Nine Lives

by William Dalrymple

  After an hour or so of this, the queues began to dwindle, and the drums struck up again. Such was the reassuring calm of the gods’ surgery that nothing prepared me for what followed. As the tempo rose, the attendants handed both deities coconuts, which they took over to a sacrificial altar and threw down with such force that they exploded.

  Then the gods were handed huge cleavers. From one side a pair of squawking chickens was produced, each held by the feet and flapping and crowing frantically. Another attendant appeared, holding an offering of rice on a palm leaf plate. Seconds later, the cleaver descended and the chickens were beheaded. The head of each was thrown away and blood gushed out in a great jet on to the rice. Then, as the drums reached a climax, both deities lifted the flapping carcasses up to their faces, blood haemorrhaging over their costumes and headdresses. Together Chamundi and Vishnumurti placed the severed neck of a chicken in their mouths, each drinking deeply of the blood for a full minute. Only then did they put the carcass down, on to its feet, so that the headless chicken ran off, scrabbling and flapping as if still alive. Only after another full minute had passed did the chickens finally pitch over and come to rest at the edge of the crowd.

  One last triumphal lap of the shrine followed before the deities bowed to their devotees and headed back to the green room. There, as they stood with their hands raised in namaskar, their headdresses were removed by the attendants. By the time I had made it through the surging crowd, Vishnumurti had gone and Hari Das was back again. The makeup boy removed his busk and breastplate and he lay down on his back on a palm mat. He was spent, breathing heavily with his eyes closed. Finally he opened his eyes, and seeing me, smiled. I asked if he felt any of the spirit of the deity remaining in him.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s all over—gone. Now there is no relationship with that state of being. All you feel is exhaustion, and lightness, and sometimes hunger too. But mostly, just deep exhaustion.”

  “When is your next theyyam?” I asked.

  “Tonight. The kavu is about three hours away by bus.”

  “It’s another all-nighter?”

  “Of course.” Hari Das shrugged. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “The season may be hard work, but it’s what I live for, what I look forward to for the rest of the year.”

  The boy who had played Chamundi had his costume off now, and was heading down to the stream below the clearing to bathe. He looked at Hari Das to see if he was going to come too, but the latter indicated that he should go ahead.

  “These two months are very happy,” he said. “I am very satisfied. I love coming out to remote places like this to perform. Theyyam has made me what I am. All my self-esteem comes from this. I am here in a village far from mine because of my fame as a theyyam artist. The rest of the year, no one here would even greet me or invite me to share a cup of tea with them. But during the season no one knows me as Hari Das. To them I am like a temple, if not a god. Suddenly I have status and respect.”

  The makeup boy was now cleaning the pigment, the sweat and the congealed chicken blood off his face.

  “Is it hard going back to normal life?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course. All of us find it so.” He smiled. “At the end of the season we just pack up our things and prepare to go back to our jobs—to being a bus conductor, or a well builder, or life in prison. There is a total disconnect with this life. We are all sad. But at least we all know it will come back the next season.”

  Hari Das got up and together we walked down towards the steps of the makeshift ghat where Chamundi was already neck deep in water, washing himself clean.

  “The other ten months are very hard,” said Hari Das. “But there is no way around it. That’s reality, isn’t it? That’s life. Life is hard.”

  The Daughters of Yellamma

  Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,” said Rani Bai. “Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one who is gentle …”

  She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. “But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.”

  “And eight of them every day,” said her friend Kaveri. “Sometimes ten. Unknown people. What kind of life is that?”

  “We have a song,” said Rani. “‘Everyone sleeps with us, but no one marries us. Many embrace us, but no one protects.’”

  “Every day my children ask, ‘Who is my father?’ They do not like having a mother who is in this business.”

  “Once I tried to open a bank account with my son,” said Rani. “We went to fill in the form, and the manager asked: ‘Father’s name?’ After that, my son was angry. He said I should not have brought him into the world like this.”

  “We are sorry we have to do this work. But what is the alternative?”

  “Who will give us jobs? We are all illiterate.”

  “And the future,” said Kaveri. “What have we to look forward to?”

  “When we are not beautiful, when our bodies become ugly, then we will be all alone.”

  “If we live long enough to be old and to be ugly,” said Kaveri. “So many are dying.”

  “One of our community died last week. Two others last month.”

  “In my village, four younger girls have died,” said Kaveri. “My own brother has the disease. He used to be a truck driver, and knew all the girls along the roads. Now he just lies at home drinking, saying, ‘What difference does it make? I will die anyway.’”

  She turned to face me. “He drinks anything he can get,” she said. “If someone told him his own urine had alcohol in it, he would drink that too.”

  “That can’t be easy to live with.”

  Kaveri laughed harshly. “If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer,” she said, “the leaves of that tree would fall like tears. My brother is totally bedridden now. He has fevers and diarrhoea.”

  She paused. “He used to be such a handsome man, with a fine face and large eyes. Now those eyes are closed, and his face is covered in boils and lesions.”

  “Yellamma never wanted it to be like this,” said Rani.

  “The goddess is sitting silently,” said Kaveri. “We don’t know what feelings she has about us. Who really knows what she is thinking?”

  “No,” said Rani, firmly shaking her head. “The goddess looks after us. When we are in distress, she comes to us. Sometimes in our dreams. Sometimes in the form of one of her children.”

  “It is not the goddess’s doing.”

  “The world has made it like this.”

  “The world, and the disease.”

  “The goddess dries our tears,” said Rani. “If you come to her with a pure heart, she will take away your sadness and your sorrows. What more can she do?”

  It was the goddess Yellamma we had come to Saundatti to see—Rani Bai, Kaveri and me. We had driven over that morning from Belgaum, through the rolling green plains of cotton country high on the Deccan plateau in northern Karnataka. The women, who had been dedicated to the goddess as children, normally took the old slow bus to visit their mother’s temple, so they had jumped at the chance to make the journey to see her in the comfort of a taxi.

  It was hot and muggy, not long after the end of the rains, and the sky was bright and cloudless. The road led through long avenues of ancient banyan trees, each with an intricate lattice of aerial roots. These were cut into an arch over the tarmac so that at times the road seemed to pass through a long dark wooden tunnel, with the roots rising above and to either side of the road, like flying buttresses flanking the long nave of a Gothic cathedral.

  As we neared Saundatti, however, the green tunnel came to an end, and the fields on either side gave way to drier, dustier, poorer country. The trees, the cane breaks and the cotton fields were replaced by dry strips of sunflowers. Goats picked wearily through dusty stubble. Women in ragged clothing sold onions laid out on palm-weave mats placed along the side
of the road. Existence here felt more marginal, more tenacious.

  After some time, a long red stone ridge appeared out of the heat haze. The ridge resolved itself into the great hogback of Saundatti, and at the top, rising up from near-vertical cliffs, was the silhouette of the temple of Yellamma. Below, and to one side, stretched a lake of an almost unearthly blue. It was here, according to the legend, that the story had begun.

  Yellamma was the wife of the powerful rishi Jamadagni, who was himself an incarnation of the god Shiva—he had arisen out of the ritual fire while his father, the King of Kashmir, was performing a mahayagna, or great sacrifice. The couple and their four sons lived in a simple wooden hermitage by the lake. Here, the sage punished his body and performed great feats of austerity. After the birth of his fourth child, these included a vow of complete chastity.

  Every day Yellamma served her husband, and fetched water from the river for his rituals. For this, she used a pot made of sand, and carried it home in the coils of a live snake. One day, as Yellamma was fetching water, she saw a heavenly being, a gandharva, making love to his consort by the banks of the river. It was many years since Yellamma had enjoyed the pleasures of love, and the sight attracted her. Watching from behind a rock, hearing the lovers’ cries of pleasure, she found herself longing to take the place of the beloved.

  The sudden rush of desire destroyed her composure. When she crept away to get water for her husband as usual, she found to her horror she could no longer create a pot from sand, and that her yogic powers of concentration had vanished. When she returned home without the water, Jamadagni immediately guessed what had happened. In his rage, he cursed his wife. In seconds, Yellamma became sickly and ugly, covered in boils and festering sores. She was turned out of her home, cursed to wander the roads of the Deccan, begging for alms. No one recognised her as the once-beautiful wife of Jamadagni.

  Later, when she returned home and asked for forgiveness, Jamadagni was angrier still. Disturbed from completing his great sacrifice, he ordered each of his four sons to behead their outcaste mother. The first three refused to do so, but the youngest and most powerful, Parashurama, finally agreed; he cut off his mother’s head with a single stroke. Pleased with such obedience, Jamadagni gave Parashurama a boon: whatever he asked would be done. Parashurama, however, was not just an obedient son; he was also a loving one, and without hesitation he asked for Jamadagni to revive his mother. The sage had no choice but to fulfil his promise, and he did as Parashurama had asked. But still Jamadagni would not be appeased. He vowed never to look at Yellamma’s face again, and went off to continue his feats of asceticism in a cave high in the Himalayas. There, he was later joined by Parusharama, whose story is told in the Mahabharata, where he appears as the teacher of powerful mantras and secret weapons to another wandering outcaste, Karna.

  The story is a harsh and violent one, and Jamadagni belongs to that class of irascible holy men who fill Sanskrit literature with their fiery and unforgiving anger. In contrast, the goddess Yellamma, like Sita in the Ramayana, is a victim, wrongly suspected of infidelities she never actually committed. Though she had been a good wife, her husband threw her out, disfigured her beauty and cursed her to beg for a living. She was rejected by all.

  Though the story is full of sadness and injustice, devadasis—as those who have been dedicated, or “married,” to a god or goddess are known—like Rani Bai, tell the tale as they believe that it shows how their goddess is uniquely sympathetic to their fate. After all, their lives are little better than hers: cursed for crimes of love outside the bonds of marriage, rejected by their children, condemned like Yellamma to live on the roads, begging for favours, disfigured by sadness and without the protection of a husband.

  I got a little glimpse of the tensions in the life of a devadasi on arrival in Saundatti. We had gone to a tea shop near the lake, at my suggestion. It was a bad idea. Devadasis are a common sight in Saundatti, where they often beg in the bazaars on Yellamma’s holy days of Tuesday and Friday, and during her month-long festival, holding small statues of the goddess on their heads. But they don’t usually brave the tea shops on the main street, at least not if they are as striking as Rani Bai. Long before the glasses of hot, sweet chai had arrived, the farmers at the other tables had started pointing at Rani Bai, and gossiping.

  They had come from their villages to sell their cotton at the market, and having got a good price, were now in a boisterous mood. Although both Kaveri and Rani Bai had the red tikka of the married woman on their forehead, Rani Bai’s muttu—her devadasi necklace of red and white beads—and her jewellery, her painted face and her overly dressy silk sari had given her away. Kaveri was almost an old woman now, or at least looked like one; in fact she was only a few years older than me, in her late forties. Though you could see that she had once been beautiful, the harshness of her life, and the many sadnesses she had suffered, had turned her prematurely halfway to a matron, and she no longer attracted attention.

  But Rani Bai was different. She was at least ten years younger than Kaveri, in her late thirties, and was tall, long-limbed and still undeniably lovely. She had a big, painted mouth, full lips, a firm brown body and an attractively bawdy and lively manner. She did not keep her gaze down, as Hindu women are supposed to in the villages; instead, she spoke with a loud voice and every time she gesticulated about something—and her hands were constantly dancing about as she talked—her bracelets rattled. She wore a bright lavender silk sari, and had rings sparkling on each of her toes and up the curve of each ear. So the farmers in their cotton dhotis with walrus moustaches sat there as we sipped our tea together, looking greedily at her and undressing her with their eyes.

  Before long, they were loudly speculating at the relationship she might have with me, the firangi; her cost; what she would and would not do; the pros and cons of her figure, wondering where she worked and whether she gave discounts. Rani had been telling me in the car about the privileges of being a devadasi, about the way people respected her, how she was regarded as auspicious and was called even to upper-caste weddings to give her blessings. So the incident, and the open disrespect she had been shown, had particularly upset her.

  When we finally fled the chai shop, to a chorus of laughter and bawdy remarks from the farmers, her mood changed. No longer was she in feisty holiday spirits, and as she sat under a banyan tree beside the lake at the edge of the town, she became melancholy. It was then that she told me how she had come to this life.

  “I was only six when my parents dedicated me,” she said. “I had no feelings at the time, except wondering: why have they done this? We were very poor and had many debts. My father was desperate for money as he had drunk and gambled away all that he had earned and more, and he said, ‘This thing will make us rich, it will make us live decently.’

  “At that age, I had no devotional feelings for the goddess, and dreamed only of having more money and living a luxurious life in a pukka house with a tile roof and concrete walls. So I was happy with this idea, though I still didn’t understand where the money would come from, or what I would have to do to get it.

  “Soon after I had had my first period, my father sold me to a shepherd in a neighbouring village for Rs 500, a silk sari and a bag of millet. By that stage, I knew a little of what might lie ahead, for I had seen other neighbours who had done this to their daughters, and saw people coming and going from their houses. I had asked my parents all these questions, and repeated over and over again that I did not want to do sex work. They had nodded, and I thought they had agreed.

  “But, one day, they took me to another village on the pretext of looking after my sister’s newborn baby, and there I was forcibly offered to the shepherd. I was only fourteen years old.

  “It happened like this. The night we arrived with my sister, they killed a chicken and we had a great feast with rotis and rice—all the luxuries even the rich could dream of. Then my mother went home to our village, and I went to sleep with my aunt. I was asleep when the ma
n came, around nine. It was all planned.

  “I realised something was going to happen and started crying. But my aunt, who was also a devadasi, said, ‘You should not cry. This is your dharma, your duty, your work. It is inauspicious to cry.’ The man was about twenty-two, and very strong. My aunt left the house, and I tried to kick him and scratch him, but he took me by force. After that, he cheated me and never gave the full Rs 500 he had promised my father. Though I had given my body to him, he used me, and then cheated me.

  “The next morning, I shouted at my aunt. I said, ‘You are a whore and you have made me into a whore.’ She just laughed at me. Often, I still curse my mother. Because of that woman, my life has been wrecked. For two years, I was very upset, and we did not talk. During that time, I refused to do any sex work. Instead, I worked in the onion fields here, earning 50 paise a day.

  “Eventually, I went to Bombay with my devadasi aunt, who had promised to show me the city. We went by train and I was very excited as it was my first visit. I did not know that I would be tricked again. But when we arrived, she took me straight in a rickshaw to a brothel. There she handed me over to the gharwalli—the madam—who was a friend of hers.

  “The gharwalli was very sly. She did not force me, and she was very nice to me. She gave me lots of sweets and chocolates, and introduced me to the other girls. They were all dressed up in fine clothes and good saris with amazing jewellery on their wrists. I had never seen so much gold or so much silk! In fact, I had never seen anything like this on any woman in Belgaum. I thought this was the good life. The gharwalli offered my aunt Rs 2,000 for me, as I was very good-looking; but she did not ask me to do any dhanda [sex work] at first, and let me take my time. That first month, all I had to do was to help cook and clean the house, and I was happy with that. I liked Bombay. I ate fabulous biryani at the Sagar Hotel and once when I was in the streets I saw Amitabh Bachchan pass by in his car.