From where we stood, before the gates to the CIT buildings, studied by Rajasthani children, we could see the Marble Palace. If this had been a television interview, it would have made a good, if paradoxical, frame, the corridor–narrow lane telescoping towards the mid-nineteenth-century mansion at its end. My mother’s friend, I know, has never been to the Marble Palace. Perhaps, like the Bengalis my companion had been talking about, she needs to make an infinitely longer journey before she can make this relatively simple one. How do we measure distance or define location? How do we know when something is part of ‘our’ history, or choose what is foreign to it? Is history actually accessible to us, and do we decide when to deny it; or does it create a distance sometimes that makes the path towards it impossible to traverse? All the routes to the Marble Palace are wayward ones; and some journeys have not been made at all.
I am reminded of Amina, the mother in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Palace Walk, who, one day, makes an excursion to a famous mosque in Cairo in the company of her son. Amina’s life is contented but constricted; it revolves around the patriarch who is her husband, and her children. She seldom steps out; it is as the patriarch wishes. The novel is inflected, implicitly, by what she can’t see but must imagine herself located in, or close to: the coffee houses and shops her husband visits; Cairo and its alleys; the mosque that, through its muezzin, is at the centre of her life. One day the son exhorts her to ‘have a look at a little of the district you’ve lived in for forty years but never seen’.
The journey, the pilgrimage to ‘the shrine of al-Husayn’, is like an adventure, a minor act of transgression for the woman. It ends in a small disaster; Amina is hit by a taxi and breaks her leg. Mahfouz has confessed his admiration for Proust; and his narrative of the mosque is a rewriting of Proust’s account of the church steeple in Combray in Swann’s Way: ‘Saint-Hilaire’s steeple, so slender and so pink that it seemed to be no more than scratched on the sky by the finger-nail of a painter … ’ It was this steeple that provided a definition of locality to the narrator’s childhood, ‘that shaped and crowned and consecrated every hour of the day, every view in the town’. The vehicle for these airy ruminations is, however, an insomniac who compares himself, early on, to an invalid who finds it difficult to sleep or wake (Proust suffered from chronic asthma). The pain of the invalid, the simultaneous excitement and difficulty of movement, the transcendence offered by history and its monuments: these elements in Swann’s Way permeate Mahfouz’s description of the mosque, Amina’s journey, and her accident. My mother’s friend, too, is now a near-invalid, stricken by osteoarthritis; the physical dimensions of a journey are no longer, for her, a cause for pleasure.
We went, later, into the interior of the extraordinary mansion; more largesse was promised to the numerous attendants. There is a small cottage industry of attendants in the palace; and, inside, among the splendid items of nineteenth-century kitsch that populate this once emphatically nouveau riche Bengali household, is the Rubens I had told my companion about, and which we had come to quickly investigate. I thought of what a fourteen-year-old American cousin had said to me on a previous visit here: ‘It is like Miss Havisham’s house!’ Was it Pip’s terror she was expressing, that feeling of hesitation and uncertainty that descends on us in certain places in the first stage of life’s long journey?
2. Kalighat Fragment
When I was a boy, Calcutta to me was my uncle’s house on Pratapaditya Road. On the right, the road passed a few houses and turned right again towards the direction of Kalighat. Although not quite a ‘stone’s throw’ away from my uncle’s house, it was probably no more than a twenty-minute walk away; yet I never went there. I had no great interest in the fact that the supernatural beginnings of the great city had taken place not far from where I was.
Now, after all these years, I find myself going to the Kali temple for the first time—to honour an assignment. It is late afternoon. I get out of my car; before me, the Nirmal Hriday ashram of the soon-to-be-beatified Mother; and, near it, another building, whose white dome is visible: I think, This must be the temple. Two such contiguous and pervasive feminine presences from two distinct religions strike me as unusual.
I don’t know what kind of air possesses me as I stand there: certainly not that of a visitor from Wyoming or Birmingham; I’ve come here from Ballygunge.
A man is standing next to me. ‘You’re fortunate to come here today,’ he says. ‘It is less crowded—and it is the day of Ma’s birth.’
The man turns out to be a brahmin, a small-scale travel agent to ‘darshan’. ‘I’ll take you inside for twenty rupees,’ he says. ‘You won’t have to stand in line. But first you must take off your shoes.’ He takes me up a couple of steps into a roofed room that is open in the front and on one side, where two or three other facilitators of ’darshan’ are lounging. Here I find a tiny short-sighted woman with dark patches on her face who addresses me as ‘Tumi’. ‘Tomar juto ekhane rekhe dao’: Keep your shoes here. I am deeply reassured by her. But I won’t walk across the street barefoot; my brahmin guide offers me his rubber sandals, still warm with his soles’ temperature, blue discoloration upon their white instep.
Then there is a crisis. The twenty rupees has turned out to be a decoy. With the flowers and sandesh for the offerings, which are also sold here, and other bits-and-pieces expenditure, I’ll have to pay about a hundred and fifty rupees. I know the sum is ridiculously exaggerated; I won’t pay. ‘Won’t you give flowers to Ma?’ they ask in mock astonishment. ‘It is not a question of giving flowers to Ma; it is a question of how much I give you.’ They shuffle about like customs officials. ‘Besides, I am not here for all that. I am not a devotee.’ There is an embarrassed silence.
We coldly arrive at a compromise. My brahmin companion has disowned me; he will not take me inside. Instead, a younger brahmin in tucked-up dhoti and vest has been the delegated the task. In the usual container made of leaves, I am given sandesh and flowers worth sixty-five rupees. Before I touch the container, I must wash my hands in ‘Ganga water’, because I undid my shoelaces not long ago.
We pass through arches with other people and a small temple that is not the actual temple. Here I must divest myself of the borrowed rubber sandals. I slip them off on the lowest rack of a cupboard, but don’t push them inside far enough. ‘Why are you behaving stupidly?’ asks the young brahmin. ‘Do you want them to be stolen?’
A long queue of people cradling the offerings in their hands has formed outside the shrine where the deity resides. The queue goes up about seven or eight steps, hovers on a raised platform, then stops outside a door. I am taken straight up to the door: the small advantages extracted by money in a poor country. ‘Be careful of your cellphone and your wallet,’ says my companion. In his next breath, he begins to chant, ‘Om Vishnu … ’ miming to me that I should repeat the words.
As in most Bengali houses, two doors open inwards in the doorway. One is closed; through the other enters the long line of humanity. You glimpse the rectangular room you are to enter; it is lit by daylight coming from the other end, and the electric light from the shrine on the left. There is a melee of priests and devotees before the shrine, people shouting, colliding and moving on. ‘Don’t go too near,’ warns my guide, ‘or they might pull you towards them.’ It is too late to go back; a bell is being rung constantly.
Around the shrine, people are milling around like commuters waiting to alight a local train. I glimpse the autochthonic image lit by electric lights; her eyes are like careless streaks of mascara that have been applied to a phantom face. Someone puts a red tilak on my forehead; I leave behind the roar of the departing train; I am not sure what to do with the offerings. My guide wants to know if I’ve had ‘darshan’, like a companion at a football match making sure I saw the striker kick the ball into the goal.
‘Darshan’, I suppose, is the act of ‘seeing’ the sacred; it is neither quite prayer nor obeisance. In a sense, sacredness is conferred on the deity by the act;
because seeing becomes a form of apotheosis. We’ve all experienced this when we’ve fallen in love; the helpless but deep satisfaction of spectating silently. This busy little railway platform of a place facing the shrine must be one of the few remaining public places in the world where photography is prohibited; and, yes, I had my ‘darshan’—the din, the refulgent image, the sketchy sense of headlong inevitability—and have committed it to memory; ‘darshan’, like the face seen from the platform, cannot be reproduced on a photograph.
Later, I return to the room where I’d left my shoes. I’d thought the bespectacled lady might be angry with me; but she asks me—addressing me again with the informal ‘tumi’ rather than the formal ‘aapni’—‘Would you like some water? People always like some water when they come back.’ Her name is Savitri Chatterjee.
I walk about in the environs of the temple, impelled by some superstitious belief that this is where the city began. A woman standing next to a scooter with her child joins her palms together and closes her eyes. A young priest asks me if I want to go to the temple; his friend says, ‘Idiot, don’t you see the red tilak?’ Priests, eighteen or nineteen years old, in white shirts and dhotis, move about in bands of two or three, like scholars on graduation day. I am reminded of Oxford. A man comes and stands before me. He speaks to me in Hindi: ‘Sir, I am an army man. I can show you the holster where I still carry my gun. Someone has just stolen my train fare and I am stranded. I just need money for my fare, sir.’ The story is an old one, but the embellishments are new. ‘You have a gun?’ I say. He unbuttons his shirt just above his trousers and reveals a sort of jute pouch in the shadow of his shirt and undergarment. ‘I don’t have the gun with me today, but that is where I keep it.’ ‘I’d give you ten rupees,’ I say—he brightens immediately: ‘That is all I need, sir’—‘but I’ve exhausted all my change.’ It is true; after the various payments and purchases, I only have a five-hundred-rupee note in my wallet. He stares at me, sobs in frustration, then moves on brusquely; he doesn’t have a moment to waste.
I begin to realize I have nothing to do here; not beg, not pray, not steal. Everyone here wants something tangible; I am not sure what I want. My purpose has become furtive and inadmissible; I feel like I am cruising, like an old man on Broadway.
_______________________
Jamini, November 2003.
49.
An Old Woman
Arun Kolatkar
An old woman grabs
hold of your sleeve
and tags along.
She wants a fifty paise coin.
She says she will take you
to the horseshoe shrine.
You’ve seen it already.
She hobbles along anyway
and tightens her grip on your shirt.
She won’t let you go.
You know how old women are.
They stick to you like a burr.
You turn around and face her
with an air of finality.
You want to end the farce.
When you hear her say,
‘What else can an old woman do
on hills as wretched as these?’
You look right at the sky.
Clear through the bullet holes
she has for her eyes.
And as you look on
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.
And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls
with a plateglass clatter.
around the shatter proof crone
who stands alone.
And you are reduced
to so much small change
in her hand.
________________________________
This poem is from Jejuri.
50.
The Dervish of Dwarkamayi
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Getting there isn’t easy. The eight-hour bus ride from Bombay is about blind surrender to that familiar species of Indian bus driver: weedy of frame, shifty of gaze, but transformed behind the wheel into a foaming speed zealot. Then there’s the dust and the cramped feet, the periodic descents into toilets shimmering in a haze of ammonia.
You could opt for a deluxe AC bus, of course. But that is if you don’t mind Lata Mangeshkar’s honeyed trills of devotion alternating with the gut-wrenching soundtrack of the latest Hindi movie. Then follows the sinister drop of temperature as the air conditioner—like the man at the wheel—begins taking its raison d’être too seriously. And as a stranger’s head lolls familiarly against your shoulder, you watch your feet grow numb and your breath turn arctic.
The sane option is the train. Or so I thought, until I actually took one. This entails reaching Manmad station at the dead of night and then flagging a cab—usually helmed by the aforementioned species of speed junkie—to take a spine-chilling night ride to your destination. Forking over a few thousands and hiring a car to take you all the way is probably the best bet. Despite having to keep a wary eye on the speedometer and thermostat, it gives you at least a provisional sense of control over your destiny. The probable flat tyre and attack of sinusitis or diarrhoea are just some of the minor irritants that you’d better learn to take in your stride.
Because that is what a journey to Shirdi is all about—accepting that all the lurching and buffeting are an integral part of your host’s blueprint. The sooner you begin to align your desire with his inscrutable intent, the better. For while his mercy is boundless and his compassion legendary, the Fakir of Shirdi is also known to be a strange and capricious old man.
His image stalks you all over the country. You see it on car stickers, shop windows, bus stands and wayside shrines. It is difficult to remember the first time you set your eyes on it. But it registers somewhere amid the synaesthetic blizzard of images to which every Indian is accustomed—and frequently immune.
It is the picture of a man with a white beard and penetrating glance, clad in the traditional attire of a poor mendicant—a ragged white robe and a kerchief around his head—seated barefoot on a rock, his right ankle resting on his left knee. There are variations on this theme, as there invariably are when an image proliferates. At times his robes are saffron. At other times, the focus is only on his face with its compelling glance. And at other times, he wears a halo the size of an overripe lemon.
Who is this man? And how did he come to generate such pan-Indian devotion? A glimpse into that enigma is to be found in the nondescript, sun-baked town of Shirdi in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra—a flystain on the epic expanse of subcontinent. It is here that the legendary mystic of twentieth- century India lived for most of his life. It was his presence that transformed a sleepy village, skirted by sugarcane fields, into a noisy, unimaginably congested pilgrim spot, attracting thousands of visitors on a daily basis.
The first time I visited Shirdi some fifteen years ago it was as a detached tourist. I was merely accompanying my parents whose own visit was fuelled by little more than a mild curiosity about pilgrim trails around Bombay. I recall emerging from the Nita’s Travels bone-rattling bus ride, with frozen feet, a head foggy with Mangeshkaritis and a sinking feeling in the heart. The first impression was people—largely touts, insistent as flies, peddling lodging (complete with AC, shuttle lift, swimming pool, pool table and a mysterious choice of Andhra and Chinese cuisine), food, quickie darshans, garlands and prasad all at once. And the second impression was, well, people.
The stolid blocks of concrete that could be glimpsed somewhere between the seething hordes weren’t particularly uplifting either. The pictures of Sai Baba that leapt out from everywhere had the lurid tones and glossy surfaces reminiscent of Bollywood posters. And the odour of mercantilism was simply overwhelming. From hotel proprietors to the street vendors to the ubiquitous touts, everyone seemed ferociously single-minded about marketing the Sai Baba phenomenon.
The rest of my visit passed in a blur. I remember serpentine q
ueues peopled by perspiring adults, wailing infants and professional overtakers, all beatific faces and vicious elbows. I remember the security guards, imperious and smugly unreasonable. I remember a fleeting glimpse of a white marble fakir, bedecked in silk, smothered with garlands, wearing a patient and somewhat wry expression. And I remember a few moments of peace in an adjacent masjid where, we were told, the Fakir of Shirdi actually lived out his life.
That struck me as odd. On reflection, it seemed like something of a miracle: that serenity in a place throbbing with a sense of perpetually impending catastrophe.
What I do remember quite clearly is the act of tucking away a small gaudy image of the Fakir into my bag before clambering on the sleekly purring Nita’s Travels monster back to Bombay. I was quite unaware of what this implied at the time. But I later discovered that this seemingly whimsical act was actually part of my host’s design. Hardened rationalists have been known to furtively pocket fragments of Sai memorabilia on their way out of his hometown.
And that’s just the beginning of the great contagion. For slowly but inevitably, the Fakir of this godforsaken place in western India gets under your skin.
Let’s get this out of the way. No, it’s not easy being a Sai bhakta if you fancy yourself a pilgrim of somewhat refined tastes. For one, it means you share him with every third person in the country. His picture routinely looks down from behind cash counters in restaurants from Agra to Alappuzha. Ram Gopal Varma’s movies have shown his image benignly presiding over the hatching of bloody conspiracies by Bombay’s most lethal mafiosi. If you’re looking for an unsullied icon—in terms of the company he keeps—you’ve got to hunt elsewhere. In his own lifetime, his durbar was hectically motley: from Brahmins to Dalits, Muslims to Parsis, priests to peasants, renunciants seeking nirvana to businessmen seeking progeny or prosperity or both.
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