‘And the second thing, Aropa?’ Persis asked.
‘You cannot be carried on somebody else’s shoulders. The mists that shroud the mystery don’t melt and yield their treasure to you on the strength of another’s striving. This search is your own and you have to carve a way out of the labyrinth by yourself. Piggyback rides don’t get you very far.’
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This extract is from Faith and Fire: A Way Within.
46.
Like treasure hiding in the earth
Akkamahadevi (12 century ce)
Translated by H.S. Shiva Prakash
Like treasure hiding in the earth
Like taste hiding in the fruit
Like gold hiding in the stone
Like oil hiding in sesame
Like fire hiding in the tree
No one can see Channamallikarjuna—
The Brahman hiding in yearning.
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This poem is from I Keep Vigil of Rudra.
47.
Crossroads and Stray Shrines
Rahul Srivastava
It was one of those violent monsoon days that punctuate the season, convincing you that nothing and nobody will survive the ensuing flood.
The afternoon, dark as a winter evening, with the deafening surround-sound of falling sheets of water, made me focus sharply on my immediate goal: to get the hell out of that remote tribal hamlet in the Sahyadri Hills where I had gone on fieldwork, part of a research project on the Kathkari adivasis of western Maharashtra for a Jesuit priest.
The exhilarating beauty of the landscape, the luminous greenery that had taken my breath away that morning, was long forgotten. The celebrated enchantment of the monsoon that transforms the world—one minute hot, dry, brown and positively evil in its oppressiveness and the next moment cool, moist, green and gloriously exuberant—loses its impact when the rain doesn’t seem to pause for breath. And when it appears as if all the waters in heaven are being drained out through an elaborate celestial plumbing arrangement. At such times, you tend to lose all perspective, particularly if you are trapped in a remote district and there is no sign of public transport.
I could barely see the road and was constantly slipping off the mossy rock on which I was perched, in the hope that some passing vehicle might stop and offer me a lift. But I also knew that in my black plastic raincoat and matching cap, I seemed like the kind of person you wouldn’t pick up. So I wasn’t in the least surprised when the odd air-conditioned car whizzed by, splashing me with that flourish in which the owners of expensive cars take special and sadistic delight.
And I wasn’t in the least surprised when the vehicle that did halt happened to be a truck. I realized then how gratifying it is when the world chooses to unfold in stereotypes. Only a big burly cheerful Sikh truck-driver would halt his rickety truck on a forgotten road off the highway and pull you into its cabin, his henchman making space for your dripping raincoat as a matter of course.
All throughout my stint of fieldwork in the district, I was dropped off near remote villages because of the generosity of an obliging truck-driver who didn’t mind taking a little detour off his official route—especially when he learnt about the nature of my work. More often than not, he would add his two bits about tribal communities from his travels through the country.
Almost immediately the driver started a conversation. ‘You looked straight out of Woh Kaun Thi—that Manoj Kumar film about a ghost!’ he laughed. I would have responded to this provocation with matching zeal, evoking that classless common ground of Hindi movie lore with much enthusiasm, had it not been for the hypnotic effect the windscreen was having on me.
The rain was still coming down in a relentless curtain of grey. The truck lights barely penetrated this watery darkness. And we were navigating the tortuous roads of the ghats, now as slippery as the snakes that slithered all over the countryside, escaping their flooded homes.
The driver continued to talk about his favourite movies. His hands manipulated the steering wheel mechanically, taking sharp turns, gliding on the edge of what I was certain was a very steep hill, honking at what seemed like empty space, but which almost immediately revealed itself as the rear of a vehicle, always too close for comfort.
At some point he must have realized why I was so silent and tried to allay my fears. He assured me that he had been travelling this very route for fifteen years and knew it like the back of his hand. There was absolutely nothing to fear. Besides, we were now very close to the shrine of a goddess whom he had patronized all those fifteen years and she had never failed him even once.
‘We will be with her in a few moments!’ he grinned.
I gave him a strained and polite smile.
Soon, he slowed the massive vehicle down and turned into a clearing. The truck-lights shone onto a wayside shrine under a mango tree. We hopped out of the high cabin and walked gingerly over wet slippery mud, making our way to the shrine, a little structure made of black stone, about three feet high.
The idol was a simple oblong stone, painted a bright crimson, with two black dots for eyes. There was a small earthen urn for money offerings close by. Stubs of incense sticks were held in place by stones in front of her, keeping company with withered flowers and a few pieces of coconut on a betel leaf.
I tried to look at the shrine as an anthropologist would. Anything to get my mind off the terrors of what had passed and what lay ahead. But I wavered from the path of scholarship the moment I realized that the driver and his assistant were already in the middle of a conversation with the goddess. Having slipped in some coins into the urn they were praying with their hands folded, eyes shut and heads bowed. For those few moments they seemed to be completely disconnected from everything else. It was then that I realized that their lack of concern, their almost foolhardy confidence all through the journey, was yoked to this moment.
Abandoning all intellectual pretensions, I removed a few banknotes from my wallet and said a heartfelt prayer. Hands folded, head bent and eyes shut, I prayed as I had prayed all through my childhood, to distant relatives of this deity, framed in colourful paintings. In a remote part of my self, the part from which we observe ourselves, I recognized my position. This was how I prayed on my way to school, especially during examinations and almost always when afflicted by the agony of a childhood romance. Once again, I was in conversation with the deity, thanking her for having protected me this far and praying for an extension of her grace.
The rains that lashed her shrine also sprayed her expressionless face, animating it with the little droplets of water that fell all over the painted stone. They made rivulets that reflected the light shining from the truck’s headlights. Was that what made her black beady eyes compassionate and reassuring?
My fellow travellers sat down on a rock under the protection of the thick foliage of a mango tree and lit their bidis. ‘We will leave in a few minutes,’ said the driver with a smile, ‘and now there is even less reason to worry. The goddess will protect us!’
I smiled, joined them on the rock, declined their generous offer of a puff, allowed myself to relax and changed gears in my head, back into a scholarly mode, out of sheer habit.
Inspired by D.D. Kosambi, I had documented many of the small shrines that littered this part of the countryside. They were manifestations of the anxiety and fear that inevitably accompany travel, whether for trade or for pilgrimage. I even saw one being born in an orchard not far from where we were sitting then. At first it was just a stone, indistinguishable from the others that lay around it. For some reason it found itself singled out as worthy of being worshipped. At first it was just a smear of vermilion. Then travellers, inspired by that mark of distinction, began throwing small coins from passing vehicles. Over a year, it became a full-fledged shrine, of mud-brick and lime, complete with a moneybox with a very large mouth kept at a prominent place. At first I attributed its existence to the fact that it was located just a
few metres away from a rickety fifty-year-old bridge that most vehicles passing through had to cross. Divine intervention was the only thing that might ensure safe passage.
But that was not a very satisfying explanation. I noted that even as new roads were built, or when sturdier vehicles hit the road and or as bridges got upgraded, shrines such as these did not lose their value. After all, new insecurities always accompany transformations, whether of roads or of new modes of travel. And all of them have their own pressure points, points of vulnerability that soon blossom into their own particular manifestations of the sacred.
The anthropologist Mary Douglas approaches this from another angle. In her detailed archive of human insecurities and anxieties, Purity and Danger, she notes that all ‘in-between’, interstitial spaces are sites of our strongest sources of fear. Corridors, staircases, graveyards, roads or highways make us vulnerable. They flatten us into being some version of travellers, even if it is just a matter of moving a few feet between two rooms.
Despite their brevity, such experiences become a warehouse of fears; fears that manifest as anything, from the sacred to the monstrous. Thus ghosts, alien visits, possession by spirits, divine visions and murderous attacks are all most likely to be encountered in those spaces, spaces ‘in between’ destinations and homes, especially roads and highways. She also points out that sooner or later any such sacred experience gets enshrined either as temples, monuments, heritage sites, totem poles or simply as prohibited spaces with an aggressive ‘no trespassing’ sign posted to keep people firmly away.
But what is particularly interesting about Douglas’s ideas and the real reason why I thought of her that stormy evening was to do with her second insight about these in-between worlds. For she also sees them as spaces of transgression where you can lose your identity, your boundaries and all the points of stability that you otherwise take for granted. Thus an experience that involves travelling is designed to loosen you up. When you travel, the most rigid taboos, restrictions, caste inhibitions and fidelities are known to be transgressed and these transgressions forgiven. Religious journeys are no exception.
The truck-driver told me that he saw each mundane long drive as a pilgrimage of sorts, with his livelihood being the centre of this sacred activity. And in the course of making such a journey, spaces like this goddess’s shrine had become very important to him. They familiarized alien lands and provided solace in his peripatetic life.
When I pointed out that he was a Sikh and the goddess was not part of his faith, he shrugged. He pointed out how his Hindu assistant (from south Gujarat) never failed to get off near a dargah on reaching Bombay. He talked of another shrine, near Jalandhar, from where he usually began his journeys, and proceeded to narrate stories of about twelve important shrines through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra that he encountered on his journeys. All of them belonged to varied religious traditions, ethnic histories and caste affiliations.
These shrines housed all kinds of deities, spirits and departed souls, and most of them almost always happened to be on the fringe, whether of their religious traditions or their geographical locations, since they often existed outside villages or towns. One could even find them outside the boundaries of the habitats they were supposed to guard, a position that could allow one to see them as patron deities of roads and pathways, of travellers and pilgrims.
According to Mary Douglas, it is precisely such marginal positions that make them open to transgressions, mostly in the form of a cross-dressing of faiths. They represent a place where, for a moment, even the most faithful may disregard histories, affiliations and identities and become reckless, even fickle.
‘Sometimes,’ the truck-driver interrupted my thoughts, ‘a dog does not mind sharing her milk with kittens. We may feel she has been deceived into believing they are her puppies, but it could well be because she is generous and comfortable with what she is doing, in spite of knowing that they are not her kind. I think these roadside shrines are like that. They don’t discriminate about who we are and we shouldn’t discriminate about them either.’
It was time to go though the rain was still streaming down. All three of us turned towards the shrine and bowed our heads in farewell.
Just then, the headlights of a bus a few feet away blinded us.
Even though the truck was parked inside the clearing, the driver felt he ought to move the truck just in case the bus decided to stop on this very spot. He made for the steering wheel and asked us to step aside while he steered the truck back on to the road.
The bus driver, realizing what the sardar intended to do, shouted out to him through the downpour, assuring him he was just slowing down. The truck did not have to move, he had no intention of stopping.
I peered through the murk in the vain hope that there would be an empty seat on the bus. While the company and the conversations had been wonderful, the seat in the truck-driver’s cabin was not the most comfortable for a long journey in such weather.
But the bus was packed.
Many of the passengers seated on the side that faced me were staring in the direction of the shrine. Their eyes were shut in prayer. Their faces still carried the imprint of the terror they had experienced coming up the ghats a few moments ago.
Just when the bus picked up speed again, I found myself shouting, ‘Sister Martha!’
I had recognized a face—a nun who worked near the Jesuit house to which I was affiliated. She was someone with whom I had had many enjoyable, if intense, arguments about matters of faith and loyalty.
She didn’t hear me. Her eyes were shut and her lips were mumbling a prayer, her face turned towards the same wayside shrine as her fellow passengers.
48.
Illusions Of Nearness
Amit Chaudhuri
1. Miss Havisham’s House
A man from the BBC asked me to show him my ‘favourite parts of Calcutta’; this was towards a year-end programme on cities of the world. The idea was to locate me in the whirl of the very street I was talking about, and catch the sounds on tape; the sort of verisimilitude that the radio used to be so good at before the chatter of the small screen entered the household.
I decided to take him to the North, beyond Mahajati Sadhan, into a tiny lane on the left whose entrance was signposted, coincidentally for those about to make a programme for the radio, by a shop called Betar Mahal, a place for ‘wireless’ repairs. This was not one of my familiar worlds; every time I came here, I would be partly appalled and partly wonder-struck. I could have taken him to the area in Bhowanipur I had written of so often in my fiction; but that would have been too easy. Even the appeal of that street in south Calcutta had been deceptive. The first Bengali readers of my first novel had been convinced it was set in north Calcutta. I had gradually realized that it was not a sense of home I was trying to articulate in my writings, as I had earlier thought I was, but a sense of elsewhere.
Instead of turning left at Betar Mahal, we turned into the lane before it, which led straight to Mullickbari, the Marble Palace. This was part of my reason for coming here: this strange house. It was a house—if you could call this immense, uncommunicative building a ‘house’—whose existence I’d been unaware of on my many visits to this city as a child. When I heard of it later, I felt no curiosity about it. It was only after I moved to Calcutta in 1999, and made my wife’s childhood a sort of guide to my new life in the city, that I began to visit cemeteries and places in her company that I’d never known before, the Marble Palace among them. Apparently a mamima had once said to her when she was a schoolgirl, ‘What, you’ve never been to Mullickbari?’ and dragged her off to see it.
My companion from the BBC nodded and said (he is a Bengali), ‘It is only after people leave Calcutta that they think of seeing the Marble Palace.’ This sounded like an indisputable bit of wisdom and a shrewd piece of analysis; and, if it were true, I wondered why it might be so. My interlocutor, who had grown up in Calcutta and knows it far better than I do,
had never seen the Marble Palace himself.
After parking the Maruti Omni in the shadow of the great mansion, and promising largesse to the spear-bearing darwan (the spear not so much an instrument of defence, apparently, as a talisman decreed by the family), we walked straight from the gates of the palace to the CIT buildings, about five minutes’ walk away. This was my other reason for coming here: the dreary block of flats on the left, arrived at by a narrow lane ending at the Marble Palace on one end, with petty traders and labourers and their families, most of them fourth-generation migrants from north India, on either side. Many of them were interested in the interview; in fact a toothless rickshawallah, reclining on his rickshaw, pouted and demanded to be questioned.
In the CIT buildings lived my mother’s childhood friend and her older sister; both of them unmarried, both retired schoolteachers. From my own childhood onwards, every visit to Calcutta entailed an excursion to these buildings, to meet these charming and humane women—now ailing in body and spirit—who had lived here with their brother, then their brother, sister-in-law and their four children, and now alone. I thought of the women as displaced people, and I said so to my interviewer (watched by four children who, noting the mike, had asked my companion if he would deliver a bhaashan); and I wondered why I thought they were. They had lived in the small flat, after all, for forty-six years. What made me think this was not their home? Was it the fact that they were still tenants, and did not own the flat; or was it the women’s personal sense of exile, which they expressed continually, their sense of having been uprooted by Partition from Sylhet? What would it take to make the CIT buildings and the dirty, crowded lanes outside feel, after forty-six years, like home?
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