My
first morning in Dang, I came downstairs to the grandmother distilling rice
liquor (raksi) over a wood stove outside. For each batch, the grandmother would first
fill a clay pot, then cover it with leaves and set it aside in the family puja (worship) room. These, Kopi (my host) told me, were for the deuta, or deity. This alcohol was not
tasted, to see if it was good or not. These would later be used in puja.
The grandmother made new batches about every three days. “You’re making rasksi again?” I asked at one point. Where did they put in all? One night,
when the electricity was out, the grandmother began preparing the still on the
inside kitchen; passing me on her way in, she gleefully exclaimed to me in
Tharu, “mahi phe raksi banaitum! [I’m making raksi again!]” She also told me
that I should drink some—everyone drank raksi, ate dhikiri, and pork meat, at
Dashai. How else was I going to celebrate?
Once
Dashai started, numerous guests began to drop by. Sabita—Kopi's wife, and the daughter in law—kept
a variety of curried vegetables and meats on hand, ready to be served up in
small, separate bowls formed from leafs. She had made a special trip to the
forest a few days before to pick these. Once the guests left, these bowls were
thrown behind the house to decompose. Alcohol was served in brass bowls, or in
leaf bowls, depending on how many people dropped by at one time.
One
morning, a group of schoolgirls came by, singing a ditty. I was out back
finishing my bath when they came to our door, so I did not see what Sabita gave
them. What did they want? They were begging raksi, Sabita told me. Did you give
them raksi?! I asked, horrified. She laughed—yes, of course! They were
collecting it in an empty 2-litre soda bottle; they would later sell it to make
money. Sabita and her friend had done that during Dashai when they were young.
Later, a group of boys—between the ages of eight and twelve—came by, singing
the same ditty. Kopi—Sabita’s husband—brought out leaf bowls of raksi, which
the eldest two drank. The boys then moved on to the next house. The grandmother
wasn’t joking when she said that everyone
drank raksi at Dashai.
Another
item the grandmother made was called jar.
As far as I understood, these were fermented rice cakes, first dried out then
mixed with water; the extract was then drunk. The affect was some kind of drug;
the grandmother described these to me as ausadi
or medicine. She decided to dry these fermented rice cakes in window in my
room, on the lid of a bucket. Thankfully, I was away in another village for the
night; they stank so badly. When I came back, they had bite marks in them; the
grandmother was upset that the mice had gotten to them. My sympathies went out
to the mice—how their stomachs must feel after eating that stuff!
One
evening, I went with Sabita to her maiti ghar
(parent’s house). There in the front yard, among the bison, a man was sleeping.
Turns out, he had been eating jar; Sabita’s
dad mentioned that his companion was sleeping inside. The guy woke up and
started stumbling around. Binaram—Sabita’s youngest brother—was home and in the
yard at that time; he took the guy back to his sleeping place and had him sit
down again. The guy started caressing the new bison calf—which the calf seemed
to like, he laid down real quiet and put his head closer to the guy—and
sweet-talking to it, telling it what a beautiful bison it was. Binaram went
inside and woke up the other guy, and pulled him outside. As I was sitting
right next to the house door, he commented to me on his way out that people who
ate jar were like this. Eventually, he got them out of the yard; they stumbled
off down the road.
On
the evening of Dhikiri Puja day, I went with Kopi down to the village shrine
for a community ritual. The head of each house brought barley sprouts, sage
leaves and a clay pot of raksi as an offering to the village deities, and
received white tikka from the guruwa—the Tharu traditional healer and priest.
After these formalities, the men all sat around drinking the alcohol offered to
the deities. Later that evening, presiding as priest in his own house, Kopi
offered the household deities their favorite foods: raksi (distilled from
rice), dhikiri (steamed rice dough), roti (flat bread made from rice flour and deep fried
in oil) as well as several cups of uncooked, husked rice. Apparently, Tharu
deities are fond of rice.
That
night, I went with Sabita to watch the sakya/paiya naach in their own village.
Unmarried girls dance and sing portions of the love story between Krishna
and Radha—two Hindu deities—each night for about a month before Dashai,
accompanied by men on madals (two-headed drums). These performances take place
in the front yard of the matawa, the
village leader. The night before I had gone to the neighboring village to see
the performance, where drinking had been prevalent. While it wasn’t as ubiquitous tonight, there
was one guy stumbling around the middle of the dance circle without a madal;
when he got a madal, he kept yelling “shabas!
(good work!—what you tell a little girl or boy when they’ve obeyed)” between
the girls’ sung phrases. Shyam—another one of Sabita’s brothers—and a couple of
other men ended up pulling him off to the side and out of the matawa’s yard to
the road, disappearing in to the dark.
