This purgatory has been described to the child before, in the old folk tales and legends of the evil men who steal sweets from the village kitchens. The child sits quietly through the rest of the ceremony, wincing every now and then, as if wondering which woman in the crowd looked most like the demon that was just described. The rest of the ceremony is carried out on the instructions of the old lady, Nowri Tikri, who turns out to be the child’s grandmother. There is more song and dance, and bananas from a wild tree nearby and tea are passed around to the assembly of about fifteen people.
It is afternoon by the time the malhar finishes tattooing the child’s forehead, and even cheeks—on the insistence of the grandmother—to prevent evil spirits from casting their eyes on the child. The tattoos look more like angry, swollen welts than works of art; it will be another few weeks before they become dark, pigmented symbols in the shape of fat-bellied raindrops, symbols to promote safe delivery during childbirth. The musicians and dancers have long retired to their fields, and the child is tired—dried blood congealed on her cheeks and eyes drooping with sleep. But she has to be washed, according to the grandmother, before being taken back inside her hut. ‘The malhar is from a lower caste,’ Nowri tells us as we arch closer. She bends over the child, closely monitoring the mother as she smears turmeric paste all over the child’s body.
‘Careful, now! Use the turmeric sparingly,’ Nowri spits, baring her remaining teeth. ‘My son works hard for this money!’
The touch of the lower-caste malhar on the child is believed to have caused contamination and requires a purging of the dirt with warm water and haldi. Nowri reminisces that as a young girl, when malhars came to the village for godna, they would use the route along the village that passed through the jungles. These untouchable men were not allowed footwear once inside the village and were barred from wearing clothes above the waist and below the knees, even in the cold winters of the forests. In those days, if the malhar or their womenfolk, known as malaharin, were given food for their services, the bowl which they had touched would be cleaned with cow urine (which was considered auspicious) and then heated over fire to be purified.
Nowri herself had never allowed a malhar into the house for each of her three daughters’ godnas. ‘We still don’t,’ she says assertively, slapping on some fresh gobar—a natural cooling agent as well as an antiseptic—on to the child’s wounds to prevent infection. Her thick silver bangles clang together like ancient temple bells, louder than the soft, clinking sounds made by the shiny glass bangles her daughter-in-law wears. Beneath the silver bangles, one can see the faded green marks of a tattoo all the way up her elbow.
‘The ladies of the village envied my godna. I would sit still like a statue whenever I got them done. The more godna you get done, the stronger you become—both in terms of spirit and physical prowess,’ Nowri explains. ‘Children are weak these days. I got an entire arm done by a malhar when I was all of eleven years old. But Nekka’s godna will be split over the years till she gets married,’ she speaks of the child. ‘When the God of Death, Yamraj, approaches her during her time of death, he will immediately identify her and not confuse her with her husband. In a way, Nekka gets these tattoos to protect her husband from Yamraj. A year later, we can get one done on her back, then another on her neck and some on her arms,’ she mutters, slapping another layer of fresh green gobar on to the now-sleeping child, her head resting on her mother’s lap.
‘More tattoos?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘These are our ornaments, our assets. The only things we take with us to the heavens.’ Nowri smoothens the wrinkles on her hand, revealing a complex pattern of dots and lines, like binary codes, engraved on her hand; an octagon with a dot in the middle near her elbow is a lotus—the pedestal of Goddess Lakshmi, the distributor of wealth; triangles along her upper arm represent Yoni—the goddess of femininity or womanly strength, translating literally to vagina or womb; and a set of concentric circles down to her wrist represent the nine planets that control the destinies of the wearer.
Godna finds its roots in ancient India, in pieces of history documenting life and culture along this side of the subcontinent. While citations refer to it all the way back to the fifteenth century, it is hard to determine its exact antiquity. Around the sixteenth century, Tavernier, a French traveller and jewel merchant,3 wrote in an article that the women of Banjera (East Bengal) tattooed their skin from the waist upwards. These nomadic communities did this as a mark of identity as they wandered from place to place. One clue regarding godna’s antiquity may be found in comparing petroglyph designs of labyrinths dating back to 2500 BC on a riverbank at Pansaimol,4 Goa, that have similar designs as those of a godna—but of course this might only be mere speculation. But the only accessible and available historical records we have are the oral narratives of women like Nowri Tikri, narrating the tales of their own grandmothers’ who patterned their body with a variety of symmetrical tattoos in indigo.
‘It has healing properties too. Look at this,’ Nowri says, pointing to a dark mole-like tattoo on her throat. ‘I got it done a couple of years back to cure my goitre. It disappeared for a few years,’ she says, snapping her fingers, perhaps hinting at the acupuncture effects that godna is rumoured to have, ‘but then it came back . . . Pakhi, the village medic, suggested eating a medicine made of pig’s throat, and Durki, the old witch whom villagers prayed to, made me stand on my head every day for hours,’ she scowls. ‘But nothing worked. It is the work of evil spirits, that is it . . .’ She pauses, her face contorting into a frown as she spots something, pursing her lips and distending her nostrils—a grimace that her daughter-in-law immediately appears to recognize as threatening, for she holds the child closer.
‘Ai you,’ she screams at the malhar, hobbling rheumatically towards him. He is washing his face at a well near her dwelling. ‘Do not go near my well,’ she screams, hurling a few Kurukh5 curses at him. With a hand covering his mouth, making an irrefutably urgent excuse and offering an unspecific apology, the malhar scuttles away. ‘Defiling the water in my well, that mouse . . .’ Nowri mutters under her breath.
‘Does he live here?’ I ask her.
‘No, no, they have no homes. They are nomads.’
‘So how did you catch a hold of him for the godna ceremony?’
‘They travel from village to village performing godna and making copper utensils in their free time. My brother told me that he had spotted this malhar, Dubru, near the village. He saw him while coming from the fields and summoned him immediately. We give them a bag of rice or a few coins in exchange. Dubru will stay here in the shed for a night and leave tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, the shed is near my well. I hope the midget doesn’t defile my well. Oh, it’ll be the curse of the Gods if it happens . . .’ she says, disappearing into her hut, murmuring a curse about constipation plaguing him for the rest of his life.
Malhars are the male members of the Hindu coppersmith caste. Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow, a German scholar,6 mentions in his book that this caste is considered especially dirty and lazy and that the name is often used as an insult. Malhars do not farm or sell wares. They do not go to schools. They have no addresses, nor any official papers. They have no representative in the government or panchayat that they can look to for help or lodge complaints with, nor do they have any expectations from the government. They look for a place in the fringes of the villages—under trees, haystacks, some barren land usually labelled by the village panchayats as useless. Malhars move around with their wives and children—and with bare possessions—much like the nomads in an African slum described by the Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński in his article ‘City of Nomads’: ‘Many of my neighbors here have just the one thing. Someone has a shirt, someone a panga, someone a pickaxe. The one with a shirt can find a job as a night watchman (no one wants a half-naked guard); the one with a panga can be hired to cut down weeds; the one with the pickaxe can dig a ditch. Others have only their m
uscles to sell.’
Dubru, although a malhar, is privileged because he owns two things—a prong and a shirt. What he lacks is muscle. Dubru is puny, with the thin skin around his mouth shrivelling like that of an old prune. He sits under the shed, thatched with dried hay, lazily scratching his stomach and buttocks, yawning as he makes lampblack. A small cup-shaped oil lamp made of baked clay has a wick burning placed near him. A few inches above is another lamp, inverted, collecting the soot from the burning lamp. ‘We mix this with a mother’s milk to make the tattoo ink,’ he says in a croaky voice that is somewhere between a whimper and a song as I sit beside him. The air fills with the smell of alcohol apparent on his breath and through a discarded plastic Sprite bottle with apple-juice-coloured liquid. Dubru often uses this handiya, a rice wine, instead of water—even to clean his mouth in the morning. Light filters through the bottle and a green reflection flickers on his shirt that is stained with the little vignettes of his life—soot, dust, turmeric and handiya.
Every morning at sunrise, Dubru travels many kilometres from village to village on his slippers that have lost all their tread, through paths in this rainforest that are strewn with dried leaves, traversing shady paths that move with the sun. On most days, he starts his morning with leftover rice that charitable villagers give away to nomads like him. On some good days, he may have performed a godna or carved out a vessel, which can possibly fetch him tea or even a boiled egg from the money made. But he definitely prefers handiya over tea. Half a pint of this stuff is sufficient; it not only makes him forget hunger but also provides nourishment—for the soul, at least. As dawn arrives with a fanfare of singing koels, he is often spotted by passers-by passed out in what can roughly be called happiness.
‘Before I drew blood,’ Dubru says—talking carefully to avoid a slur, but his moustache becoming a hindrance; the thin hair curling into his mouth in the absence of substantial lips—‘I whispered prayers under my breath to the spirits in the trees. I avoided handiya because the ill spirits might be put off by them and cause pain to the child or curse me with a lifelong illness,’ he says, twisting his moustache. ‘Of course, you can smoke though,’ he adds quickly as I eye the beedi stubs in one corner of the hut. ‘And if you or I or the child had interrupted the ritual by running away, this would have been a very bad omen and I would have had to stop right away. The child’s family would then have had to perform prayers for the spirits.’ He shakes his head. According to him, the dark spirits do not wish for the tattooing to continue then and it has to be postponed till the next day.
‘Godna is a highly regarded and carefully followed ritual here,’ he continues, mumbling. ‘Lactating mothers rarely want to donate their milk these days. Their milk is said to be the purest and closest to the composition of human blood,’ he says, clicking his tongue in disapproval, picking at the soot ingrained in his nails. ‘Till a few years back, it was a noble deed, an act that would make the Gods happy. But they want to keep it only for their babies these days. So I mix cow’s milk sometimes.’
The spirits expect Dubru to act suitably. If he doesn’t, they’ll inflict death and destruction upon him and his subjects.
‘Has anyone ever been infected after the Godna?’ I ask him.
‘Ihi thatha amba nana [Do not joke]. No one has ever fallen ill after I made the godna. In other places, they have to stuff the girl’s mouth with a cloth in case she bites her tongue in pain. But I don’t need that. I have the blessings of my ancestors. The chants help, and I very carefully indent the upper layer of the skin. It requires skill and craft,’ he smiles, proudly, looking at his plastic bottle, as if it had the spirits perched atop it, rewarding Dubru for every godna he performs.
He takes a swig from it, a few drops dripping down his arm, which has a sleeve full of godna. ‘These I inscribed myself when I had leftover soot and ink,’ he says with a burp. ‘Men hardly get these tattoos around here, but the Oraons7 sometimes burn the skin of boys with a lighted stick to mark their coming of age.8 They move into that dumkuria,’ he says, pointing to a shed which is a meeting place for the men of the community in this village, ‘where older boys mark the younger ones. But some may simply do it for ornamentation. Look at this godna, there is jawaphool, the young sprout of wheat,’ he explains, pointing to a five-sided leafy figure on his bony chest.
‘This other one, though, I regret. It was unlucky for me,’ he says, pointing to a tattoo near his wrist known as the Kanhaiya’s mukut—Krishna with his beloved wife, Rukmini. ‘My wife happened to leave me for heaven right after I got this. The godna though ensures that her memory remains, even as it fades away.’
A few years ago Dubru married a girl. They travelled together in groups, like malhars did. But she had cholera and no government hospital would admit them because of the absence of residential proof. ‘How would we have a fixed residence?’ he says, nodding his head as he narrates the story. ‘This is how we have always lived. When someone is tired of travelling, they erect a shack. Some other malhars put up another one beside it. And then another. And if we fall short of water and food in that area, we just abandon these homes and move somewhere else,’ Dubru says, shrugging his shoulders. ‘So she died.’
‘Nobody taught me this craft,’ Dubru says, sighing, as he collects the soot in the centre of the earthen lamp. ‘I just saw my parents practise it on the villagers. They also made utensils—both earthen and metal—on fires. My mother helped me make these prongs, my very own pair with a bamboo stick and thorns from shrubs. My parents can’t travel any more so I left them behind a few years ago. We are the eternal nomads. It turns out that except these permanent marks of godna everything in our life is temporary,’ he says, laughing. Even parents.
I ask him what will he do when he gets old? He looks at me quizzically. ‘I’ll also live in a village and die. After one last sip of handiya.’ He laughs. ‘Anyway, that time is near. I might also live on roots and rats like old men and women in villages do. Except for these Naxal parties who want to flaunt their tribal legacy for political interests, nobody wants a godna anymore,’ he says.
Tribal students also tend to avoid godna or get them removed at tattoo-removal clinics, due to bullying by urban students or other reasons. Many tribal women also get married to men in villages and cities now, their sensibilities having been altered by years of urban upbringing. The men prefer not to be spotted with wives sporting traditional godna and often leave them behind at homes for social assemblies.
‘But never mind,’ Dubru whimpers, looking at the now-finished bottle of handiya. ‘The rest of us will keep our fading, spreading tattoos, the few links between our past and present.’
2
THE RUDAALIS OF RAJASTHAN
A thin layer of desert sand has enveloped everything by the time I wake up on the upper bunk of the overnight train—my mouth, the Ondaatje book which I use as a bolster for my head and my leaking thermos of water.
The sand reappears almost as soon as I dust it off, flying in from the open windows as the train skirts a last long stretch of desert before coming to a clanking stop at the Jaisalmer station, among crackling oil lanterns on hawkers’ carts and the yammer of red-coated coolies making their way through the multitude with suitcases jammed on their heads.
Outside the station, I scour the parking area for Satar Khan, my driver for the journey, whom I find waiting outside his jeep, holding a placard with my name spelt wrong. He nods at me, taking my bag quietly, and starts the incapacitated engine. It is an hour before dawn. From my last few visits here I know that in some time the peacocks will perch on the khejri trees and pick on the unripe sangria, women will appear on the horizon with shimmering brass pots on their heads. But there is still time before the sun rises as we wade through the twilight into the rolling dunes, leaving the highways behind, the sand grains climbing into the car like a sinking ship filling with water.
Twice we get lost under these remaining stars of the night. Satar then stops his vehicle, flashes his torch, an
d looks for a path in the ever-changing dunes—perhaps looking for a jeep trail or the direction of the wind. And then he speeds back down the dunes, finding the North Star that will guide us out of here.
Satar is a tall, burly man who looks like he has spent his life in the grey safari suit he is wearing at the moment; rich white strands peek through the cover of his oiled black hair, his light hazel eyes, prematurely wrinkled, seem to say he has all the time in the sun.
‘Are you sure about going to this village?’ he suddenly asks me as we drive through the dunes, turning his head to me, his long neck punctuated by a protruding Adam’s apple. ‘Even the police think twice before going there. Just be careful, okay,’ he whispers when I nod. ‘They don’t like being photographed by straying tourists and the like,’ he adds. I tuck my camel-sized camera beneath the seat.
‘Driving through the dunes is like an ant walking on a rug,’ he says looking out of the rolled-down window, as the first light of dawn breaks through the sky. A vacant desert horizon looms before us, and except for an occasional camel tinkling by with ghungroos tied to its hooves, the earth looks as if its skin has been peeled away—without the greenery, animals and people to clothe it. Nothing is permanent in this desert which moves like a wild sea, the landscape altering each time a breeze whispers or a sandstorm roars by—taking, moving, shifting things. But rocks, camel tracks, and passages of an ancient river,1 rumoured to have disappeared below the earth—civilizations as old as time itself—still exist, magical survivors of the past.
For a while, there is nothing much to see except the changing light and, then, dhanis, or clusters of mud huts start sprouting on either side of the road, like discarded toys amongst rocks. Satar slows down after crossing a signboard in Hindi with the name of the village, steering the jeep on to another road for a few kilometres and then finally continuing up a drive to stop at a herd of cows that are tied to a pole.
The Lost Generation Page 2
