When emails and SMS messages leave my computer and cell phone during Dasain – the post-monsoonal Nepali carnivore carnival – wishing everyone a sacrifice-free holiday, much electronic venom is inevitably spat in return. In Kathmandu just two decades back, to be a vegetarian by choice was to belong to a species difficult to understand. When I returned in 1989 after schooling in Kalimpong and Calcutta, finding vegetarian food at a Newar bhoj, or feast, was as difficult as in the steakhouses of Texas. Sweetmeats would be piled on my plate as substitutes for all the dishes that were either prepared of meat or meat sauce, or cooked in animal fat.
So, I started eating a few dishes in which the meat was well altered, such as the ubiquitous momos or tender barbeques. When asked whether I was a vegetarian or a non-vegetarian, I would answer that I was a 'non-bone-etarian', which meant that I ate anything that did not have the look of meat, and did not come with spare parts such as bone, fat or thick – and I mean thick – skin.
In Kalimpong, we had grown up as vegetarians partly because, as Shakyas, we were perceived to be practicing Buddhists. In my ancestral town of Patan in the Kathmandu Valley, however, one could not be both a Shakya and a vegetarian. My desire to learn and understand the vast range of Newari cuisine thus led me to remain a 'non-bone-etarian' until I learned enough to cook for myself, without necessarily having to taste.
The questions one is asked with regard to vegetarianism in Nepal are not about religion, but rather about how one substitutes for protein intake. Vegetarianism in Nepal is associated with deficiencies in diet and, therefore, health. Many of my cousin-sisters who had been adamant about not eating meat gave in to family pressures and started to do so during pregnancy. When my Gujarati wife – a Jain, and thus a vegetarian as a matter of faith – proceeded to bear and nurse a child without touching meat, some of my relatives thought that we were in for serious health troubles.