India (15 page)

He made on an average 1000 rupees a month (on an average: weddings didn’t come every month), and he was content. There were also the food gifts: the rice and coconuts and fruit and pulses, things needed in pujas as consecrated offerings: a portion of the too-abundant store laid out by the devotee used up in the ritual itself, the rest given to the pujari to take away. So, going from house to house every day (living the kind of life the Jain
munis
lived in traffic-ridden Bombay, finding food at the homes of the faithful), it must have seemed to the pujari that in Bombay the world had been made whole again for him, after the scarcities of the far-away temple.

He was a small, even dainty man of thirty, not much above five feet. He was sweet-faced, with a little moustache and the pale skin of his community, and he was dressed in white. His dhoti had a light-brown edging. He wore a necklace of sandalwood beads, and he had a white nylon shopping bag for his belongings. His voice was as soft as his smile and his eyes. He was the picture of the serene and gentle brahmin: he looked as content and unfussed as he said he was.

His talk of pujas and gifts of food – and that nylon bag or sack
to take away offerings, no doubt – brought back memories. There had been so many pujas in my grandmother’s family in Trinidad when I was a child, so many ritual readings from the scriptures and the epics. They had given us less the idea of what we were than the idea that in Trinidad we were apart. These readings – sometimes going on for days – had been in a language I didn’t understand. I remembered them as holiday occasions, punctuated – at certain stages of the ritual, when clarified butter and raw brown sugar fed and sweetened the sacrificial fire – by the ringing of bells, the blowing of conches, the play of cymbals.

These occasions had fixed in me the idea of the privilege of pundits. They were the star performers on these occasions, and everything was done to pamper them. The best blankets or sheets were spread for them to sit on; the best food was kept for them, and served to them in state at the end. Afterwards, when the religious moment had ceased, had turned to ashes, as it were, and the pundits were no longer strictly on show, it remained their privilege discreetly to go and gather up the coins that had been thrown on the sacred fire on the decorated shrine, as well as the coins that had been thrown on the brass plate with burning camphor – emblem of the sacred fire – that had been taken around the people watching the ceremony: you threw your coin on the plate, passed your fingers through the camphor flame and took your fingers to your forehead.

To me, they were memories from far back, almost from another life. And here they were whole, in an unlikely setting. I met the pujari in Nandini’s apartment. Nandini was a journalist who worked for an advertising magazine. She was of the community of the pujari. She herself had no belief in rituals and no need of them, but the pujari seemed still to be called upon on certain occasions by her family. The apartment was in the neighbourhood of Dadar. It was an apartment in a block – four floors, 10 apartments on each floor – and we were on an upper floor: a respectable middle-class Bombay apartment: verandah, front room, back room.

With a memory of the excitement I had felt as a child at the idea of money being raked out from the warm ashes of the shrine, and coins being picked up warm from the plate with the burning camphor, I asked the pujari whether people in his community put money on the plate with the burning camphor. He said the custom didn’t exist in his community. But sometimes people from outside
the community put money on the plate when the sacred fire was taken round, and then even people in the community, not wishing to be outfaced, followed suit – and all that money was his.

He told me about the deity of the temple-and-ashram, the
math
, where he had grown up. The deity there was the Lord Bhavani Shankar. Who was he? The friend of Lord Shiva. What were his attributes? The pujari behaved as though I was testing him. Bhavani Shankar, he said, was a reincarnation of Yama, the Lord of Death.

He said, ‘You pray to him so that the soul may rest in peace.’

‘Isn’t that a Christian idea?’

It wasn’t the Christian idea; he didn’t seem to know the Christian idea. He talked on in his soft way, with his smile and his bright eyes, and Nandini interpreted.

‘Our community believes in the soul, the atma, that merges with the Lord.’ And almost at once – he was a pujari, a performer of ritual, rather than a guru or philosopher or theologian – he outlined, again as though he felt he was being tested, the ritual that had to be performed after a death. ‘On the 14th day after a person dies you have a ceremony where you have to prepare all kinds of food – certain dishes in addition to the dishes the dead person liked – and there is an elaborate puja. After the puja you put all the dishes on a plantain leaf and you leave it out in the open. The expectation is that a crow will come and peck at what is laid out on the plantain leaf – Indian crows are rapacious and swift and watchful – ‘and we take that as a symbol of the soul merging with the infinite.’

That was the kind of thing he had studied at the temple. It was an immense course of study. There were rituals at death; there were rituals at birth.

‘There is a cradling ceremony. You have then to refer to the
Panchang
. That’s an ancient text; it’s printed now in various Indian languages. You refer to that text to cast a horoscope and find a name. That’s common Hindu practice. It isn’t restricted to our community. I had to learn that, and I had to learn the details of all the other ceremonies. Let’s suppose you move into a new apartment. You have to exorcize the spirits that are there. The new apartment should be pure. To achieve that, again you have to go through quite an elaborate puja. When a child is eight there is a thread ceremony. And there is the wedding ceremony, of course – six hours, with the pujari chanting all the time.’

I wanted to know whether the details of the rituals were absolutely fixed, or whether there were disputes between pujaris – as, long ago in Trinidad, there were disputes between pundits, sometimes about small things: the correct form of Hindu salutation, for example.

The pujari said, ‘In recent times the pujaris have been taking shortcuts, especially with the marriage ceremony. They think a six-hour ceremony is too long.’ He didn’t like the shortcuts. ‘There is no meaning to it. I feel that once you start taking shortcuts it all goes down the drain.’

That was another point. How much of that complicated Hindu theology – evolved layer upon layer over millennia – had already gone down the drain in Bombay? For me, in Trinidad, only two generations away from India – though the Hindu epics still had a charge – whole segments of Hindu theology had been lost; later, parts of it were to be recovered, but only as art-history. Without its setting and its earth, Hindu theology seemed to blow away, as it had blown away after centuries from the cultures of Java and Cambodia and Siam: irrecoverable now, the emotions and the elaboration of belief that had supported the building of Angkor.

The pujari said he always took care to explain the verses he chanted. He had also bought some books published by the Arya Samaj – the reforming Hindu movement, more active earlier in the century than now. The Arya Samaj books explained the significance of some of the ceremonies he performed, and helped him to explain them to devotees.

Did he himself sometimes have trouble with the theology?

‘I’ve grown up with it. It’s part of me.’

‘Bhavani Shankar. The friend of Shiva, the reincarnation of Yama. These are difficult ideas by themselves. When you run them together, they become harder.’

He said again, ‘You pray to Bhavani Shankar so that the soul merges with the Lord.’ Speaking then of the various deities, he said, ‘To understand God, each one has his own way. In our
math
we have given him that persona, Bhavani Shankar. The math has been there for 300 years, and the deity has been there for centuries.’

‘Is the deity there very different from Ganpati at Pali?’ This was Mr Patil’s deity, the bringer of good fortune, the bestower of confidence.

The pujari said, ‘In my eyes all deities are the same. Ganpati is
actually the deity I like most, because Ganpati is the Lord of Learning.’

‘Isn’t that Saraswati?’

‘Ganpati’s other name is Vidia-Dhiraj. The Lord of Wisdom. When it comes to God, there is no end to learning. You probe deeper, and you always get more. Once you are in the profession, you don’t feel like giving it up. It is my livelihood, but at the same time through it my search for knowledge goes on. My faith has been so built up over the years, is so strong, that it wouldn’t be the same if I did something else, if I was working in a bank, for instance.’

The pujari’s younger brother worked in a bank. This brother had been trained as a pujari, too, but he had also gone to the local college. This was what was happening now to young men of the pujari class, the pujari said. They were turning away from their traditional work. One man, for instance, a fully trained pujari from the temple, was writing the accounts in a hotel in Bombay, near the airport. The younger generation didn’t want to go into the profession. The pujari didn’t blame his brother for working in a bank. Everybody didn’t have the same kind of faith; and even if the brother had decided to come to Bombay and be a pujari, he would have had a lot of trouble finding accommodation.

‘How much does your brother get in the bank?’

‘Twelve hundred rupees a month.’

‘That’s about what you get.’ And perhaps a good deal less, if the pujari’s daily gifts of food, and other things like cloth, were taken into account.

In the beginning, the pujari said, it had depressed and worried him that he hadn’t had a chance to study properly at the modern college in his temple town. He used to feel he was going to have a hard time making a living. But he no longer worried about the education he had missed, especially now that he was earning almost as much as his younger brother, who had gone right through the college and had ended up in a bank. Sometimes kindly people told him he should be thinking of some additional, modern occupation, just in case. Even if he was earning almost as much as his brother, that still wasn’t a great deal in Bombay.

‘But,’ the pujari said, ‘the first thing people ask you if you go for a job is, “Are you a graduate? Have you done this course or that
course? Do you have any job experience?” So the best thing for me is to continue in this profession.’

‘You talk as though you’ve looked for other jobs.’

‘I haven’t. But I’ve seen a lot of graduates sitting at home because they have no employment.’

Even if he didn’t want to think of a back-up profession, it must have occurred to him that travelling in Bombay was going to get worse, and that it would take him longer and longer to get from puja to puja. Shouldn’t he, then, be thinking of doing something on the lines of the Electric Pujari, to safeguard his future?

He talked as though he had considered it. ‘I don’t believe in that.’ He meant preparing his own puja cassettes. ‘You are too busy
fast-forwarding
and
rewinding.
’ He used the English words. ‘Your concentration is disturbed. The whole purpose of doing the puja is lost.’

I said that in a temple ashram a pujari could be poor, and not lose dignity. Even now, it was probably all right in Bombay, being a poor pujari. Was it always going to be like that? Bombay was changing all the time; there was a lot more money around now. Wasn’t there the risk that, as a poor pujari, he might start to fall in people’s esteem?

‘Let others have material wealth. I have peace of mind.’ In fact, he said, smiling, he wasn’t doing badly. He wasn’t a paying guest nowadays. He had just bought an apartment of his own, a ‘one-roomed kitchen’, as they called it in Bombay, an apartment like the one where we were talking. Three hundred and ninety-three square feet, 75,000 rupees.

I made a simple calculation. He had been in Bombay six years, and he said he made 1000 rupees a month. So the apartment cost more than his entire earnings for the six years. Did he have a mortgage?

He said, with his sweet smile, ‘No. Savings.’

Savings! So he had been living more or less on the gifts he got as a pujari, and had hardly been spending what he picked up in puja fees.

He said, ‘I paid by instalments. Because I am a pujari, the contractor gave me special consideration. He is a man of my community.’

‘Not many people have that kind of luck in Bombay.’

He said simply, ‘I accept it as a divine favour.’

It turned out that he had even begun to think of getting married. It wasn’t going to be easy for the woman he married, since he would be out all day travelling to do his pujas. So he was thinking that it would be nice if he could have a
working wife –
he used the English words – and that, of course, would help with the expenses and all that side of life which I appeared to be so concerned about.

Did he have pleasures?

It wasn’t a good question. There was no division in his mind between work and pleasure. He was a pujari; he served God; that wasn’t a matter of work and hours. Still, he set himself to thinking. And his gentle black eyes were bright and smiling as he thought. Pleasure, pleasure – what might pass as pleasure?

He said, ‘I like decorating the shrine.’

He looked inwards always. But – we were in Bombay, a city of many faiths and races and conflicts. How did he see the city? What did he feel when, for instance, he saw the tourists around the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal Hotel? What did he feel about the crowds, the people among whom he – in his pujari’s garb – would almost certainly stand out?

‘I’m indifferent to it. I have my work. It keeps me busy. I don’t have the time to go visiting. I don’t have the time to look around me.’

He had been in Bombay six years, and was going to be there as far ahead as he could see. But the only person he still looked up to and revered was the head of the Chitrapur Saraswat brahmin community.

He looked inwards and was serene; he shut out the rest of the world. Or, as might be said, he allowed other people to keep the world going. It wasn’t a way of looking which his fellows in the community had (some of them in the Gulf, among Muslims). But it made him a good pujari.