Nepal earthquake fails to shake child goddess from her home

Amid the devastation of Kathmandu's Durbar Square, where the old royal palace and Hindu temples were reduced to rubble by last week's earthquake, one house decorated with carvings of deities and human skulls stands almost unscathed: the home of the Kumari, the city's living child-goddess and the nation's protector.

"We believe that it was her powers that might have protected the place," said Mahendra Shakya, one of the dozen-strong family that guards the 10-year-old girl revered by Nepal's Hindus, "though there are some cracks inside and we are trying to fix them".

Mr Shakya stood outside the intricate wooden door of the Kumari House, leaning on one of the brightly painted stone lions that guard the entrance and watching troops and rescue teams sift through the debris of the historic square with their bare hands and clear away heaps of bricks with bulldozers.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake in central Nepal last Saturday killed more than 6,000 people, including tourists visiting fragile brick-built temples and monuments, villagers whose homes were destroyed in the foothills of the Himalayas and climbers swept away in a post-quake avalanche that tore through Everest base camp.

Matina Shakya, Kathmandu's so-called royal Kumari, is the most prominent of the child goddesses who represent the fearsome Hindu goddess Durga and are worshipped in various Nepali towns until they reach puberty and are replaced by another Kumari.

When the earthquake struck, demolishing most of the older structures in the square, "she was upstairs and had just finished eating," said Mr Shakya. "We couldn't manage to get down at first but when it stabilised we came down. For safety we're living on the ground floor, though the building is unaffected."

It is not clear how the Kumari reacted to the earthquake, although the selection process for the position is so severe that she might have been less frightened than other girls of the same age: not only must a Kumari have a body like a banyan tree and a neck like a conch-shell; she must also calmly endure a test of nerve in which the young candidates are confronted at dead of night with men in demon masks and a roomful of severed buffalo heads.

Another Kumari in nearby Patan - seven-year-old Yunika Bajracharya - was sitting at her ceremonial altar at the time of the earthquake and told those around her to calm down and not rush outside, according to the Nepali Times.

"She had her eyes closed as if she was in a trance, told us nothing would happen to us," her father Ramesh was quoted as saying. In Patan, too, the Kumari house withstood the earthquake while other temples collapsed, the paper said.

Mr Shakya said he understood that the Kathmandu Kumari house had even survived the terrible Nepal earthquake of 1934. "She's the protector of the nation - and purifies the place she's in," he said.

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