The journey from Candolim to Old Goa took an hour or so by road. The bus tumbled through long stretches of empty countryside, braking only when it came to a village or small township. The houses had picket fences and gutter-spouts and eaves, and the whitewashed churches had peaked front porches. It could have been a village in Europe, but for the heat and the corroding sand. I found a window seat from where I could look at the flat green country as it rushed past, and I watched the bus conductor at work. At each stop—but also when the bus slowed at a junction or an obstruction on the road—he blew his whistle eight times, never more or less. He blew loudly, the veins bunched up on his neck, and then he walked to the front of the bus to ring the bell; and this too was done multiple times in rapid succession. He was full of the importance of his job, but it gave him no happiness. It made him tense and angry and his mood affected the passengers. Arguments broke out. People fought for standing space, for sitting space, for no space at all, and then the bus stopped at Panjim depot. Some of the passengers got off; someone picked my pocket. Then, a different kind of journey—highways, regulated city traffic and a river that followed us all the way to the Basilica of Francis Xavier. We climbed a hill so steep that the packages on the overhead racks slid to the floor. At times the road was little more than a dirt track and the river slipped out of sight. We passed the ruins of St Augustine’s Church, its rafters overrun with moss, the windows and doors intact but everything else gone; it was all façade, like a studio set. We got off the bus and boarded another, a chartered vehicle that took us to a mela where villagers sold vinegary spiced sausages and drinks of improbable colours. There was a profusion of religious geegaws: Xavier dolls of plastic or tin, and rosaries, and candles in the shape of arms and legs. There were small mountains of coconut sweets and hard candies. I bought a sausage-pao and paid for it with the emergency wad I carried in my sock. I ate standing and felt the heartburn begin. I looked at the candles and wondered which one I would get if I were in the market for candles shaped like body parts. I thought: I could get a thousand candles and it still wouldn’t fix everything that is wrong with me.
At the Basilica of Bom Jesus, people strolled around the famous interiors. Some sat in the pews and looked at a painting of Francis Xavier at the business end of the church. Unlike the usual representations of Xavier as a gaunt haunted figure, this was a jollier man. He wore a rich surplice that billowed over his immense stomach like the flag of a small sailing vessel. The artist had used plenty of primary colours. The saint’s cheeks were red, the gown and eyes blue, the cross around his neck forest green. His face was broad and good-humoured and partly obscured by a bushy red beard. This was St Xavier as Falstaff, inviting the men and women of Goa to partake of the pilgrim’s feast. With their straw hats and cameras and plastic bags of food and drink, the pilgrims were happy to oblige. They massed up the aisle and back and forth across the nave as if they were at a museum. They took pictures. They examined the empty Medici casket that served as Xavier’s tomb, empty because the body had been moved for viewing. The casket’s grimy marble cupids and gilded Florentine pillars were open to the elements and to curious hands, and there was renewed energy among the camera-wielding pilgrims as they approached it. They took a frenzy of pictures. Two women, stunned from the heat or from lunch, slid to the floor near the casket and sat with their backs against the cool stone. One said, ‘Photo nikla?’ And the other replied, ‘Photo nikla?’ They sat comfortably, stroking the floor, completely at home. It occurred to me then that they weren’t pilgrims but tourists. The real pilgrims were sitting at the very back of the church. They were fewer in number and they had come to see Francis Xavier’s remains, on display for the first time in a dozen years. They sat in the back pews, withdrawn, without cameras or snacks, but their eyes strayed to the big-bellied Xavier and to the tumult of tourists and to a sign near the casket:
PLEASE KEEP SILENCE
DON’T PHOTOGRAPH PERSONS
DON’T DISTURB
He is the patron saint of navigators and aimless travellers. He is the patron saint of Goa, though he didn’t like the place and never lived there for any length of time. And he is the patron saint of Japan, where he lived and preached for two and a half years. Born in Spain, he was ordained at the age of thirty-one in Rome. Four years later, in April 1541, he set sail for India with the intention of preaching the Word in the most remote corners of the world. It was a long voyage, described by one writer as ‘tedious and difficult’. He landed in Goa in May 1542, but, in just a few months, he was ready to leave. He was unhappy. The Portuguese were wanting in faith and the Goan upper class was self-indulgent and decadent, he wrote. His work of preaching in the streets had been a failure. He preferred to preach in the poorer coastal areas of the south and the west. For the next decade he travelled unceasingly, sailing to Ceylon, to Malacca and to the islands of Indonesia. He went to Japan, and, in early 1552 he returned to Goa for the last time, leaving almost immediately for China. He died on the way, on the small, inhospitable island of Sancian. He was beatified and canonized. Pope Pius X made him the patron saint of all missions, as if to reward him for the difficulties of his brief, vagabond life. In his four and a half decades, Xavier suffered great hardship and the hardship didn’t end after his death: from an excess of devotion, or hysteria, his remains endured a remarkable number of exhumations, mutilations and unforeseeable acts of violence.
It was November, but the heat was intense. People wandered around the grounds with no idea why they were there or what was expected of them. I went into a tent, where, from a raised stage, a priest addressed the congregation, haltingly, as if he were improvising. His sideburns were sharpened to a point on his cheeks and he held the mic like a carnival barker. He was young. He talked of sex and God and love and slavery. He talked of language and accuracy of expression. He made it plain that he did not approve of certain types of phrase-making, for instance, the words: I made love. What does this phrase mean? It means the person had sex. Brothers and sisters, this is not love, said the young priest. Love is unconditional. It is faithful. God’s love is like that. He sacrificed his only son for us. He did not say, I love you but. The priest stopped for a moment and stepped back from the microphone. He looked around at the bored or expectant faces and seemed to lose track of his thoughts. When he began again his voice was louder and less confident. He said: how can we experience this God who protects us from bondage and slavery? We must bear witness in the following ways. We must love the nature, my dear friends, so beautiful are the flowers, the animals, the created things. And, two, we must love our fellow human beings, not by embracing them—here he glared, inexplicably, at those of us who were closest to him—no, not by embracing them and saying, I love you, but by respecting the other person so he feels the bond of love whether he is a slave or a governor. Third and last, to bear witness we must know the teachings of the church. This exposition is not meant for us to have fun, it is not a forty-day retreat. It is a catechism. That is the real meaning of this gathering, said the priest, and then he stopped talking and stepped back from the microphone and looked around as if he were seeing the congregation for the first time. Someone said, yes. In the row ahead of me, two Goan matrons whispered to each other. Love, they said, love, and their knees shook under their black dresses and their long black plaits trembled in the sun.
The priest asked the congregation to stand. Anticipating him, they said: oh Lord, hear us as we pray. The priest said: that we may change society for the better. The congregation said: oh Lord hear our prayer. The priest said: to replace corruption with truth and righteousness. And with each phrase his voice became louder and the words were less convincing. When it was time for the collection of money, women in blue saris walked up and down the jerry-rigged aisles. They carried long sticks with nets at the end and they paused before each congregant. Notes were passed into the nets. Then the communion service began and more priests appeared. Less grand, they wore white cassocks, their feet were in worn rubber slip
pers and their trousers were frayed. They handed out the wafers very solemnly and it was difficult not to be moved by their poverty and hesitation. The wafer itself was a surprise: pressed into my hand, it was shiny, tasteless, slightly soiled. I tasted it and let it drop under my seat. The priest was winding up. St Francis, your heart was burning with love. To proclaim this love you went from country to country and died. This is why God took you to heaven and kept your body uncorrupted on earth. Again he stopped and this time the silence stretched. And though I knew the body was not uncorrupted and that I would soon see its corruption for myself, I was affected by the simplicity of the priest’s words.
Two months after Xavier’s burial on Sancian, a sailor exhumed the body and took proof of his find back to the ship: a piece of flesh from the lower thigh. The remains were then transported to Malacca, where they were reburied in a grave dug into the rocks. The difficulty of the burial, and the unsuitability of the gravesite, is reflected in the facts as they are recorded: the sailors had to break Xavier’s neck to make the body fit into its too-small grave. Two years later, the body was re-exhumed and a number of injuries were discovered: the ribs were fractured, the nose dislocated, there was a bruise on the left breast and another on the right cheek, and there was the broken neck. The body was taken by ship from Malacca to Goa where the church received it with fanfare, taking it in procession to St Paul’s College. Soon Xavier’s legend—repeated by the faithful and encouraged by the church—began to spread. It started with the sailor who had taken the souvenir from the thigh. He told his shipmates that the body had bled, that it was still fresh. The first official medical examiner wrote that the body was incorrupt. It was incorruptible, the church said, and the legend took wing.
The mutilations only gained in severity after Xavier’s sainthood in 1622. A Portuguese pilgrim bit off the small toe of his right foot; she wanted, she said, a personal relic. The woman, Isabel Caron, far from being punished, was commemorated and her name is associated with Xavier’s in the various histories of the saint’s mutilations. Others would also be commemorated. Jose Bravo, a lay brother, cut off a piece of flesh, which was installed in the reliquary of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where Xavier’s body, separated from several of its extremities, still resides. Three hundred and forty years after his death, another toe of the right foot was detached, ‘found loose’ said one account of the mutilation, and allowed to find its way to Bom Jesus by order of the patriarch. Two joints of a fourth toe were added to the reliquary by yet another patriarchal order. These parts were removed from the corpse, but they did not travel far. Other body parts did. Xavier’s right arm, from the shoulder joint, was sawed off on the request of the Jesuit Superior of the Society of Jesus. The hand and forearm up to the elbow were sent to Rome, where they lie at the altar in the church of Gesu. The upper arm was divided into three pieces, one was apportioned to a Jesuit college in Cochin, another sent to a college in Malacca, and the shoulder blade to the former Portuguese colony and present casino destination of Macau. The corpse’s internal organs, from the chest and abdomen, were removed and sent to various reliquaries in various countries at the request of Jesuit officials. But there were unrecorded mutilations as well. More toes were taken away, and, between two official examinations, in 1932 and 1951, the left ear disappeared. The examinations were conducted by medical men with some experience of the corruptibility of the human body, and they are revealing compilations of medico-religious prose. A 1951 report by Dr Pacheco de Figuerado and Dr Wolfgang da Silva gives a detailed description of the now desiccated remains: ‘a shrivelled skull, two legs, the left arm and hand, and heaps of bones, loose vertebrae, ribs or fragments of ribs and pieces of skin.’ How meagre an inventory compared to a report of 1782:
He has the whole head with a great portion of hair. His facial features have deteriorated, but are covered up with skin, except the right side that has a bruise. He has both ears, and all his teeth visible, except one. He has his left arm with hand eaten up, he does not have the right arm … The body has everything save the intestines. There were legs with dry skin, the bare feet covered with skin, lines made by the veins as well as the nails could be seen. Only one toe on the right foot was missing, and had been taken off by a devotee.
The devotee, of course, was Isabel Caron. But it is a 1974 report, also by Dr Figuerado, that reveals a change in the terminology used to describe Xavier’s remains: ‘We can no longer speak of an incorruptible body—which is not necessary, for the sanctity of a person is not measured by the preservation of his body—but of the sacred relics of St Francis Xavier, for what we have today are mainly bones of the Saint.’
After the elaborate state preparations for the exposition and a film festival in Panjim—and the complaints from residents about the strain on the infrastructure, about the number of tourists expected at both events, about the screening of an inaugural film on the beach—the exposition itself was unexpectedly subdued and the tents were half empty. A long walkway led to the cathedral where Xavier’s remains were displayed. It was deserted. Signs advised pilgrims, who were expected to arrive in the millions, to rest frequently and to sit down if they were oppressed by the crowd. After the too-easy final leg, to find myself under a broken chandelier, on a worn straw mat, in sight of the glass casket in which lay Xavier. Here, police in plainclothes herded the crowd into an enclosure. The pilgrims were told to take off their hats and to move quickly. Ahead of me was an industrialist with a retinue of police officers and women in sunglasses; the industrialist in white shorts and T-shirt, his face flushed red, his shorts too short; even this industrialist, a famous name in Goa, was asked to move. A policewoman in plainclothes was stationed at the casket, her only job to wipe the stains of spit and sweat left by the pilgrims who kissed the glass, aiming for the area above the feet, not the face. They left small envelopes with printed prayers, currency notes, lockets, bits of fabric and thread.
My sight of Xavier was brief; I saw a small figure dressed in a gown of gold and red brocade. The gown was there mostly for show; it covered empty, burgled space. There was not much of him to see, nothing more than a skull, a hand and both feet, with all but three of the toes missing. What skin remained on his head had turned a dark brown. There was skin missing from around the mouth, which gave him a perpetual grimace, and the teeth were stained a deep yellow. It was possible to see that he had been a slight, slender man, whose habitual expression—it seemed to me, a man who wore a similar expression—was one of worry. He was nothing like the representations of Xavier I had seen, representations that painted him as a tall young man with brown hair, a pointed beard and blue soulful eyes: Xavier in the manner of Christ as told by a western imagination, a white man of strapping build and physical beauty. I could not bring myself to touch the smeared glass.
38.
Jaipur March 25, 1962—on Morphia—
Allen Ginsberg
In 1961 Beat poet and literary icon Allen Ginsberg (whose generation was once described by Time magazine as a bunch of ‘pilgrims to nowhere’) left New York on an Indian spiritual odyssey that took him across ashrams in the Himalayas and blazing ghats in Benares. This excerpt from his journal describes his ‘dark night of the soul’ experience that occurred in a Jaipur tourist bungalow.—Ed.
Lying from 8 p.m. to 11 on charpoy (rough rope spring woven on wooden cot frame) in Tourist Bungalow, after spending the day in bazaar and streets Jaipurish—
As lying there in my familiar body, a subtle detachment took place as usual and I lay outside my fleeting life surveying its twinkling away—that now more and more as this life approaches its meridian of thirty-seven years and being half gone by becomes more sure of its mortalism, the chance of the life tho[ugh] marked by shows and pageants, poetical & airborne—consisting in sexualities & all sorts of fame—as it were—were not much to go by. After all, what’s all that experience limited as it is, to a Henry James of the entire Kosmos? So flit as I go by—all I’ve seen is my own life go by, swift as a mosquito
with climactic buzzings of aestheticism & self-congratulatory Rhapsody & morphia inactions and musings furthermore. An open closet door—I’ll return to the States, take an apartment—where with thinning hair & more tentative soul, arrange my possessions, type up my notes, discharge them for posterities, place my statues in order—one Japanese scroll of medium quality, one Korean print of an awakening Roshi, several cheap Nepalese tantric small figures, Tara, Avalokitesvara, the 1000-armed Destroyer of Death, Ganesha with a red belly button, Hanuman pious & praying, Krishna fluting, Shiva whirling his arms & dancing, Kali with a necklace of skulls on Shiva’s belly astride—an orange wool Tibetan blanket, a few Amazon cloths & pipes, a Mexican basket, a straw hat and whatever other Persian type miniatures I collect—and that is the accomplishment of a life searching and travelling wherever I can go on my earth.
Kali, Durga, Ram, Hari, Krishna, Brahma, Buddha, Allah, Jaweh, Christ, Mazda, Coyote, hear my plea!
Avalokitesvara, Maitreya, St John, Ho-Tei, Kuan-Yin, Satan, Dipankara, Padma Sambhava—whoever there is—is there ever anyone but me?
Lying in bed in Jaipur on morphine, lone in Denver awake on Benzedrine, flat on my back in Puccallpa wrapped in Death Vines, Valparaiso or Santiago enthralled with atropine—Shamans’ herbs or modern Somas absorbed & vomited—not yet comprehended to any Eternity. A mosquito buzzing near my ear again. My face sweating having covered itself with thin film of mosquito repellent.
There is no direction I can willingly go without strain—nearest being lotus posture & quiet mornings, vegetarian breathing before the dawn, I may never be able to do that with devotion. And if it is a matter of Karma and reincarnation, when will I ever learn? All the saints like Shivananda handing me rupees & books of yoga and I am no good. My hair getting long, wearing a huge thin silk shirt, useless to perfect my conscience. A smoking habit my worst Karma to overcome.
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