After nearly two weeks back in Dharchula, New Year's Eve day came with our Dharchula auntie's announcement that we would be hosting a "pooja," or offering to the gods in this case one associated with her family and town of origin in the courtyard out front. When we arrived back in December, Auntie Sonta, our landlady, had been at her hospital job. Fortunately, despite our delayed return, our rooms were still available, but the courtyard was a wreck filled with trash, indiscriminate piles of rock and large bricks of gray mortar and hand-broken stone. Sonta came back to town to welcome us briefly just before the holidays, jetted back to work for a couple of days, and then reappeared in time for Christmas. In keeping with our predominantly Hindu environs, our own Xmas had been decidedly low key; a few drinks with the German dam contractor and his small multinational crew of engineers, plus a covy of local drivers.

The excuse for a grander New Year's celebration came as a welcome. We definitely were pleased to see the courtyard cleaned in anticipation of the pooja.

For those familiar with Hindu tradition, as we've slowly become after two years, it should be noted that this celebration featured none of the serene chants, bright marigolds or fragrant incense one might expect. Rather, at about 10 a.m. the butchers showed up with a shaggy, white, very dead sheep, which they had killed in a nearby temple; we were told the process of ending the animal's life consisted of cutting a small incision through the chest, and reaching behind the ribcage to close a hand and stop the heart from beating. Still supple, they laid the sheep out on a plastic sheet and set to work skinning it, eventually opening the body cavity and cutting the meat from the bones.

Some internal organs were diced and mixed with a salty, red pepper garnish, which was served as "prassad," a communion-type snack of liver, bladder and brain. The pepper all but overpowered the flavor of the sheep innards, making them palatable -- so long as you didn't focus on where exactly they had come from.

Around here, it's worth noting, they haven't so much turned their backs on vegetarianism as they never fully embraced it (although given the high cost of meat most maintain a veg diet when it's not a feast day). Dharchula is on India's border with Nepal, which is evident in not just the steep canyon landscape but also the increased Asiatic visage of many of our neighbors. So while the region is predominantly Hindu, animal sacrifice remains an important part of religious practice as it does in Nepal. Moreover Auntie, despite concerns about her Hindu dharma retains connections to the older indigenous religions of this region. Her worship of ancestral family members, connected to her historic mountain home in the hills, calls for slaughter.

For us, the curried but curiously bland mutton, served with pungent, fresh blood sausage and large quantities of rice splashed with broth leftover from cooking, made a nice change of pace. The feast, which brought about 30-40 people to the house, involved a bit of fortune telling focused on the sheep's organs (prior to consumption, obviously), the collection of a couple thousand rupees ($75 USD) to pay for the poor animal, and a division of leftover hunks of meat among 28 family units descended from long-dead but still honored grandfathers. The name of the god additionally being worshipped escaped me, though intriguingly he was reported to be an inhabitant of holy Mount Kailash, a Tibetan peak also believed to be the home of Shiva, one of the big-time Hindu gods.

In other regards, the days since we returned to Dharchula have passed in familiar fashion. Beyond the occasional stop at the German dam engineer's to sponge off his satellite Internet connection (utilized to post this), we've been soaking up sights and smells, wandering the hills, shopping for rugs and visiting the bazaar daily for dinner ingredients. It's been pretty damn cold in our house, with nighttime temps sticking in the low 40s and no heater or fireplace. On the flip side, our old friends, including Govind the photographer and Davinder the founder of the new Rang school and community center (Rang is general name for the tribes related to Darma, which C is studying; our landlady is Byansi, which means her tribe is from a different valley), are happy to have us back.

Things remain rough in this neck of the woods for the permanent inhabitants, though. The Maoists are still running things on the far side of the Nepal hills, and the latest national news in India from Dharchula concerns a group of Sino-Tibetan traders who were robbed in Nepal and stranded here until about the time we arrived. Another dispatch discussed a smuggling operation busted carrying endangered antelope wool to New Delhi. A couple of the Tibetan traders are still here, sticking out almost as much as we do. Though doubtless they're much stronger mountaineers, they're likely stuck here until spring.

Of course, the major news from this part of the world concerns the impact of the tsunami on South India and its neighbors. The plate tectonics that caused that natural disaster, which looks like it may eventually claim some 50,000 fatalities globally, are the same that forced the Himalayas up over 60 million years ago. Not that we had any sense of what had happened until a friend stopped by to tell us the news. It was the only time since our first stay in Dharchula that I thought a television might be a good thing to have.

In a week, we'll start South ourselves towards Kerala on the West Coast, which we hope to find relatively untouched by these recent events. It seems callous to worry about our coming vacation in the face of such tragedy, but to lean on a cliché, we're all destined to be lambs to the slaughter, aren't we? With this epiphany, we ring in 2005, Indian-style.