Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  What interested me was a remarkable newly constructed air-raid shelter in the shape of a tall and slender isosceles triangle of steel, and when I stopped in what had once been the main street to photograph it, a policeman extricated himself from its base to prohibit this. ‘Photography forbidden,’ he said, politely enough, with no trace of menace in his manner. He was quite happy to talk about the tower, describing it as an example of the inventive skills of the new Nicaragua. ‘Its shape prevents its demolition by the bombs of the attacker,’ he said. ‘Note that it is sharp at the top and therefore almost impossible to hit. A bomb that only just misses will slide down its steep side and bury itself in soft earth. We Sandinistas shall fight off attack from wherever it comes.’

  I praised the inventiveness of its makers and immediately we were good friends. There was a hot wind and the street was full of the scent of dust and ancient fires. Tiny drops of sweat had formed on the sides of the policeman’s nose and we both covered our nostrils against a white air-borne cloud, twisting slowly as it wandered by. The policeman was staring at the Cadillac, clearly fascinated, although under obligation to disapprove. ‘Es obsceno,’ he said, and I was quick to agree.

  ‘I know it’s obscene,’ I said, ‘but I was sent here by a newspaper, and I have to get around. This isn’t my choice.’

  He laughed. ‘My advice is to take it to a gas station and get them to smear sump oil over it.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘Anywhere I can find something to eat on the way?’

  ‘Place just down the road,’ he said. ‘I have to warn you this is Monday, so it’s bean stew.’

  ‘I was afraid so,’ I told him.

  ‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘They promise us meat by the end of the week.’

  Two nurses from the hospital came past, swinging their arms like soldiers to let it be known that they, too, had carried guns. Suddenly I noticed how attractive girls had become since the days, as I remembered them, when young females over-ate to become plump in accordance with male taste of those times. Now starvation, suffering—even sorrow—had carved away the flesh, and everywhere one looked a new and refined style of good looks having something about it of the classical Greek ideal had emerged, as Managua had become full of beautiful bean-stew faces.

  I watched the nurses disappear among the ruins, then turned round at a cry of exasperation from my policeman friend as, in defiance of many warning arrows, a ragged car with wheels of different sizes roared towards us down the one-way street. The policeman waved a limp protest as it rattled by. ‘It happens all the time,’ he said. “They’ve all gone crazy about freedom, so whenever there’s the chance to drive the wrong way down a street they do. The latest crazy thing is that traffic lights are supposed to interfere with personal choice, so they’re tearing them down all over the town. They’re out to prove we’re really free.’ An idea struck him. ‘By the way, someone’s going to heave a rock through that car’s windshield sooner or later. Instead of having a guy at the gas station go over it with sump oil, you could have them paint LIBERTAD in big letters all across the front. Now that really would go down well.’

  1997

  A Goddess Round Every Corner

  DAWN SPREADS A GLACIAL calm over the waters of Cochin, and slowly a muted profile of temples, godowns and palms emerges from the mist-bound promontories and islands over which the city is spread. Fishing boats styled in remotest antiquity slide with their patched sails past the Malabar Hotel gardens, as if dragged by ropes across a stage. The thick-leaved trees release their morning crows, and at 7 a.m. on the dot each member of the hotel staff is at his post to greet the passing guest with a sonorous ‘Good morning, sir,’ (or ‘madam’), which sounds like a salutation and blessing combined. The greeting is repeated ad infinitum as often as you pass, until the stroke of midday, when afternoon comes officially into its own.

  At eight o’clock a Mr Williams, a guide supplied by a friend, arrives to show me the sights of this most ancient city on India’s south-west coast: a small, dark-skinned man with a beautifully carved face and spiritual expression who, having introduced himself, advises me that he is a Christian, a history graduate, and that he voted for the Congress Party at the recent election. His wife is a Hindu and a supporter of the Communists, who are at present in power in Kerala. ‘She cherishes the belief,’ he says, ‘that Lenin was an incarnation of Vishnu. If such credence is keeping her happy, why should we worry?’

  The seeing of sights is unavoidable—a matter of common courtesy as well as of interest. Our tour was to begin with St Francis’s Church, started in 1502, soon after the Portuguese had established a trading station here—the first church to be built in India by Europeans. We set out for it on foot by the road to the Willingdon Island Bridge (which links the island with Mattancheri), and thence to Fort Cochin. In the event it was the experience of this morning walk that counted: the clamour and the colour of the narrow streets; the sight of the morning train from Alleppey shouldering aside the buffaloes and the egrets on the tracks; the field packed with circus elephants; the auto-rickshaws charging through glinting laterite dust; the limbs thrust through the windows of jam-packed buses, the rampaging juggernauts, the suicidal cyclists; the resigned cows locked into the streams of embattled traffic; the crashing outcry from the cinema loudspeakers on every corner. A bus station released a flock of office-bound girls into the street ahead; as they came towards us swathed in their multicoloured saris, their feet, concealed in stirrings of dust, seemed hardly to move. A man hosed down a truck painted all over with tigers. An old election poster depicted the fathers of Marxist socialism sitting garlanded under ceremonial umbrellas. Surely these were the sights I had come to see?

  The Church of St Francis came into view in an oasis of space within what must be one of the densest concentrations of humanity on earth. When they took over from the Dutch (who had in turn replaced the Portuguese) at the end of the eighteenth century, the British tried with some success to create an image of rural England from which crowds were banished. Here was the village green, the peace, the shade, the large houses in their gardens behind high walls. The church is vast and solid, with an empty tomb that once held the bones of Vasco da Gama.

  Three church officials are ready to greet occasional visitors, to display the palm-leaf authorisation ill-advisedly given by the Raja of the day, permitting the Portuguese to settle here. Inside a harmonium wheezes softly out of sight. Outside only the crows disturb the silence, and a few mild cows crop the blond stubble where once there was a cricket pitch. Here, one draws in the aroma of the past with every breath.

  The Chinese fishing nets, on view all along the shore from where we stood, were another of the sights. Nets like these were brought to Cochin at the time of Kublai Khan, and the ones I saw were identical in their spindly construction and mode of operation to those still found in less advanced parts of the Chinese homeland. Stretched between claws of wood, they seemed suspended like the flowers of a monstrous blue convolvulus over the sea. At short intervals, when the tide was in, each net would be lowered into the water, then hauled back by the team straining at the levers to disclose a pouchful of tiddlers, worth a rupee or so, which would be split six ways. Across the water, on Willingdon Island, a saccharine Portuguese church with three baroque towers sparkled among the palms. ‘The fishermen are all Christians,’ Mr Williams said, ‘and are very poor. They are showing a lesson in devotion in money spent on places of worship.’

  The city is, in effect, a show-window of religions and sects. The earliest Christians were here, followed by Arabs newly converted to Islam, although both were preceded, it is claimed, by ‘black’ Jews, who arrived as refugees after Nebuchadnezzar’s occupation of Jerusalem in 587 BC. There is no solid evidence to support the contention that Christianity came over with St Thomas the Apostle in AD 52, but Syrian Orthodox churches were established by the sixth century, and many of them are still active and independent of Latin Catholicism.

  The present synagogue,
built in 1568 and the oldest in the Commonwealth, is embedded in a crooked street of spice merchants in the heart of the city: a tiny, polished jewel of a building with a floor of unique Chinese tiles flooded with the bluish light of antique Belgian lamps. At a favourable moment back in the tenth century, the community was so powerful that King Ravi Varma seems to have considered sanctioning the creation here of a Jewish state in miniature, for he presented their leader with copper plates engraved with title to a substantial grant of land. Nothing came of the project. In later centuries the tolerance of native rulers was replaced by the Inquisition-bolstered fanaticism of the Portuguese, and prosperity, prestige and numbers began to dwindle. In recent years emigration of the young to Israel has brought the Jews of Cochin to the brink. One guidebook put their numbers at about fifty, a figure that had declined by the time of our visit to twenty-seven, drawn from seven families. There is no longer a rabbi and, although all the elders are qualified to perform religious offices, it is sometimes necessary to borrow visitors of the Jewish faith to make up the minimum of fifteen worshippers without which the Saturday service cannot be held.

  Whenever tourists congregate and linger—as they do in these historic surroundings—attempts are made to engage their interest in performances of a kind abhorrent to the authorised image of India today. Few spectacles in the Orient attract foreign onlookers as surely as the common one of indignities inflicted upon snakes, and it was inevitable that the immediate vicinity of the synagogue should be viewed as prime territory for this kind of entertainment. One operator would hold up a passerby long enough for a second to rake a cobra out of its tiny basket and subject it to the attack of a mongoose on a leash. The performance—since it was repeated several times a day—was necessarily a listless one. The cobra uncoiled itself with evident reluctance, spread a flaccid hood, and the mongoose, shuffling backwards and forwards in a desultory fashion, finally caught it briefly by the neck before a blow with a stick compelled it to release its hold. Onlookers who appeared to approve were rewarded with the promise of a treat in which the mongoose would be fed a live mouse. Indians, who on the whole are kind to animals, stand aloof from such spectacles.

  There were more cobra and mongoose pitches outside the Mattancheri Palace, built in the rectilinear European style of the day and presented in 1558 by the Portuguese to the Cochin Raja Veera Kerala Varma, in the expectation—which was to be fulfilled—of a valuable quid pro quo in the matter of concessions. It is now a museum of a sort, housing in the Durbar Hall a display of the Cochin Rajas’ ceremonial gear.

  The murals with which the palace is densely painted throughout are regarded as outstanding examples of the Indian art of the period: allegorical scenes, based largely on the stories of the Ramayana, but accepted as illustrating aspects of the court life of the seventeenth century in which they were completed. Inevitably those decorating the walls of the harem attract the greatest interest.

  The problem of fertility or its lack seems to have been easily disposed of. The wonder drug of the day, payasa, was freely supplied by a powerful monk. King Dharatha’s three wives (one fair, one medium and one black) conceived promptly and were brought to bed of three strapping boys—each destined to become a hero of the Ramayana. The King looks on exultantly while the meticulously painted processes of birth take place. Eroticism in Indian art produces problems of excess and confusion. The viewer is confronted with unnatural agility and a baffling confusion of torsos and limbs. Which leg and which arm belongs to whom? (Eight of the arms belong to Shiva.) Among the gods and their paramours depicted in athletic strivings on these walls, only Krishna, lord of forests and music, is instantly identifiable, engaged in amorous dalliance while playing the flute—with the dexterity to be expected of a god who in one incarnation or another possessed 10,000 wives.

  Not long ago a ban on photographs of these goings-on had been imposed. But why should this be? Was it possible that such scenes of legendary self-indulgence could be in any way linked with snake and mongoose acts as a reflection of an unprogressive past? If so, how long would it take for a request in writing, in proof of serious purpose, for a photographic visit to the old harem to be approved?

  A call at the State Tourist Office reinforced my worst suspicions. Permission to take photographs might be granted in special circumstances, said the man in charge, but application had to be made to Delhi, which could be expected to take three months to reach a decision. This seemed to be the moment to enquire about the possibility of visiting the shrine of Bhagavathi, some twenty miles away at Chottanikara, celebrated all over India as the Temple of Exorcism, where persons suffering from mental disorders are treated by an energetic form of psychotherapy based on song and dance. The official’s response was guarded. After a moment’s reflection he said, ‘I am hearing of this place, but it is only for inspecting the exterior. Entrance prohibited for foreigners.’

  Nevertheless, a taxi driver from the rank at the Malabar Hotel saw no obstacle to the visit. There was something special about the hotel’s Ambassador taxis which, despite appearing like all others to be copies of the Morris Oxford of about 1953, gave the sensation of concealed power in their corpulent bodies. They were fitted (unnecessarily one would have supposed) with fog lamps and police-style revolving blue lights. Perhaps there was something special about the number plates, too, for traffic blocks opened up and dispersed in magical fashion at their approach. The driver imposed his own conditions: one hundred rupees, a half-hour’s waiting on arrival and no camera-showing at the temple. OK? By this time Mr Williams had left. I was at the driver’s mercy, and agreed to listen to his terms. He lit a joss-stick, stuck it in a holder, and we set off down the traffic-choked country lanes, along the banks of canals dense with Chinese nets, then tearing into a market crowd, scattering both buyers and sellers, but slowing to negotiate our passage round an introspective and unbudging Brahminy bull.

  The temple was an unimpressive building at the end of an approach glutted with foodstalls and souvenir booths. In India, religious observance and discreet fun mingle easily, and most of those who visit temples enter the presence of their gods in holiday spirit. Devotees and visiting patients were arriving by the busload, engulfed instantly in a swarm of beggars, astrologers and sellers of shrine decorations, of ear-splitting rattles for children, paper windmills and sweets packed in bird-shaped containers which actually flapped their wings.

  A trayful of plastic busts of Karl Marx, adorned with garlands of real flowers, attracted the driver’s attention. He bought one, then led me to an office where a man in uniform with a severe expression regarded me with evident mistrust. A muttered discussion followed. The driver was conciliatory and persuasive, and we were waved through into the temple compound. The large open space was crowded. In Cochin a goddess waits round every corner, and people came here not only to pay their respects to the goddess of the insane, but for the performance of marriages and a great variety of small ceremonies, such as the feeding of a child for the first time with ritual rice, and the cropping of a boy’s infantile top-knot in properly sanctified surroundings. For the majority of those present, said the driver, this was a pleasant family outing.

  Worshippers were streaming through the temple doors into a brilliantly lit interior, though the diminutive but powerful image of Bhagavathi was not in sight. A row of small windowless buildings with bright blue padlocked doors encircled the courtyard. In these the patients—the majority of them young girls—were confined between doses of treatment in which they were encouraged to dance until they fell exhausted to the ground. These remedial activities peaked twice a day, when a procession of musicians led by the temple elephant carrying the idol made a tour of the compound. No foreigners, said the driver, were allowed to be present on these occasions.

  By this time it was clear to him what I had come to see, and he led me to a small low-walled enclosure in which five patients, appearing to be girls in their late teens or early twenties, were receiving emergency treatment. They had been sea
ted in a circle, each one with an attendant, his fingers entwined in her hair, and each was rotating her torso and jerking her head backwards and forwards in time with a four-man orchestra playing cymbals and archaic horns. When the rhythm speeded up, the patient’s gyrations and contortions increased in violence, so that only the hold on her hair prevented damage to her head against the wall of the enclosure or on the ground. Abruptly the music stopped, and with it the moaning and the frenzy. There would be a few minutes’ respite before therapy recommenced. The ancient tree under which this took place bristled with nails that had been driven into its trunk. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of them, each representing the cure which, said the driver, was obtained in two-thirds of the cases accepted for treatment.

  At the far end of the courtyard, steps led down to a pleasant, well-maintained garden in which family groups strolled, sometimes with the daughters they had come to visit. Once in a while a stunning report from the recreation area suggested that small charges of dynamite were being exploded in a festive manner. Small boys dashed about, twisted their rattles, played hide-and-seek among the bushes, and went in hopeless chase after the big sombre butterflies frequenting the flowers. A smiling out-patient wearing a crown of frangipani skipped along at her father’s side. In the distance the compulsive beat of the temple music had started again. Apart from that the principal sound was that of the crows in every yard of the sky.