Cultural & Ritual

You always eat dessert at the end, after you’ve savored your main dish and Bhaitika was just like that for me: one big, fancy festival that wrapped up an entire month-long celebration made just for us sisters. Although it’s meant to celebrate the bond between brothers and sisters and even when it has “bhai” in its name, I always felt like the sisters were the real main characters.

Less a festival, more a traversal time was Dashain for me for far too many years. It felt like travelling from the scorching summer time to searing winter in almost an instant. The time between Dashain and Tihar felt like an entirely different timeline. Needless to say, Dashain was the reason I only recently learned what Autumn felt like and that Kathmandu even experienced Autumn at all.

In Nepali society and culture, we believe in ‘Bhakal’, which means a prayer or vow made from the heart. When the wish is fulfilled, people repay it with an offering or a pilgrimage to a temple. That’s what my mother says she did when she prayed to the goddess of Manakamana for a daughter.

I sit and watch people coming and going in the courtyard. They worship God in their own ways. I see elders, adults, and children alongside their parents with puja thalis. Parents hold their toddlers’ hands, teaching them to perform puja and touch the gods for blessings.

Everyone calls it “hamro manakamana” probably to clear out the confusion that early in the morning, they are going to the nearby manakamana mandir, not the Manakamana of Gorkha. The word “hamro” attached to it made it special, even for people who lived more than a hundred meters away.

My identity lies in this deep sense of belongingness and ownership. The language I speak, the clothes I wear, the food I eat, the values I hold, and the festivals I celebrate define who I am.

But as I watched the line slowly curve around the temple’s walls, I found myself wondering: when does a ritual become routine?

I missed the life in the worship. Because at home, temples weren’t just sacred. They were social. Messy. Human.

Cultural memory is not neutral. In deciding what to preserve, we’re also deciding what and who is worth remembering.

But when the bell rings, everything around me seems to pause for a moment; a quiet stillness I can’t quite explain.