6 The tulsī, or sacred basil tree, is often grown in special shrines in front of Hindu homes or in domestic courtyards.
AGAINST A PEACOCK SKY
Monica Connell
Monica Connell is an Irish author and photographer. She studied Sociology at London University followed by Social Anthropology at Oxford. Her first book, Against a Peacock Sky was shortlisted for the Yorkshire Post Best First Work award and has been translated into German and Dutch. Her latest book, Gathering Carrageen, is about her return to live in a Donegal village she knew as a child.
With the permission and orders of the
king of heaven, Indra, I have crossed
mountains and rivers and hills and
other strange and lonely places and
have come to this world of the mortals.
It’s the time of the karāti, the nights leading up to the full-moon festival, when the gods enter the dhāmis and use their bodies to dance among the villagers. Somewhere people are drumming – it must be at the far end of the village, because at times the rhythm is distinct but when the wind takes it it becomes muffled, merging with the roar of the full monsoon river.
Later, well into the night, Mina and Kāli wrap blankets round their shoulders and walk out through the village. Dogs mark their progress, a different one barking from each rooftop they pass. They sound anxious tonight and fierce, troubled by the full moon and the drums. When they reach the source of the drumming they climb up one ladder and then another on to the top roof of the house.
Already there’s a crowd – men, women, boys and girls, toddlers and babies. The door of the shrine at the back of the roof is open. Inside there’s a group of men sitting round the fire, their faces striped with flames and shadows. Outside young girls in pairs hold hands facing each other and, leaning back, they pirouette so fast that their shawls flare out from the tops of their heads. One young boy streaks through the darkness, like a small fish, in and out of the groups, stinging ankles with a handful of cut nettles, then melting into the shadows before the inevitable angry rebukes.
I have plucked flowers from twenty-two
pastures and twenty-two mountains and
from plateaux and green lowland meadows.
There are flowers of nine different
colours, and I gathered them and put
them into my hair out of sheer joy, and
they have become part of me.
The drum-beat intensifies. The musicians are sitting in a row on the edge of the roof, facing inwards. Their drums, half spheres of hand-worked copper, are laid out in a line in front of them. They’re pounding them with bent drumsticks, hard and fast, with all the strength of their hands and wrists. The roof is vibrating. Inside the shrine the bells start ringing, rhythmically clanging as they swing up and down, round in an arc as the cord is pulled and released. Close by the doorway two boys clash cymbals, hard so they hit together squarely, hollow full against cupped hollow. Next to them a baby shrieks in its mother’s arms.
For twelve years I have wandered through
different places. I have walked in the
truth and spoken in strength. I have
shaken twenty-two regions with my power.
And I have done much that is good as
well. I have made places of pilgrimage,
and cared for their pilgrims. I have
built temples. On the banks of a lake,
in a place called Garagāli, there was a
temple inlaid with gold and silver, and
when you saw that temple, even if you
had never wept in your life, tears would
fill your eyes and you would weep.
A man sitting in a group, leaning against the wall of the shrine, starts shaking and stands up, throwing aside the woollen blanket he wears as a shawl and kicking off his shoes. His body still convulsing, he fumbles to untie his turban and release the long twisted tuft of hair, the dhāmi’s insignia, that’s always covered from sight except when he’s possessed – when he becomes the god. The crowd clears back and he moves into the middle of the roof.
Standing alone in this pool of moonlight, he puts his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his mouth and, staring out across the houses and the fields and the river valley to the stark moonlit mountains, whistles long and loud into the night.
For an instant the moon disappears. The sky is still bright and the roof illuminated, but where the moon had been there are now heavy black storm-clouds brightly outlined in white light. Then it slides back, perfect in its pale roundness.
The dhāmi stands motionless before it. It seems for a moment as if the world is peopled only by this god and this moon, facing each other through the aeons of the night. His face is unearthly – eyes glazed in concentration, cheekbones and jaw protruding floodlit from heavy black shadows.
He disappears for a minute into the shrine and returns with two pairs of bells and with a yellow ṭikā marked between his eyes. He begins to dance, holding the bells – a pair in each hand – rigid by his groin. He dances to the rhythm of the bells and the drums and the cymbals, moving fast, careening about from one end of the roof to the other. His arms hardly move at all – just the legs move, and his bare feet on the ground as he jumps up and down, and the long tuft of hair that bounces back and forth over his shoulder. He’s wearing white, the only white on the roof, a symbol of his purity. He wears white for the same reason that he never drinks raksi, and that he’s eaten no food since morning. It’s a mark of reverence that the vehicle provided for the god to come to his people is pure and empty and won’t pollute.
One place especially was beautiful.
The mist would blow off the top of the
mountains and there were always a few
fine clouds and a light rain. It gave
me so much pleasure. And near that
plateau was a forest of larch and
evergreen oak. And below it the wide
open grassland. There I took twenty-two
stakes and in twenty-two hours I
pegged them into the ground and marked
out twenty-two boundaries.
Another dhāmi has joined him and they link arms for a while and then move closer together, stretching their arms across each other’s shoulders so they dance as one, their bodies tilting first forwards and then back as they bounce across the roof. They’re brothers, two of the Bāra Bhāi, the twelve Mas.t.ā gods. They’re smiling, eyes ablaze, lost in each other’s presence, in the dance.
They embrace, then separate, and one goes over to a woman in the crowd with a child cradled in her arms. She talks to him, anxiously tilting her face upwards so it’s exposed and openly imploring, a look designed to tap compassion. He answers without looking at her, his eyes focused on space, on the moonlight. His voice is high-pitched and breathless, floating in the back of the mouth, instead of pushing up from the throat and chest. It’s a voice that doesn’t belong to one of the villagers and she seems not to understand: maybe she can’t even hear, above the bellow of the drums.
Still twitching and shuddering, as if to the beat of the wrong pulse, the dhāmi looks at the child, willing his eyes to focus, be still. Standing close above it, he presses the rim of a bell hard against its skull and, leaning forward, blows a blast of air into each ear, one after the other. Then he stands back and, from a distance, sprays the child’s face with a fistful of rice grains, and dances away.
There are three of them dancing now, sometimes together, sometimes separately, all in white. Without warning one falls out of step and drops back to his place in the crowd. Panting and breathless, but no longer shaking, he takes hold of his tuft of hair, winds it into a coil on top of his head and reties his turban. His god has left him.
The other dhāmis carry on dancing for a while and then their gods go too. The bells in the shrine have stopped ringing and gradually the drumming abates and the vibrations are stilled.
People spill back across the empty space of m
oonlight, and the dancers’ faces merge with the crowd. Someone is closing the double doors of the shrine, fastening the chain latch, and firelight flickers out dimly between the slats.
There were rocks and boulders that made
it difficult to walk to and from that
place. Those rocks and boulders were
like mountains. And I took my stick
and swung it round, and my power was so
great and so terrible that the hills
and mountains shook. And I split that
place in two and made a path for people
to come and go, and for their sheep and goats.
And there was little water in that place.
So when I saw that, I dug my knee into
the ground and water welled up beneath
and flowed out around it. And I dug
wells of milk and wells of oil. And I
sowed seeds and grew plants and trees so
that that place would be still more beautiful.
Ekādaśi, duadaśi, tetradaśi, chaturdaśi: the days of the karāti, when the gods dance at night. Then follows the day of the full moon, purnimā, and the full-moon festival, called the paiṭh. It dawns sunny and clear, with a strong wind blowing, and storms of chaff from the barley-threshing on the roof rain down yellow against a peacock sky.
No work is done in the fields today and Kalchu is sitting in the sun, making a necklace of marigolds by sinking a needle into the yellow hearts and sliding them together along coarse black thread. Chola is replastering the floor with fresh mud and cow-dung in deference to the gods’ visit. Since early morning there has been intermittent drumming in different parts of the village and the echo rolls round the valley like the stifled rumblings of a caged lion.
There was a demon called Banba, and
he was king of all the demons. There
was a great battle between Banba and
myself. We fought for seven days and
seven nights. Then I chained him to
the four corners of the earth, and I
danced on his chest and sat on his
back. There was blood streaming from
his mouth and nose, and he was
frightened and said that he would
leave that place and would go to the
underworld. I made him take an oath
that he would never frighten anyone or
cause them any harm – only then did I
let him go. He even licked my feet.
First he wanted to fight, then he
licked my feet. That made me laugh.
Mina and Kāli are taking their offering for the festival to the house where the dhāmis have been dancing at night. Mina is carrying the wheat flour in a bronze plate and the oil in a smaller bronze bowl bedded inside it. They pass a group of boys, a jangling procession, on their way to wash the temple bells in the stream their annual cleansing and consecration. They wait in turn while the ḍāṇgri, dressed in white, measures other households’ offerings.
Two mānās of flour is the quota, plus one ladle of oil that’s poured into a wide-mouthed container so that the yellow mustard oil, the greener walnut and hemp-seed oils and the cloudy melted ghee combine.
Later in the afternoon, while most people are still washing and dressing and getting ready, the preparations begin at the shrine high above the village, on a plateau under the shade of two juniper trees. The wind is even stronger at this height. It carries the scent of pine and tosses the juniper branches back and forth across the sun, so the ground and the roof of the shrine are slashed with creeping shadows.
The ḍāṅgri is there, plastering the floor with a wash of red mudand cow-dung, filling and lighting the oil lamps, burning some sprigs of juniper as incense. That’s in the darkness of the inner room, with its raised seat for the dhāmi when he’s possessed, and its rows of bells and strips of red and white cotton cloth strung in a jumble from the rafters.
Outside on the veranda, where the eaves are supported by pillars crowned with carved wooden rams’ heads and the real skulls and horns of sacrificed rams and he-goats, two men are kneading the dough for puris, pummelling the flour of every household in the village. They’re talking and laughing as they work. Beside them, tethered to the corner post, are six lambs. One is alert and quietly bleating; the others are lying crumpled in a heap of fluffy whiteness in the sunshine.
It’s almost evening when Kalchu climbs up the hill carrying Hārkini on his back with Kāli, Nara and Lāla Bahādur following behind. The shrine is packed with people. Children cram themselves into the doorway and cling to the window, like moths to light, hoping to catch a glimpse of the possessed dhāmi. Inside, the god is reciting his paṛeli, the story of his wanderings through the earth before he settled in the village. And people are asking for advice and blessings, telling him about the problems they trust him to solve.
Outside the shrine the crowd is waiting. Almost everyone is there – the whole village dressed in its festival finery. The musicians, six or seven of them, are crouched in a row behind their drums, playing abstractedly until the dancing begins. One of the juniper trees is enlaced with the spreadeagled bodies of children, fighting for the highest branches and the best view of the dancers below.
At last the bells start to ring in the shrine and the drummers respond, picking up the strength and intensity of the previous nights’ rhythm, pounding again so the earth shakes. The dhāmi bursts out through the crowded doorway, carrying his bells and a bronze bowl of turmeric-stained rice grains in one hand. He dances about among the crowd, greeting people here and there by stamping yellow rice marks on their foreheads with the thumb of his other hand.
The evening sun is low in the sky with its rays almost horizontal, piercing the dhāmi’s eyes as he turns back to face it. It tints his white tunic orange and projects his dancing shadow right back across the ground until it rises up with the juniper trunks.
He doesn’t dance on his own for long. Soon two more dhāmis emerge from the shrine with their bells, and their heads bare and shaved bald except for their waist-length black tufts, braided at points with silver bands – gifts to the gods from their devotees. Then other dhāmis, immersed in the crowd, stand up shaking, jostling their neighbours and struggling to take off their jackets and their ṭopis or turbans, and shoes if they have them. Two boys and a woman, who aren’t even dhāmis, leap to their feet, possessed, their bodies spinning-tops set turning by the strength of the gods’ will to dance.
A man from the audience is walking out among the dancers. He’s wearing a garland of marigolds and carrying a bowl of yellow rice grains. He stops in the path of one of the dancing dhāmis and drapes the garland round his neck and plants a yellow ṭikā between his eyes, greeting the god. The dhāmi stoops his head for the garland’s embrace.
Other people follow suit and surge out into the space enclosed by the crowd. And as the dhāmis dance in the sunshine, the tiers of yellow garlands collide with their hair and bounce up and down against their white tunics. And there are flowers in their hair and loose yellow flowers strewn about under their bare feet on the ground.
To test me the Bārakote king made me
knead sand into a ball and made me carry
a load with rope made of stones. He
told me that if I had the power then I
could carry water to him in a basket.
And this I did. And then the king said,
‘Now that you have shown me all that is
good, I wish to see all that is evil as
well.’ I told him that I could do
anything, but that he would have to
suffer. Still he insisted that he
wanted to see all that is evil and he
forced me to prove my power.
So I brought about twenty-two earthquakes
and I caused that kingdom to tremble.
And when it had trembled for twenty-two
hours I told him that this glimpse
in all manner of ways, but still he
wouldn’t listen. So I shook the houses
and the palace and destroyed them and
caused the black-and-white snake demon to
fall from the skies, and stones and rocks
to fall from the skies. There was no
chance of survival. And then, when the
houses and palace were destroyed, the
floods came and washed everything away so
that you couldn’t tell that this was this
place and that was that. Nothing could be recognised.
Ten or twelve different gods are embodied now, and they are all amusing themselves in different ways. Some are dancing on their own, or in twos or threes, as they did in the moonlight. One is dancing his way round the outside of the shrine, carrying another sitting upright on his shoulder. It’s the Bāhan, one of the demons the gods defeated in the past, who then reformed and became a lesser deity. Now he’s restating his submission to the Bāra Bhāi and the forces of good.
There are others who aren’t even dancing: one who has just gone over to the veranda and plunged his hand into the vat of boiling oil so he could offer a hot puri to a child in tears: another who is standing in the midst of the dancers being continually buffeted as they come and go, and hungrily eating a plateful of raw rice grains. When he’s finished someone takes him some water and he drinks it, spilling it over his face and down his chest and bare legs and feet.
The crowd is delighted by the gods’ high spirits and pleasure in the dance. People laugh and point as they recognise a particular god by his mannerisms, by the way he contorts the dhāmi’s body to dance, or smile, or leap high into the air. They’ve all come today: Bijulī Maṣṭā, Thārpā Bāhan, Ukhāṛi Maṣṭā, and Bhawāni the goddess, younger sister of the twelve Maṣṭā brothers. Even Yangre has come, standing on his own with his back to the dancers, chewing marigold heads and squirting a jet of yellow pulp into a child’s face. It cries out, horrified by the affront.
There was a widow who came to me
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