The Saint of Kathmandu: And Other Tales of the Sacred in Everyday Life by Sarah LeVine

From the Publisher

“You should come with us to Lumbini, Lord Buddha’s birthplace,” said the Saint of Kathmandu as she swept by me after evening devotions in the nunnery. Pausing at the bottom of the stairway to her quarters, she turned and, bright black eyes locking with mine, added, “Will we meet tomorrow? The buses leave at six”—an order, not an invitation, I realized, and so, putting my life on hold, the next morning [I joined the pilgrimage].

Sarah LeVine began doing research in Africa in 1969 as a young woman and sometime Anglican newly married to an anthropologist and provisionally, at least, to a rationalist view of religion. Over the next several decades, as she continued her research in cultures as various as Muslim Nigeria, Catholic Mexico, Buddhist Nepal, Hindu India, and New Age America, she honed a keenly observant eye. During this time she also raised two children, learned and forgot many languages, wrote highly praised novels (under the pen name Louisa Dawkins), and began to understand that religious faith has little to do with doctrine or philosophical abstractions.

These deftly crafted accounts plunge us into the lives of some of the people LeVine became close to on four continents. In a northern Nigerian town we find orthodox Muslims trying— and failing— to ignore the thriving spirit possession cult in their midst. In a Mexican city women struggling with their husbands’ infidelity and the loss of children and take the Virgin Mary as their role model. In the face of tragedy in a Kenyan village, tensions flare between traditionalists who live in dread of ancestral wrath and witchcraft and Christians who reject suchbeliefs. In affluent Hong Kong a Filipina maid, enduring a long separation from her son, turns for support to a charismatic Catholic church; and in Nepal, LeVine accompanies the remarkable Saint of Kathmandu, who fled an arranged marriage and earned renown as a Buddhist nun and feminist leader, on a pilgrimage to holy places all across north India.

These lives led LeVine to think of religion as inseparable from cultural complexity and constraints, and to view less critically her own lingering attachment to what she calls The Life of Christ (The Movie). As engrossing and surprising as any novel, The Saint of Kathmandu is a richly textured and unsentimental depiction of the role of religion in lives all over the world.

“This is a major work, the beginning of ongoing discussions about the role and impact of religion in multiple societies around the world. It fascinates and prods and disturbs and enlightens. Best of all, the book reads like a novel without losing a scintilla of academic credibility. My best advice: whatever you were going to read next, forget it. Read this book instead.” —Joan Chittister, author of Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir

“In this remarkable book Sarah LeVine brings us into religious lives and cultural worlds portrayed with an immediacy, complexity, and intimacy so very different from ‘textbook religion.’ With her we enter into those borderlands of real encounter where we meet people who do not share our lived world and who ask us questions as penetrating and illumining as any we might ask of them.” —Diana Eck, author of A New Religious America and Encountering God

“Sarah LeVine's THE SAINT OF KATHMANDU is a reader's delight. The author's fine gifts as a novelist combine here with her long experience as an ethnographer. The result is a lovely confluence of stories—each one vivid in detail, elegant in structure, beautiful in prose expression, and brimful of human understanding.” —John Demos, author of The Enemy Within: Two Thousand Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World and The Unredeemed Captive

“The Saint of Kathmandu is rich, intense, utterly credible. The tales are deeply engaging, and reveal more about workaday religion that any standard approaches—perhaps because the author takes on individual dramas of suffering, enduring, growing. This is allso the most global small book I can think of. Save for Nepal, I have traveled in or looked into religion in all six country-contexts which Sarah LeVine treats, American Zen not least. She is compellingly concrete; she evokes humility without rue; she emits wisdom without pride. An extraordinary feat of religious story telling.” —Theodore Friend, author of Indonesian Destinies

Publishers Weekly

Anthropologist LeVine, who has observed family interactions in Asia, Latin America and Africa over the course of decades, recounts how faith and superstition influence the daily life of the vibrant people she has met. "My focus is always on my characters' need for religious faith and the uses they make of it," she writes. With her "observing eye" and boundless curiosity, LeVine describes how witchcraft, Buddhism, spirit possession, charismatic Christianity and the Virgin Mary help people make sense of their lives and endure the hardships they encounter. Vivid descriptions and sympathetic portraits are this book's strengths, while the author's treatment of religion sometimes tends toward the superficial, addressing religion primarily as solace. LeVine (who coauthored Rebuilding Buddhismwith David Gellner) is reticent about her reactions to the practices she witnesses and doesn't always reveal when the events occurred, thereby omitting vital clues about political and cultural contexts. Still, this is compelling ethnography, and much of the book serves as testimony to the vulnerability of women in developing countries. (June 18)

Lisa Liquori - Library Journal

LeVine (Sanskrit & Indian studies, Harvard Univ.), a long-standing researcher, anthropologist, and master storyteller, finds that it is the human need for protection from evil (i.e., poor health), worldly transformation (e.g., better jobs, sobriety), and eternal transcendence rather than abstract dogmatic belief that truly shapes our spiritual encounters. She uses tales from Nigeria, Mexico, Kenya, Hong Kong, and North America to illustrate various sacred views that people hold, along the way exploring spirit possession, witchcraft, Mother of God fixation, charismatic Christianity, and Buddhist mysticism. Particularly fascinating is her account of how different aspects of religion converge to work as an effective intercessor between humans and their creator. The author submits that the fear of the unknown leads people to attempt to make peace with the unknowable. Ultimately, she writes, diverse expressions of seeking the divine infer a rich vital force at work in our world. More a survey of varied religious practices the author has observed in her travels than a work of anthropology, this is recommended for the religion collections of larger public libraries.

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Spirit Possession in a Muslim Town

"Sit, please." Alhajia Rabi indicated a rickety chair with a ripped vinyl seat. "I am busy now, but later we will talk."

As the only purveyor of western medicine in Kaura, a Nigerian town one hundred miles south of the Sahara Desert, the Alhajia treated patients in a squat, iron-roofed, green-shuttered dispensary on a lane behind the Magaji's mud-walled palace. The Magaji, chief of Kaura, had instructed his messenger to bring me to her. "The Alhajia and I used to work together," he'd told me. Before the eldest son of his father's elder brother had been deposed by the provincial governor for egregious corruption and he'd been appointed in his place, the Magaji had been a nurse.

"While I treated gents, she treated ladies," he'd explained to me. "Of course my appointment as chief necessitated my resignation. The Ministry of Health has promised a replacement but none has been forthcoming so far. Thus my former room in the dispensary is padlocked, and for medical attention our Kaura gents must travel to the clinic in faraway Funtua. As the road there is long and full of potholes, for sick people it is a horrible journey. They scream and even beg for death to take them. In fact, meeting death on the way is not infrequent. But our ladies and our children, too, are fortunate." Alhajia Rabi in her white uniform-crisp head tie, long-sleeved blouse, toe-length wrapper-had remained at her post. "She attended the school established by the old emir of Zaria, and later, also in Zaria, she took midwifery training. So she knows English. Somewhat, at least." As the nephew and grandson of chiefs, he himself had found favor with the British colonial government, which had sent him for training to Hillingdon Hospital, Uxbridge, England. Twenty-five years after he returned, his English remained fluent, authoritative, and ringed with a Home Counties accent. "You will find that Alhajia Rabi knows how to speak with white people. I have confidence, Madam, that she will inform you fully about the ladies and the children of this place." As an afterthought, he'd added, "She is a good Muslim also. Twice she has made the hajj." (Hence her title, "Alhajia," reserved for women who had made the pilgimage to Mecca.)

Seated at a broad table this Tuesday morning, Alhajia Rabi gazed intently at the women whom her "boy" Musa summoned one by one to present their complaints. Many held small children in their arms of had infants tied to their backs. Since the Alhajia and I occupied the dispensary's only chairs, the women were required to stand. After listening for two minutes maximum, the Alhajia would rise magisterially. If, as an aid to the diagnostic procedure, a physical examination seemed warranted, she would usher her patient behind the grubby blue curtain that closed off the rear of the room-or, in the case of a child, have the mother lay him on the table, whereupon, as she explained to me, the procedure was to pull up shirr, pull down shorts, and place ear to chest and then to stomach. But often she proceeded immediately to treatment. A glass-fronted cabinet behind her contained six large jars variously marked in black capitals: COUGH, WEAKNESS, DIARRHEA, VOMIT, FEVER, ACHE. Shaking out a handful of tablets, she'd dump them into a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book and, while deftly folding them into a packet, would bark instructions. Sometimes, in addition to prescribing tablets, she swabbed gentian violet on gashes and insect bites, squeezed thick curls of ointment onto squares of paper, or proffered acid yellow tonic. If the patient hadn't had the foresight to bring her own bottle, the Alhajia would sell her, for a penny, one of the empties lined up on top of the cabinet, throwing in a rag, to be used as a stopper, for the price. One in roughly fifteen patients merited a penicillin injection.

When I arrived at the dispensary, the line of swathed women shielding themselves with black umbrellas from the West African sun, already fierce at nine o'clock in the morning, had wound away down the lane. But given the Alhajia's streamlined approach to clinical practice, by eleven o'clock the line had evaporated and the few remaining women, heads still covered but umbrellas folded, were squatting inside the building on the earthen floor. When, by eleven-twenty, the last had been attended to, the Alhajia produced a key from inside her wrapper, locked the cabinet, and turned to me. With narrowed eyes, she asked suspiciously, "Well, Madam, what is it that you want?"

"I have come to learn how mothers in Kaura bring up their children."

"Are there no women in your own place who could teach you these things?"

"They would teach me how Americans bring up their children, and I want to know how Kaura mothers do it."

The Alhajia looked at me in skeptical silence. "How many children have you got?" she asked.

"I don't have any."

"None at all? Why is that?"

"I've been too busy studying ..."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-eight."

"So old! Then why do you still study?"

Ignoring her implied "when you should be having children," I plunged on. "The Magaji told me you're a child health expert, and that you know all the women in Kaura. Most important, that they trust you," I added, hoping to beguile her. The Magaji had also informed me that in this Muslim town in which all females between the ages of twelve and fifty were married and kulle (in purdah-confined to the house, to protect their purity and the honor of their families), Alhajia Rabi, alone among respectable women, was free to walk the streets by day and learn everybody's business.

Kicking off wedge-heeled slippers, the Alhajia stretched out her legs and as, head down, she mopped her face and neck with a corner of the salmon-colored towel on which she'd examined her child patients, she studied her own small hennaed feet. Though her forehead was lined, when she pushed back her head tie, I saw that her elaborately braided hair was black. As I had found to be the case with most people in Kaura, it was difficult to ten her age. "Without me, the ladies here would hardly survive." With a complacent burp, she added, "Do you wish to talk to them?"

"Yes, that's the general idea."

"But how? You make too many mistakes in our language."

A grammar book, pocket dictionary, and several months of lessons from an ex-Peace Corps volunteer in the States had only equipped me with "kitchen" Hausa, the lingua franca of the area; this meant I could just about deal with our servant, a skinny fellow named Ali, and the children who came to our door selling onions, okra, and guinea-fowl eggs. "Perhaps you could teach me to speak your language better," I suggested.

"Where will I find time for teaching? Every day, so many ladies and children are coming ..." The Alhajia sighed deeply. "And when they are too sick to come or they are giving birth I must run to help in the compounds. Many nights, I have no sleep at all." But suddenly she brightened. "My idea," she exclaimed, jabbing her forehead with an index finger. "You will help me! You will keep the records!"

It emerged that though the health ministry required records, she had largely neglected to keep them. From a drawer in her examining table she produced a tattered ledger, a wooden ruler, and a stubby blue pencil. My task would be to draw columns and list in them every patient's name, diagnosis, and medicine prescribed. I should arrive at eight o'clock each morning and on days when she didn't have too many patients she would help me hone my conversational skills.

"First time in Nigeria?" she asked as she replaced ledger, ruler, and pencil stub.

"Second time. My first, I was a teacher in the East."

She looked at me doubtfully. "In Iboland? Those people are Christians, not Muslims," she added, her implication being "Why would you want to go there?" which was pretty much what my parents had said when, as-in their view-a still dangerously impulsive twenty-one-year-old just out of university, I'd announced I'd joined a volunteer organization which was sending me to Nigeria to teach "whatever you know that they think might be useful." (This turned out to be European history, Latin, and elementary French.)

"Yes," I said. "Hausaland's a lot different." For one thing, in Iboland women aren't in purdah, I said under my breath.

The following morning we wrestled with vocabulary for female body parts, which, together with some useful phrases, I wrote in my spiral notebook. But the morning after that, as soon as the last patient had departed, the Alhajia indicated that to remain in the dispensary after her day's work was done was not to her taste. I could also study in her house, she observed. And so, with Musa taking up the rear, we proceeded through the center of Kaura, our progress slowed by the Alhajia's frequent stops to chat with shopkeepers, cloth peddlers, herders returning from market to their cattle camps in the bush, children selling kola nuts from round tin trays, and the occasional leprous beggar. Outside the iron-studded gates of the Magaji's palace turbaned men dozed beneath dusty-leafed neem trees and caparisoned horses, tethered to the trees, flicked at flies with lazy tails. The Magaji was not "on seat" (in his office, attending to business), Alhajia Rabi informed me. "Gone to settle a case in Giwa where there are camel thieves." Wrinkling her nose disdainfully, she added, "And when he is absent his people only sleep."

Just as we were passing, the noon can to prayer issued from the white minaret of the town's main mosque, across the road from the palace. Men stirred, sat up, stretched, adjusted turbans, reached for kettles, performed ablutions. That done, they rolled out mats and knelt, facing east, for their devotions. Meanwhile, from the yard of the primary school next door a stream of jostling barefoot boys in embroidered caps and long khaki shirts poured out into the road. Their cries and high-pitched chatter almost drowned out the muezzin's call. A small phalanx of girls in blue frocks and neat white head ties followed decorously behind them.

Momentarily trapped by the tide of schoolchildren, three young women in bright silks, eyes outlined in kohl, heads boldly uncovered, stood in the middle of the road. Holding hands, they laughed at the children, at one another, at life in general. They looked inordinately cheerful. As we drew close, they greeted the Alhajia, who, with a curt nod, swept by. "Karuwai," she muttered distastefully and abruptly turned off the road into a narrow lane.

"What are karuwai?"

"They have run away from their husbands."

"Why are they out in the street at midday? Are they prostitutes?"

"Surely you saw their dresses?"

"They were very colorful ..."

"Colorful and costly! Prostitutes you see in the lorry park. They are old and ugly and wear cheap dresses. Karuwai are young and pretty. Instead of going with any man who brings three shillings, each has only one or two rich friends."

"So would you call them courtesans?"

The Alhajia's brow furrowed. "That word I do not know."

In the entrance hall of the compound where the Alhajia rented rooms we came upon a small boy and girl fighting over a pink plastic doll. (Black dolls had not yet been seen in Kaura; in fact the peddlers who went house to house selling head ties, water bottles, rubber sandals, and soap had only recently added pink dolls to their wares.) The boy jumped backwards, doll clasped tightly to his chest, and the girl raced up to the Alhajia, grabbed a fistful of her wrapper and unleashed a piercing wail; whereupon, with a snort of irritation, the Alhajia darted forward and snatched the doll from the boy's grasp. Then, scooping the little girl into her arms and beckoning to me to follow, she strode across the compound to her own quarters.

We entered a room which, shuttered since morning, was mercifully cool. Setting the child on the earthen floor, the Alhajia presented her to me. "Her name is Laraba," she told me. "When my friend Rakia gave birth, I said, 'When you wean this child, you will give her to me!' Rakia is my bond-friend. Bond-friends may deny each other nothing, so how could she refuse my request? After weaning, she sent Laraba to me. Kaura is a better place than Giwa, where Rakia is married. Here Laraba can drink milk and eat meat and green vegetables every day. When it is the season I buy for her papaya." She added proudly, "See how well she grows!" Indeed, in a region where more than half the children died before age five, Laraba, fair-skinned and too cute for her own good, appeared to be bursting with health.

After opening one of the shutters a crack so that a shaft of burning sunlight sliced across the floor, the Alhajia withdrew in order to exchange her nurse's uniform for a dramatically patterned cotton blouse and wrapper. Meanwhile, Musa had been sent to the corner shop for orange Fantas, which we drank from the bottles while seated on tightly woven grass mats. The packet of biscuits that Musa had also bought was pounced upon by Laraba; clutching it closely, she ran outside. "That one will give her husband much trouble," the Alhajia remarked, smiling indulgently.

"You're already thinking about her marriage? She's still so little."

"And soon she will be big! At twelve years, I myself was married, Madam."

But that marriage, it emerged, had been to a previous husband. Her current husband, Mamman, was the emir of Katsina's driver. In the dry season he drove the emir about in a great black pennanted Mercedes Benz, which, in the rainy season, he exchanged for a gray Land Rover. Ashis duties kept him mostly in Katsina City and the Alhajia's kept her mostly in Kaura, husband and wife met only on the third weekend of the month. Though on occasion Mamman visited her in Kaura, usually it was the Alhajia who visited him in Katsina, four hours away in the back of a lorry, or, if she was lucky, by bus.

"Who cooks for your husband when you aren't there?"

"His other wives," she replied matter-of-factly. "It is because they are there in Katsina City that I am free to work here." As for Laraba, "Eight more years and then, like I was, she'll be married."

"But what about school? Will she study?"

"Already she studies. Each afternoon Musa takes her and that boy Suliman, with whom we found her fighting, to study the Koran in the house of Malam Hussein."

"They don't study in the mosque?"

"May females enter the mosque?" the Alhajia shot back. The Alhajia herself had never set foot in a mosque. Mosques were for gents only. But the Koran was a quite different matter. "The Koran is for ladies as well as for gents." As a child she-like several other girls she knew-had committed it to memory in its entirety. "When Laraba marries she too will have it by heart. She will also attend the government school, as I did. Four or five standards [grade levels] will be sufficient. If she studies longer, she will find it difficult to settle in her husband's borne."

"Did you find it difficult?"

The Alhajia rolled her eyes heavenward. Then, drinking down the last of her Fanta, she said briskly, "You wish to study the Hausa language, isn't it? So let us speak about the sicknesses of this hot season. First, meningitis." But hardly had my lesson begun than a young woman entered the room. Dark-red wrapper tied high under her armpits, "In God We Trust" marching in orange letters across her buttocks, she seated herself on the mat beside us and urgently engaged the Alhajia. Within moments, she was joined by a second young woman with a baby on her hip. The Alhajia turned to me. "These are daughters of this house, they have come back here because they have trouble with their husbands. Excuse me, please, but I must give them advice."

A roll of drums came from the direction of the town's main gate. Laraba reappeared and, ignoring her mother's visitors, tucked in her elbows, lowered chin to chest, and began to dance. On several afternoons since our arrival in Kaura my husband and I had heard drumming. We knew that the bori cult, in which adepts become possessed by vengeful spirits, was found throughout the region; but when we'd asked our landlord if we were hearing bori drums he'd replied evasively. "You Europeans entertain yourselves with music, isn't it?" he'd said. "Well, we do as well." Our neighbor, a Yoruba agricultural officer who had recently transferred to Kaura from his southern homeland, had suggested, "It should be for a wedding." But it wasn't the wedding season.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE SAINT OF KATHMANDU by Sarah Levine
Copyright © 2008 by Sarah LeVine. Excerpted by permission.
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