I first met her while trekking to Gosainkunda. My friends and I had walked up to her village with an old man who was headed home, a village a bit farther down on the trail to the sacred lake.
When he stopped at this ramshackle place for a bowl of chhyang, we decided to join him. Thus we entered the lair of the teller of some of the tallest tales I have ever heard in Nepal.
She introduced herself as ‘Jiddé Budi.’
Jiddé was her husband’s name, so her name was short for Jiddé ko Budi (Jiddé’s Wife). Her hut had the look of something between a permanent dwelling and a temporary camp. There was no attempt at décor. Two benches flanked a table. A bamboo cut into a cup served as an ashtray. There were no decorations on the walls. Strips of meat hung from rafters directly above the hearth. That was her specialty—stir-fried smoked meat. And chhyang.
As Jiddé Budi shuffled around to ladle out corn chhyang into aluminum bowls, a man sipping the thick spirit asked us where we were headed.
“Gosainkunda,” we told him. The drunk’s expression turned pensive. “There is an evil serpent that lives near the lake,” he said. Like drunks, he didn’t wait for permission or invitation. Without anyone so much as having uttered a word, he went into the storyteller mode.
The story was about a shaman who lived long, long ago. The shaman travelled to Nag Kunda, the lake where the serpent lived, to challenge him to a duel. Before he dived into the lake, the shaman instructed his wife to beat his drum and to keep doing so no matter what.
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