by M G Vassanji
We finally come upon the pilgrimage site. It is a modern village, with recently constructed blocks of flats, a bank and other businesses, and public toilets, one rupee a head. There are flies without number, and smells, and unpicked litter. The path now has railings on both sides to hold in the crowds, and it leads directly to the temple and Ayyappa’s shrine. The temple is constructed of wood and looks rather small and strangled, the modern concrete jungle pressing in all around. The government has plans to build a road up, in order to convert this into an even bigger tourist site. Impressive as the number of pilgrims would be at this enlarged shrine, I cannot imagine what spiritual comfort it could give. But I have not gone through the rituals, the expectations; perhaps the experience would reside in one’s anonymity among other black-clad pilgrims, the humility that would impart.
We are unable to climb up the famous eighteen steps to see the icon of the god; it is the off-season, and besides, we have not gone through the forty-one-day ritual. We do not carry on our heads black bags with our offerings and our sins. Instead, we see a smaller shrine with two pictures of Ayyappa, one with him on a tiger, in the company of a few other tigers, another with him sitting in a sort of Buddha pose. Since 5:30, hymns have been sounding here, over a loudspeaker, one to Lord Ayyappa, in which the devotee-singer falls to the god’s feet, saying, “Swami sharanam Ayyappa,” the same chant the pilgrims sing on their way here.
It’s time to go. The tractor not having returned, all four of us walk down. The time factor is again forgotten as the walk turns into a lazy stroll. But in an hour we are down, and after a dip in the Pampa river, considered sacred, we depart.
It is not the tigers, snakes, or elephants who ultimately scare me, but the driver, who is so reckless he misses our turn and consequently has to take a longer route. This bothers no one. We stop for lunch. Then we stop at a village where Hussein was brought up. It is more a town now, a previously small street having become a highway spewing fumes, having taken over part of the sidewalk. A street has been nicknamed Pakistan Street because of its quarrelsome Muslims. But Hussein’s former home is a ruin, the back destroyed and covered with junk for sale—bottles, shoes, cardboard. The front is a proper junk store, called Seconds. It belongs to his younger brother, who is not around. The older brother, living next door, comes out in shirt and dhoti and gets someone to climb up a coconut tree and drop a bunch of fruit, which are then shaved and cut for us. We stop at his sister’s house next, which is nice, the husband working as a caretaker in an expatriate colony in Abu Dhabi. Then we leave.
On the way, some customs are explained to me by the station master. Most Muslims, he says, tuck in their dhoti on the left side, Hindus on the right. There are exceptions, he being one. The Hindu women have the tikka on the forehead and let their sari fold fall on a shoulder.
They talk about dowries. An engineer or doctor is the most preferred groom. When a girl’s family (she has to be educated) finds such a boy, they will make their offer, something like two hundred thousand rupees for “pocket money” for the groom’s family, and a car (three hundred thousand), a hundred and twenty-five gold sovereigns (a kilo), and a nice house for the couple. Such a dowry is being contemplated by Hussein’s brother-in-law, who is in the Gulf, for his daughter. I don’t know what to make of the figures. Hussein himself received a dowry of six thousand rupees; but that was a different time, a modest family.
A family they know has seven sons. Six are physical therapists working abroad. The seventh is pursuing the same training. Getting into college is not easy. Hussein’s son is also training as a physical therapist.
During a subsequent visit I learn that Hussein has moved to the more civilized Trivandrum from the backward Varkala—actually the beautiful cottage by the sea where I stayed once. But his wife suffers depression in the city. Still later I hear that he suffered a heart attack while on a train and died. He had found a better job as a school inspector. His dissertation was incomplete, his dreams of Canada unfulfilled. The translation he began of one of my novels also remains incomplete.
Whenever I think of him I cannot help but recall my first visit to his home: the waves pounding at the shore, the wind rustling through the coconut palms; the outside door open and his wife, cooking in the kitchen, too shy to come out and meet me; Hussein telling me of Raja Rao. I also think of our relationship, fraught with misunderstanding as it was, due to the partial language barrier. He respected me, in the way Indians traditionally respect teachers and writers; I think he also felt affection for me because I was accessible. And I responded with affection in return.
Vaikom Basheer, too, has died, as has Thakazhi; and more recently, Paniker, who was sick but did not reveal it until finally, as I am told, when the pain became too hard to bear. Three literary men of a generation.
He who has served and helped one poor man seeing Siva in him, without thinking of his caste, creed, or race, or anything, with him Siva is more pleased than with the man who sees Him only in temples.
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA
Trivandrum is far south on the Indian subcontinent, but not quite at the tip, the apex of the upside-down triangle. I have always harboured a desire to visit that tip, called Kanya Kumari, and simply stand there, looking away. There is something romantic about the idea, something symbolic about that point where India ends so abruptly. All that tumult, all that land mass, all that history behind you, the silent sea ahead of you.
It is not quite like that.
The road to Kanya Kumari rips through town after roadside town. On the way, rice and banana fields, the occasional hospital or college, and temples, churches, and makeshift shrines consisting sometimes of nothing more than a stone, or three stones, or some god’s pictures. Fifty-six miles take all of three hours to traverse. India’s economic boom is apparently reflected, in 2007, in the fact that several times I have to tell the driver to turn the air conditioner down; I had to make a similar request in my hotel. We arrive finally in Kanya Kumari. A long, straight cheerful street leads us into the town, restaurants on either side serving veg or nonveg, and delivers us to the beach, where rows of shacks sell cheap plastic goods, electronics, and articles made with seashells to local tourists. The feel of the place is that of a rustic funfair.
From the beach one takes a ferry to two little islands close by; they form the tip of India, as it were. The sea is choppy but the attendants very adroitly help the passengers into the rocking vessel thus keeping the ferry service brisk. The first island we come to has two handsome mandapas (halls) of stone, one quite dwarfing the other and blocking it from the open sea. The smaller, squat structure houses a rock with an outcrop upon it that is in the shape of a human foot. It has a garland of flowers around it and is apparently the footprint of the Goddess, who is supposed to have once visited here. The larger mandapa is a hollow rectangular block of grey stone, with a layered red-brown roof flanked by cupolas and black columns of marble at the entrance, the whole raised upon a pedestal and reachable by some two dozen steps. Impressive and beautiful—one might well call it intellectual in design—it is the memorial to Vivekananda (1863–1902) and was built in 1970. Swami Vivekananda, born in Calcutta, was a spiritual teacher of the Vedanta philosophy and practice of self-realization, which is based on the Upanishads. He is said to have sat at this spot to meditate before heading out for Chicago to attend the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. He became famous as a teacher and now has an international following through the Ramakrishna Mission, which he founded. The simply stated features of his memorial, compared to the richness of a typical temple, are striking and indicative of the esoteric nature of his teaching. Inside is a statue to him, in a large austere hall, and there’s a room for meditation at the side of the building, where a few people have come to contemplate in silence; on a screen in front of them is displayed the symbol Om.
The swami’s memorial easily steals the thunder from the Goddess’s foot. And ironically it seems that Vivekananda himself has been turned into a god.
Walking around this rock islet, looking back upon the mainland, the Nilgiri mountains are visible on the right, to the east; and, somewhat surprisingly, the most prominent and tallest structure in the town of Kanya Kumari is seen to be a white cathedral. On the opposite side, facing south, you see the horizon and the point where the two seas, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, meet and the sea changes colour from green to blue.
The ferry takes you to the second little island. Here, atop a pedestal which is itself a full-scale building, is an immense statue to the Tamil poet-guru Tiruvalluvar that, at 133 feet, dwarfs even the Vivekananda memorial. Just the toe of the statue is a foot or more in height. Tiruvalluvar is the author of the 133-chapter Tamil work Thirukural, considered by his followers to be the best among the world’s masterpieces of literature or philosophy. His dates are before the Christian era, but not much more about him is certain. It took five hundred sculptors nine years to complete his statue, which was inaugurated in 2000. It is undoubtedly a magnificent achievement, though one wonders what the point of it is, here, blotting the view of the sea from the mainland.
And so, two new idols at a symbolic spot. They stand high and aloof, stony and sterile, celebrating supposedly poetry and philosophy, yet in reality human vanity and political power.
More satisfying for me is the visit to the temple of Kanya Kumari, the Goddess. The temple is reputed to be three thousand years old and you enter it bare-chested along with the crowd that has been waiting for the door to open, having left your shirt and other belongings at a stand outside. If one wants a god or goddess, they had better be ancient and distant.
To Finish: Back on the Himalayan Foothills
On naked feet Akbar came,
A canopy of gold on Mother he placed
bhajan
IT IS SAID THAT THE GREAT MUGHAL EMPEROR AKBAR walked barefoot uphill from the pilgrim town of Kangra to pay respects to the goddess Jawalamukhi here at this temple, where she is represented by a perpetually burning flame. Proud Akbar, Protector of the World, who desired so much a convergence of faiths in his empire; Akbar who had beautiful, defiant Anarkali buried in a cave (legends say) for refusing to deny her love for his heir, but released her, for he had promised a boon to her mother and he always kept his word; Akbar the Great (as the history books taught) brought with him a canopy of solid gold to place over the flame that is the goddess Jawalamukhi. But next morning when they (it’s not clear exactly who) opened the temple door, they saw that the emperor’s gold had turned to base metal and darkened. This was the goddess’s way of showing Akbar that he was still a mere mortal. Her name, Jawalamukhi, means “the one of the flaming face.”
The other form of this goddess is a very beautiful and very Indian woman.
In a worship mandap next to the main temple, a woman in a trance jerks on the ground; a group of chanting women surround her. Over the loudspeaker, stories are sung about the goddess, who is a form of Durga.
Kangra, a short distance from Dharamsala in the western Himalayan foothills, where I am on a visit long promised to a friend I met on my second day in India, on the Puri Express, fourteen years ago. Much has happened since then.
Dharamsala is a simple little town, though now also a resort for some Delhiwallahs. More fashionable, for Westerners at least, is McLeod Ganj, a short distance up a steep hill. Movie stars visit here, bhang is available, and moksha. It reminds me of a fashionable American college town of the sixties and seventies, young people meandering about, a few bookstores, questionable but trendy restaurants, bookstores and signs offering faddish Orientalia—lessons in Tibetan, reiki, yoga, fortune-telling. The lineups outside the ATM are but a modern twist; the monks are a local attraction. The town is the exiled Dalai Lama’s headquarters, and his temple has some beautiful sculptures and other art which was brought along from Tibet. In the morning, in the very colourful temple complex, you can see some of the younger monks in their maroon robes practising their debating skills, finishing each argument with an emphatic clap of the hands, the traditional way. An exclamation mark of sorts. You wonder how much of this is a show for the tourists. Relationships between the Tibetans and the locals are not always the best, and the Tibetans are not all monks, many run businesses.
The Bhagsunath temple, a short walk from the Dalai Lama’s centre, at the end of the crafts market, was the official temple of the First Gurkha Rifles, which had its headquarters in this area from 1861 until it was moved recently. Further down the road back to Dharamsala is the Anglican church with a cemetery. Many of the British officers buried there died fighting in Afghanistan.
“There is much to see…you should have stayed longer,” scolds one of my hosts.
“I should have,” I confess, regretfully. “It never ends.”
Two weeks ago I was at India’s southernmost, tropical tip looking out towards Africa; now, here I am in the north in the Himalayan foothills, where numerous conquering armies camped, including the Turkish, the Mughal, and the British; where they still remember the Mughal Akbar as a great emperor but remind him of his mortality.
“Have you seen all parts of India?”
“Hardly.” I sound rueful. “I’ll have to keep coming, I guess…”
In my mind, I imagine a map with large swaths of not-yet-visited India.
“You must stay longer next time.”
Meanwhile, photos; coffee at one of those new bars that have sprung up everywhere in the country, where we have to tell them to switch the teenage music off—there is nobody else here anyway on this monsoon day—and I wonder aloud if the roads will bear up to take me back to the heat of Delhi.
Yes, there is more to discover, there will always be more, the journey is endless, as I knew, as I had been forewarned.
But for now I must stop here, conclude this token of pilgrimage.
Select Glossary
Banya
a member of the traditional trading caste
bhajan
devotional song
bhakti
devotional worship
Brahmin
a member of the traditional priestly caste
dargah
a shrine where a holy man is buried and worshipped
fakir
mendicant
ginan
religious songs (bhajans) of the Khojas, and other sects
kafir
heretic, in Islam
khano
a Khoja prayer house and community centre (from jamat khana)
Khoja
a Gujarati ethnic-religious group with elements of both Ismailism and Vaishnavism
Kshatriya
a member of the traditional warrior caste
mandir
temple
masjid
mosque
pir
a Muslim holy man or saint
pavaya
a transvestite eunuch
qadi
an Islamic judge
qawali
a form of Urdu poetry, often devotional
sadhu
an ascetic
sepoy
private soldier
Sufi
an Islamic mystic
Vaishnavism
worship of the god Vishnu and his avatars, especially Rama and Krishna
yogi
an Indian ascetic
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