At the base of the hill, I am immediately besieged by shills bearing prasad-ready bundles of incense and a single coconut. Here, in a plastic bag, is a prepackaged bit of obeisance. Pocket calendar salvation it isn't, and for pure entertainment value, the idea of commingling worship, fragrant smoke, and eating seems promising. Furthermore, incense sticks and coconuts whip the censers and Eucharist of the Catholics any day of the week. (Marge Simpson makes a good point: "I went to a Catholic wedding once, and the incense ruined my new pantsuit!") Nevertheless, I blow off the shills.
The way to Nirach Mata is steep. A carved archway announces the entrance to the temple path, and already many devout remove their sandals and shoes, intending to make the entire climb barefoot. Some whisper a quick prayer, stopping momentarily to touch the ground and mutter. In reality, there are two paths to the temple, although they intersect and overlap with regularity. One is a steep stairway, direct and strenuous, the other a switchbacking cement walkway with railings and benches, less steep but still taxing. Along with my companions, Arun and Anuj, I take both paths at varying points of the ascent. I am in a hurry--I want to reach the top before the sun sets. The view promises to be spectacular, and I am not disappointed: the entire city of Udaipur lies stretched out before me, encircled by hills that have turned a hazy brownish-gray in the evening's dying light. The white buildings of the city--stained with dust, flaking paint, shabby and decaying in ground-level daylight--seem a network of immaculately calciferous nodules from this height, like barnacles on the back of a surfacing gray whale. The waters of Fateh Sagar and Lake Pichola are a limpid looking glass, reflecting the failing light of a darkening sky.
We're forced to halt at the bottom of the temple's ultimate stairway--it is overrun with patient supplicants (see photo at right). We remove our sandals and tread through shallow puddles of filthy water to join the queue. For now the day lives on, but by the time we reach the temple, full night has fallen. Indians are notorious queue-jumpers, but with few exceptions, everyone is patient. Some cheers ring out to puncture the monotony. The temple's exterior is lit with small white lights, not unlike those strewn across town and country at Christmas. A man is splayed across the temple's surface, checking connections with a hand-held device and replacing burnt-out bulbs. Two policemen run the show at the top, operating like bouncers at a popular club. Finally we're admitted.
The air at the temple's edge is thick and sweet with the smoke of burning incense; a solitary drum is beaten slowly, methodically. The faithful ring bells that dangle in a row before a mass of burning incense, their sound more clang than ring, more discord than harmony. I pass and strike their clappers in turn, as I have seen others before me do. It is sensuous ritual: a fiery yellow light throws shadows amid the clanging of the bells and the slow, stentorian whump of the drum, the incense, the smoke. I have the unshakeable sensation of being in the midst of something pagan, something elemental and atavistic. I admit I am utterly ashamed by the idea, ashamed that I might equate strangeness in some inchoate and unarticulated way with primitivism, and yet I can't deny the feeling. I was brought up in one of the more staid and uncharismatic traditions of a largely staid and uncharismatic religion. The Mennonites, "the plain people," cousins to the Amish, kissing cousins to the silent Quakers--this is what I know of worship. Worship is silent, solemn, unadorned, like the people of God. Can I be blamed for the momentary ignorance and ugliness of my gut?
My mind keeps returning to the end of Apocalypse Now, when Martin Sheen slowly rises from the primordial river, his face luridly smeared with black, eyes wild and steely, while lightning snakes and flashes in the sky all about him. Coppola overlays Sheen's creeping to and murder of Kurtz (Marlon Brando), with an image of the ritualistic slaughter of a water buffalo by Kurtz's worshippers, a primitive tribe of the remote Cambodian jungle. Earlier, Brando reads parts of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in voice-over: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." The murder scene is cryptic, eerie, powerful, unsettling, and however incongruous it might be with what I encounter at Nirach Mata, it is nonetheless lodges in my mind, unbidden.
Existing within this feeling of uneasiness and, yes, even dread, perhaps even at the core of it, is thrill. Thrill, too, because of the strangeness, the sensuality, the sense of trespass--both into this world to which I don't belong, and more fundamentally, trespass as an admittedly non-spiritual person into a spiritual realm. I feel I'm getting away with something, bearing witness to something secret and sacred, and it excites me. In reality, no one cares that I am here--as Anuj points out, "We can go to church, can't we?" And yet, as I sidle up to the idol (ha!, but I really did sidle) to receive darshan, I am anxious, self-conscious: I don't know how to act. I watch those worshippers ahead of me, but no two behave alike. Most surrender their coconuts for prasad, bow, and mouth some words, but some touch their foreheads to the table before Durga, and some bring their fingers to their lips and pray, and some touch their lips and chests and bow in rapid succession. It is all done so quickly, I hardly have time to formulate a plan of attack; no one tarries before the idol. (Because I've endured many a church service bloated to ninety minute with sop, filler, and grandiloquence, on some level I can appreciate the radical condensation of this practice. One only has time for the essence of the prayer. And practically speaking, if everyone is to get personal facetime with Durga, it needs be brief, or else Hindus would lament the one-third of their life they spent sleeping, and the two-thirds they spent waiting to receive darshan. And yet, what is gained by that four second prayer? I suppose Woody Allen was right: 95% of life is showing up.)
Now I am front and center, and so I press my palms together, hold my hands to my chest, make several small, quick bows and hurry off. I am not conscious of having looked at the idol; I remember only a fierce yellow light and the face of one of the men (priests?) handling prasad. He is smiling indulgently. I catch up to Arun and Anuj. The rear wall of the temple is inlaid with swastikas (an auspicious Hindu symbol), and some worshippers reach out to it and pause for a split-second prayer. I touch it. We take some time to appreciate the temple's western exposure, munch coconut that has been consecrated by the goddess (Durgalicious!), and enjoy the relative cool and quiet of this side of Nirach Mata.
Within ten minutes, we depart. The stairway down from the temple (seen at the right in the photograph) had been relatively clear during our wait--the descent of worshippers was no more than a trickle then, and could be no more, as the temple can hold only a fraction of those waiting to be admitted. But now, as we descend, impatience and fervor have surmounted propriety, and a wave of the zealous has swept nearly to the top to meet us. There is jostling and shouting. "This can't end well," I think. The crowd seethes and churns; it is an independent organism, obeying its own logic. There is a terrible strength in this mass, and that strength is heaving about, trying to find articulation in its dumb gesturing (More of "The Hollow Men": "Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow"). Caught in the middle are an elderly couple, gray and shriveled and stooped, buffeted by the crowd. I fear for their safety. I fear for my safety. I can think only of the headline that I've glimpsed online that very afternoon: "15 Killed in Gujarat Temple Stampede". "This is how it happens!" I think. Someone lifts the rope separating the two stairways, and the old couple, harried to the last, manages to duck under. Arun and Anuj and I push downward and to the left, where a second staircase branches from the first. We slip away.
After we retrieve our sandals and continue our descent, I exclaim, "Indians are crazy!"
"What?" Anuj asks.
"All those people pushing," I say. "It was crazy."
"Oh, that happens all over India," he says matter-of-factly. He and Arun are unperturbed by what has taken place. The subject dies there.
No comments:
Post a Comment