Honda sent word to his family in Japan. At once he took pleasure in scheduling his itinerary with the aid of an Indian timetable featuring steam engines that traveled only fourteen or fifteen miles an hour. Upon consulting a map, he saw that the places he wished to visit—the Ajanta caves and Benares on the Ganges—were so far apart that he almost felt faint. Yet each attracted equally the magnetic needle of his desire for the unknown.
His intention of taking leave of Princess Moonlight was dampened as he was faced with the nuisance of asking Hishikawa to interpret for him. Using the urgent preparations for his trip as an excuse, he simply wrote a thank-you note on hotel stationery for the outing to Bang Pa In. He sent it off to the Rosette Palace by messenger moments before his departure.
Honda’s trip to India was marked with colorful experiences. But it is enough to describe one profoundly moving afternoon spent in the Ajanta caves and the soul-shaking sight of Benares. In these two places, Honda witnessed things extremely important, things essential to his life.
7
HIS ITINERARY included a voyage by boat to Calcutta; then one whole day by train to Benares, which was 350 miles from there; a trip by car from Benares to Mogulsarai; then two days by train to Manmad; and finally another car trip to Ajanta.
Calcutta in early October was bustling with the annual Durga festival.
The goddess Kali, the most popular of the Hindu pantheon and especially venerated in Bengal and Assam, had innumerable names and avatars, as did her husband Shiva, the god of destruction. Durga is one of Kali’s metamorphoses, but her bloodthirstiness is less pronounced. Gigantic effigies of the goddess had been erected everywhere in the city. They showed her in the act of punishing the deity of water buffalos, and beautiful, angry eyebrows were depicted on the valiant face. At night the statues, standing out sharply against the bright lights, received the adulation of the crowds.
Calcutta is the center of Kali worship, with its temple, the Kalighat; and the activity there during these festivals defies the imagination. As soon as he arrived in the city, Honda hired an Indian guide and paid a visit to the temple.
The core of Kali is shakti, the original sense of which is “energy.” This great mother goddess of the earth imparts to all female deities throughout the world her sublimity as mother, her feminine voluptuousness, and her abominable cruelty, thereby enriching their divine nature. Kali is depicted in an image of death and destruction, doubtless the two essential elements of shakti, and she represents pestilence, natural calamities, and various other powers of nature which bring death and destruction to living things. Her body is black, and her mouth is red with blood. Fangs protrude from her lips and her neck is adorned with a necklace of human skulls and freshly severed heads. She dances madly on her husband’s body which lies prostrate in fatigue. This bloodthirsty goddess brings epidemics and calamities as soon as she feels thirst, and constant sacrificial offerings are necessary to keep her appeased. It is reputed that the sacrifice of a tiger quenches her thirst for one hundred years, that of a human for a thousand.
Honda visited the Kalighat one sultry, rainy afternoon. Before the entrance, hordes of people were noisily jostling about in the rain while beggars everywhere pleaded for alms. The temple precinct was extremely small, and the temple itself was packed with people. A throng had congregated around the high shrine with its marble base, jostling, eddying back and forth, packed so closely together that there was no place to stand. The marble base, wet with rain, gleamed especially white, but it was daubed with brown mud by the feet of the worshippers who were trying to climb up and with spatterings of the cinnabar that was to be applied to their foreheads along with a blessing. It seemed like a sacrilegious turbulence, but the intoxicating din went on and on.
A priest, his black arm extended outside the temple, was painting small, round holy dots of red cinnabar on the foreheads of the devout who had thrown a coin in the box. In the pressing crowd of those wishing to be so decorated were a woman with a blue, rain-drenched sari that clung to her body, molding the contours of her round back and buttocks, and a man in a white linen shirt, whose neck was a pile of shiny black wrinkles. They were all jostling toward the red-stained black fingertip of the priest. Their movements, their paroxysms, and their devotion reminded Honda of the crowd depicted in the “Almsgiving of Saint Rocco” by Annibale Carracci, a painter of the eclectic Bolognese school. However, in the inner part of the temple, somber even in the day, a statue of the goddess Kali, with her protruding red tongue and her necklace of fresh heads, quivered in the candlelight.
Honda followed his guide to the back garden, with its irregular, rain-drenched flagstones, that occupied an area of less than four hundred square yards. He found only a few people there. A pair of pillars stood like low, narrow gateposts, with a trough of carved stone at their base. There was also a small, partitioned enclosure like a sort of washing place. Then immediately beside them stood smaller but exact replicas. The shorter pair of posts was wet with rain; and in the trough at their base lay a pool of blood, and dots of blood smudged the rainwater on the stone floor. The guide explained to Honda that the larger one was the altar where water buffalo were sacrificed and that it was no longer in use. The smaller replica was one used to sacrifice goats; and particularly during important festivals like that of Durga, four hundred goats would be slaughtered there.
When Honda looked at the back of the Kalighat which had previously not been clearly visible because of the crowds around it, he found that only its base was constructed of pure white marble, the central stupa and surrounding chapels being decorated with a mosaic of brilliantly colored tiles reminiscent of the Temple of Dawn in Bangkok. The rains had washed the dust from the exquisite floral patterns and arabesques of affronted peacocks, and the brilliantly colored edifices towered arrogantly over the gory mess below.
Large raindrops fell in sporadic flurries; and the water-laden air, carried inside, created a misty warmth.
Honda saw a woman unprotected by her umbrella come to kneel reverently in front of the smaller altar. She had the round, sincere, intelligent face found so frequently in middle-aged Indian women. Her light green sari was drenched. She carried a small brass kettle containing holy water from the Ganges.
The woman poured the water over the pillars, lit the oil burner which functioned even in the rain, and scattered miniature vermilion java flowers around it. Then she knelt on the bloodstained stone floor, and pressing her forehead against the post, began fervently to pray. The holy red spot on her forehead was visible through her rain-plastered hair all during the ecstatic prayer, as though it were a spot of her own blood offered in sacrifice.
Honda was deeply moved, and at the same time his emotions were mixed with an indescribable abhorrence close to rapture. As he examined his own feelings, the scene about him receded and only the figure of the praying woman was sharply, almost uncannily focused. Just as the clarity of detail and his horror became so overwhelming that he felt unable to cope with either, the woman suddenly vanished. For a moment he thought it must have been an illusion, but no. He saw her walking away past the unclosed back gate of openwork wrought-iron arabesques. However, there was no connection between the woman who had been praying and the one walking away.
A child led in a young black kid. A vermilion holy spot shone on its shaggy, wet forehead. As holy water was poured on the daub, the kid shook its head and kicked its hind legs, struggling to escape.
A young man with a moustache, wearing a soiled shirt, appeared and took the animal from the boy. As he placed his hand on its neck, the goat began to bleat pathetically, almost irritatingly, writhing and backing away. The black hair on its rump was disheveled in the rain. The youth forced the goat’s neck between the two posts of the altar, face down, and inserting a black bolt between them, he pushed it home over the imprisoned animal. The victim reared its hips and struggled desperately, bleating piteously. The youth poised his crescent-shaped sword, its edge glittering silver in the rain. It desce
nded accurately, and the severed head rolled forward, eyes wide open, its whitish tongue protruding grotesquely. The body remained on the other side of the posts, its front quivering delicately while the hind legs kicked wildly around its chest. The violent movements gradually weakened, like those of a pendulum abating with every swing. The blood flowing from its neck was relatively scant.
The young executioner grasped the headless kid’s hind legs and ran out through the gate. Outside the sacrificed goats were hung on pickets where they were then dismembered and swiftly disembowled. Another headless kid lay in the rain at the youth’s feet. Its hind quarters were still trembling as though in the throes of some dreadful nightmare. The borderline between life and death, which had just been drawn so skillfully, so painlessly, had been passed almost unconsciously; only the nightmare remained to torment the animal.
The young man’s skill with the sword was remarkable; he was following faithfully and unemotionally the practice of this holy, yet abominable profession. Holiness dripped in the most ordinary way, like perspiration, from the blood spotting his soiled shirt, from the depths of his deep, clear eyes, and from his large, peasantlike hands. The festival-goers, accustomed to the sight, did not even turn around, and holiness with its dirty hands and feet sat confidently in their midst.
And the head? The head was offered on an altar protected by a crude rain cover inside the gates. Red flowers had been scattered in the fireplace burning in the rain, and some of their petals were scorching; it was the fire of the shrine dedicated to the worship of Brahma. Seven or eight black goat heads were arranged by the fireside, each red, open end blooming like a java flower. One of these was the one that had been bleating just a few minutes ago. Behind them an old woman, crouching low, appeared to be intently sewing, but her black fingers were earnestly stripping away the smooth, gleaming entrails from the inner lining of the skin of a carcass.
8
DURING HIS TRIP to Benares, the sight of the sacrifice came again and again to Honda’s mind.
It was a bustling scene as if in preparation for something else. He felt that the sacrificial rite did not end there at all; it was as though something had begun, and a bridge had been built to something invisible, more sacred, more abominable, more sublime. In other words, the series of rituals was like a strip of red carpet unrolled in welcome for some indescribable being who was approaching.
Benares is the holy of holies, the Jerusalem of the Hindus. At the point where the Ganges curves in an exquisite crescent, accepting the melted Himalayan snows where the god Shiva resides, is situated on its western bank the city of Benares, the Varanasi of old.
It is a city dedicated to Shiva, husband of Kali, and has come to be considered the main portal to paradise. It is also the destination of pilgrims from throughout the country. The bliss of paradise is achieved on earth by bathing in the waters at this juncture of the five holy rivers: Ganges, Dutapapa, Krishna, Jamna, and Sarasvati.
The Vedas contain the following passage concerning the efficacy of the water:
The waters are medicine.
The waters cleanse sicknesses of the body
And fill the body with vitality.
Indeed the waters are healing
And will cure all sickness and evil.
And again:
The waters are filled with eternal life.
The waters are the protection of the body.
The waters have miraculous efficacy for healing.
Forget not ever the awful powers of the waters,
For they are medicine for body and soul.
As eulogized in these passages, the ultimate of Hindu rituals, which start with the cleansing of the heart by prayer and the ablution of the body by water, is enacted on Benares’s innumerable ghats.
Honda reached Benares in the afternoon and immediately unpacked and bathed in his hotel room. Then he arranged for a guide. He felt no fatigue after the long train ride, and he found his strangely youthful inquisitiveness had put him in a gay and restless frame of mind. The stifling light of the setting sun pervaded everywhere outside the hotel windows. He felt as if he could instantly grasp its mystery by dashing out into it.
Yet, Benares was a city of extreme filth as well as of extreme holiness. On both sides of the narrow, sunless alleys stalls for fried food and cakes, astrologers, grain and flour vendors were all crowded together; and the area was filled with stench, dampness, and disease. As one passed through and emerged on the flagstone square by the river, clusters of crouching leprous mendicants had gathered; they had come from all parts of the country as pilgrims, and now they begged for alms while awaiting death. Flocks of pigeons. Sultry late-afternoon sky. A leper was sitting in front of a tin can containing a few coppers; his one eye was red and festered and his fingerless hands like the stumps of felled mulberry trees were raised to the evening sky.
There was deformity of every kind. Dwarfs were running about, and bodies were arranged like some undeciphered ancient writing, lacking any common symbol. They appeared deformed not because of corruption or dissipation, but because the wretched, twisted shapes themselves, with freshness and feverishness, spewed out a repulsive holiness. Blood and pus were carried like pollen by thousands of fat, shiny, green-gold flies.
On the right-hand side of the slope that led down to the river, a colorful tent with holy insignia on it had been pitched, and cloth-wrapped corpses had been deposited beside the crowd listening to a sermon by some priest.
Everything was afloat. Under the sun lay exposed multitudes of the most ugly realities of human flesh with their excrement, stench, germs, and poisons. Everything hovered in the air like steam evaporating from ordinary reality. Benares. A piece of carpet, hideous to the point of brilliance. A riotous carpet joyously hoisted day and night by temples and people and children—fifteen hundred temples, temples of love with red pillars and black ebony reliefs illustrating all the possible positions of sexual intercourse, the House of Widows whose inmates earnestly await death, loudly chanting sutras night and day . . . inhabitants, visitors, the quick, the dead, children covered with pox, dying children clinging to their mother’s breast . . .
The square sloped down to the river, leading visitors naturally to the most important ghat: the Dasasvamedha, the “Sacrifice of Ten Horses.” Tradition has it that the creator Brahma once made a sacrifice of ten horses at this spot.
The river with its opulent ochre waters was the Ganges! The precious holy water which filled the small brass kettles to be poured on the foreheads of devotees and sacrificial victims in Calcutta was now flowing down the vast river before Honda’s eyes. An unbelievably generous feast of holiness.
It was only reasonable that here the sick, the healthy, the deformed, the dying should all be equally filled with golden joy. It was only reasonable that the flies and vermin should be plump and besmeared with bliss; that the characteristically dignified and suggestive facial expression of the Indians here should be so filled with reverence as to verge on blankness. Honda wondered how he could fuse his reason with the blazing evening sun, the unbearable odor, with the river breezes like faint swamp vapors. It was doubtful he could immerse himself in the evening air which was everywhere like some thick woolen fabric woven with chanting voices, tolling bells, the sound of beggars, and the moaning of the sick. He was afraid his reason might, like the sharp edge of some knife he alone concealed in his jacket, slash this perfect fabric.
The important thing was to discard it. The edge of the knife of reason, which he had regarded as his weapon since youth, had barely been preserved, considering the nicks already inflicted on it by each substantiation of transmigration. Now he had no choice but to abandon it unperceived in the perspiring crowds covered with germs and dust.
Numerous mushroomlike umbrellas for bathers stood on the ghat, but for the most part they were unoccupied now that evening sunbeams darted deep beneath them. It was long after bathing time, which had reached its peak at sunrise. The guide went down to the shore and s
tarted to negotiate with a boatman. Honda could do nothing but wait to one side throughout the interminably long dickering, feeling the hot iron of the evening sun scorching his back.
Finally the boat carrying Honda and his guide put out from the shore. The Dasasvamedha was located approximately in the center of the many ghats along the western bank of the Ganges. Sightseeing boats for the most part went downstream to the south to see the other ghats, then turned upstream to reach those north of the Dasasvamedha.
Whereas the western shore was considered to be holy, the eastern bank was sorely neglected. It was said that people who lived there would transmigrate into the body of an ass, and therefore all avoided that side. There was not so much as the shadow of a house, just the low jungle green in the distance.
Once the boat started downstream, the bright evening sun was at once cut off by buildings and provided only a brilliant halo for the magnificent view formed by the many imposing ghats with their columns at the back and the mansions supported by pillars. Only the Dasasvamedha ghat, backed by the square, allowed the setting sun its way. The evening sky was already casting its gentle rose color over the river; passing sails dropped dusky shadows on the water.
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