A Moveable Feast

by Lonely Planet

  In front of the tent stands the hearth, a clay-lined square pit dug in alignment with the four directions. A heap of coals is always kept smouldering. An iron trident, the emblem of Shiva, stands with its shaft driven into the coals, its tines decorated with a garland of yellow flowers.

  Two sadhus squat naked in the sand, their bodies whitened with ash. One is old, with deeply creased skin and a caved-in chest with the sagging, deflated breasts of a fat man gone thin. His ribs stick out like the bars of a cage. Dreadlocks are coiled into a bun on top of his head. He sucks on a chillum, a straight hash pipe. He shoots out the smoke in a series of wheezy hacks and hands it to his companion, a younger man with lean, hard limbs. The younger sadhu takes the chillum and sucks greedily, his corded neck muscles flattening and giving him a lizardy look.

  Dharamgiri sits down by the fire and motions for me to sit next to him. The crowd outside grows, everyone wanting to see what would become a common scene at Kumbh Mela, the sadhu and his foreign guest. Dharamgiri calls out a name, and the sleepy-eyed initiate pops his head out of the tent.

  ‘Get chai,’ Dharamgiri orders.

  The boy, his saffron robe looking out of place among so many bare bodies, emerges carrying a steel pot, sets it by my host and squats nearby, eyeing me with curiosity.

  Dharamgiri takes the lid off the pot and pulls out a plastic satchel of milk, freshly bought from one of the camp’s government dispensaries. Other bags follow and are arranged neatly beside him. He slices the packet with a blackened fingernail and holds it steady as milk burbles into the pot. Then he opens another bag and fishes out some ground ginger and cardamom, sprinkling them into the milk. A handful of black tea and heaps of sugar follow.

  ‘Om Shiva,’ the sadhu mutters as he blows the grey ashes from the coals. The older sadhu runs his hands through the ashes and rubs the grit along his arms and face. Dharamgiri continues blowing, and with each puff the coals redden and pulse like beating hearts. Heat shimmers between us. I see the wavering image of the old sadhu staring at me, his ash-whitened skin blending with the steam. His bloodshot eyes look like volcanoes on the moon.

  Nobody speaks. We don’t need to. It’s a very Eastern trait, one I’ve seen from the deserts of Syria to the foothills of the Himalayas. Sit and absorb the feel of your company. Share a meal or some tea. Think of what you want to ask, then ask. If you don’t share a language, you can always just sit and eat. Some of the best conversations don’t require words.

  Dharamgiri places the covered pot on top of the coals, grinding it a bit to set it in place. Moving into the lotus position, he inhales deeply through flaring nostrils. His eyes close. The old sadhu passes the chillum to his skinny friend, skipping the initiate. A tracery of smoke curls into the air.

  I decide to join Dharamgiri. I close my eyes and drop my thoughts, slow my breathing and listen. Relax. Everyone is staring at me, but they’ve been doing that ever since I got to India, so it makes no difference. I hear the murmur of the pilgrims behind me. Across from me there’s a slight crackle of the jute mat as the initiate shifts position. The coals of the campfire hiss and pop. There’s a snap as one cracks and the pot settles with an almost silent rasp. The skinny sadhu is smoking again. The crackle of the burning hash and tobacco and the whistle of his breath through the tube sound loud in the enclosure.

  I can’t hear anything beyond what’s happening here. The giant campground might as well not exist. I can’t hear the people thronging the roads, or the honks of vehicles as they trundle along the main streets. I can’t even hear the PA system, which gives announcements in a nonstop drone audible everywhere but here. The sadhus have created a mela hidden within the larger mela, an integral part of the festival but aloof from it.

  A long, slow exhalation from my right tells me Dharamgiri is coming out of his trance state. I haven’t gotten very deep in just a few minutes of meditation, but I feel more relaxed and more in tune with my new companions. I open my eyes. The two sadhus have finished the chillum. The old man sits with his eyes shut, meditating. The younger one and the initiate watch me. I look at Dharamgiri. He nods serenely, then turns to the staring crowd, grunts and waves his arm dismissively. They melt away like water.

  The receding pilgrims part for a spry old sadhu clad only in a saffron loincloth. His dreadlocks are wrapped into a large bun, a single loose coil curving over his shoulder like a python. Expressive eyes gaze forth from a broad face. He carries an old wallet of faded and cracked leather held together with duct tape.

  Dharamgiri smiles.

  ‘Come, sit down, we’re making chai,’ he says. He turns to me and adds, ‘This is Mauni Baba. He hasn’t spoken in twenty years.’

  Mauni Baba beams me a grin that shows a row of yellow and uneven teeth. The deep creases on his face fold in on themselves like ripples on a pond. He looks like a yogic Cheshire cat. It’s the expression of someone who has learned to speak without words. It’s entirely open, welcoming, and makes me feel more at home than the chai or the chillum.

  He sits at Dharamgiri’s right hand and scrutinises me with a mixture of curiosity and unabashed delight. When you’re the object of such unrestrained wonder, there’s nothing to do but sit and smile back. After a few minutes of studying each other, he opens his wallet stuffed to bursting with bits of paper, stamps, photos, old envelopes, creased and faded postcards, even a boarding pass from a Swiss Air flight from 1989. Mauni Baba picks through the mess and pulls out a tiny map of the world printed in English. He hands it to me, points at my chest and then at the map. I point at Canada.

  ‘You can ask him questions,’ Dharamgiri says. ‘He knows English.’

  ‘How did you learn English?’ I ask.

  Mauni Baba elaborately pantomimes being hunched over a desk, typing furiously at an invisible typewriter, brow furrowed in intense concentration. Then he sits up and leafs through what can only be a newspaper, reading the imaginary lines with studied interest.

  ‘He was a journalist?’

  ‘Yes, eleven years in Delhi.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’ I ask.

  Mauni Baba sits up in the lotus position, spine straight and eyes lightly closed. His features soften into such profound relaxation that I wonder if he’s slipping into a trance, but a moment later he opens his searchlight eyes and places a finger on his abdomen. He raises his hand up his chest, touching all the chakra points up to the centre of his forehead, where he mimes the opening of his third eye by spreading out his fingers like a flower petal, eyes widening in wonder. He inhales sharply and seems to grow. He beats his fist against his chest. Power. Indicating the crowd that has once again clogged the alley, he thrusts his long arm out, bony fingers spread wide as if grasping, and pulls it towards himself. He turns and mimes pulling in people from all around, drawing a large circle in the air around him. Then he cocks his head and scowls at the crowd, brushing them away with a dismissive gesture one would use with a misbehaving child. The crowd breaks up even faster than it did for Dharamgiri. He turns to me and smiles triumphantly.

  Dharamgiri pulls the lid off the pot and peers inside. A puff of steam envelops his face, followed by a sweet smell. He grasps a pair of iron tongs and lifts the pot off the coals, then pours the fragrant brown chai, speckled with blackened bits of ginger, through a sieve and into several steel cups lined up beside him.

  ‘Om Shiva,’ he intones, pouring a bit onto the fire. The coals hiss a reply.

  ‘Babas must share their meal,’ he explains. ‘One quarter for Shiva, one quarter for guests. Two quarters for us.’

  He passes the cups around, to me first, then Mauni Baba, the other sadhus, the initiate, and finally himself.

  It’s the best chai I’ve ever had, sweet and milky and strongly caffeinated. The poorer sadhus don’t eat much, usually just round unleavened loaves called chapati, so they get most of their energy from endless rounds of chillum and chai. They say there are three C’s in sadhu life: chai, chillum and chapati.

  ‘So what’s it like being a s
adhu?’ I ask Dharamgiri.

  ‘Baba life good life, but very hard. Every morning I get up to do one hour yoga, one hour meditation. Then I go bathe in the river. The afternoon is the same.’

  ‘Where were you before this?’

  ‘At a monastery. Many Juna there. All the time smoking, all the time chillum.’ He gives a chesty cough as if to emphasise his point. ‘Too much smoking there, I’m not smoking so much at Kumbh Mela.’

  ‘What will you do after this?’

  ‘Go to the forest. Too many people here. All the time they come around to look at babas. All the time asking, “Baba give me darshan. Baba, tell me how to live my life.” I go to the forest. Meditate. Be quiet. Rest.’

  ‘Why did you become a baba?’

  ‘I join the Juna when I was twelve. My parents brought me to Juna. I grow up a baba.’

  ‘You must travel a lot.’

  ‘I’ve been all over India. Down to Goa, down to Tamil Nadu. One time Sri Lanka. Goa was a good place. Lot of foreigners like you, very friendly. They want to meet the babas, smoke chillums. I’ve been to the Himalayas. Good place. No people.’

  I catch Mauni Baba’s eye as we both raise our cups of chai. He stops mid-sip and points to me, then extends his arm at a high angle, pointing to the far distance, and brings it palm downwards to the spot where we sit. He passes his hand to encompass our circle, points to the pot of chai, and gives me a smile of radiant joy. Welcome to Kumbh Mela, it says.

  Welcome indeed.

  The Icing on the Japanese Cake

  STEFAN GATES

  Stefan Gates is a food adventurer and award-winning writer/TV presenter renowned for his perceptive, witty and unconventional approach to food and cooking. He particularly loves wild culinary quests and extraordinary food adventures. His food and travel books and TV series have won many awards, including Best TV Series at the Bologna Food on Film Festival, and his documentaries have been shown in over thirty countries. Stefan wrote and presented Cooking in the Danger Zone for BBC2, presented the prime-time magazine show Full on Food and hundreds of episodes of the studio show Food Uncut. His food/travel series Feasts took him to the greatest feasts on earth. Stefan has just finished E Numbers: An Edible Adventure, a myth-busting food science series, and he has also written an accompanying book. He chairs events, performs cookery demos, writes for newspapers and magazines, and regularly appears on radio and TV shows as a guest. He has written five books, the latest of which is The Extraordinary Cookbook, on unforgettable food adventures. He is also the author of Gastronaut, In the Danger Zone and 101 Dishes to Eat Before You Die.

  It was never meant to be like this. Look at me: a bloodied, bedraggled waif staggering around a beautiful Shinto temple courtyard drunk as a skunk and soaked to the bone, bare bottom on display for all the world to see, only a thin strip of cotton hiding my genitals and above all else, desperately, desperately hungry.

  In an unwise moment of blinding clarity, I catch sight of my reflection in a window and look deep inside my soul to ponder what brought me to this. Despite selling my soul to the evil gogglebox as a TV presenter five years earlier, I had, up until now, largely managed to preserve my dignity by sticking to serious documentaries, arcane food stories and explorations of the complex relationship between people and food. Sure, I had done a few wild things for TV, gone to war zones more dangerous than a food writer really needed to go, eaten bull’s perineum for the thrill, and palm weevils for the flavour. But that had all been in the legitimate chase of knowledge and adventure rather than a good set of viewing figures. Now I stand at the top of my modest mountain of achievement, about to cast the whole shebang into the air to crash on the rocks of naked indignity. Worst of all, I know something extraordinarily important has just happened, but I have no idea what it all meant.

  There is a valid(ish) reason for me being in this state of disarray. I am making a TV series for the BBC (the largest broadcaster in the world and, up until now, probably the most respected) called Feasts, which is about … well … feasts. I have been touring the world to find out why food has the power to bring people together, to channel grief, joy and God, and to see if I can use these feasts to get a deeper understanding of the world’s more enigmatic people. I’ll be honest with you: it had seemed like a cushy gig when I first suggested it. But now I have come to Japan, a country I have always loved but oddly never really felt a deep connection with, to see if I can dig deeper into the Japanese soul by joining in some of their more dramatic shared experiences.

  The 1200-year-old Naked Man Festival is probably the most dramatic shared experience in the world, and it’s also a Shinto ceremony that tells you all you need to know about repressed emotions (more of which later) and the Japanese obsession with superstition. Although Japan is often considered a Buddhist country, most Japanese people I know practise a pragmatic syncretism, combining elements of Buddhism and Shintoism (which is itself more of a philosophical path than a religion), neither of which require a traditional monotheistic profession of faith to allow you to be a believer.

  If that sounds complicated, it is. Unless you’re Japanese, in which case it’s simple: most say that they aren’t religious, but they often visit both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, picking whichever elements they feel they need. My friend Junko explains that she will drop into a Buddhist temple to show respect for her ancestors, but tie a wish ribbon at her Shinto shrine to ask for good luck with her driving test. She sees Buddhism as a faith for the afterlife, and Shintoism as a set of principles and superstitions that can affect everyday current life. But when I ask her if she’s religious, she curls her nose up and squirms, ‘Noooo!’

  The Naked Man Festival is a thoroughly Shinto affair: an opportunity to banish bad luck for the year ahead, to make wishes for yourself and your family’s health and happiness in a dynamic and dramatic way, and at the same time express your basest, most primal feelings by getting drunk, naked and violent. And it’s all based around a cake. I’ve come to Nagoya, which throws the most spectacular version of the festival, to try to get to grips with the whole thing.

  Let’s start from the beginning: firstly a man is selected to be the Naked Man, or Shinotoko. He is kept in isolation for three days for spiritual purification, although this isolation includes his being regularly dragged out for display for TV cameras and meetings with local dignitaries and businessmen (he’s not allowed to talk – apparently that keeps him pure). He’s grateful for this period of relative calm, because in a few days he’s going to be stripped naked and thrown into the arms of ten thousand drunken, semi-naked men desperate to slap him on the head or grab hold of an arm in order to pass all of their bad luck and evil deeds onto him, as he struggles to make his way back to the temple. It sounds like the very definition of bad karma.

  During this period of isolation, local groups of people come together around the district to pound rice into flour and then use it to cook a series of vast rice cakes, the largest weighing in at around four tonnes. Because this cake is made using everyone’s hard work and communal dedication, it begins to take on a spiritual power that is ratified and blessed upon delivery (by twenty-tonne hydraulic crane) to the main Shinto temple. The cake now has intense spiritual power.

  Up to this point, all is well and calm and the festival is merely an interesting anthropological, socio-religious quirk, of which there are so many similar events around the world. Soon, though, the spiritual shit is destined to hit the fan in a big way.

  There are lots of different theories about this festival’s meaning, and many different versions around Japan. I don’t want to offer the ultimate definition, as I don’t think there is one, and in any case it’s too complicated to pick apart, but this is my first-hand experience of the festival.

  I meet an amiable elderly Japanese gentleman by the name of Kosaki-san, who has invited me to join him to celebrate the Naked Man Festival (this isn’t the sort of gig that anyone, let alone a foreigner, should do on their own). Kosaki-san is small, for
mal, humble, smart and smiley. His wife is the same, but smaller. They invite me into their home for dinner and we spend a few days getting to know each other. They are prototypical Japanese straight from the cultural copybook: wonderful hosts, generous and kind, hard working and successful (Kosaki-san is an engineer with his own small but high-tech factory that makes lift parts) and, crucially, they seem chronically unable to express emotion. (Now, if you think I’m guilty of cultural stereotyping here, you’re probably right. I’m sure there are plenty of expressive, emotional and argumentative Japanese; I just haven’t met any of them. I nonetheless have a deep affection for my many wonderful but less expressive friends, Japanese or otherwise.)

  After spending several days getting to know them and experiencing, amongst other things, an intriguing but painfully formal tea ceremony, I decide to break with convention and ask the Kosakis some difficult personal questions. I start by asking Mrs Kosaki if Japanese men hide their emotions. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Kosaki-san looks particularly ashen-faced.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  Has her husband ever told her that he loves her?

  ‘No.’ (They have been married for twenty years.) ‘I think Japanese men find it difficult to say such things.’

  Kosaki-san laughs nervously and says, ‘I don’t say it, but she knows it. She knows what’s in my heart. The Japanese don’t often thank their wives to their face. That’s not to say we don’t feel grateful. We just aren’t very good at expressing that.’

  Mrs Kosaki looks at me with her eyebrows raised and a ‘What can you do?’ expression on her face. She takes a breath before commenting judiciously, ‘It would be nice if they could actually say thank you out loud.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a good idea for Kosaki-san to join in the Naked Man Festival?’