by Asra Nomani
I passed a sign for Tara Devi, a temple devoted to the goddess Tara. I should have stopped there to pay my respects. But surviving this climb would, I thought, be respect enough to feminine energy. It was dark now, and we were mostly alone on the road. There was nowhere to stop to rest my head for the night. I continued until I saw the sign telling me I’d made it to Shimla. I pulled over at a roundabout, where I spotted an STD booth, the phone booths of the subcontinent.
I found a room at the Himachal Pradesh Tourism hotel and turned it into my cocoon. My lower back was aching from lifting my bike. Rudyard Kipling had written a novel in Shimla. I watched MTV and HBO.
On MTV, I saw a bump-and-grind dance party under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a place I used to retreat to, to feel the magic of the Manhattan skyline set behind the calm waters of the East River. It had been taken over by svelte young women in bikinis and young men with rippling muscles. I pressed my thumb to change the channel. The Palestinian intifada filled the screen on CNN. I wondered about this world in which we live between MTV’s The Grind and Palestinian uprisings. Where did I fit in?
Over the next two days, I eased my sore body through yoga stretches on a wool checkered blanket I lay on my hotel room’s ratty soiled carpet. I ventured into the hillside of lights that was Shimla, wandering through narrow stairwells that climb into the city’s town square. A gaggle of Muslim girls wearing head scarves filled the square, jostling each other, waiting for chai. They were on a school trip. They reminded me of Arina, although I doubted she would ever have been allowed such a trip, even escorted. I thought about their lives, protected and clear, in contrast to my own. Their lives held a temptation for me because at least they had more security and stability. No matter the attraction, I knew I was on a much different path.
The story of Shiva and Shakti continued beyond the love story I already knew. Shakti, also known as Sati, vowed that she would kill herself if her husband were ever insulted. Sure enough, her father insulted Shiva one day, and Sati burned herself alive in a yagna, a fire ritual. Silly girl. Hadn’t she learned to transcend ego? Shiva was devastated. He picked up her body and spun in the cosmic dance captured on statues now popular. He rampaged through the three worlds. The other gods were frightened. They asked Vishnu for help. Vishnu unleashed his chakra, or power, in the form of a volley of arrows that cut Sati’s body into fifty-one pieces to save the earth from Shiva’s anger. The fifty-one places where Sati’s body fell are known as Shakti piths. A Himachal Pradesh tourism magazine told me the state was home to several of the fifty-one Shakti piths where parts of Sati’s corpse fell. It was more than perfect for me to put at least one of them on my itinerary.
I set out again on the morning of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. I was nervous. My motorcycle seemed so daunting. When I had last sat on it, a few days earlier, I had been exhausted. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to control it now. My doubts were confirmed. After successfully making it out of town, I veered to turn onto a back road. I found myself facing a climb. I didn’t know what gear to put my bike into. I toppled in the middle of a village bazaar. Men I didn’t even notice suddenly appeared. They picked my bike up from both sides and assured me that this was the last of the steep climbs.
“Drop down to first gear or second gear,” one told me, “and all will be fine.”
Another man offered to ride my bike up the hill. I accepted, although I wondered if I’d ever see my tiger again. I jogged up the hill behind him, my helmet still on. He sat waiting on a flat of land in the bazaar. I climbed on again, and I found myself in one of the most beautiful states of being I’d ever enjoyed. On this day when the mountains were mine to behold, the valleys mine in which to sink, and liberation mine to know, I felt like the caged bird who suddenly finds the flutter of the wind again under its wings. I pulled over to eat an apple. I took a photo of myself. I was so happy, calm woven with glee interspersed with awe.
A man in a tight Nike T-shirt stood in front of a shed that looked like it was set up for bicycle repairs. He confirmed that I was on the right road to a place called Naina Devi. It was a Shakti pith where Sati’s eyes were said to have fallen. I really wanted to go only to the Shakti piths in a corner of India where her yoni supposedly fell. That was the one that Vishnu Uncle in Kathmandu had offered to show me, but I had chosen not to trust a guru and his Bagpiper Whiskey.
I turned off the back road onto a windy path that was National Highway Number 21. To my surprise, I saw the Hotel Hilltop sitting on a hillside at a bend in the lane. That was where I had stayed with my two dakini sisters on our first night on our own in India. Naina Devi sat not far away, tucked away in the many curves and hills of Himachal Pradesh on a hilltop in the state’s Bilaspur District. The sun was setting. I found myself again on the road as darkness neared. I chose to take the gamble and continue forward. This narrow bumpy road wound up through a mountain. A jeep full of passengers passed me. Then I passed it when the driver pulled over to let off passengers. At least I had company. Only the faintest light remained. I could see the glitter of white lights far away, like a white glow upon the hill.
The word Naina is synonymous with Sati’s eyes. I wondered if she could be watching over me. I found myself at a gate. The man there pointed me to a new dharamsala, or hotel, where he said I could spend the night at the foot of the hill on which the temple sat. This would be the first time I had ventured into a mandir alone. Fireworks shot into the sky for Diwali, the Hindu holiday of lights I’d celebrated only once before in my childhood with my friend Sumita. Would they be inviting here? A Sikh Punjabi looking after the ashram guest house checked me into a room and offered to go up to the mandir with me. He was supposed to meet the temple’s pandit up there.
We climbed hundreds of stairs that ascended past stalls with shutters rolled down over the front of them. A giant pipal tree stood to the left after we crossed the main gate. It was a calm scene tonight. I took my shoes off at the foot of the stairs and climbed upward. We circled clockwise, and I found myself in front of a dark goddess figure. She had a daunting black face with a gold teeka hanging from the part of her hair to the space between her eyebrows like my mother wore on her wedding day. I offered my prasad, my gift of food to the goddess. The pandit smeared a teeka on my forehead.
As I sat on the cool temple tile, another pandit told me the tale of how the gods were confounded by the terror of an evil monster. The legend said that only a woman would be able to destroy the demon. The gods created Durga to destroy the monster. The evil force tried to seduce the beautiful Durga. He could not entice her. She destroyed him. “From sky, fire fell. There was so much power. She used to kill with her phoonk,” the short breath that I knew in a different way from my childhood, my mother breathing upon me for protection after reciting a verse from the Qur’an.
“Look,” he said, gesturing to the shrine, “this is Ma’s power.”
I settled in a corner of the small room in which Naina Devi’s shrine sat. Christmas lights strung around the mother goddess image flickered red, yellow, and green. “Jingle Bells” wafted out of the lights. Then came “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Flowers were scattered around Naina Devi. Two men in robes fed her. The smoke from incense spiraled upward. A brass railing divided devotees from the goddess, and a padlocked silver-colored box sat in front of the railing, past which devotees trickled to pay their respects and drop coins and folded rupee notes.
As the story goes, Durga threw her paseena, or sweat, behind her at Naina Devi, leaving her presence behind. The Muslim in me couldn’t relate to this devotion. Barbed wire surrounded the temple. A monkey squeaked. Hindi music filtered up the hill to the temple from down below. More fireworks popped. This was a temple like many where a pandit’s family ruled.
Back at the ashram guest house, the pandit’s children tumbled inside, fresh faced and eager. They were normal young boys with dreams. Aditya Gautam, thirteen, aspired to be a businessman. Abishek wanted to be an air force pilot. The eldest was
headed to cricket camp the next morning with the dream of becoming a cricket star. They asked me to climb to the rooftop with them. Once, they had stood here, they said, and the power of the goddess, whom they called Mataji, or Mother, swept into their hands in the form of lightning that sprang through the sky.
“Mataji is power,” said Aditya. Mother is power.
Their father wandered by the next morning, his hair twisted into a small ponytail. There was a smear of yellow on his forehead and on his earlobes. He wore a gold pendant of Durga on the end of a gold chain, a peek of the white cord that marked him as a Brahmin underneath a dirty shirt. He said he went to a degree college for one year but was unemployed. He wasn’t warm or engaging like his sons. Still, I ventured to ask him to tell me about Tantra. He didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s secret.”
I headed one last time up to the temple to see it by day. The stalls in the bazaar, now open, sold the coconuts and red ribbons of Hindu temple worship. They also had black plastic toy guns, another fixture at temple bazaars, just like the one a boy was shooting at the Kalachakra initiation in Ki. Durga was painted upon the white tile in the temple, supposedly at the top of 213 steps. I lost count at thirty-nine.
Cries of “Jai Mataji!” broke out every few minutes. “Victory to the Mother!”
I was told to go search near a goofa, a cave, for a baba. Someone yelled at me. I turned around. It was the baba, looking very much a sadhu with unruly hair and leathery skin. Only this one lived in a well-equipped room with a television in one corner beside a telephone. He sat in front of a fire in the middle of the room, tridents stuck in a cauldron, a symbol of Shiva’s weapon against three evils that have to be destroyed in order to get to enlightenment: anger, lust, and pride. I sat down.
He said, “Shanti comes from being cool.”
It soon became apparent that he got his peace of mind from something else. He talked to me between hacks of coughing, as he smoked what smelled like marijuana. He seemed a rather unhealthy person to be dispensing advice. Men trickled inside until the room was full of company. They passed his cigarette around. He flipped through a photo album and stopped at a photo of a Western woman. “She is my student.” Every baba seemed to have a token Western disciple.
I hit the road again for a place called Chintpurni, weaving along a back road as I passed a glorious splash of lake. Darkness descended, but I kept riding.
Smoke from a fire in the fields filled the sky. It was heaven on earth. I slowed down for a lizard crossing the road. Piglets danced at street’s edge. A train passed me. I was the motorcyclist that I saw from the train door on the journey from Chennai to Lucknow. I was what I wanted to become. I saw a woman in a shalwar riding a bike. She didn’t know it, but she gave me silent moral support.
After I pulled in safely to Chintpurni, I stared at an image of Durga on her tiger at the STD/ISD/PCO, acronyms dear to this traveler’s heart, Subscriber Trunk Dialing/International Subscriber Dialing/Public Call Office. She sat sidesaddle with eyeliner accenting her eyes. Her feet were laced with the artistry of mehndi, the temporary henna tattoo Madonna popularized in the West. I wondered if her back ached as mine did. Even my butt ached a little. I wondered if Durga’s butt ever hurt, riding that tiger of hers into battle. Sati’s feet supposedly fell here. Pilgrims flocked here because they believed that Ma Chintpurni cleared away the worries of any devotee who visited her.
I slipped into an STD booth. I hadn’t called home until now because I hadn’t wanted to admit to my mother that I was riding a motorcycle alone. She hadn’t heard from me in so many days, she knew I was up to something.
“Be careful,” she told me gently, but she said nothing to dissuade me. My parents always let me fly.
Two middle-aged men and a young man came inside and sat down at a table. After I got off the phone, the men invited me to join them and told me the story of how they had walked ten hours to get to Chintpurni. I had probably passed them on my ride here. One of the older men promised Shakti Ma sixteen years ago that he would walk to her if she gave him the strength to win a lawsuit at work. He won the lawsuit in 1984 but forgot the promise. He said, “Ma didn’t forget.”
He said she roused him awake while he slept two nights before and told him to fulfill his promise. He told his best friend, who agreed to set out with him on this pilgrimage. The devotee’s grown son was with him. The next morning, he planned to travel the one and a half miles to the Shakti pith by doing prostrations. He said he’d allow me to join him.
“Jai Ma” rang outside on speakers in the early morn before the sun rose.
He wore maroon MacGregor shorts marked XXXXL. We set out just after 6 A.M., the father limping from his walk the day before. The sun rose as we passed a sign for NIT Computer Institute, a reminder of the modern day. The father slipped out of his chappals, sandals. He crouched and splayed his body out straight on the road, stretching his arms over his head, his bald spot staring at the sky. His friend used a small rock to mark a line in the road beside his outstretched fingers. He lifted himself up and stood up, stepping toward the line his friend had marked. He crouched and lay outstretched again. A man walked by and yelled encouragement. “Hai, Mataji!”
He panted before he replied. “Hai, Mataji!” He continued with his prostrations, over and over again. Sweat dripped from his forehead, sitting on the tip of his nose. He spoke to Mataji. “Jai Ma! Call me! Give me shakti!”
He took his shirt off, his bulging belly squeezed only under a white bunyain, a cotton undershirt.
His friend pointed out the glory of the rising sun to us. He turned to me. “Do you have the sun in America?”
Water splashed against his bunyain as our devotee lay in a puddle. He picked himself out of the puddle. A dog with a stubby tail drank from it. He walked past Neha Beauty Parlor with its advertisement as a “Treasue of Beauti treatments cum training centre.” We went past stands selling the temple staple, including more black plastic guns. A sign over one stall made me smile. “Get a key ring with your lovely name.”
His friend exhaled, “Jai Mataji!”
Wet dirt clung to the hair on our devotee’s arms. We reached the steps leading up to the mandir. Our devotee told a sadhu reclining on the stairs his story about his unfulfilled promise to Shakti Ma. The guru listened and agreed, “She doesn’t forget.”
The devotee continued. The front of his bunyain was soaked through. A friend recognized him. He asked him if he fell. Not quite.
We bought prasad, an offering of flowers, at a stall in front of a sign for “Krishana Prashad Bhandar.” His friend started marking his progress with just his foot. Our devotee smiled now, glowing from his sweat. We crossed the threshold into the mandir. He had fulfilled his promise. The mandir was under a tree. We slipped with the flow of the crowd in front of the shrine. Two eyes stared out from under colorful dupattas. That was supposed to be the Shakti Ma we came to see. A pandit standing inside the shrine explained to me, “Shakti Ma has the power of Shiva lingam.” We offered our flowers. A man took them and guided us to step aside to let new devotees bask in Shakti Ma’s aura. I sat down on cool tile, trying not to discount the power of this Shakti pith by the rushed moment in front of the deity. I hoped to absorb the energy of this site sacred to Hindus through quiet meditation. Just as I crossed my legs beneath me, a pandit found our small group. He muttered a prayer, handed us sweets as our prasad, our gift blessed by the goddess, and opened his hand, looking for a donation for his prayer. This place wasn’t inspiring much in me. I felt conned.
I found out that cute girls who seemed to be venturing out for school were actually going up the hill to beg for money from pilgrims. One tagged after me as we descended the hill. She was beautiful with dark skin.
She glared at me. “If you don’t give me money, Shakti Ma will curse you.”
I laughed at her threat and suggested she didn’t have to be so dark spirited in her begging. I gave her money with a smile. One of her young friends grabbed the money from her
hand. She tagged after me for more. My pilgrim friends shooed them away, although I would rather have talked to these girls. All of us returned to our hotel the regular way, on our feet. Back at the hotel, the father admired my Nike windbreaker. Trying to learn to be selfless, I gave it to him. It was sunny as I headed out again, this time on to a temple called Jawalamukhi. Boulders and purple flowers lined the road, and I passed a storefront with a sign for Shakti Studio. She seemed to show up in the most unlikely places.
The temple sat in the south of the Kangra Valley. It was the temple to Jawalamukhi, the goddess of light. From the distance, I saw the golden spire that topped the temple. A wealthy devotee had built it.
This was where Sati’s tongue supposedly fell. Legend said Jawala Ma took form in the perpetual flames called jyotis that sprang out of nine different rocks in the temple. This was the first mandir that I ventured to enter without an escort. No one stopped me. I went into a tiny square chamber where a pandit muttered a mantra and waved a flame. Natural gas was said to come out of a copper pipe that shot out a tiny blue flame. This flame was worshiped as the manifestation of Jawalamukhi. I walked around the pit and touched a corner of the temple from which a flame burst out. There was another flame in a pit in the center of the room. A man gave me white kernels for my donation. He put Hindi newspapers and green leaves over the fire. A chant broke out.
As I left the temple, I asked for the relatives of the pandit family whom I’d met at Naina Devi. I was guided to a narrow store that sold the symbols of prasad, bright red fabrics, goddess pictures, coconuts, and sweets. The pandit’s son began talking with me. He practiced Tantra. A baba came by and told the young man, “You should be married.”
“But you want to find your Shakti,” I told him.
At that, he confided that he was a Shiva plotting the kidnapping of his Shakti. He was in love with a woman who came on pilgrimage from another town, but her parents had rejected his marriage proposal. He belonged to the highest caste, Brahmins, but he came from the wrong caste for them. They had arranged her marriage to someone else. A friend came from Delhi to help the pandit’s son carry out a plan to whisk the woman away from home. She was party to the plot. But our Shiva had doubts in himself. “I am not strong.”