by Tom Bissell
The Gothic cathedral before me had been built in 1893, on land previously occupied by a Portuguese church that dated from the seventeenth century. The Portuguese church was merely one in a long line of Thomas-devoted churches, many of which came to grief. As a local guidebook put it, “Down the centuries this holy shrine had suffered damages beyond reckoning.” In the late eighteenth century, for instance, the Portuguese church was occupied by Muslims for eleven years, and during that time all Christians were forbidden to enter. Prior to that, Thomas’s shrine had been attacked and burned during various spasms of religious violence. Despite a turbulent twentieth century in India, Santhome Basilica reached the present day largely unscathed. The stark, Gothic design—particularly that of the basilica’s main spire—made it seem dislocated here in the tropics, to say the least, as though a sharp piece of Middle Europe had dropped from the heavens and embedded itself immovably in Indian soil. Most striking was the basilica’s grayish, deracinated whiteness—the whiteness of having been attacked and scoured for nutrients—though a bit of color was provided by its orange roof. Santhome Basilica was the single cleanest thing I had seen in India this side of Domino’s Pizza bathroom porcelain. It must have been washed hourly, I thought. As though on schedule, two workmen appeared and began cleaning the basilica facade with long-handled mops.
For more than a thousand years, non-Indian Christians have been coming to the shrine of Thomas and the various churches built around and atop it. (The first church in Mylapore is, of course, locally credited to the carpenter’s rule of Thomas himself.) There is record of two British monks having visited Thomas’s shrine in the ninth century. Five hundred years later, a Franciscan missionary visited the shrine and wound up staying in Mylapore for thirteen months. Around the same time, Thomas’s shrine welcomed one of its most celebrated Western visitors, Marco Polo.
While Polo never specified the name of the town in which Thomas’s remains were kept—he referred to it as “a small city not frequented by many merchants” within the “province of Ma’abar,” which is apparently what Indian Muslims once called the modern-day state of Tamil Nadu—he obviously meant Chennai. Polo described how some Indian holy men, as “descendants of those who slew Saint Thomas the Apostle,” were supernaturally repelled from entering Thomas’s tomb. He also noted that “Christians and Saracens” alike venerated the apostle and that the local nut trade was in the hands of Christians. In the fourteenth century, an ill-tempered friar complained about “the vile and pestilent heretics”—that is, Thomas Christians—who oversaw the shrine’s operations. Shortly before the Portuguese first arrived in India in 1498, a Venetian with a more forgiving turn of mind visited the shrine and noted that the “body of St. Thomas lies honorably buried in a large and beautiful church,” where he was worshipped by “a thousand Nestorians who identified themselves with the Apostle.”
The possibly fictitious fourteenth-century traveler John Mandeville also claimed to have visited Thomas’s “beautiful tomb” in a city he called “Mailapur.” Thomas’s body, Mandeville noted wondrously, remained uncorrupted, and he described how Thomas’s arm—believed, of course, to have touched Jesus—was displayed outside the reliquary: “Men of that country judge who is right by [Thomas’s] hand. For if there be a quarrel between two parties and each affirms right is on his side, they cause the case of each party to be written in a scroll and put these scrolls in the hand of Saint Thomas; quickly the hand casts away the scroll that contains the false case.”
The suite of buildings along the edge of the basilica courtyard contained a souvenir store, a liturgical center, and a management office. Outside every doorway, I noticed, was a small pile of Indian shoes, though some Indians, I also noticed, went inside these buildings without taking off their shoes. Whether this was a Christian thing or a caste thing or a Hindu thing or simply an individual thing, I was not sure, but to remain on the safe side, I removed my shoes before entering the shrine office. A jowly, dark-eyed Indian woman sat behind an uncluttered desk, writing in a ledger. She looked up at me as I came in. I asked her if the basilica had a resident historian or public affairs person with whom I could discuss its history and relics. No, she said, though there was a priest here who was normally happy to discuss such matters with visitors. Wonderful, I said. Was he available? He was not. That was a shame. When would he be back? Next week. She frowned. I frowned. Her office was small and airless, infused with a warm, rotting-fruit smell. I asked her, “What do you think of the Thomas relics your shrine contains?”
She put down her pencil. “Sir, I think they are what give us our church and our faith.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Please, sir.”
“To you, is there any doubt whether the apostle Thomas came to India?”
“There are many scholars saying this, sir.”
“That Thomas came to India?”
“Many scholars, sir.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Many scholars, sir.”
“I see. Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Once again I removed my shoes outside the basilica’s souvenir store, as had all its Indian customers, but a friendly Indian nun approached me and said there was no need for me to remove my shoes. I put them back on. Another Westerner came in, however, and, in full sight of the nun, removed his shoes. Alarmingly, she said nothing to him. This sharpened my anxiety that shoe removal was yet another aspect of Indian life governed by an invisible rule set, which I had blunderingly violated not once but twice. I began to peruse the shop’s bookshelves.
The books, many of them crypto-Christian, had titles like 31 Tips for Youth: How to Develop a Pleasing Personality, Making the Most of Your Business, Coping with Criticism (Made Easy!), and Strategies for Effective Leadership—at Home and the Office! Here, perhaps, was a sign that Indian Christianity was at long last tolerant of, and vulnerable to, conversion-minded outreach. This mingling of profits and spirituality was not much different from graspier versions of American Protestantism, wherein faith in Jesus and economic success were regarded as similar types of accredited investing. The uncritically acquisitive model of Christianity on display here in the souvenir store was evident elsewhere in India. A church in Kokkamangalam, which was supposedly founded by Thomas, contains a relic that, according to one account, is prayed to on Friday evenings by Indians who “aspire to employment, especially abroad.” My eyes wandered along the souvenir store’s bookshelves, stopping at a title that suggested another correspondence between self-help-inflected Indian Christianity and American Fox News Christianity: The Indian Media: How Credible?
I asked the nun in the bookstore if I could have a seat for a moment. Just a moment. “I’m not feeling well,” I told her. She nodded and rose and got me a cup of water. She had round, kind eyes and a small, humorless mouth.
I was uncertain as to whether this water was potable. She noticed my hesitation. “Drink the water, sir. You look warm.”
After I drank, she nodded and said, “You may go to the church and pray now, sir.”
I walked across the courtyard to the basilica, removed my shoes, and made my way to an empty pew. The floor was surprisingly cool against my feet, but an empty pew was not so easy to find, given the number of worshipping Indians present, despite its being a weekday. The interior of the basilica was just as handsome as its exterior. The ceiling and walls were white; the floor, pews, wooden chandeliers, and joinery were cocoa brown; the stained-glass windows had a candy maker’s splash of red and blue and orange. Above all fourteen stations of the cross, a giant fan turned quietly, which proved magically effective in cooling the church down. Before many of the stations of the cross were freestanding easels that held large, garish portraits of the Twelve. The portraits had pretty obviously been hijacked from the Internet, blown up, printed onto poster board, painted over, and attached to the easels. Quite a few of the Twelve resembled mid-1980s American television hunks. James the Lesser looked quite a bit li
ke Thomas Magnum, and John had a mullet gloriously similar to Greg Evigan’s from My Two Dads. Now that I was looking at these portraits closely, it seemed increasingly likely that they were repurposed photographs of Thomas Magnum and whatever the name of Greg Evigan’s character in My Two Dads had been.
Jesus was on his cross in the back of the basilica, behind the altar, distant, wan, and violated, as he always was. Had any other religion settled upon such a pessimistic, but demonstrably true, organizing symbol as to how the mechanisms of earthly power really worked? Nearby, beneath the sixth station of the cross—wherein Veronica wipes the face of Jesus, which has no scriptural basis—was a portrait of Thomas, which seemed to be one of the few apostolic portraits here that had not been based on a cast member of Riptide or Simon & Simon. The resulting image, muddy and only partially competent, was of a balding man holding a spear.
My knees sank into the pew’s plush, comfy kneeler—a sensation I had not felt in two decades. The last two times I attended Mass with my father, during my senior year of high school, I refused either to kneel or to pray. I no longer believed, I told my father, so why should I go through the motions of celestial obedience? Many members of my family initially regarded my loss of faith as part of my “journey.” They were sure my journey would eventually bring me back around. Sitting there, I remembered two things about going to Mass with my father: he never took Communion because of his and my mother’s divorce, and he always tapped his heart three times, with solemn insistence, after the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. I asked him about his ritual once. His eyes filled with such alarm that I instantly knew his heart tapping had something to do with a loss or devastation: his parents’ early deaths, his divorce, his wounding in Vietnam. There was no reason for me to invade that space. Maybe that was the best simple explanation for religion: it filled our spaces.
I stared at bald, spear-carrying Thomas, whom I had come to see, whom I had become unwell to see. I tapped my own heart three times, just as I had once watched my father do. Thomas, I am sick. Thomas, I ask you here today, how credible is the Indian media? Thomas, where is the nearest Domino’s Pizza?
To my utter surprise, part of me wanted to pray right now, but prayer without a direct object was merely thought. I lifted myself off the kneeler and sat back against the hard, handsomely carved pew and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my notebook and pen were on the floor. I had been asleep, it turned out, for thirty minutes. Falling asleep in church had an esteemed tradition that went all the way back to the Acts of the Apostles, when, in Troas, a young man named Eutychus nods off while Paul speaks, falls out of a window, and dies, thereby becoming what one scholar calls the “first recorded Christian to fall asleep during a long-winded sermon.”
The only remaining building left to visit was Thomas’s shrine, which was located under the basilica’s altar. Even so, to get there, you had to move through a separate building, part of which was a museum and part of which offered blessings, Communion, and counseling from an on-site priest. Before entering the shrine, I drank six glasses of gaggingly sweet iced tea from the basilica concessions stand, which despite the heat was doing a mean business selling cup after paper cup of hot coffee and tea to thirsty Indians.
I removed my shoes at the museum door. The museum was small, as was its selection of artifacts: a painting of Chennai in the seventeenth century, another painting of Chennai’s old Saint Thomas Church, yet another painting of the modern Santhome Basilica. Various bronze friezes commemorated India’s Christian history. A few unusually dubious relics were on display, including the tip of the alleged spear that killed Thomas.
I headed down into the shrine, where I was greeted by this plaque: ONLY THREE CHURCHES IN THE WHOLE WORLD ARE BUILT OVER THE TOMB OF AN APOSTLE OF JESUS CHRIST. It smelled as though many barrels of incense had been burned down here over the years: two shallow sniffs turned into a headache annunciation. In the middle of the first room I passed through was a water-filled brass bowl the size of a semitruck tire; floating on the water’s surface were two dozen red and white carnations. Two side doors—an entrance and an exit—angled off toward the shrine itself.
Beside the shrine’s entrance was a diorama habitat, the kind you find in old-school natural history museums, with plaster people, fake greenery, molded wax water, and matte vistas on the too-close back wall. The action portrayed within was that of a huge-nosed, swarthy man preparing to spear Thomas in the back. This aggressor, a pop-eyed murdering beast, wore a turban and had a scorpion tattoo on his forearm. The saintly, kneeling figure before him did not resemble a first-century Palestinian Jew so much as a nineteenth-century Englishman.
The cheap reverence of the appalling diorama nicely prepared me for the shrine itself, which was even worse. Low ceilings. Poundingly artless light. Dirty Formica floor. Cheap wood-paneled walls. Dusty corner-mounted stereo speakers, the covers of which were frayed and shroudy with cobwebs. An empty keyboard stand pushed off to the side of the space. It looked like some VFW hall devoted to servicing the veterans of a disgraced war. According to one of the books I picked up in the bookstore, Thomas’s shrine had been built in 1906 and was once faced “with beautiful marble, so that pilgrims could have easy access to the bottom of the crypt and that mass could be conveniently held right over the grave.” The beautiful marble was no more, but the pilgrims remained present in force.
Thomas was kept in a glass case near the back, over which a white tablecloth had been draped, Thomas’s famous words “My Lord and my God” written across the hem. This was the busiest, fullest apostolic shrine I had yet seen. Two Indian women were kneeling in front of Thomas’s case, praying quietly, and from time to time kissing the glass. About two dozen other Indians were in the room, most of whom were sitting motionless in their pews. I walked back into the anteroom and asked the woman sitting at the information desk (a fold-out card table) if I was seeing a normal amount of visitors today. She waggled her head and said she believed so, yes.
What exactly Thomas’s Indian shrine contained was a matter of historical confusion. At least since the fourteenth century, Indian Christians have affected to believe Thomas’s remains were here in Chennai. But the traditions associated with his remains are equivocal even by apostolic standards. Clement of Alexandria, one of the first Christians to weigh in on Thomas’s death, believed Thomas perished from natural causes in an unspecified place, information he credited to a heterodox Christian named Heracleon; other early reports place his death in Edessa rather than India. Later, a different death tradition developed, and from that grew another tradition, which was that in the third century Thomas’s remains and relics were carried by Syrian Christians from India to Edessa on July 3, which has since become Thomas’s feast day.*11 His relics were apparently kept in a grand Edessan martyrium until 1258 (a fourth-century visitor described it as “very great, very beautiful and of new construction, well worthy to be the house of God”), after which they were sent to Ortona, Italy, by way of the Greek island Chios, due to fears of Muslim ruination. In Ortona’s Concattedrale di San Tommaso Apostolo,*12 Thomas’s relics are still displayed and venerated. One of Thomas’s arms was supposedly brought from Ortona to Kerala, on the west coast of India, in 1953, where it is still displayed in a church. Meanwhile, a Roman church, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, claims Thomas’s finger, which is kept in a silver repository affixed with a wax seal that attests to the finger’s authenticity: the doubter himself now protected from doubt. What possible piece of Thomas did that leave for Chennai? His toe? Eyelid? According to local tradition, Thomas’s reliquary in Chennai had been opened on four occasions: at some ancient time no one agrees on; in the thirteenth century; in the sixteenth century, by the Portuguese, when they were building their church; and in the early eighteenth century, by the bishop of Mylapore, who sprinkled local Christians with a handful of dust gathered up from the tomb itself. Perhaps that was all that was left of Thomas in India. Dust.
When I walked back into the shrine, half of
Thomas’s visitors were asleep in their pews. I wanted very much to join them but instead walked up to the reliquary. Behind the glass was a supine statue of Thomas covered by a red cloth robe. Parallel to Thomas, set just against his arm, was a spear. While I scribbled impressions in my notebook, two Americans, a man and his daughter, came in and stood next to me. The man was in his fifties, overweight and overdressed, wearing expensively tasseled brown loafers. His daughter was a small, pale girl with the straight black hair of a young squaw in some patriotic Thanksgiving painting. I gathered they had not been in Chennai for long because they still seemed relatively happy.
“Terrible,” I said, while scribbling a spirited jeremiad in my notebook, “isn’t it?”
The man sighed. “It’s not great, no.”
“This is the worst apostolic tomb I’ve ever seen.”
The man looked over at me. “Seen a lot of apostolic tombs, have you?”
“Dude, you have no idea.”
His daughter peered into the wall-mounted glass case next to the reliquary and made a bright sound of discovery. “One of Thomas’s bones,” she said. I had a look for myself. The fragment was no bigger than a piece of perforation plucked from the edge of a postage stamp.
IX.
A young man who worked at the hotel put me in touch with a family friend of his, an Indian writer, he said, who knew a bit about Chennai and its Thomas cult—and what the Indian church had to gain from preaching its inviolate Thomas traditions. When I called the man, I asked him if he believed Thomas had made it to India. The man laughed and said, “No, of course not.”
We agreed we would meet at Saint Thomas Basilica the day before I left Chennai, walk around, do an interview, and have lunch. The morning of our interview, I was feeling well enough to walk to the basilica. I made it perhaps a fourth of the way to Mylapore when there descended upon Chennai a storm of black-skied savagery. The streets filled up with rain almost instantly, saturating the air with the smell of waste. The clouds seemed to squeeze the light itself out of the morning, and the trees shook as though some mighty hand were distressing them at their base. Everyone ran for cover. In my case, this meant the lobby of a hair-removal clinic, where I was joined by at least twenty Indians. The nurse of the clinic was at first annoyed. Then she got a look outside and sighed. The storm went on for ninety minutes and left much of the city flooded and without power. I already knew, standing shoulder to shoulder to shoulder with my fellow refuge seekers in the lobby of a hair-removal clinic, that I would not be seeing or interviewing the Indian skeptic today, or ever. My time in India would end in disaster, just as it had begun.