The Age of Kali (33 page)

The old man took my hand and led me sadly back towards the road. ‘My children tell me you mustn’t live in your memories. One must try to move with the times, and face the future rather than always dreaming about what has gone.’

Mir Moazam turned to face me: ‘And they are right, of course,’ he said. ‘That is why I do not like to come back here. At every step there are fragments of my past. And frankly it breaks my old heart to see it like this.’

COCHIN
,
1993

Something was clearly wrong with the woman.

As I walked past, she jumped up, rocked unsteadily one way and the other, then lunged towards my face with her long, dirt-stained fingernails. I sidestepped, and she lurched after me, one foot dragging slightly behind the other. Then, as abruptly as she got up, she sat down again on the floor, and curled herself up in to a little ball. Nearby, three other women rolled around beside her, cackling to themselves in deep, broken voices.

Mr Venugopal put a calming hand on my shoulder: ‘You must not worry about these ladies,’ he said, smiling at my alarm. ‘Each of them has a devil in her. But soon all these evil spirits will be exorcised.’

He patted me reassuringly on the back: ‘By tonight our goddess Parashakti will have all these devils tamed. By eleven o’clock, I promise you, sir, all these ladies will be ripe as rain.’

Mr Venugopal was a kind and devout old man. We had met a little earlier that morning in a roadside tea-stall; as we shook hands, Mr Venugopal had handed me his card. It read:

Venugopal
Chief Engineer to All-Kerala Electricity Board (Retired)

Mr Venugopal, it was true, looked a slightly unlikely Chief Engineer. As he sat at his breakfast, gobbling down great plates of
idli sambhar
, he was naked but for a thin white cotton loincloth, over the top of which spilled his sizeable paunch. He wore heavy black glasses, and his forehead was marked by a prominent sandalwood
tilak
mark. Over his chest, attached to a thin black thread, hung a Hindu charm.

‘I am a retired person interested in spiritual affairs only,’ he explained. ‘Now my career is over I visit temples and pray to God. But of all the temples I have visited, the goddess of this place is by far the most powerful. I tell you: if you surrender to her you will get total peace of mind.’

Perhaps I had looked a little sceptical, for Mr Venugopal had immediately offered to take me around the great temple of Chottanikkara himself. Although all the major temples in Kerala are officially closed to non-Hindus, Mr Venugopal insisted that he was a personal friend of one of the temple officials, and that his friend would be happy, as he put it, ‘to expedite everything’. Sure enough, twenty minutes later I was through the great wooden gatehouse with its upturned Chinese flying eves, past the burly temple guards, and inside the temple’s first compound.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Venugopal. ‘Before I take you in to the presence of the goddess, let us sit down in the shade and take our rest. Then I can tell you about the Mother.’

We found a stone wall-bench under an arcade of the cloister garth, and Mr Venugopal started to explain.

‘We Hindus believe that some of the symptoms of epilepsy – delirious convulsions and mad utterances – are due to the effect of
yakshis
, or evil spirits. These spirits have astral bodies only, and are invisible. Their identity can only be guessed at by the symptoms of the possessed person, and also by the astrological calculations of our Brahmins. Our feeling is that every evil spirit would like to unite with the Almighty. But thanks to his bad deeds he cannot. For this reason there are too many evil spirits roaming around in the atmosphere.

‘Now, the aim of these
yakshis
is to get inside the bodies of weak-minded peoples. Then they think they will be brought to a temple where some compensatory
puja
will be done for them, and in this way they will get salvation.’

We walked past the first shrine and through a courtyard lined
by a succession of small cells, each with a simple wooden door. Walking in the same direction as ourselves there flowed a continuous stream of pilgrims. Many were plump Brahmins over whose oiled and glistening torsos hung thin sacred threads. I remarked to Mr Venugopal on the number of visitors.

‘Each year this shrine is more and more popular,’ he replied. ‘Twenty years ago people did not have belief. They were materialistic and said that all temples were just humbug and nonsense. Now many have learned the error of their ways. They think materialistic things are not everything. They realise you cannot get happiness even with all the material benefits in the world. So, like all people who are in trouble, they call for their Mother, and she is answering them.’

We had arrived at the bottom of a great stairway. Here a second gatehouse led past a tank in to a second compound.

‘Mr William. At this stage you must please take off your shirt. If you wish to go in to the inner temple, you must be wearing only a pant or a
lungi
. This is our custom.’

‘Why here?’ I asked. ‘Why not at the entrance?’

‘Our goddess Parashakti reveals herself in different forms in different parts of the temple,’ explained Mr Venugopal. ‘At the top she is in her most gentle and wise and motherly form: there she shows herself as the goddess Saraswati and the goddess Lakshmi. But here in this lower compound she appears in her most terrible form. Here she is Kali. We must be most respectful. To anger her …’

He broke off, and ran his fingers melodramatically across his throat.

‘Finish,’ he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis.

The inner compound was much smaller than those we had already passed. A wall pressed in around the small, dark shrine where the believers were bowing in front of the idol. To one side stood a tree. Its trunk was punctured by hundreds of long steel nails.

‘This is the Devil’s Tree,’ said Venugopal. ‘By hammering nails in to the bark with the heads of the patients we clamp the spirits
to the goddess Kali so they will not disturb any other person.’

‘Did you say with their
heads
?’

‘Oh yes. But first the possessed person must be in a state of trance. She must be seized by the goddess, then she will feel nothing.’

‘And how do you persuade Kali to seize the person?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that is easy matter,’ said Mr Venugopal. ‘We feed her twelve basins full of blood.’

Who is Parashakti?

Her names are as many as her devotees, though sometimes she is called simply Mahadevi – the Great Goddess – for the world was created when she opened her eyes, and it is destroyed whenever she blinks.

Some call her Jagatikanda, the Root of the World. Others know her as Supreme Ruler, She who Supports the Galaxy, She who is Ruler of All the Worlds, Mother of All. Her most sacred title is the Root of the Tree of the Universe.

Yet if Parashakti is Life itself, she is also Death. She can destroy all she creates, and for this reason many of her devotees choose to worship her as Pancapretasanasina, She who is Seated on a Throne of Five Corpses. She is also known by the names She who is Wrathful, She who has Flaming Tusks, She who Causes Madness, She whose Eyes Roll about from Drinking Wine, the Terrible One, Night of Death.

To summon her, the Brahmins chant a Sanskrit invocation:

Though she is fierce, terrifying and destructive, the goddess is said to be quick to come to the aid of her devotees. In times of drought she appears in a form having many eyes. When she sees the condition of her creatures she begins to weep, and her woe has the force of a hundred monsoons. Soon the rivers begin to flow, the ponds and the lakes fill to overflowing, and verdure covers the earth. Through Parashakti the world is reborn.

At no place on this earth is the Great Goddess so accessible as in her principal shrine of Chottanikkara. For there, so it is said, her idol sometimes comes to life and in physical form takes action to protect her devotees against devils and demons.

Once, Mr Venugopal told me, a demonic
yakshi
desired a handsome young Brahmin. The Brahmin was crossing the jungle in order to perform a
puja
at the temple at Chottanikkara when the
yakshi
first saw him. She joined him on his journey and began to talk sweetly to him. It was late in the evening and the
yakshi
’s outer form was that of a tall and lovely Tamil girl. She knew that if she were able to persuade the Brahmin to spend the night with her she would be able to devour him alive.

But on his way through the forest the Brahmin happened to stop at the hut of a holy man. He invited his beautiful companion to come inside and take some refreshment, but she refused and hovered among the trees outside. The holy man, through his spiritual powers, realised then the true nature of the
yakshi
. He gave the Brahmin a red cloth and told him to leave the woman and to go on as fast as he could to the shrine of Parashakti. When he got there he should throw the cloth over the idol; only then would he be saved.

The Brahmin ran from the holy man’s hut, and the
yakshi
, realising that she had been discovered, abandoned her disguise and changed in to her real form. She became as tall as a mountain, with a mouth like a cave, and her hair was a mass of hissing cobras. The
yakshi
chased after the boy, and by the time he had neared the temple gatehouse she was virtually upon him. She grabbed at his leg and he just managed to throw the red cloth over the idol before the
yakshi
pulled him from the gateway.

At that moment the Kali idol came to life. Seeing that her devotee was in trouble, the goddess brandished her sword and chased the
yakshi
in to the forest. Beside a jungle pond the goddess caught up with the demon and cut off her head. Then she drank the
yakshi
’s blood. So much gore flowed from the corpse that to this day the pond beneath the temple still has a reddish tinge.

But the drinking of the
yakshi
’s blood also had its effect on the goddess. As Mr Venugopal put it when he first told me the story, ‘finally the drinking of blood became her habit. Now she cannot live without it. Every day we must feed her twelve full basins. In return she still rids us of our demons.’

In 1830 a Bengali Maharajah slaked the thirst of the Mother Goddess with the blood of no fewer than twenty-five of his youthful retainers; as recently as 1835 a boy was beheaded every single Friday at the altar of the Kali temple at Calcutta. Many temples in Kerala still quietly sacrifice cocks, goats and sheep to the goddess, but at Chottanikkara, where Parashakti requires her full twelve basins of blood every day, the goddess has been gradually weaned (or perhaps detoxed) on to a blood-coloured solution of lime juice and turmeric.

Parashakti is fed her supper at nine o’clock every evening. After she has drunk her fill, music is played for her entertainment. It is then, Mr Venugopal told me, that the goddess makes the devil’s dance.

By night the temple precincts were more eerie than by day.

The postcard-sellers had gone and the tea-shacks were shuttered and closed. In the dark, unseen palm trees rustled in the wind.

A figure stepped out of the shadows.

‘Mr William?’

It was Venugopal. He looked agitated.

‘Come quick,’ he said. ‘We are late.’

Together, we passed through the empty gatehouse. On the far side, lit by flickering reed torches, we were confronted by a large and completely silent crowd. All the pilgrims and devotees were facing the shrine, bowed double before the image of the goddess. Some of the men had prostrated themselves flat on their faces, arms outstretched towards the idol.

Then quite suddenly the silence was broken. One of the priests clashed a pair of brass cymbals; simultaneously four of his colleagues began to blow conch shells and large curved trumpets of a design familiar from Cecil B. de Mille Biblical epics. From around one corner of the shrine another priest appeared, sitting astride a huge tusker elephant. The
mahout
bowed to the goddess, hands arched in the gesture of
namaskar
, then began circumambulating the shrine, followed by the cymbal-clashers and the trumpet-blowers. As the priests circled round and round, the other devotees joined in, until the shrine was ringed by a great collar of moving pilgrims.