They had been travelling over dead-flat land and had come to a village of some sort. From the car’s headlights and from spots of other illumination, made by kerosene lamps, it was possible to make out coconut trees and shophouses and people walking or sitting around on the roadside, grinning at nothing in particular. The relation parked the car in front of a Malay garage, and they set out on foot, following the flow. There was a continuous soft murmuring from the people around them, a collective, beehive hum.
‘Soon you will see the caves,’ Kanan said.
They turned sharp right and Judith stopped. The land, as flat as a table, leapt up ahead in a single mountain. Suspended above it was the small blue moon, a stage-light aimed down on the mountain’s jungle and white limestone cliffs. Two parallel threads of fairy lights ran part-way up the mountain side.
‘They mark the stairway to the cave,’ Kanan said.
Unconsciously, they had all quickened their pace. Everyone had. Women with flowers plaited into their hair and gold bangles from wrist to elbow moved past them. When Judith bumped into one she turned, startled but smiling, a glass ruby flashing from her nostril. They were moving like parched animals heading for water. But there was more to it than that – there was joy in the air. Or maybe love.
Judith turned her face up to Kanan’s and saw him smile.
‘Do you hear the drums?’ he asked.
She could, just. The double heart-beat thump off in the distance, perhaps a kilometre away. And there was something else, a sweet smell. Incense. Even on this still, warm air its smoke was perceptible and was drawing them on, to its source. It was narcotic, Kanan said. It helped the trance.
Judith knew the way without any help from him now, she was ahead of him already, almost running towards the lights off to the right of the roadway where hundreds of people moved in the dark, and where the music was loud, and there were shouts and fires burning on the ground, with clouds of incense billowing up from the flames.
Kanan caught hold of her arm. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘First we must go to the cave. You can see what happens at the river later.’
He pulled her back to the centre of the roadway in to the crush of soft bodies. They were crossing a bridge over the river. Ahead and above them the fairy-lights on the stairway stretched up the limestone cliff. From the distance it had looked like a toy ladder. Now its true dimensions were revealed – a funnel hundreds of metres long leading in to the belly of the mountain.
‘Up there?’Judith said.
‘Oh yes, up there.’
There was more noise now. Indian music was swirling out of microphones rigged up above the food and drink stalls, which choked either side of the roadway. In the extra light that came from the stalls Judith saw that Kanan was onearmed; his other embraced a brass pot. The relation too had a pot. He must have brought them in the car. People in the crowd smiled at them when they saw the pots. But there was hardly time to notice anything, they were all moving so swiftly, carried forward towards a new area of darkness before the base of the stairs. And pushed, too. Judith knew something was pushing her, something different from the soft, hot bodies. It was an urgent noise, musical instruments – cymbals and drums – and a shout ‘Vel! Vel!’
People in front of her parted. She could feel the force pushing her against her back and moved sideways against Kanan to give it passage. There was a rush of energy, five or six men in a circle, running forward, shouting, thumping their drums, and in their midst, something strange, a dancing tower of tinsel and peacock feathers. It twirled past her, gyrating, this fairground thing, a pink kewpie doll at its peak a metre and a half above her head. Then the bodies closed in again and the shouts of ‘Vel!’ faded. They were crowded in darkness now, close to the stairs, when the shouts came again, very wild and mad. She moved aside for them, but there was no dancing tower in the circle of yelling men: it was a long, cold flash of silver, a spear held. Held how? She could not see, but her hair was rising on her scalp.
Then they were at the base of the stairs and Kanan was saying, ‘Stay close to me, stay close.’ There were hundreds of people, flesh rubbed on flesh, they were all pressing together, jerking upwards in unison as their feet felt for each new step. ‘Don’t fall,’ Kanan said and Judith thought, Oh God, I’ll be trampled to death. They can’t stop. None of us can stop. She felt a moment of panic, then laced her fingers in to the hand she knew was waiting and was drawn against his side, so that they moved together, her hip heating on his thigh. The fairy-lights turned their faces yellow, red and green. Ahead a woman shrieked, her back arched in a rictus. People grabbed something from her, some bundle. A sleeping baby. The woman had gone dashing up the stairs. The crowd felt her coming and moved aside. It went on, this hot, rising movement. How long? Twenty minutes, an hour? The sky was still black. At times they all rested and Judith closed her eyes. Every sense seemed overwhelmed, even on her lips and tongue she felt the ebb and flow of breath as she panted in the scented air.
The crowd in front of them had thinned abruptly; they were in the vanguard now, high up above all the hundreds below. There were only twenty or so steps to go, with nothing in their path.
‘Let’s run,’ Judith said. She had recognized something, some memory from decades ago, an earlier life or childhood, of two people rushing together, the excitement of one spurring the other, a back-and-forth exchange.
She tugged Kanan’s hand and they ran, then paused, then ran. Then Judith stopped, frozen.
They had reached the mouth of the cave. Deep inside it there was smoke and fire, but here at its entrance there was a cold, sour breath. And a smell, a piercing foetid odour. She knew it too well. ‘Bats!’
‘Bats love caves,’ Kanan said.
They dropped their hands apart.
‘What will you do with your milk?’Judith asked, glancing at Kanan’s brass pot.
‘I present it to the god.’
She dawdled behind him as they walked forward into the cathedral of rock, with its great sails and curtains of coloured crystal. The confusion and noise was at a crescendo some hundreds of metres further inside the cave. There was chanting and mumbo-jumbo from priests in white dhotis, things were being flung into open fires, and grey clouds of camphor incense floated into the air.
‘I’ll wait for you here,’ Judith said.
‘Don’t you want to see the idol?’
She shrugged. ‘Is it worth seeing?’
‘Frankly, no. Just a small plaster god with garlands of marigolds round his neck.’
She found a ledge of stone and sat on it. A man, exiting from the shrine, walked up to her and suddenly collapsed on the ground. He was naked except for a pair of yellow shorts, a red headband and ankle bells. His back and chest were smeared with ash. He just lay on the cavern floor. Dead? Asleep? Drugged? Nobody paid any attention to him. Judith felt too tired to be interested. She was angry with Kanan for going off with his pot of milk. He had seemed apart from the crowd when they had been together on the stairs and yet he had abruptly rejected her to return to a superstition which, when discussing it in the car, he had held in contempt.
She stared down to the lights by the river and wondered vaguely why he had been so insistent that she should not see what happened there, as if he were protecting her from something. She would see it soon, nevertheless.
He returned after a few minutes, alone, swinging empty hands. The relation had been lost ages ago, on the stairs.
‘We’ll have breakfast, then go to the river,’ he said.
The descent – there were 272 steps – was speedy. They went in to the first stall they came to and ate free fried bananas and curry puffs. The stall holder was giving away his food on this holy day.
‘As a penance for being so greedy the rest of the year?’ Judith asked. Her ill-temper was abating, and settled completely after a glass of tea mixed with condensed milk. ‘I was starving,’ she said.
Kanan nodded, in that infuriating way he had, as if he understood everything one was abo
ut to say before it was actually said.
Outside the stall it was as noisy and as aimlessly active as Saturday at the Royal Easter Show. Music was blaring overhead. An old party wearing nothing much asked Judith to buy a calendar showing a fat blue baby seated on a lotus leaf and holding a cobra in each pudgy fist. More of the weird tinsel towers were wheeling past, their bearers hidden in the throng. The night was fainting away.
Judith got out her notebook. ‘Now, what about the kavadis?’
‘Are you strong?’
‘Look, I covered the riots here in ’69.’
Kanan smiled. ‘There will be no blood. That is, very little blood. And they are not in pain. It’s important that you know that first. They feel no pain. They are in ecstasy.’
Judith wanted to say ‘Don’t look at me like that. Don’t ask me those questions with your … oh God, your beautiful eyes.’ Instead, she said, ‘You make ecstasy sound more frightening than pain.’
They rose and began walking back towards the river, over wet grass. The sky was now a thin wash of grey; the phantom shapes of coconut and banana palms were glowing faintly green. Faces could be seen more clearly now. Judith leapt aside from a man with a naked chest as hard as a gymnast’s and grey snakes of hair to his waist. He glared at them and jumped up and down on the grass, rattling his ankle bells. A mindless, concentrated malevolence seemed to emanate from him.
‘A man of Siva,’ Kanan said. ‘Siva destroys the universe by dancing it down to atoms.’ He looked admiringly at the devil.
She moved away from him, pushed through the crowd, and was suddenly witness to the things that happened on the river bank. It was dawn and she could see it all very clearly, this orgy. This abomination.
Later she tried to explain it to a hippy girl who also had fled and had joined her in a search for transport back to the city.
‘It was when I saw them doing it to the children,’ Judith said. ‘I thought either I’d vomit or I’d rush and stop them. There was a little girl of about five. She looked starving, her arms were like sticks, and her eyes were too big for her face. They screamed “Vel! Vel!” in her ears, held the incense under her nose, and she closed her eyes and began rolling her head. They just grabbed her, her mother held her still, and they speared her tongue. Everyone looked as calm as if they were threading meat on to a skewer for shish-kebab.’
The girl said, ‘I couldn’t stand the young guys. They’re so bloody beautiful. Their bodies are so smooth and lean after all the fasting. Did you see? When their eyes roll up, showing only whites, and they start dancing they don’t have any expression at all. No joy, no excitement, no fear. Just nothing. When the priests put those big spears through their cheeks they don’t register anything. They aren’t there, they’re out with the cosmos somewhere.’ The girl picked distractedly at a patch of bleached skin on her arm – she said she’d caught a skin fungus in Bali. ‘I wonder if they fuck like that?’
Judith snorted.
‘No, I’m serious,’ the girl said. ‘Those guys really let go. They let go of the whole world, they look like they’re coming. I kept on thinking, Jesus I’d like to fuck with a guy who looked like that. And then I’d think, but Jesus, it’s scary. You’d be alone.’
‘We’d better start thinking of catching a bus,’Judith said.
The traffic from town was bumper-to-bumper on the road that ran past the village, but it was flowing freely enough in the other direction. Some family groups were already going home. They strolled along, chatting contentedly, smiling with accomplishment. They had discharged their duty by helping a relation into the trance, helping the spearing or skewering or fish-hooking – dozens of silver fish-hooks were run through the flesh of backs and chests to act as anchors for the towers of tinsel, peacock feathers, plastic dolls and other glittery rubbish that made up the big kavadis.
‘I thought I saw you earlier with a Tamil guy, a tall guy wearing one of those shirts with a high collar,’ the girl said. ‘You were talking to him on the river bank. What happened to him?’
‘He did something I didn’t like,’Judith replied. ‘I left him.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Maybe I imagined it,’ Judith muttered.
‘Yeah? Well, he’s no good for a lift. We’ll get groped on the bus. Let’s hitch.’
A Sikh succumbed to the girl’s demand for a lift back to town. His son, a man in his twenties, was slumped comatose on the front seat alongside him.
‘When his sister was sick he vowed to carry the kavadi for three years if she became well,’ the father said. ‘Now he loves the kavadi so much he has vowed to carry it for the rest of his life. My son is a wonderful boy.’
‘Did you see the Chinese who went into a monkey trance before he was speared?’ the girl asked him. ‘He turned into a monkey before my eyes. He ate bananas with the skins on, and ripped a coconut husk off with his teeth, and they beat him with whips.’
‘There were European devotees also, this year,’ the mother said. ‘They are discovering some of the secrets of India. You see, there are natural body substances called endorphines which we are knowing about for millennia but only in the last couple of years is Western medicine discovering them, how they act like morphine. We Indians do not need painkilling injections because we know the secret of selfproduction of these substances. I, Madam, am a medical worker. I read the journals.’
She jabbered away as the car moved off. The landscape, revealed now, was shattered – wastelands of grey sand, the abandoned land of former tin mines, that once had been jungle. It was already suffocatingly hot in the car, although it was only about nine in the morning. One of her fellow passengers – perhaps the hippy girl – stank, but even that was preferable, Judith thought, to the nauseatingly sweet incense down by the river – and the fruit abandoned to be trampled under foot, and the music and screams which had shuddered through her. Everything in excess for these people. There had been young men who cut their tongues with metre-long knives. Their eyes had bugged out as they danced around displaying their bloodied tongues. One had tranced while sucking a cheroot, until it burned his lips; a white rope of congealed saliva had hung from his mouth to his navel. He’d rolled in convulsions on the ground, making people leap backwards from his flailing limbs. And Kanan … oh, Kanan.
‘Would you open the window?’ she said urgently. She leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. A few minutes later the car drew up outside the Hotel Malaya. The hippy girl was accepting an invitation to stay at the Sikh’s house, and Judith was stumbling out, saying thank you, then tottering up the front steps into the glorious, airconditioned, efficient world of the Chinese business class.
‘Your suitcase delivered. In your room already, la! Another cable. Also a telephone message from Australia.’
Judith took the slips of paper and her key. Five minutes later she was asleep.
When Judith had refused to go with him into the cave and later, when she had run away from him, down by the river, Kanan had not taken offence. He knew that she had not meant to give offence, but was frightened.
At the river, he had explained to her, ‘All of us want only two things: power and protection. That is the human condition – the desire for dominance, the craving for succour. These devotees, who are mostly from the socially oppressed classes, satisfy both in their trance. The god takes away their pain; they have his protection. But they also unite with him, they have his strength. So they are as strong as a god, isn’t it?’
She had not understood a word he had said, for she had asked about Bibi and inner consciousness, so he had explained that Bibi’s ideas were Hinduism for non-Hindus, the husk only. But because of them Bibi no longer wanted to commit suicide. And when Judith had still not understood he had said, ‘There is no god in the cave. There is only yourself. Power over yourself is the only power. All this’, he had pointed out a young boy having fish-hooks put in his back, ‘is the workings of a mind in darkness, an excess called piety, nothing but an illusion of piety
.’
She had cut in, ‘I’ll say it is. It’s not religion either. It’s mutilation of children!’
It was like reasoning with an imbecile. He had merely replied, ‘His parents don’t mean to harm him. They believe they are doing something wonderful for him. The philosophy of Hinduism is harmlessness to all living things. Frankly, you are wrong about religion, also. Religion is – I am quoting Marx, isn’t it? – a system of ethics, a source of consolation and an explanation of the unknown. So, you see … ’
She had not run away then, but later, when he had begun to dance. Kanan liked dancing, liked the feeling of his limbs flowing loose and his hair giving soft blows to his checks as he shook his head. It was lovely dancing on the wet grass with all the other dancing people, the sky pink and blue with dawn, incense rising from the altar fires. He had watched her running away, her hands covering her ears against the drums.
Later his father-in-law had turned up, and danced also. Then they ate some noodles and drank kopi-O and drove back to town.
‘The Australian lady is in love with you,’ Father-In-Law said. ‘That is my opinion.’
‘Oh, yes. What will I do, Father?’
They both laughed at the dilemma. ‘Let’s go to a kedai and have a beer,’ Father-In-Law said. ‘Ranee won’t know the difference if I have one beer. She’s so pleased that I delivered the milk that she won’t complain about one beer.’
So they drank for the rest of the morning. Mother-In-Law shouted at Father-In-Law when he got home and auntie with the nose-jewel shouted at Kanan, who did not listen to her and fell face down on his bed and went to sleep.
15
There was only one sensation: heat. As if his thigh were a warm iron being pressed against her side and the heat from it were spreading across her pelvis. And there was one image: a semi-naked youth as slender as a palm tree dancing in the trance and behind him, Kanan dancing, too. Kanan’s eyes had been half-closed, he was slipping away, going back to the drums and the silver spears. There had been orgy in his half-sleeping eyes.
Turtle Beach Page 14
