A Place Within (49 page)

The concert turns out to be in a school hall, and it’s a Carnatic recital of songs by Thyagaraja. And I, who came to it impatient and a little angry, not expecting much from such a setting and ready to depart as soon as I took a peep inside, am completely bowled over by the beauty of the singing and the music, performed by three or four musicians in the far front of the hall. It is a lesson in humility, patience, and sense of humour. We stay longer than intended, and at the station I have to run to catch my overnight train. But once I have deposited myself in my second-class seat, staring out at the darkness and listening to the clackety rhythm of the rails, I feel an overwhelming sense of elation. Trust a bit of music to lift you up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

I learn later from an amused and happy Paniker, who shared a room with him once, that Basheer was an excellent cook and loved tea. He listened to Paul Robeson and K. L. Saigal.

Thakazhi, on the other hand, was a miser.

I finish reading Thakazhi’s
Chemmeen
in an Indian edition I have picked up in Trivandrum. It’s a slim novel, one of his shorter ones, a story about the romance between a girl from a Hindu fishing village and a Muslim boy. A tragic tale, simply told, in which customs and taboos—internalized taboos, as well as those enforced through family and neighbours—work with the immutability of fate. Breaking a taboo in such a setting is to court disaster, which for fisherfolk is meted out at sea. What would have happened if the young couple had run away together to live in a city?
Could
they have run away? I have met many Hindu-Muslim couples, but there are few fictional and hardly any cinematic treatments of this phenomenon, even though in Bollywood Muslim actors regularly play upper-caste Hindu men, and in their real lives marry Hindu women. This is a subject fraught with sensitivities. Recall the phenom in Gujarat who uses goons to break up mixed marriages in order to save the Hindu nation. Why, I was asked passionately once, could Muslim men marry Hindu women, and not the other way around? This seems a common perception, especially since orthodox Muslim women live sheltered lives and could not possibly come into contact with Hindu, or indeed any, men. Among the mixed couples I have come across, however, the women have been of either community.

Basheer, it turns out, had a passionate love affair with a Hindu Nair girl. This I discover much later after my visit to see him, in a brief biography introducing an English edition of his stories. The young woman’s parents threatened to kill themselves, and Basheer pleaded with her to give him up and marry the man of her parents’ choice. The experience took its toll on Basheer, “leading him to intemperance of an alarming nature,” says the introduction to
Basheer Fictions
. What form this intemperance took, the introduction doesn’t say. Basheer married later, when he was fifty.

Every year from November to January thousands of men, many of them wearing black lunghis round their waists and bare-chested, are seen on the railways on their way to make pilgrimage at the Sabarimala temple of Lord Ayyappa. When I suggest to my friend Hussein that we undertake this journey, even though the pilgrimage season is over, and he consults with his friends in Varkala regarding my crazy-sounding proposal, there is a deal of objection. Climbing the mountain in the heat is hazardous, I am warned; if I go, I should leave early in the morning and take plenty of rest on the way; and so on, until I am ready to give up the idea. But finally they agree, they will indulge my wish. Hussein thinks much of me. My letters to him from Toronto, I have learned from his friends, are a source of pride for him.

We leave from Varkala at 4:30 a.m. With us is a railway station master, who has called in sick to accompany me and see the site for himself. He tells me that a Muslim (he is one, too) from Varkala had done the pilgrimage and been ostracized afterwards by his mosque. And so I am his ready excuse, it’s for my sake he’s going there.

The full pilgrimage requires a kind of preparatory ritual of forty-one days—a fast, abstention from sex, meat, alcohol, etc., sleeping on a hard surface. The pilgrims are required to take a black bundle, carried on the head and representing their sins, which will be left behind at the temple. The bundles contain offerings, usually rice and coconut, so the value of the collections during the pilgrimage must be enormous.

Ayyappa, born of the gods Shiva and Vishnu, the latter of whom had taken the female form of Mohini to give birth, was found by
the childless King Rajasekara as an adorable baby on the bank of the Pampa river. He was brought up as Manikandan, a gifted child, and considered the heir to the throne; but meanwhile the queen gave birth to her own son. Encouraged by the prime minister, she pretended to have a sickness which could be cured only by drinking a tigress’s milk. An impossible proposition, who would milk a tigress? The foundling Manikandan, as expected, volunteered to go to the forest and fetch the milk. He would have met certain death had he been an ordinary prince. But he was not. On the way he met and killed the evil Mahishi, a deed that accorded with prophecy, and returned to the palace in the company of gods and goddesses, who had all taken on the forms of tigers or tigresses. Manikandan’s identity as the god Ayyappa was thus revealed. The king had been a father to him and therefore Ayyappa told the king to ask for a boon. Rajasekara requested him to indicate a place where a temple could be built in his honour. Ayyappa drew his bow and let fly an arrow. It fell on the hill where the ascetic Sabari had once lived, where Rama had once passed. This became the site of Sabarimala.

Rajasekara, of the Kulasekara empire of Kerala, lived in the ninth century, so this legend of Sabarimala is quite recent. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit the site every year. Any male, and any female not in her childbearing years, irrespective of caste or creed, can go up to glimpse the god and attain his darshana. Before going up, the pilgrims are required to visit a mosque in Erumeli, a nearby town. And up on the mountain, beside the main temple, there is a shrine to a Muslim saint called Vavar that the pilgrims attend.

Why then would Hussein and his friends hesitate to take me up to Sabarimala? The answer lies in the recent hardening of attitudes.

Our taxi climbs a steep hill on a quiet, winding highway. There’s not a soul in sight. On one side of us, a forest valley, the meandering Pampa river sometimes visible. On the other side,
thick vegetation; at one point columns of tall rubber trees, at another, straight, sleek-trunked teak. Parallel to us, at the same height, puffs of cloud across the valley. We realize that we are in a cloud ourselves. The visibility is low, some seventy yards at most. Sharp, clear calls of the birds. The Pampa flowing below in the valley.

The natural Keralan reserve I had seen among my companions now dissolves, and there is, in the small-town companionship of friends, much giggling and teasing. The driver, near retirement—he’s fifty-five—has jet black hair, presumably dyed. He can’t see well but will not wear glasses. He spent fifteen years working in the Gulf, and upon his return, flush with money, bought this car. He also has another job.

The station master, who generously put me up for the night, giving me a room probably used by someone else, has a nice large two-storey house. But it has such rudimentary furniture as would suit a mud house, giving me the impression that nothing more can be afforded for the time being.

In olden days the journey to Sabarimala was undertaken on foot, through the forest. Legend has it that those who had not observed the preparatory rituals would be picked off by the tigers and leopards. But now there is this road, smooth except for the odd interruption, which takes us straight to the town of Pampa at the foot of Sabarimala.

The town has numerous “hotels,” canteens roofed with thatch for the pilgrims to rest at and purchase refreshments. Two of them are open but almost empty. In the distance, rows of public toilets, one rupee per head, as a large sign says.

The place has not been cleaned since the last pilgrims left about a month ago. Litter lies all over, plastic and paper of all kinds. There is a stench of rotting fruit. The alleys between the hotels serve as garbage dumps, and the ground is covered with animal turd. It’s not obvious at first what animal is responsible, then comes
a braying sound accompanied by rhythmic groans, and we realize that it’s donkey turd around us and a copulation is in progress. The donkeys are used for carrying sand for building in the area, and perhaps also for carrying up pilgrims.

There are flies in abundance. The pilgrims may have left, but the flies have only multiplied. And how they cling.

Two of my companions now spend an hour hiring a tractor to take us up the mountain. A noisy tractor with four chattering people going up to a pilgrimage site somehow doesn’t sound attractive to me. I tell my companions that I prefer to hike up. The time factor is mentioned to deter me, but I persist, saying they have already wasted an hour. Finally the station master and I walk up with a guide, the other two drive away ahead of us.

There are canteens, now empty, to either side of us as we walk, the path littered with plastic wrappers, paper, cardboard, juice boxes. But the climb is relentlessly steep, so that one has to rest. After a mile or so, the track flattens, and there are fewer stalls around. The land drops steeply away on either side here. The guide points to a ravine, saying, Sabari peed there once with such great force that the land gave way. There is indeed a fast-moving stream below; I don’t know if it signifies anything. All around us, green dense forest. There are sounds in the bushes and trees—birds, wildfowl, a brown furry-tailed thing of which only the tail is glimpsed, a red and black squirrel. The trees are huge, the red earth soft. Two stones, one large and one small, are kept in an enclosure, and they symbolize the story that Sabari was once turned into a stone by a rishi, until Rama on his journey in the forest came upon her and released her. I have not been able to corroborate these stories about Sabari since. Across the valleys, other mountains. No sign of habitation, but an electric cable has discreetly followed us and becomes visible. After a couple of miles, tube lights appear at regular intervals on the trees to light the way of the pilgrims in the dark. The sight of thousands walking, clad in
black, carrying two bundles each, chanting to Lord Ayyappa must be inspiring, electricity and juice boxes notwithstanding.

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.