Age of Frenzy

by Mahabaleshwar Sail

  The veins on the priest’s face throbbed as though he were in deep pain, ‘No, my brother, you are wrong. Our religion teaches compassion, it spreads the message of love and brotherhood that Jesus spoke about. It is a sin to use force on anyone.’

  ‘How can you force someone to accept your religion? We would rather batter our heads against a rock and die,’ old man Phondu exclaimed.

  ‘Those men are also men of faith. But they are following the wrong path. Let us pray to the Almighty to give them good sense. The way to Lord Jesus is through people’s hearts. The use of force is against everything He stands for. Amen.’

  The priest began to walk away with Annu following him. The villagers were amazed. ‘Annu, turn back. You are an orphan with a lame brother at home. Don’t get carried away by that outsider, you have your own religion,’ they cried.

  Someone rushed forward to drag him back but the others cried, ‘Don’t! He’s touched that outsider, he’s impure. He must bathe and be purified with dung and water before anyone touches him.’

  Annu followed Padre Simao Peres through the fields, paying no attention to their words. The priest stopped by a fence and turned around. ‘Innocent child, which way are you headed?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going your way, ga. I want to go with you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want you to take me to Jesus.’

  ‘Why? Don’t you have your own god?’

  ‘Whose god is Jesus, then? Isn’t god the same?’

  ‘You are still very young and innocent. Come with me, stay for a month, then decide. You can leave me any time you want, but once you accept Jesus and His Christian faith you won’t be able to leave, ever.’

  They set off again, crossing the open space before the temple, heading towards the priest’s hut. The soldiers had come one day and built this tiny structure of wooden posts and beams and thatched it with plaited wild grass. A mud pot stood on the three small stones in one corner that served as a hearth. There were two small dishes and a cup of some dark, heavy metal that looked like brass. A crucifix hung on one of the posts.

  A sturdy looking soldier wearing a thick loincloth and vest, crouched before the hearth. ‘Tomas, this boy will stay with us for a month. He will then decide whether he wants to join our faith,’ the padre said.

  ‘He doesn’t need a month, Father. One day is enough,’ Tomas laughed.

  ‘Why do you say that, Tomas?’

  ‘There is only one route to this place. Once you come here you cannot go back, all paths are closed. Do you know what happened at Merces the other day? Some Christian cart drivers cooked their meal on a hearth. When they were done a Hindu family cooked a meal there. When other Hindus heard about this they were declared outcastes and driven away. The couple wept and pleaded for mercy. They were going to jump into the river to end their lives when a soldier took them to a Christian priest. They were baptized in three days.’

  Annu went up to the soldier whose head was shaved except for a patch of short hair on the crown. The tuft of long hair that once grew out of that patch had been lopped off. His upper ear lobes had large holes in them as though the earrings had just been removed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Annu asked the man softly.

  The soldier seemed lost in thought for a while. ‘My name is Demu. You can call me Demu mama, if you like. Why are you here?’

  ‘I liked what the padre said. I’ve heard that Jesus is a good god, that plants bear flowers when he touches them.’

  ‘Who knows what’s good and what’s bad?’ Tomas sighed. ‘It’s been two years since I was baptized. My wife and children are Hindus still, I can’t go near them till they become Christians too. Only Jesus knows what will happen next.’

  ‘Why did you become a Christian?’

  ‘Fate. Robbed two gold cruzados from a white-skinned soldier’s box. But I got caught. They said I could be free if I became a Christian. I was scared, so I agreed. They sent me to Goapattana where a priest baptized me in St Catherine’s Church. They even let me keep my job.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing much. You bathe in a lake so that your past is washed away. Then they smear oil on your temples and give you something to eat. Don’t ask what it is, just swallow it. Then they celebrate Mass and give you a Christian name.’

  ‘What’s Mass?’

  ‘A ceremony to praise God. To pray for our well-being.’

  ‘Don’t they sing bhajans?’

  ‘They sing something, but we can’t understand those songs.’

  ‘Are you sorry that you became a Christian, Demu mama?’

  Tomas was filled with happiness when Annu addressed him thus. ‘No. Not any more. I was very upset for a month or so, now I don’t feel anything. I just want my wife and children to come to me. What’s your name, boy?’

  Padre Simao took off his thick cassock to reveal a thin, sleeveless undergarment that hung down to his knees. He knelt before the crucifix and began to pray in Latin.

  Simao’s father was a Portuguese sailor who had lived for some time in Spain after his ship sank off the Spanish coast. He had married a Spanish woman but soon after Simao was born, he had gone back to Portugal, never to return. Simao’s mother, who worked in an orange orchard on the western coast, could barely make both ends meet. She married again, soon after this, but Simao’s stepfather treated him very cruelly.

  When he turned thirteen, Simao ran away to a distant village where he kept himself busy with church activities. The priest was so impressed with his dedication that he sent him to the seminary at the Vatican for theological studies. He stayed at the Vatican for seven years after which he served as a priest in Greece for seventeen years. Then, armed with a letter of permission from the Pope, he travelled to Ceylon, and then to Goa.

  Since Simao had no letter of recommendation from the King, the Portuguese Viceroy in Goa was thrown into a quandary. The Jesuit priests exerted pressure on him to reject Simao’s credentials, but the viceroy didn’t dare go against the authority of the Pope. So Padre Simao Peres was sent to distant Adolshi village to preach his faith. He was to receive forty cruzados every six months and a soldier was deputed to look after his needs.

  As required by law, Padre Simao Peres spent the first eight months of his stay in Goa at St Paul’s College where he learnt the Konkani language and familiarized himself with local matters.

  Before leaving for Adolshi, Simao Peres went to call on the viceroy. ‘I often dream that all of Goa has been converted to Christianity and the King is congratulating me. I want to accomplish this as soon as possible. I will need your help to do it,’ Viceroy Constantin Braganza said to him.

  ‘I’m going to that village to spread the word of Jesus and to tell them that Christianity is the greatest faith in the world. But I won’t go against the villagers’ wishes and trick them into being baptized,’ Padre Simao declared.

  ‘You’ve been sent here by the Pope sayeb. Our King accepts the views of the Pope and honours his dictates. The King believes that all his subjects should follow his religion.’

  ‘There is no doubt that this will happen, but it must not happen because of trickery or force. The people must be filled with a desire for the new faith, we must appeal to their hearts. Those who are converted by force or fraud might not turn out to be good Christians. They may besmirch our religion,’ Padre Simao said.

  ‘The King has a solution for this. The Inquisition. For Goa and all the other Portuguese colonies. The chief Inquisitor, Alex Dias Falcao, has just landed in Goa. He will ensure that no one goes against the Christian faith.’

  ‘Is an inquisition really necessary for these simple unlettered people?’ Padre Simao asked in a calm voice but Constantin Braganza flew into a rage.

  ‘Let this be the last time you say anything against the Inquisition. Go to Adolshi and work according to your convictions, let the others work according to theirs. Don’t come in their way. But let me tell you this, those who set out to win the world cann
ot afford to be patient. They don’t have the time.’

  Tomas and Annu had become good friends, they spent hours talking to each other. Tomas built a small hearth of three stones outside the shack and got Annu a new mud pot from the potter. He gave Annu a fistful of rice every morning for his breakfast and two fistfuls of parboiled rice for cooking his lunch and dinner. Annu gathered bits of firewood from the hill slope and used the water kept outside in a large clay pot.

  ‘You’re drinking water that has been touched by a Christian,’ Tomas said one day.

  ‘You’re my uncle, aren’t you? How can one become an outcaste because of an uncle’s touch?’ Annu said, with a smile.

  ‘Will you eat something that this uncle cooks for you?’

  ‘If you serve it to me.’

  ‘No. I won’t serve you any food till you are baptized. The one who feeds is a bigger sinner than the one who eats,’ Tomas sighed deeply. ‘The uncle is a Christian and the nephew a Hindu! This is what is happening all over this land, only god knows what will happen next!’

  Padre Simao watched them spend hours together in affectionate conversation. These are ties of blood and faith; they spring from the same culture, the same land. Their religion might change, but the ties that bind them remain the same. If you build a dam across the water, does the nature of the water on either side change? All our efforts are useless, we strive in vain!

  After a few moments, however, Padre Simao thrust such thoughts out of his mind. They were a betrayal to his cause. He decided once again that he would lead people to Jesus through love.

  The government had provided Padre Simao with a bodyguard, but the priest didn’t take the soldier along as he wandered through the village, morning and evening. Gradually the people began to view him with respect. They didn’t come up to him, nor was he invited into the settlement, but they listened to him deliver his sermon as he stood by the edge of the colony, just as they would have listened to someone who had a story to tell or a song to sing.

  One day while the priest was going past the artisan’s colony, he spotted two people moving about in the undergrowth at the edge of the forest. An old man and a youth, sixteen or seventeen years of age, had dragged a dead cow out of the field and were cutting up its flesh with large, sickle-shaped knives. They had skinned the carcass and thrown the bloody scraps of skin on one side while the chunks of soft flesh were piled in a basket. A pack of vultures waited on a tree nearby. Both men’s bodies were drenched in sweat and flecked with blood, their hands covered with blood and flesh.

  Padre Simao went up to them, ‘Do you eat cow flesh?’ he asked.

  The old man seemed nervous, ‘Yes, we do, ga,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you a Hindu?’

  ‘No, ga. Priests and Brahmins are Hindus. We’re low caste Mhars. We handle dead cattle. We weave reed mats and baskets. We go around the village making announcements.’

  ‘So then what is your religion?’

  ‘All that is for the big people, those who live in the village. We are low caste. We only go to the bhat or to the joish to ward off trouble from bad planets and ghosts or spirits. They give us charms…’

  ‘So you have no religion?’

  ‘Don’t know. Must ask the joish.’ The old man seemed confused.

  ‘Do people eat food that you have touched?

  ‘No, no! We’re Mhars. Low caste.’

  ‘Do they touch you?’

  ‘No, no! We’re Mhars!’

  ‘Aren’t you men?’

  ‘Don’t know. They sprinkle dung water to purify themselves if our shadows cross their path.’

  ‘Are you worse than dung?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Will you leave your caste and your religion and join another faith?’

  The old man seemed bewildered for a while, ‘I don’t know what you say, ga, how can we escape our caste? They say God came in the guise of a sadhu seeking alms at our door. One of our ancestors tossed a broken horn into his bowl. God was enraged. “Never again. Never again will anyone come to seek alms at your door. You will carry a horn and handle dead cattle all your life” God cursed us.’

  The padre went up to him. ‘Has anyone, other than another low caste person ever touched you?’

  ‘No ga, never. Once, when I was returning from the forest I accidentally bumped into Biru Nayak. He thrashed me with a cane and then went home to bathe and sprinkle dung water on himself.’

  The padre moved closer and gently placed a hand on his shoulder. The old man recoiled as though a scorpion had fallen on his body. Turning pale he said in a piteous voice, ‘No, no ga! Don’t touch me. You are a big man, white-skinned, Brahmin-like. If we touch them, the sins are upon our heads, they say. Do not add to our sins!’

  The padre was deeply distressed. The butchered carcass, the bloody hide lying there, the vultures waiting on the tree and the sight of the two shunned men was more than he could bear. He stood there silently, unable to think or speak. Just then Annu appeared on the scene, probably looking for Padre Simao.

  ‘Annu, will you touch these men?’ the padre called out.

  ‘No! No!’ Annu almost screamed.

  ‘Why? Why won’t you touch them, Annu?’

  ‘No one touches them. You’ll become impure if you do.’

  ‘How do you become impure? Does your body get soiled, or do you get cuts and wounds if you touch them?’

  ‘I don’t know, Padre bappa. The others don’t go near them, so I don’t go.’

  ‘Do you touch bullocks and oxen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Frogs and earthworms?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why won’t you touch these men?’

  ‘I don’t know anything, Padre bappa. Must ask the bhat or the joish.’

  Padre Simao lost his temper then. ‘Cruel, wicked, barbaric! That’s what you are!’ he fumed. ‘How wrong this is, how unfair! Imagine one human being refusing to touch another! Who wants such a religion! The lot of you should be made Christians immediately or drowned in the sea.’

  The priest stomped away through the field with Annu behind him. The old Mhar and his son stood silently, like pre-historic figures from the Dandakaranya forests, human only in body and spirit, shrinking into themselves, lest their shadows fall on the ‘big people’.

  The priest was aghast at the way men could discriminate against other men. He had read books on the Hindu religion while he was at St Paul’s college and had been very impressed with the philosophy, but he now felt that those lofty ideas were a mere sham designed to hoodwink the people.

  He also realized that the Hindu priest and the astrologer exerted a great influence over the common people, so he decided to meet Narhar Joish, whose house was at the edge of the fields by the Ravalnath temple in Raigali. He had seen many strange things during the two months spent in Adolshi, and had many questions to ask the joish.

  One part of the plain in front of the temple was almost encircled by the foothills and it was here that the Solankhe families lived. These four households were outsiders who had come to the village some fifty or sixty years ago. It was rumoured that while working for one of the kings in the north, they had committed treason and had fled to this village to escape his wrath. They belonged to the Khatri or warrior caste and often wore swords strapped to their waists. They carried logs down from the hills and shaped wheels for bullock carts which they sold in the surrounding villages Their houses were artistic, with white-washed walls and on either side of the main door was an image of the sun, etched with red mud, with large eyes painted on it.

  Since they belonged to the warrior caste, like the Nayaks of Shirvaddo, people from these two communities would marry each other, but sometimes there was tension because the Salonkhes practised sati while the Nayaks did not. Yet the times were such that once a girl was given in marriage, her future was decided by her husband’s family, whether they buried her alive or set her ablaze, no one could intervene. The Solankhe families had erected shri
nes to seven women who had committed sati during the last sixty years.

  Padre Simon Peres was aware that Viceroy Constantin Braganza was going to introduce a strict law banning the practice of sati. So one morning when he noticed some people bustling about beneath a kadam tree, he hid behind a bush to watch what the men were doing. The men dug a deep trench and filled it with wooden logs. Soon some men arrived bearing a corpse on a bier. A young boy, fourteen or fifteen years of age, followed them with a slender pole held across his shoulders. A small earthen dish with a few flaming dung pats hung from the front end of the pole while a new mud pot filled with water was at the rear. When they reached the trench the pall bearers shouted ‘Deva Mahadeva! The path has come to an end!’ and set the bier down. Some of the men cut the ropes binding the body and removed the clothes, the silver waist chain and ear rings and flung them away. They lowered the corpse on to the logs and covered it with smaller pieces of wood till only the face could be seen. They soaked large palm fronds in a pitcher of oil and poured the fuel over the corpse, scattering armfuls of dry grass all over the trench.

  No one said a word through all this except for the young boy who sobbed inconsolably, often breaking into screams, ‘Don’t bring her here, don’t make her jump into the pit.’ Soon Padre Simao heard the sound of drums and cymbals as a group of people made their way towards the pit. A young girl, sixteen or seventeen years of age, was at the head of the group. She was fair and pretty, but her eyes were red and swollen as though she had been crying. As she stumbled along, someone in the group propped her up. Have these people drugged her into this stupor, the priest wondered.

  The girl wore a white sari with a red border, the folds drawn between her legs and tucked in at the waist. There were dozens of red and green bangles on her arms and masses of flowers in her hair. Her forehead was smeared with kumkum. The few women in the group prostrated themselves before her at the edge of the clearing and then returned to their homes without a backward glance. ‘Touch a live coal in the hearth and you can’t bear the pain. Imagine throwing yourself into the fire!’ they muttered amongst themselves, ‘Would be far better if they wrung your neck and then threw you in. After all, who has seen heaven or hell?’