This year Ghatasthapana was soaked with drain clogging rain. The day after, I felt Dashain had finally come to Kathmandu. There is something about the festival that it has a certain feeling about it. And it is not only because New Road is filled to the brim with doubled Dashain bonus purses, or because the kites take their full flight into the air, or just because like every year our cards have been dispersed, lost or wounded at the edges and we have arrived at the same shop to buy three new packs.

It is perhaps a combination of that and much more. There is also something about the weather: at the onset of the festival the sun arrives, as if itself on some sort of a vacation; one can imagine the temperature has been set right at that sweet spot of warmth and leisure.

When I was a kid our pre-second terminal exam tests nearly always fell after the vacation (itself riddled with a maze of homework which we treaded around our busy childhood schedules) and one of the recurring questions in either English, Nepali or Social Studies or all of them with some slight twist of perspective would be about Dashain, how we had spent it and the pros and cons of the festival.

I was relentless on these particular questions and would describe in detail my excursion to my father’s village in Ilam, the linge swings that I had tried to cross beyond their bamboo stands, the very long wait for my turn to get the Tika from my grandmother and so on and forth. The more interesting answer for me now, is how I religiously wrote about the pros and cons of the festival.

The pros of Dashain are as follows:

1. Everybody gets to meet people from their family.
2. Continuation of culture.
3. Learning to respect elders and love the younger.

The cons of Dashain are as follows:

1. Drinking alcohol.
2. Killing of animals.
3. Gambling.

I had learned of these cons from our books, especially the social studies book, which I still vaguely remember to have a chapter entitled “Our Festivals” with sketches of angry and bad looking men fighting each other or crying having lost everything in cards. The lines of morality are a little fuzzy now, as it seems happens with the process of growing up.

Having partaken in both number one and number three “con” activities (and being an active consuming, third party member of the second), I now realize the “culture” whose preservation I so advocated in number two of the “pros” isn’t a clear cut concept. The “gambling” and “drinking” that was put into such bad light with all those pictures and heavy words were actually only questions of balance and self control and in many ways, if not all, part of the culture itself.

They seem to be a part of Dashain– not an essentially important attachment, but part of it nevertheless. And you realize there was certain hypocrisy to the whole brand of adults, the teachers, the writers and the whole lot who underestimated a sixth grader’s understanding of good and bad, of balance and appropriateness to put such a protective and wrongly black and white idea of a concept one would face so differently in reality.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.