■□■ 原文 ■□■
The next day Uli went to Fulbari and I stayed
in Makaibari. In the morning there was a big
ceremony going on and Mrs. Srirupa Banerjee and
I, as guests of honour, had to participate actively.
The ceremony was very beautiful. I was thankful,
that in Hinduism ceremonies are so complex that
there always have to be some explanations on
how to do everything.
So it wasn't a problem that I didn't know what
was going on. In Christianity religious ceremonies
often get boring, although they usually are
much shorter.
This didn't happen in the Hindu Puja. Although
I didn't understand anything, neither the language,
nor the symbolic meaning of all those actions,
I was enjoying very much to watch and experience
everything.
It was very colourful. There was singing, drums,
prayers and various actions. And it were
the people of my own generation who were the most
actively involved. Not the older ladies 50up,
as in most European Churches.
In the afternoon I went to Fulbari for a short
visit and at night I was back for the next cultural
program.
This time there were group dances,
theatre sketches and a game. The dance and
the acting... I don't know how to describe it,
you have to see it yourself, this Makaibari
youth is brilliant. I sat there, between my new
friends, watching the dances enchanted and laughing
at the acting although I didn't understand a word.
The game was funny also, there was a closed box
with chick peas and everyone could pay 10Rs and
give a guess on how many there were.
Then during the evening they counted the peas.
If someone guessed the right number, he gets
all the collected money, if nobody hits
the right one, the money goes to the organisers
of the Puja. The one who gets the closest to
the right number wins a chicken.
A girl, who didn't dare to take it,
won the chicken.
It was funny watching the men counting 900
and something peas on a stage and the chicken
looking down to the audience suspiciously.
In the end, the young people were dancing,
they also asked me to come on stage and dance
with them, which I did. Unfortunately
I couldn't present any solo dance,
I would have liked to, but I had never danced
as much as they did, never their style and never
their kind of music. So I just copied what people
around me did. For me it was just enough to make
me feel like I should learn how to dance,
but everyone seemed to be happy.
The next morning was the final day of Durga Puja.
I joined in the procession to take the statues of
the gods to a river and throw them into it.
My friend Barshat convinced me to let them
dress me up in the traditional Nepali dress.
Everyone who saw me was first surprised and
then happy to see me like that.
Most of my friends also wore traditional dresses
or Sari.
The statues were on the trailer of the tractor,
which was decorated. They blasted Nepali music
and we walked in front of the tractor.
The guys danced. Girls were more reasonable,
because even without dancing it was tough enough
to walk uphill to Kurseong in the warm sunlight.
I enjoyed it very much, walking with my friends,
with the music, as part of the group through
the beautiful nature and then through Kurseong.
Every once in a while we stopped and a group
presented a dance. But also while walking
there was dancing and clapping hands.
When we reached the river the statues were
dumped into it, there already were some other
statues, falling apart into straw and mud,
and then everyone started to splash water
at each other.
The guys had to walk back, probably hanging out
a little in Kurseong.
We girls had the privilege to be taken on
the trailer of the tractor. It was a fun ride.
We sat very tight, almost on top of each other,
and the group was singing a lot of songs on top
of their voice. One moment the toy train
was passing, I looked up, right into the faces
of two western travellers. I had to laugh,
they had very long hair and beards.
You meet a lot of odd western tourists
in this area.
But then I thought of how they were probably
surprised to see a white girl in Nepali cloths
sitting with singing girls on the trailer of
the tractor.
A little later two guys jumped up on the trailer,
one of them was really drunk and he then fell
in love with me.
He started to talk to me in Nepali and English,
telling of an arrow in his heart.
He repeated the same sentence over and over again,
until the girls cut him short by singing whenever
he rose his voice.It was a funny situation.
