Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  “By that time, our guruji had returned, and he gathered the community. By early afternoon all the gurus and matajis were there guiding her and sitting together around the bed. Others came to touch her feet. The room was full of people, and so was the veranda outside. Everyone was chanting the namokara mantra, singing bhajans and kirtans and reading the Jain texts which explain the nature of the soul. Everyone was there to support Prayogamati, to give her courage as she began to slip away.

  “Around 4 p.m., the doctor said he thought she was about to die, but she held on until 9 p.m. It was very peaceful in the end. It was dark by then, and the lamps were all lit around the room. Her breathing had been very difficult that day, but towards the end it became easier. I held her hand, the monks chanted and her eyes closed. For a while, even I didn’t know she had gone. She just slipped away.

  “When I realised she had left, I wept bitterly. We are not supposed to do this, and our guruji frowned at me. But I couldn’t help myself. I had followed all the steps correctly until she passed away, but then everything I had bottled up came pouring out. Her body was still there, but she wasn’t in it. It was no longer her.

  “The next day, 15 December, she was cremated. They burned her at 4 p.m. All the devotees in Indore came: over 2,000 people. It was a Sunday. The following morning, at dawn, I got up and headed off. There was no reason to stay.

  “It was the first time as a nun that I had ever walked anywhere alone.”

  The following day, after she had finished her breakfast, I went to say goodbye to Prasannamati Mataji.

  “Her time was fixed,” she said quickly reverting to the subject of Prayogamati, like a pigeon returning to its coop. “She passed on. She’s no longer here. I have to accept that reality. All things decay and disappear in time.”

  Mataji fell silent, apparently lost in thought. There was a long pause. “Now my friend has gone,” she said eventually, “it is easier for me to go too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have seen over forty sallekhanas,” she said. “But after Prayogamati’s, I realised it was time I should set out to that end as well.”

  “You mean you are thinking of following …?”

  “I am on the path already,” said Mataji. “I have started cutting down the food I eat. I have given up milk or curds, salt and sugar, guava and papaya, leafy vegetables and ladies’ fingers. Each month I give up something new. All I want to do now is to visit a few more holy places before I go.”

  “But why?” I asked. “You are not ill like she was. Isn’t it an absurd waste of a life? You’re only thirty-eight.”

  “I told you before,” she said. “Sallekhana is the aim of all Jain munis. It is the last renouncement. First you give up your home, then your possessions. Finally you give up your body.”

  “You make it sound very simple.”

  “When you begin to understand the nature of reality, it is very simple. It is a good way—the very best way—to breathe your last, and leave the body. It is no more than leaving one house to enter another.”

  “Do you think you will meet her in another life?” I said. “Is that it?”

  “It is uncertain,” said Mataji. “Our scriptures are full of people who meet old friends and husbands and wives and teachers from previous lives. But no one can control these things.”

  Again Mataji paused, and looked out of the window. “Though we both may have many lives ahead of us, in many worlds,” she said, “who knows whether we will meet again? And if we do meet, in our new bodies, who is to say that we will recognise each other?”

  She looked at me sadly as I got up to go and said simply, “These things are not in our hands.”

  The Dancer of Kannur

  In the midnight shadows of a forest clearing bounded on one side by a small stream and a moonlit paddy field, and on the other by the darkness of a rubber plantation and a green canopy of coconut palms, lit only by a bonfire and a carpet of flickering camphor lights, a large crowd has gathered, silhouetted against the flames. Most have walked many miles through the darkness to get here. They are waiting and watching for the moment when, once a year, the gods come down to earth, and dance.

  For twenty minutes now a troupe of six sweat-glistening half-naked, dark-skinned Dalit drummers have been raising their tempo: the insistent beats they are rapping out on the goat-hide cenda drums with their small, hard tamarind-wood drumsticks are getting gradually yet distinctly louder and faster and more frenzied. The song telling the myth of the god about to be incarnated has been sung, and in front of the shrine, at the centre of the clearing, the first of the dancers has just been possessed—seized by the gods, as they put it. Now he is frenetically pirouetting around the clearing, strutting and jabbing, unsheathed sword in one hand, bow and a quiver of arrows in the other. Instinctively, the crowd draws back, towards the shadows.

  Behind the shrine, on the edge of the clearing, there is a palm-thatch hut, and this has been commandeered by the theyyam troupe as their green room. Inside, the next dancer to go on, a fanged female figure representing the goddess Bhagavati, with a red-painted face, supporting a huge red-gilt, mirrored headdress, is getting ready to summon the deity. The young male dancer who is about to take in the goddess is putting the final touches to his breastplate and adjusting the headdress, so that the facets flash in the flames.

  Prostrate on a palm mat amid the discarded clothes, the unused costumes and the half-made headdresses, immobile at the rear of the hut, lies the dark and muscular figure of the man I have come to see. Hari Das, one of the most celebrated and articulate theyyam dancers in the area, is naked but for a white lungi, and he is lying on his back as a young boy applies makeup to his face and body. His torso and upper arms are covered with yellow paint, and his cheeks are smeared with orange turmeric, which gives off a strongly pungent smell. Two black paisleys are painted around his eyes and a pair of mango-shaped patches on his cheeks are daubed with bright, white rice paste. On these, using a slim strip of coconut leaf, the makeup boy is skilfully drawing loops and whorls and scorpion-tail trumpet spirals, then finishing the effects with a thin red stripe across his cheek bones.

  I sit down on the mud floor beside him, and we chat as the makeup boy begins the slow transformation of Hari Das into the god Vishnu. I ask whether he is nervous, and how the possession comes about: what does it feel like to be taken over by a god?

  “It’s difficult to describe,” says Hari Das. “Before it happens I always get very tense, even though I have been doing this for twenty-six years now. It’s not that I am nervous of the god coming. It’s more the fear that he might refuse to come. It’s the intensity of your devotion that determines the intensity of the possession. If you lose your feeling of devotion, if it even once becomes routine or unthinking, the gods may stop coming.”

  He pauses as the makeup boy continues applying face paint from the pigment he is mixing on the strip of banana leaf in his left hand. Hari Das opens his mouth, and the makeup boy carefully applies some rouge to his lips.

  “It’s like a blinding light,” he says eventually. “When the drums are playing and your makeup is finished, they hand you a mirror and you look at your face, transformed into that of a god. Then it comes. It’s as if there is a sudden explosion of light. A vista of complete brilliance opens up—it blinds the senses.”

  “Are you aware of what is happening?”

  “No,” he replies. “That light stays with you all the way through the performance. You become the deity. You lose all fear. Even your voice changes. The god comes alive and takes over. You are just the vehicle, the medium. In the trance it is God who speaks, and all the acts are the acts of the god—feeling, thinking, speaking. The dancer is an ordinary man, but this being is divine. Only when the headdress is removed does it end.”

  “What is it like when you come to from the trance?” I ask.

  “It’s like the incision of a surgeon,” he says, making a cutting gesture with one hand. “Suddenly it’s all ove
r, it’s gone. You don’t have any access to what happened during the possession or the performance. You can’t remember anything that happened in the trance. There is only a sensation of relief, as if you’ve off-loaded something.”

  The second dancer is now gazing intently in a small hand mirror at the entrance of the hut, identifying himself with the goddess. As I watch, the dancer stamps his feet, ringing the bells and cowrie shells on his anklets. He stamps again, loudly and more abruptly. Then he jerks his body suddenly to one side, as if hit by a current of electricity, before stretching out his hands and sinking into a strange crouching position. His body is quivering, his hands shaking, and his eyes are flicking from side to side. The figure who had been still, silently staring, only seconds earlier is now transformed, twisting his head in an eerie series of movements that is part tropical fish, part stinging insect, part reptile, part bird of paradise. Then he is gone, bounding out into the clearing, under the stars, closely followed by two attendants holding burning splints.

  Hari Das is now getting to his feet and preparing to put on his own costume. I ask: “Is this a full-time job, becoming a god?”

  “No,” he replies, a little sadly. “For nine months a year I work as a manual labourer. I build wells during the week, then at the weekend I work in Tellicherry Central Jail. As a warder.”

  “You’re a prison warder?”

  “I need to make a living. I am poor enough to be ready to do virtually anything if someone pays me a daily wage. It’s not for pleasure—it’s very dangerous work.”

  “In what sense?”

  “The inmates rule the jail. Many have got political backing. No one dares to mess with them. The jail authorities are totally under their control.” He shrugs. “Every day the local newspaper has some new horror story. They are always cutting off the noses and hands of their political rivals on the parade ground, or in the cells at night.

  “In fact, there are two jails around here: one for the RSS [a far right-wing Hindu organisation] in Tellicherry, and the other in Kannur for their political rivals, the Communist Party [CPM]. The two parties are at war: only yesterday the RSS attacked a CPM village near Mahe, killing three people with home-made bombs. In Kannur it is said that the mouth doesn’t speak, the sword does. If you abuse someone’s father he may forgive you. But if you abuse his party, then he will instantly cut you into pieces. Both jails contain those the police catch for such crimes and they’re notorious for housing all the worst political goons [thugs]. If a Communist ever ends up in Tellicherry or an RSS kar sevak [activist] is put in Kannur you can guarantee he won’t last twenty-four hours—or at least will have lost several body parts by the time he comes to eat his next breakfast.”

  “Can’t this be stopped?” I ask.

  “Occasionally someone tries,” says Hari Das. “One day a new superintendent came here from Bihar and severely punished one of the big gang leaders. Before he got home that night, the superintendent’s home had been burned to the ground.”

  Hari Das laughs. “All the prisoners have mobile phones and can order any sort of act from inside the prison. The head warden once brought in a jammer to try to stop them, but within the week someone had got to it and poured seawater into it so that it jammed itself. That was the end of that.”

  He smiles. “I keep my head down. I never beat a prisoner, and just try to avoid being beaten up myself. I know that if I tried to do the job properly I would soon be beheaded—I would no longer have a body. Even the superintendent has the same worry. We all just try to get through the day alive, and intact.”

  “And all the theyyam dancers lead double lives like this?”

  “Of course,” says Hari Das. “Chamundi over there makes wedding decorations and Narasimha is a waiter at a hotel. That boy playing Bhagavati is a bus conductor and Guligan the Destroyer”—he nodded at another dancer still putting on makeup in the back of the hut—“is a toddy tapper. It’s his job to pluck coconuts from the top of the palm trees and collect the fermented coconut juice.”

  “So you are only part-time gods?”

  “Only during the theyyam season, from December to February. We give up our jobs and become theyyam artists. For those months we become gods. Everything changes. We don’t eat meat or fish and are forbidden to sleep with our wives. We bring blessings to the village and the villagers, and exorcise evil spirits. We are the vehicle through which people can thank the gods for fulfilling their prayers and granting their wishes. Though we are all Dalits even the most bigoted and casteist Namboodiri Brahmins worship us, and queue up to touch our feet.”

  His costume is now on and he picks up the mirror, preparing to summon the deity. “For three months of the year we are gods,” he says. “Then in March, when the season ends, we pack away our costumes. And after that, at least in my case, it’s back to jail.”

  Separated from the rest of India by the towering laterite mountain walls of the Western Ghats, the wet, green and tropical slither of coastline stretching along the south-west flank of the Indian subcontinent is perhaps the most fecund and bucolic landscape in India—“God’s own country,” as the Malayalis call their state.

  For many centuries Kerala was the Indian terminus of the Spice Route, and the most important trading post in the great medieval trading network which stretched from Venice through Egypt down to the Red Sea and across the Gulf to India. The ancient trade in the spices and pepper that for centuries grew—and still grow—so abundantly here brought generations of incomers to this part of India, all of whom in turn slowly became absorbed into its richly composite civilisation.

  Kerala was probably the biblical Ophir, from where King Solomon received apes, ivory and peacocks. It was at this period that pioneering Jewish traders seem to have first crossed the Red and Arabian seas to bring the pungent flavours of India to the Middle East and the Mediterranean world. The now-vanished Keralan port of Muziris, described by Pliny the Elder as primum emporium Indiae, was the spice entrepôt to which the Roman Red Sea merchant fleet headed each year to buy pepper, pearls, spices and Indian slave girls for the Mediterranean market.

  The Arabs followed the Jews and the Romans. Then on 18 May 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama reached the Malabar coast from Europe, intent on wresting the spice trade from the Moors. The beach where da Gama landed, a little to the north of Calicut, is today marked by an obelisk. Two hours’ drive farther north is the coastal town of Tellicherry, site not only of Hari Das’s notorious jail, but also of one of the earliest East India Company trading posts.

  Behind the grim black stone walls with pepper-pot sentry posts, and beyond the gatehouse with its Elizabethan belfry decorated with unexpected statues of two Jacobean gentlemen in cavalier breaches and wide-brimmed hats, lie a succession of spice warehouses, arsenals and dungeons. Here the very first Britons in India stocked their merchandise and made plans to expand out from their warehouses to seize control of the wider hinterland. Some of them lie here still, resting in their domed classical tombs on the headland above the breakers where once were loaded the cargoes that went to spice the stews of Shakespeare’s London.

  The fertility of the soil, which attracted centuries of merchants, still defines this land. Everything, it seems, is teeming with life here, and the life spills out from the backyards onto the backwaters and waterways, the wide lagoons and overgrown canals. From the steps of the canals comes the slap of wet cloth on stone where the women in smocks stand ankle deep in water, busy with their washing, or peeling their vegetables, or cleaning the day’s rice amid a scattering of blue water hyacinths. Nearby, their menfolk are repairing their boats or weaving coir ropes under the Chinese fishing nets, while naked little boys stand soaping themselves, up to their ankles in river mud. The houses are covered with trellises for the climbing roses, and washing is hung up to dry between palms. Flotillas of ducks quack and stretch their wings. An egret suddenly swoops low over the water, a flash of white against the green.

  All this seems the most gentle, be
nign and benevolent landscape imaginable; yet in reality Kerala has always been one of the most conservative, socially oppressive and rigidly hierarchical societies in India. When the British traveller and doctor Francis Buchanan passed through the area at the beginning of the nineteenth century he found caste inequalities and restrictions so severe that a warrior-caste Nair was considered within his rights instantly to behead and kill a lower-caste man if the latter dared to appear on the same road at the same time. The exact distances that the different castes had to keep from each other were laid down in arcane legal codes, as was the specific way that different castes should tie their lungis or even dress their hair.

  As late as the early years of the twentieth century, lower-caste tenants were still regularly being murdered by their Nair landlords for failing to present sweets as tokens of their submission. Today people are rarely murdered for violations of caste restrictions—except sometimes in the case of unauthorised cross-caste love affairs—but in the presence of persons of the upper castes, Dalits are still expected to bow their heads and stand at a respectful distance.

  These inequalities are the fertile soil from which theyyam grew, and the dance form has always been a conscious and ritualised inversion of the usual structures of Keralan life: for it is not the pure and sanctified Brahmins into whom the gods choose to incarnate, but the shunned and insulted Dalits. The entire system is free from Brahmin control. The theyyams take place not in Brahminical temples but in small shrines in the holy places and sacred groves of the countryside, and the priests are not Brahmin but Dalit. The only role for the upper caste is that, as land owners, they sometimes have the right to appoint a particular family as hereditary theyyam dancers for a particular shrine, rather like a village squire in England having the right to choose the parish priest.