Khyāh

On the packed brick of Kathmandu’s old royal square, in the lamp-smoke and drum-noise of the Yenyā nights, a squat furred shape comes tumbling out of the crowd. It is about the height of a child and built like a barrel, wrapped head to foot in shaggy black hair, and it moves the way nothing holy is supposed to move. It blunders into onlookers. It sprawls, rights itself, pats a startled bystander on the shoulder and lurches off again. Children shriek and give chase. The khyāḥ has arrived, and the laughter rolling after it through the square is the whole point of the thing.

Away from the festival the khyāḥ is a quieter presence, and a domestic one. It belongs to the Newar households of the Kathmandu Valley, the old traders and farmers and craftspeople of Nepal, and in their telling it is less a monster than a lodger. A khyāḥ takes up residence in a house, in the dark of a storeroom or the unused space beneath the eaves, and there it stays, mostly unseen, folded into the life of a family that never invited it. What it does there depends on which khyāḥ you have drawn.

The good ones are luminous with luck. During Svanti, the Newar keeping of the autumn festival of lights, when every household is scrubbed clean and coins and grain are laid out to draw the goddess of wealth indoors, the khyāḥ takes its place in the sacred picture. In the painted image of Lakṣmī set up for the worship, the goddess stands crowned and many-armed, one hand on a tortoise, another open in blessing, and set before her, flanking her like two small devoted guards, are a pair of benevolent khyāḥ. They keep her company. They keep her treasure. You would know one had been at work in your house by small mercies rather than by any sighting: a store that lasts longer than it should, coins that seem to breed in the box, the low steady sense of being looked after by something patient and close to the floor.

Then there is the other kind. A darker-tempered khyāḥ turns the same intimacy to trouble, souring sleep and luck, making a small nuisance of itself in the walls. The tradition sorts them by colour and temper, the pale auspicious khyāḥ set against the black and difficult one, generosity on one side and spite on the other, the same creature facing two ways.

No one pretends to have taken careful measurements. The khyāḥ is round-bellied and thickly furred, nearer to a small ape than to a person, with a broad flat face, stubby limbs and a bustling, graceless walk. Most of what is agreed about its body comes from the costume, because the surest place to meet a khyāḥ is not in a house but in a dance. The Khyāḥ Pyākhaṃ, the khyāḥ dance, is a fixture of the Newar festival year, performed above all during Indra Jātrā, the great late-monsoon festival that fills Kathmandu’s Durbar Square for eight days in honour of Indra, god of rain. Masked dancers take the brick as gods and demons, and among the fearsome ones lumbers the khyāḥ, fat and furred and clowning, working through routines that are half acrobatics and half pratfall. Where the terrible figures menace, the khyāḥ disarms. In some performances it is paired with a skeleton, the kawaṃcā, the two of them playing off one another, the fat and the fleshless, appetite and its end.

Where the khyāḥ first came from is a question the tradition mostly declines to answer. It is spoken of as a spirit or a benevolent ghost rather than a god, a being of the household and the shadowed corner, at home in Newar imagination and in the stories told to Newar children. The written record for it is thin. It lives in ritual and performance and in the memory of grandparents far more than in any book, and the neat English inventories of its habits that circulate now rest on very little. What holds up is the shape of the thing: a small furred presence at the edge of the house, bound to fortune, and let loose once a year to caper in the crowd.

Its power is the oldest a domestic spirit can hold. It can make a household prosper, keep the grain from running short and the money box from emptying, and stand watch over the wealth a family gathers under Lakṣmī’s eye. Its limits are the flip side of the same coin. A khyāḥ gives only to the house it favours, and the favour can curdle. There is no blessed blade or banishing rite for driving one out the way there is for a demon, only the hope that the tenant in your walls is the pale and generous kind. It is a creature you learn to live beside, not one you defeat.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Khyāh?

A khyāh is a household spirit from the folklore of the Newar people of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal, usually described as a short, fat, furry, ape-like being. It is regarded as a kind of benevolent ghost tied to a home’s wealth and good fortune, and it is best known today as a comic, tumbling masked figure in Newar festival dances.

Is the Khyah good or evil?

It can be either, and the tradition distinguishes the two by colour and temperament. A pale, auspicious khyāh brings luck and guards a household’s prosperity, while a darker, ill-tempered one brings mischief and misfortune to the home it haunts.

What is the Khyah dance?

The Khyāḥ Pyākhaṃ is a Newar masked dance in which a performer wears a shaggy full-body khyāh costume and clowns and tumbles through the crowd. It is performed especially during Indra Jātrā, the eight-day festival held in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, where the khyāh serves as comic relief among the masked gods and demons.

How is the Khyah connected to the goddess Lakshmi?

In the Newar celebration of Svanti, the autumn festival of lights, two benevolent khyāh are shown flanking the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, in the image set up for her worship. In this role the khyāh act as attendants and guardians of the goddess and of the household’s money.

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