steeped in regret for things left unsaid.When Maa put a bowl of vegetable soup before me, I got up and left the table, instead of saying “I love you”. When Baa offered to drive me to meet my friend, I got out of the car and said I can walk, instead of saying “thank you”. Reactions too, like words cannot be unsaid. I responded with my being, my body yelling at them in silence and they cannot be undone-- the getting up and out and walking away.But these were all days I needed out.For months, I told myself I have to go away. That is my destiny. I have always known I was meant to go away. Not knowing where drove me out of my wits and yet I wrote a prayer each night for my deliverance.But every time the time to leave showed up on the calendar, I dragged my suitcase to the door and stopped to stare at my parents. How can two people be so happy for your freedom? How can they revel in not knowing I have gathered the weapons to self-destruct? It is what wayward daughters do, pick the path of suffering and run swiftly towards the end of the world, with no desire to slow down, whatsoever.Read also: <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/opinion/we-are-fire-breathing-dragons/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">We are fire-breathing dragons</a>, Pratibha Tuladhar…Ever wondered why growing old is such a relief? Because it lets us know that the worst has passed and that we are more prepared because of our familiarity with sadness and that even the worst will be lived through.It is full of promise, you see? Promise, that I will be right here when you want to sit down and take my hands in yours. Promise that I will always be capable of writing these open-ended, useless ramblings fit only for someone like me who never outgrew her teens.Perhaps it is true then, that we become arrested in the years when life poured the most into our fold. And from those years begin to grow the bubble that will eventually become the void. And around that, we chisel our lives, putting in a little bit every now and then, hoping for what life must become. And by the time life has come whole, we are still in the process and we continue at the attempt to architect it-- even the end must be perfect!Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

Pratibha Tuladhar

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The wait

<figure><img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221110161124/636d17989c7e80680e0ac777jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1000"/><figcaption>Women-only night at Indra Jatra festival where participants drink rice wine from Swet Bhairav’s mouth as a blessing. Photos: MONIKA DEUPALA</figcaption></figure>Here is what the image shows:  her face turned towards the sky, her mouth open, catching a fountain of thwon (rice wine), flowing down Hatu Dyaa’s mouth, straight into hers.Her eyes are shut, like they were caging inside them a perfect moment of desire. It is an image from a day at the Indra Jatra week, now, popularly known as a women-only night at the festival.“How was it?” I ask her.“It was exhilarating!” she texts back.In 2017, the Yenya or Indra Jatra committee set aside a day for women to drink from Hatu Dyaa (Swet Bhairab) an activity which in the past had not been segregated by gender, and was therefore accessible mostly to men.“It gets quite rowdy,” my friend says. And explains she had gone prepared with a “quick dry tee and shoes and all”. She says she would love to do it again and I assure her I would join her.Growing up in Naradevi Tole, tucked away in old Kathmandu, Yenya was the focal point of the year for me, and not any other festival. In the evenings, the family would set out for a walk through the festivities.One time, my काका raised me through a crowd of men, taking me all the way to where the wine was trickling down the mouth of Swet Bhairav. I carry a faint memory of being scooped up from the ground and being flung under the massive face of the deity as some wine spray hit me.As a grown-up, however, I have only experienced the ceremony from a distance. I got on a call this week with some girlfriends who had attended the event in 2019, and felt an excitement rise in my belly, looking at images of them jostling to get under the wine tap.“I definitely want to do it again,” Anbika Giri laughed. “It was hard to push others and go all the way to the wine pipe, but I still managed. It splashed  over my face, body, mouth, my hair. But I also came away with a sense of achievement.”Bhawana Gurung, who was alongside Anbika that evening, did not exactly get to drink, but was definitely showered on as she got shoved around in the crowd: “I came home smelling like thwon.”Anbika recalls how everyone around her looked overwhelmed by the experience, despite clothes and hair that had become soaked in rice wine. She calls the experience a way of exercising your will. She calls it a symbol.“I saw it as a way of choosing. To push your way through the crowd and then to compete to drink — not everyone gets to do it. But the thing is, you’re not being hindered. You’re making a choice to experience it,” says Anbika. “Fun events for Nepali women are limited. We’re told that enjoyment is not right. We internalise it. So this activity is a symbol to reverse that. Even if it was water instead of wine, people would still go. It is about claiming space.”Coming from a Janjati community, Bhawana has experienced more “freedom” than her friends from other communities. “I think it’s a privilege that we don’t have to observe seclusion when we’re on our periods. I’ve also had freedom of mobility. But my mother would still bar me from drinking alcohol, which means that even within our community, my freedom is inferior to that of a man. So, the event for me was not so much about drinking, as much as it was about participating at free-will.”Bhawana’s main take away: “We have festivals where women aren’t allowed to go to temples or attend certain festivals. If this festival can be inclusive, so can the others.”<img src="https://superdesk-pro-c.s3.amazonaws.com/sd-nepalitimes/20221110161124/636d179c9c7e80680e0ac778jpeg.jpg" alt="" width="1500" height="1000">Festivals, in different cultures, are known to restrict women’s freedom as they are mostly confined to kitchen duties, while men revel. Then, there is also the sunset curfew for women. The liberty for women to drink from a deity, has also been seen a mark of how women have the right to be outside their homes at night, participating in celebrations alongside their male relatives and friends.Ever since drinking from the Swet Bhairav spout opened to women five years ago, women clamouring before Hatu Dyaa, have been some of the most viewed photos on social media. While a lot of these images clearly come from the male gaze, there is also the photo-opportunity side to it, the two strands representing two very different things.Anbika says media has glamorised the event like it has always done with events where women and drinks come together. She also cites examples of front-page images from Tundikhel during festivals like Udhauli, Ubhauli and Sonam Lhosar, where it is always young women who are splashed across the pages. There is certainly the risk of over glamorisation of an event eclipsing the meaning of it, she argues.Some images of women drinking at Indra Jatra, however, have come to represent the other side of the gaze. They depict women as aspirants to be seen as equals in a society where the festive nightlights and the right of participating in a fun activity are male entitlement.Bhawana argues that the festival, with so many female deities at its centre, must have always had women at the heart of it. “When I watched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqG_okS_wPI">Anil Chitrakar</a> talking about how Indra’s mother makes the journey from Heaven to Earth to rescue her son, I instantly thought of how the festival’s crux was a <a href="https://www.nepalitimes.com/banner/the-legend-behind-the-myth-of-indra-jatra/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">woman’s journey</a> and how that is an empowering story in itself.”Even though Bhawana moved to Kathmandu many years ago and lived in Patan, she says she has never felt like she could be a participant in the jatras of the valley, however, a sentiment that Anbika echoes: “People who are migrants to Kathmandu shy away from local festivals even though we live here. And no one invites us. Who takes the first step to make them more inclusive is also a thing.”Asha Thapa, who has been quietly listening to our banter interrupts: “I will surely attend the festival in a pandemic-free world for the experience. I come from a community where even as someone in my late 20s, I’ve never had alcohol with my parents and to give women an opportunity to drink publicly seems me like a way of saying that the culture is making space for women to be who they want. Whether to drink or not, is also a choice women should get to make, don’t you think?”For over a decade now, I have sauntered around Basantapur alone during Yenya, observing its many eccentricities and critiquing its ways that are beyond my comprehension and sense of agreement. But I have also thought that if a festival can keep improvising to make way for changes in society, it also means there is hope that the culture will keep up with its people.And so, in a pandemic-free world, I will probably jostle alongside my girlfriends, sharing a moment with them before Hatu Dyaa. For I have learned that sometimes it takes a moment in our memory to set us free.Suburban Tales is a monthly column in Nepali Times based on real people (with some names changed) in Pratibha’s life.

Wine and women during Yenya

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The wait

Wine and women during Yenya