He’s coming
He’s coming
He’s coming…[break]
“He’s coming to marry and look after you ooh ooh” – she sings, her eyes rolled up and her voice a sheer mockery.
It’s yet another Friday night in Kathmandu. At one end of the city in an overcrowded space, she sings to a crowd dancing in trance to the ska-reggae-punk beats of her electrifying band Naya Faya.
Amid the dancing frenzy of mostly male, mostly expat crowd, the barely five feet tall brown woman sings, warbles, growls, screeches – her words mocking the society where, even now, little girls are married off at the age of 13 or younger.
“Girl, don’t expect to ever come home,” she shouts out the line continuously, boiling up against the social order for girls who once married are ostracized from their own homes.
Despite the not too good sound system, you can still hear her clearly and cannot help but feel the sting of the lyrics that stick with you, not because they’re catchy but because they’re harsh and true, “ ..you know what the in-laws have to say? They say, Bring me a son. Bring me a son. Bring me a son. Kill the other one!”
As a moss pit builds up through the show and the music takes over, the few girls dancing in the crowd slide off towards the sideline. But some refuse to step out.
Call it madness, call it courage, a feminist would’ve been proud of the scene and especially proud of the woman at the center of it all singing her soul out.
On stage, singer/songwriter/guitarist Sareena Rai is a punk singing songs of revolutions and doing what she loves. Off stage, living in the foothills of Budanilkantha, she is a soft spoken mom, working at home as well as in her community and doing what she loves.
“Well, it’s been 15 years or more,
You may as well call me a ‘rock n roll ho’,
I’ve been surrounded by a few good men,
Now I gotta girl rockin harder than them!
La! La! La!”
-15 years, Tankgirl
Rai says she learnt to play guitar watching her brothers play. In 2010, she teamed up with drummer Oliver Bertin, now her partner, to form the anarcho punk band Raiko Ris that set the foundation of her journey into music.
The activist duo has also been making music with other musicians under the band names of Tank Girl, an anarcha-feminist band, and the latest being Naya Faya, injecting punk into ska-reggae beats.
Though it’s been more than a decade now, Sareena and her band members have chosen to remain low key.
They have supported and drawn inspiration from international DIY punk scene, kept their music alive without corporate support and avoided mainstream media, which gives many music lovers and activists a sense of great joy in having discovered their music either by chance or headlong inquisitiveness.
“I didn’t really agree for an interview,” says Rai with a teasing smile as she welcomes her visitor into her two-storied village-style mud-and-bamboo house. An open kitchen, and two adjoining rooms, there’s a wide space with a green carpet laid down where she plays with her one-year-old.
There’s barely any furniture in the house besides the racks that display some of the feminist/queer/gay alternative literature, magazines, books, pamphlets on anarchism, d.i.y sustainable living, socio-politico music magazines from the infoshop they used to run in Lazimpat (which they have now set up in their home).
She shares that she and Oliver built the house with the help of the villagers, specially their friend Sukman to whom, Rai ko Ris have dedicated a song, “Sukman Hanuman”
Rai, who’s had her share of school and university education, feels that though academic education opens the doors to many perspectives and understanding, most of it is sometimes limited to “just in the head.”
Hence she admires people like Sukman who use “their own hands to build things, lay down the foundations and grow things” despite being uneducated.
Having lived with community people, mostly from Dalit families, for seven years now, their family is now loved and respected by the people around. As most men and women go out to work in the fields, many of the neighboring kids often wind up playing in their backyard.
“They’re either playing with our kids or with us. We’re like kids ourselves. Free!” she says, chuckling as she starts preparing lunch.
But there are also many cases of domestic violence against women and children, abuse, discrimination and malpractices prevalent in the village which Rai not only writes and sings about but has stepped up against it in real life as well.
“I’m a strong believer that change can start from where you are,” she says, “So, when you see anything wrong happening, you step up, voice it out, make it stop and make sure it doesn’t happen again with your constant presence. That’s how it happens in a community.”
A non-believer in the police system, she says things have to be solved within the community. However, for women, it is still a hard world and Rai believes in and promotes self-defense for women. Even for an outspoken woman like Rai, there have been times sexual harassment has made her feel helpless.
“During a jatra, I was just having fun dancing with the crowd when one man just grabbed my breast and I was so infuriated I was blindly punching him in my rage. But when I opened my eyes, I realized I was punching him on the shoulder and arms which felt like nothing to him,” she laughs it off as she remembers how Ani Choying Dolma, who was with her at the time, had pulled her away from the scene.
But she is very serious about having girls learn self-defense for which the infoshop even publishes their own zine Self defense with instruction and illustrations “to make lives safer for girls and women on a daily basis.”
At her home, Rai also has an instructor come over to give self-defense class every Saturday to some girls from the village. “We’re trying to get women to join, too. I mean, you know, they’re the ones always getting beaten up. I hope the interest grows.”
Besides, it’s also been a year that three bands with a total of 10 girls from the village have been learning to play guitar and drums from Rai and Bertin. “We had a punk concert in the village last year with us, the girls and our visiting friends from Germany. It was great,” says Rai, grinning.
Initially, women in the village didn’t like girls hanging out with Rai, she tells us. It was as if she were a bad influence, keeping them away from important chores like “helping around the house and taking care of her little siblings.”
“But some women in the village don’t want their daughters to have the same life as them,” she says. “So they see me and think ’Ah she looks happy.’ They see my husband washing clothes, working together with me and think ‘See, it’s possible’ and then send their daughters to me.”
They’ll even have three women (in their late thirties or forties) from the village joining in to learn how to play guitar and drums starting next week. “There were seven of them who approached us. One of them was our neighbor who we see working in the fields and comes over and cries about her alcoholic husband, keeping another woman and wishing for him to bring her home so they can live peacefully together,” she says, raising her eyebrows and hands together. “That’s how it’s here, it’s crazy.”
Taking the classes for free, living off from what they earn through their gigs, working on their music, taking care of their children, juggling through the electricity schedule, Rai says it gets crushing sometimes.
“You can only do so much for free, you know, when you’re not really earning yourself,” she says, smiling and making funny sorry faces as she checks time on her black and white Nokia phone.
But it pays off for them as they help the community people out with something, and they teach you how to sow spinach and help with other things. “But we’re involved and do things in the community because we love to do it or because some things bug us. We’re not out to change the world, though,” says Rai.
Even with the band, when people come out to them saying they need more exposure, they often turn offers down. “It doesn’t make sense to us or we’re not made for it,” Rai says and Bertin intervenes in a tone typical of Nepali villages, “Just because we’re a little different, they call us ghamandi (proud). Testo haina ni (But it’s not like that).”
Their songs openly oppose corporate culture and false advertisements, and just in her their latest gig, the audience stomped down on Wai Wai packet which she threw on the floor, singing “Why why why wai wai?”
For Rai, who always wrote her own lyrics and co-writes all the band songs as well, it is an important means of activism. Be it the highly political lyrics of Rai ko Ris telling stories of people during people’s war, to situation of Bhutanese refugees and anarcha-feminist lyrics of Tank girl to the ‘rebelutionary’ lyrics of Naya Faya or other alter ego of the band, their songs become the anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, anti-racist and revolutionary anthems.
It also becomes her form of self-expression as you notice some bits and pieces of her life and frustration poured out.
“Nepali girl, Nepali girl, why you hanging with that white guy?
Do you suck his balls, does he give you money?
Are you his doll, his little brown honey?
They criticize and they criticize
Nepali girl, you should be ostracized!
You married a guy, a papa of two
White guy - brown chick, shoo shoo shoo!
- Nepali girl, Tank girl
Steering things differently however doesn’t always land her in a comfortable position. Rai says she often gets into a lot of disagreement and arguments. And with the way she dresses, does tattoos, defies social norms, voicing out opinion and intervening with things going wrong around her gets her lot of criticism and grudges.
“I probably one day will get burnt as bokshi (witch),” she says jokingly and once again laughs it off.
All these years, but she still chooses to be the anarcha-feminist punk singing out her songs and letting the society see its true face in her lyrics and smashing it with her music.
Leave home at 17, leave home at 21
Society’s telling me just how a girl should be
Good-looking, sexy, with a master’s degree
Society’s telling me I cannot be Me
Samaaj ko keti, samaaj ko kaidi
(Society’s girl, society’s prisoner)
Let’s smash it!
- Samaaj ko keti, Samaaj ko kaidi, Rai ko Ris
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