It’s not you, it’s thee.
The Royal Kumari of Kathmandu always strikes me as a tragedy. Not a walking tragedy, mind, because of course she is not strictly allowed to walk.
The Royal Kumari is a little girl in Nepal who has passed a long list of physical, behavioral, and astrological criteria, and a series of complicated tests, to be declared the physical manifestation of the badass goddess Durga. She has among her attributes (according to Wikipedia):
- a neck like a conch shell
- a body like a banyan tree
- eyelashes like a cow
- thighs like a deer
- chest like a lion
- voice soft and clear as a duck’s
…whatever that means!
After she’s been selected, the Royal Kumari leaves her old life behind. She moves to a palace and becomes a living deity. Each movement and expression is analyzed; she’s treated with awe and deference; her feet can never touch the ground. She also wears a really complexion-killing amount of makeup on her forehead every day.
Then, one day she gets her first period, and it all stops. She’s no longer a goddess. She’s just some kid the goddess used to inhabit but doesn’t anymore and never will again. They start looking for a new, untainted Kumari immediately, and she’d better have a neck like a conch shell, dammit.
The scorned, newly adolescent, erstwhile Kumari will get a pension from the government for the rest of her life, probably move on, get married (despite a tradition that it’s unlucky to marry a former Kumari), do whatever it is you do with your life in Nepal. It’s not a bad gig, really.
But how jarring, how devastating is it to be a goddess one day and a mortal girl the next? How cast-off must she feel? How embarrassed and enraged that her body betrayed her by succumbing to menarche?
I wonder if it feels like the first time you realize someone is falling out of love with you, but in her case that someone is a deity, a religion, and an entire country.
Now I keep fantasizing about one who happens to have primary amenorrhea, and thus is able to stay in office long enough to take charge of her own godhood and use it for… I’m not sure what, actually, but her own purposes instead of someone else’s, and that’s what matters.
In practical terms they’d probably just kick her out at fifteen or so anyway, but it’s my fantasy.
Good grief, that’s an enormously difficult age for a person who HASN’T just been demoted from godhood. I can’t come close to imagining what that would be like.
People do such weird shit, don’t they?
@Holly Pervocracy Hopefully at some point she regains sovereignty over her walking rights, because getting carried everywhere cannot be good for her legs.
@Mousie00 I’m thinking it’s roughly horrible, but I have no idea if cultural factors mitigate that or not.
@phlegmfatale We really, really do. It’s all fun and games until someone gets traumatized.
I think they let her walk around inside the palace. The wiki article mentions that she gets other kids to play with, too, which is sort of sweet on a “the least you could do” sort of way.
@Holly Pervocracy Oh god, I hope so.