In February 2020, Vespucci Group sent Ada to Nepal, where she spent a week with Rashmila Shakya - a software engineer who, as a child, served as the royal Kumari. Believed to be the incarnation of the goddess Taleju, the Kumari is the central figure in the religious life of the Kathmandu Valley. She is chosen from among Newar girls who meet a strict set of physical and astrological criteria, and serves only until she reaches puberty.
Rashmila was four when in 1984 she was taken from her family home and installed in a palace in the heart of Kathmandu. There, she received devotees who sought her blessing and drank water in which she had dipped her feet - said to have healing powers. She dressed only in red; her bedroom, bathroom, and even her toothbrush were red, too. She could leave the palace just 13 times a year, on religious holidays, and never on her own two feet - the Kumari’s soles must not touch the ground outside the palace, so she was carried on a palanquin. Everyone, including the king of Nepal, touched her feet as a sign of utmost respect. She never went to school. A goddess, after all, is assumed to know everything.
Then, just before her twelfth birthday, Rashmila was suddenly required to leave the palace. The Kumari is a virgin goddess, and her incarnation cannot grow up. A new girl took her place, and Rashmila returned to a home she didn’t remember, a family who felt like strangers, and a mortal world she barely understood.
At 12, she put on shoes for the first time and went for a walk - just to the next street, to buy a Dairy Milk chocolate bar. She rode in a car for the first time (and got motion sickness). For the first time, she was called “Rashmila” - until then she had been addressed only by her ceremonial title, Dyah Meiju, “Virgin Goddess.” And she went to school for the first time, five years older and two heads taller than the other first graders. It was a hard landing, but she went on to become the first former goddess to earn a university degree, as well as a mother, a wife, and a Microsoft engineer.
Ada wrote the script for the podcast The Living Goddess in collaboration with Rashmila and translator Sonu Lohani. The field recordings she collected in Kathmandu were edited by Lauren Hutchinson and Charlie Brandon-King.