“Oh, alright!” says my spawn. (Neither of us are at our best with colds.) “Yeah, I guess we do have to see that.”

“And,” I interject rapidly. “There’s this other Hindu temple that’s very famous, on the banks of the sacred river, and it’s right on the way. So we could go through there en route…”

“Hmmm…”

“AND,” I say, wheedlingly. “There’s this lovely garden called the Garden of Dreams… We could maybe stop there for a drink on the way?”

And off we set, with nary so much as a facemask against Kathmandu’s traffic and crazy, in search of the biggest stupa in Asia.

The Garden of Dreams, an elaborate, Edwardian affair built on cowrie shell winnings and populated largely by petting Nepali couples, pleases us immensely.

The boy appreciates a gigantic bamboo swing that cannot, but CANNOT have been part of the formal garden design.

And we both find the stripy Himalayan squirrels almost unbearably cute.

“Aw!” says the boy, bonhomie restored by a tonic water in the rather smart bar area. “I just want to catch it and SQUEEZE it.”

The squirrel, sadly, has other plans.

We’re only seconds from the hubbub of the traffic, but thanks to the tranquil pavilions, we feel a mile or so away from it.

It is, to be frank, a shock returning to it.

“I’m sorry,” I say to Zac, who is expressing a desire to head back to base. “It’s not really a very pleasant place to walk, is it?”

We’re picking our way through a muddy gutter past gridlocked traffic, sharing this limited and rather splashy space with motorbikes, cyclists and a few brave fellow pedestrians, some of them in miraculously pristine saris.

“Oooh, look,” says Zac. “I think there’s some pavement on the other side…”

We edge across in a neat diagonal, only to find the pavement disappears, and head out into suburbia through a welter of almost-certainly-fake automobile dealers (CHEVROLET?! Really?!) and definitely-absolutely-fake hotels and colleges (Crown Plaza Hotel! Oxport Language College!), their signs typically hand-painted onto crumbling walls.

“She’s selling offerings!” I say, spotting a stall adorned with heavy strings of marigolds, so different, I think, from the delicate flurry of petals and fanpalm that forms the typical offering back in Bali. “We must be getting closer.”

“How far IS it, anyway?” asks Zac.

I consult my guidebook. “According to this, about 8k from where we started. With Pashupatinath about 6k…”

“WHAT?” he says.

“Pash… Push… Pash… hang on…” I open the guidebook again. “Pashupatinath.”

“Is that the ‘sacred’ Bagmati river?” Zac asks, his voice labouring the quotation marks around the word “sacred”.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I think so.”

“It’s disgusting,” he says. “They should clean it up.”

We plough up the hill.

Offerings stalls and small temples appear with increasing frequency, many of them lined with nattering teenagers; Hindu women in festive finery begin to crowd the streets; and then we hit the ring road, which is, as far as I can see, the only road in all of Nepal designed for more than two lanes of traffic.

A sacred cow is obstructing traffic! We’re definitely close.

As non-Hindus, Zac and I are not allowed into most of the Pashupatinath temple, so we sit up above the funeral ghats that line the Bagmati river, watching the unceremonious yet ritual end of a number of lives to a background of the lowing of cattle, and trying to work out what the young boy and his father are doing with the coffin and the orange cloth in the river.

“Oh dear,” I say to Zac, dusting some ash off myself. (After watching buffalo sacrificed in the Tana Toraja, plus a royal cremation in Bali, the pair of us are relatively comfortable around death.) “Was that a leg that just fell out?”

“Yes,” he says. “And you can’t take a picture…”

The guy with the bamboo pole pokes the disembodied limb, fully consumed above the knee but barely touched below it, except for some blackening around the toes, back into the pyre.

It is, I think, a nice-looking leg. The owner of this shapely calf must have died young. Folk do in Nepal.

I wonder about the body slumped unceremoniously on the steps still wrapped in orange, awaiting its turn. How old was he or she? What killed them?

After a while contemplating our own mortality (me) and staring into space (Zac), we cross the river and wander up grand, ceremonial steps to a series of Shiva shrines, each with their very own lingam, where we find a bunch of disreputable-looking and well-fed holy men, or sadhu, catching the sun, arrayed in quite fabulous body paints of red, gold and white.

Traditionally a type of Hindu ascetic, yer classic wandering holy man, in Kathmandu sadhu, genuine and otherwise, make much of their money by posing for tourist photos.

And so it proves.

“Photo?”

My heart isn’t really in it. There’s a terribly photogenic chap with a flute a bit up the hill. But my mind is back at the river, with the burning bodies, and, rather childishly, I’m thinking, “I don’t want to die! Not young! Not at all!”

“50 rupee OK?” I ask.

It’s OK. I snap a few shots.

I’d be interested to know whether they sleep the night in the beautiful Shiva shrines around them or remove the clay and dye, slip something over the giveaway dreadlocks, and return home to their wives and families…

The Shiva shrines would be more aesthetic, that’s for sure.

We ascend the hill to a tree-lined deer park, more Shiva shrines and more temples. “Oooh!” I say. “Look! Monkeys!”

“Hide your camera!” says Zac.

We’ve had enough run-ins with temple monkeys over the last couple of years to treat them with caution, but these seem good-tempered enough. We watch some of the babies working a high wire act from a high tension cable, a mother giving the youngest one a hand.

It’s rather sweet.

“I think we should head back now,” says Zac.

“No!” I say. “We need to get to Boudhanath. It’s the biggest stupa in Asia.”

Our third crossing of the Bagmati, and we’re out in the proper suburbs, where the pace of life slows dramatically.

The walking is pleasant, past bamboo swings and subterranean vegetable gardens, past fruiterers and toy shops, past old men wheeling vegetables from the garden, schoolgirls in pleated skirts carrying satchels back from school and women scratching marigolds and onions out of their little patches of soil.

And, out of nowhere, we’re there. The biggest stupa in Asia!

Even Kathmandu’s apparently uncontrolled growth has stopped, the circle of narrow blocks that surround it simultaneously truncated to the base of the spire.

Great streams of prayer flags flicker in the breeze, the vast white bell of the stupa is decked in golden dyes, the all-seeing eye gazes down blankly – and there are people, people everywhere.

This is Boudhanath. And it’s worth the journey.

There are Tibetan exiles in neat bright aprons, strolling in groups, prostrating in pairs, burning offerings…

And all the myriad diversity of the Nepalese: dark, hook-nosed men who could be from the plains of India, women with the flat high cheeks of northern Chinese minorities, delicate, beautiful boys with almond eyes and neat wide noses, straight out of Burma, old women with cheeks like apples, windscoured wrinkles, girls just blossoming into their teens…

As one elderly lady says her prayers at a shrine, a policeman settles down on it to eat his tea and banter with a mate…

Later, we watch a group of very, very young novices, proud in their Tibetan maroon robes, having their picture taken by a monk who’s only slightly older.

“How old do you reckon they are?” I ask Zac.

“The little one’s maybe 8?” he says. “The others? 9, 10, 12?”

“Would you like to be a monk?” I say. “Can you imagine being a monk at your age?”

“Well,” my little atheist says. “It’s a life that involves giving everything up. In the service of religion…”

“No sex,” I say. “No children… Or it could be like Laos, where they only do it for a few months, or a year…”

“Nah,” he says. “I can’t imagine that. But I think it’s great that people do it. I think it’s great that people will give up everything for something they believe in.”

Later, back at base, I’m thinking about the Boudhanath stupa.

And, for the biggest stupa in Asia (according to Lonely Planet), it didn’t really seem all that big – at all.

It didn’t have the jaw-on-floor impact of Istanbul’s Aya Sofya, let alone of Angkor Wat.

I turn to Google. There are taller stupas in Thailand, India and Sri Lanka. And, if you call the whole of Borobodur a stupa (which would be pushing it, IMHO), there’s a bigger one in Indonesia too.

After all that, it seems that Boudhanath is only the biggest stupa in Nepal.

Not that it matters.

We’re glad to have seen it, and Pashupatinath too.

And tomorrow we’ll flee Kathmandu for the fresher air of Pokhara, a lakeside town fringed by mountains that’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.

The post The Biggest Stupa in Asia? appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The baby graves? Well, as the beautiful kids who gave us directions and made us sign the guestbook said, they were in a “big tree”.

“These holes in the trunk,” I wondered to Z. But they seemed so natural, gnarled by age into natural knots.

So, no, we decided. They must be the bundles high up in the branches with the ferns shooting out of them, basket coffins transformed into a proliferation of life.

Since attending a traditional funeral the other day, I’ve been talking to a lot of Torajans about what they believe.

These are beautiful, friendly people, happy, sunny souls. They cut grass daily and feed it to their buffalo by hand simply to slaughter them at funerals. They work their entire lives to provide living gifts for sacrifice at their funerals and those of their infinitely extended family.

Joseph, a chap in his 40s, was my victim this evening. I bought him a beer in our local eatery and asked why the baby graves were in trees, not caves.

“In the old beliefs,” he says (though it’s hard to find a Torajan who doesn’t, when you talk to them properly, follow the old beliefs), “Spirits only go to Puya, the afterlife, when there is a buffalo sacrifice. But you can’t sacrifice a buffalo for a baby whose teeth have not come through. They go to somewhere different. Up into the sky.”

“So were they the bundles in the branches of the trees?” I ask.

Part of me is wondering how a mother can submit her tiny baby’s body to the branches of a tree, open to the sky, without the holocausts or ritual that must ease the pain of grief, then watch the leaves grow through the decaying body of an infant, their life cut short decades ahead of time.

“People who follow the old beliefs put the baby’s body in a living tree,” he says. “They wrap it in a blanket — no coffin — or areca bark. They cut a hole in the tree, only the size of the body. Then they put the baby’s body in it, and close it with palm leaves. Then as the tree grows to the sky, the babies go with it. Because they cannot go to Puya, they do not have souls, they carry on living. And, still living, they play in the sky like angels.”

This culture is so foreign to me. And I have never lost a child. But I can see how this belief makes sense. It’s like a kinder version of the Limbo to which unbaptised babies went (go?) in Christian eschatology. They don’t die, because they don’t have a soul.

So you let them live with a living thing until they reach the sky. Almost as one might plant a fruit tree over the body of a loved one, and eat the fruit in remembrance.

It’s like the halfway house they have here, between death and life. When a person dies, their body stays in the family home, not dead, just sick, until the funeral is prepared, which is generally many months and sometimes years.

“Does it help?” I asked Arras, the night before, of this belief. “Did it help you when your father died?’

“Yes,” he said. He’s a Christian. And an animist. A very reflective man. “It helped.”

“But,” I say. “Surely you must have had that [I mime clenching grief] feeling, when your father died.”

“Yes,” he says. “I have that. Oh, I have that. But then I think. He is not dead. He’s sick. He’s sleeping. He’s still with me.”

“And that helped?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “It helped a lot.”

It was the open graves today that bothered Z. Not the opened cave graves.

Now, they bothered me.

I don’t think of myself as superstitious (though, clearly, I am). But I wouldn’t have wanted to walk that road in the dark. Squeezing between the granite slabs in the lowering gloom to the rattan-fringed ravine over which the graves lowered was, well, unnerving, though the spirit of the place is kind.

It was the broken house graves we saw at Lokomata earlier that worried my son. “How can they let that happen to them?” he asked. “They’re just broken! How can they go to all that effort with the funerals, murder all those buffalo, then just let the graves fall to pieces like that?!”

He asks Joseph the same question.

Well, says Joseph, in essence. That’s because the family have moved the body somewhere else. You know, as you do. With a grave burial, or a cave burial, you dig up the body and move them somewhere else. When you move your village, you know.

I don’t really know that. We hardly ever exhume in our culture. We are, in fact, very, very squeamish about our dead. We don’t touch them. Don’t lay them out. They stay with the doctors, the nurses, morticians, funeral directors…

It’s fairly rare for a body to rest in the house even on the night before the funeral, and exhumation generally only happens in the context of a criminal investigation. I’ve never seen a dead body. My parents have only seen their parents’ bodies.

Later, Z is helping a pretty teenager with her English homework, and Joseph and I are talking about Laos, and how animists there make offerings on new paths through the forest when they open them up. Torajans, he says, do that too.

I explain what we learnt walking the forests there, how most Lao believe that the spirits of people who are unburied haunt the forest, needing to feed. I tell him about the Lanahan people, who hold a gate-locking ritual every new year to protect their villages from the hungry spirits.

“Yes,” he says. “We have a ritual like that. If a person leaves the village and does not return, we take a blanket up onto the hill. We fasten one side, wait until it is filled with the wind, then close the blanket around the wind. We return to the village. And we hold a funeral for the blanket. One night, only.”

“You sacrifice a buffalo?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. “Just one.”

“And do you believe in bad spirits?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. “When something goes wrong in your life. When you are sick. You feel wrong. When things are going wrong. You go to the holy man, and he reads the bamboo. And he will tell you which of your ancestors are angry, and what they need.”

“So,” I say. “Those many broken house graves, those open cave tombs. They are angry ancestors, who needed to be moved.”

“Yes,” he says.

It was a paradoxical day today. A walk through a landscape dominated by death and packed with joy and life. Beautiful children calling out, walking on stilts, hanging with Z.

A constant hello from every house we passed. Young rice sprouting from the mirrored fields. Livestock lorries packed with guys and girls in funeral black, grinning, waving, taking our picture, cheery greetings from men carrying bamboos full of pig’s blood or the innards of a slaughtered buffalo.

And in the morning we went to Rantepao’s market, the animal fest which happens every six days, and chokes the streets with traffic. There was a buffalo there, albino and blue-eyed, with gold-coloured horns.

He was worth around $30,000. US. (Need a comparison? You can build an elaborate tongkonan house, complete with carvings and paintings, that will endure for generations, for $20,000, US.)

I showed his picture to folk we met along the road, as they chatted about the funerals coming up. They were, I think, impressed.

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The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”, preserved in formalin, with his family for the last eight months. Now he has left the house, he is finally dead, his soul winging its way towards the afterlife.

“Not really,” I say. “People are always buried within about a week of their death. Normally we put them in the ground. Sometimes we burn the bodies.”

As if sensing that one of their souls will shortly follow the dear departed, the pigs, hogtied with strips of bamboo bark in the noonday, equatorial sun, reach a crescendo of screaming.

“What do you sacrifice?” he asks.

“We don’t have sacrifices in England,” I say.

“Not even a chicken?” he asks, clearly shocked and politely disapproving that our dead could pass into the afterlife unescorted by even the lowest of creatures.

“Not even a chicken,” I say, apologetically, thinking of the sandwiches, cocktail sausages, olives, quiche and French fizz at my grandmother’s funeral eighteen months ago and a world away.

Like my grandmother, though, like the deceased, like the other funeral guests, and like the folk whose bodies lie below the hanging graves in the nearby village, my interlocutor is a practising Christian.

Here in the dazzling highlands of south central Sulawesi, where jagged mountains fling out green hills like flying buttresses, rice terraces tumble like mirrored staircases and surrealist outcrops jut from the hilltops, pretty much everyone is Christian, in fact.

The Muslim evangelists who swept across the Indonesian archipelago shortly before the Portuguese arrived half a millennium ago never reached this far into the interior. So the Toraja followed their old beliefs and rituals unmolested until well into the twentieth century.

Then Protestant missionaries, with a mental athleticism almost Jesuitical in its genius, managed to paste the Good Book over the existing animist framework.

Just, in fact, as their antecedents pinned Christmas onto the Roman festival of Saturnalia and the druidic ceremony of Yule, and painted Easter carefully over a myriad spring fertility rituals.

Along the main road, where scooters whiz and bemos roar, there are almost as many little churches as there are tongkonan houses, their roofs curved dramatically like the boats which, the Torajans believe, brought their ancestors over the sea from Indochina.

And the crocodile of female relatives who process past the 40-odd bamboo structures erected to house family members over the week or so of the funeral are dressed in good Christian garb.

They bear token gifts of coffee, tea and biscuits, covered with purple doilies, into the family reception room.

Their menfolk carry the larger gifts – the pigs, the plastic jerry cans of palm wine and rice hooch – up the hill on bamboo poles.

Others lead their highly prized buffalo, with quiet, or more obtrusive, pride. I mean, if you’d spent three years’ wages on a buffalo for the slaughter, would you laugh or cry?

The dead man’s beautiful grandchildren form the reception line, fidgeting in beads, silk and turbans like so many pages and bridesmaids at a Western wedding: last-minute wardrobe adjustments included.

Men bring the conventional token gift of a carton of kretek (clove cigarettes), sometimes in elaborate boxes, other times (as we did) in black plastic bags. Though a couple of the older mourners wear solemn expressions, the atmosphere is more festive than funereal.

It’s a celebration. A good show. Months of planning and crippling financial investment reach its culmination in days of processions and ritual.

Not only what the dead man would have wanted. But what he worked his entire life to achieve.

It would be fair to say, however, that the nine year old does not entirely appreciate this masterclass in comparative religion and ethnology. He is concerned by the condition of the pigs.

Some of them are foaming at the mouth. Others urinate and defecate uncontrollably. Immobilised by their bamboo carrying poles, dumped on the ground like so many sacks, they alternate between panicked screaming and a desperate panting.

This prize sow will, apparently, be spared the coming holocaust. Which is why someone has covered her in rattan leaves, a token attempt at shade.

“This is making me nauseous,” Z says. “Can we go yet?”

“No,” I say, pompously. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see an authentic animist funeral. We can go after the sacrifices.”

“Mum…” he says.

“Have you ever seen a buffalo sacrificed?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Me neither,” I say. “So we should. But you don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

Z has done really well, in fact. He’s eaten lunch (plain boiled rice — after a look at his expression when confronted with the pork, I explained in my pidgin Indonesian that “Child Eat Boiled Rice. No More. Thank You. I Eat. Very Good. Good good!” ). And he has done so using his right hand, not his left.

Two strapping chaps begin to dig a hole in the ground, in front of the decorative rice barns under whose porticos the elite guests sit.

“I really don’t like this,” Z says. “Do you see that buffalo there? He’s got blood coming out where the ring goes through his nose.”

Torajans reckon their wealth in buffalo. Even an entry-level bovine costs thousands of dollars: a blue-eyed, albino version will sell for around 250 million rupiah (or well over 25 thousand US dollars). More than the price of the most elaborate tongkonan and many times the price of the car.

Throughout their lives, they work to amass these precious creatures, and tend them with a deep affection. Not necessarily as rice farmers, any more, though this is how the dead man acquired the wealth demonstrated for the first time at his funeral and the rich soil of the highlands supports three rice harvests every year. Today, they could be computer repairmen, teachers, motor mechanics, tour guides…

Then, as family members die, the buffalo are sacrificed, in an epic of conspicuous consumption and family togetherness that puts the average Western wedding quite to shame.

Bill, the dead man’s Australian son-in-law, up from Jakarta for the occasion and resplendent in black shirt and black funeral sarong, has invited us for coffee and tea.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say, rather awkwardly, given that we are here, essentially, to gawp.

“It’s alright,” he says. “He’s been dead since December, so it’s pretty much in the past.”

“December?!” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’ve been getting together the money for the buffalo. It takes months to do that. Sometimes years. They’re expensive things, buffalo. And people round here don’t earn much. I bought three of them,” he adds, wryly. “I mean, my wife did…”

The MC continues his perorations, reciting the gifts brought and the names of their donors, inscribing each on old-fashioned carbon duplicate forms.

The local Protestant pastor will show up later in the day, after the sacrifices are safely complete and before too many of the jerry cans of palm wine and rice spirit have been drunk, to give a form of eulogy. I imagine a character straight out of Anthony Burgess’ Malayan Trilogy, returning home to gin and obliteration at the hopelessness of his flock.

A handler brings forward one of the ten or so buffalo which scatter the grounds, stroking his forehead and murmuring soothingly. The diggers produce the widest bamboo pole I have ever seen – almost a foot in diameter, I would guess.

At the sight of engineering, Z’s colour lifts noticeably.

“Oh,” he says. “Do you think they’re digging the hole to put the stake in?”

“I reckon so,” I say.

“I think that’s the buffalo they’re going to sacrifice, don’t you?”

“Yep,” I say.

The chaps secure the bamboo pole with three wooden stakes, each three or four inches in diameter. A screaming pig is unceremoniously dumped on the ground behind the pole, where it squawks and grunts itself into submission.

Another procession of women files past. The women of this branch of the family are wearing lilac tops. Rather, I think, like bridesmaid’s outfits in the west.

The concept of family in the Toraja is an extensive one: a better translation might be “kin” or “clan”. It encompasses everyone up to grandparents (their siblings, their children, and their children’s children), and everyone below that.

The dead man was ninety-four with nine surviving children of his own from a sequence of wives. The relatives have invested in a ton and a half of rice to feed guests over the week, and round the back of the guest constructions guys are killing, singing and butchering pigs around the clock.

Poorer neighbours have set up temporary stalls under the bamboo guesthouses and on the track leading up from the main road.

Martin, our guide, remarks with ill-concealed envy on the number of buffalo. “He was a very rich man,” he says. “And his children have very good jobs. They’ll probably kill only one today. Another one or two tomorrow. Then seven or eight on the sacrifice day.”

Martin’s father died relatively recently. So he owns no buffalo any more. Although a poor family, they put together a ten-buffalo funeral. But nothing on the scale of this.

It rankles.

The buzz of expectation grows. Now, Z and I both eat meat. Whole-heartedly. Bloody fillet. Bleeding roast beef. Tartares, kidneys, liver…

But, as urban creatures, neither of us has ever seen an animal being killed. The closest we’ve come to the living, bleeding source is the whole sucking pig I bought Christmas one year, which a five year old Z, with absolutely no sentimentality whatsoever, insisted on carrying proudly from the butchers.

Some of the young mourners hold ceremonial axes, like the ones which decorate the balcony of the house. But the guy who performs the sacrifice is not in costume and holds only a butcher’s knife. There is no incantation. I wonder, idly, how this ritual would have looked before the missionaries arrived.

The pig dies first, so quietly and matter of factly I almost miss it. The slaughterer bends down, opens the back of the pig’s neck from ear to ear, and catches the blood in a length of bamboo. The creature does not even have the time to scream before its soul is racing into the afterlife.

Though out in the boiling sun, its fellow swine scream in sympathy.

The buffalo is secured to the stake with a halter that runs to its ankle. His handler strokes his nose and murmurs to him lovingly, soothingly. I think of the hecatombs of Homer’s Iliad, the mass slaughter of hundreds of oxen, the moment when the axe fell…

“You need to move back,” says Martin. “It’s dangerous.”

Dangerous? I think. The buffalo is tranquil, calm, doe-eyed, as slow in its movements as any cud-chewing Anchor cow. In all our time in Asia, I have not once seen a buffalo move at anything other than a snail’s pace.

We move back. And then it happens very quickly.

The handler takes the knife. Whips it across the animal’s neck so fast I cannot see it, and leaps out of the way, cobra-speed. The gash gapes open, filling the air with a fine spray of vermilion arterial blood.

The buffalo rears on its hind legs, gallops the length of its halter at phenomenal speed then stumbles, felled by the rope, onto its side.

There it jerks and spasms, trying hopelessly to rise, the gash widening each time it raises its head, a gush of fresh, well oxygenated blood the colour and consistency of Strawberry Ribena sullying the grass, eyes more doelike by the second, mouth open in a soundless bellow, over a tonne of death writ very, very large.

As Z says, “It’s an ugly sight.”

But it’s mesmerizing, too. One’s gaze is drawn away, then back, away, then back.

Maybe I need to read more Hemingway. But I never knew how long a buffalo takes to die. This one alternates between minutes of quietude, chest juddering, eyes blank, blood leaking from its neck, and moments of active struggle, when it lurches upwards as if galvanised by electricity, Frankenstein-style, while guests carry yet more screaming pigs up the hill.

As the dogs begin to sniff around it, and the pool of blood congeals, the buffalo’s soul passes, finally, into the ether, to carry the dead man’s soul on its journey to the afterlife. Z tugs at my arm. We make our farewells. The funeral will continue for several more days. But he has seen enough*.

Thanks to Debbie at Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Friday.

*: You can read his take on proceedings here. On balance, he is glad he went.

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