A Place Within (3 page)

“City people are like biscuits,” he says. “They are the same everywhere.”

He’s a lecturer in nearby Berhampur, a newspaper man, an Oriya poet. A short stocky man in bush shirt, whose brown even teeth look as if they’ve had a dip in jaggery. He believes in folk motifs, he tells me, a people’s poetry. He writes of the hungry and the displaced, of those who have to sell their children to survive in the arid, undeveloped waste of Orissa. “You should see a village, visit the tribals.” “Tribals” are the aborigines of the country, also called the “Adivasis.” I never knew such people existed. I had known of the canonical four Hindu castes, and then there were the Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. Now these. Having given me his confidences and opinions for a good part of a day, my new friend finally takes me and a few others to a jatra, which he translates as “opera.”

The jatra starts at eleven and goes on for most of the night. The reason for these hours, explains our host, is so that people who live far don’t have to walk back home in the middle of the night. We have also acquired by now another host, a retired police inspector general. We’ve been told he comes from an accomplished literary family, his brother is a well-known dramatist in Delhi. It is perhaps because of him that we receive our VIP treatment, seats close to the stage.

The jatra is a travelling show, therefore thoroughly professional. It is also the poor people’s night entertainment. It takes place inside a large tent on dusty ground on the city outskirts. As we arrive, there are crowds waiting to get inside. Outside the entrance: stalls of food, tea, paan, cigarettes. The crowd is predominantly men, youths or a little older, in shirts and trousers, a shawl draped across the shoulder for the chill. They are, I am told, working people, living mostly in shanties. Women are not present—except for the few young companions brought along—because someone has to stay behind to mind the children and the home. Among the middle classes, it appears, this mode of entertainment is not respectable. My host has moved up, but misses his village, has had to convince
his wife that this nocturnal and lower-class outing is only because the visitors want to go.

Inside the tent are three stages in a row. The main one is in the centre, colourful and brilliant with lights, a diaphanous curtain going all around it. This arrangement allows all portions of the crowd a close view. Five thousand people sit in the tent, the chairs arranged around the three stages in sections separated by aisles. The seating is numbered, according to a code only the ushers seem to know.

Not many years ago the program consisted of a musical prelude followed by the main drama, which used to be based on the Indian epics, the
Mahabharata
and the
Ramayana
. But today the prelude consists of dances of the Hindi-film mode, very sexually suggestive with hip shakes and crotch thrusts from the boys (about twelve years old) directed at sweetly smiling girls. The audience whistles and shouts. The dance is on the main stage; thematic screen projections and solo dancing appear on the second stage, where the manager also makes loud announcements and introductions. The lit gangway between these two stages serves as the third performing space.

The drama now begins, with a dance to the spring season performed by girls in bright colours playing the roles of flowers; in the midst of this performance arrive the bees, boys dressed in black costumes with wings attached, fluttering from flower to flower. The bees and flowers dance together. Watching them, among an audience, is a greasy politician.

The plot is typical, filmic. Girl, poor parents, wealthy boy with unscrupulous father demanding dowry, the villain of the piece the politician-crook who wants the girl; a good police inspector under a corrupt police chief; and so on. The aficionados among us can see through this entertainment into the realistic message. The villain in such plots used to be the moneylender; now he is the politician. The crooked policeman is only too familiar. And the message of the dowry is clear.

Some of the girls in the dances are in fact boys. My host, grinning cheerfully, tells me they get regularly buggered by their managers. What to make of this, my mind racing through cries of child abuse? What to make of his grin: is he seeking male approval or is he apologetic? I don’t think even he knows, perhaps he is testing my response.

We leave at 2:15, a little after the intermission.

On the last night of the conference it is decided to hold a mushaira, a session of poetry recitals. The readings, in English, on the terrace of a hotel earlier in the evening amidst vegetarian fare, have gone well but left a sense of incompleteness. Something stronger for the heart and soul is required, something more nourishing in Hindi and Punjabi. And so we gather in the square courtyard of the state-run guest house called Yatri Nivas. The rooms open directly into this space. No Mughal prince could have asked for a better venue for a mushaira than this mellow, subdued night under a star-studded sky. A circle is formed, everyone is invited
to join in, including the Oriya watchman, who, deeply touched, goes to ask permission from his manager; it is denied. A contingent of high school teenagers, boys and girls, have arrived from Punjab and sit in the distance against the walls, eyeing us adults with bored sleepy looks on their faces.

And so: ghazals, kavitas, film songs. A line recited, a phrase offered up to savour; repeated for effect. The verse completed, ending with a repetition. The audience under stars and moon resay the words, the phrases they enjoy. The reciter becomes a poet among an audience of poets. It is wonderful to see how many of the poems and songs are commonly known among this audience, from Punjab, Delhi, Shimla, Gujarat. One of the teenagers, a boy, has surreptitiously drawn closer to our circle, charmed no doubt by poetry’s magic. He is invited to recite. Unabashedly, and much to my surprise, he does so, two verses from a poem. Wah! they respond. Well done! They’re my own, he says modestly.

A Punjabi scholar working in Gujarat sings a poem by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, perhaps (I am told) the greatest Punjabi poet of modern times. When he starts to sing, Raj Kumar closes his eyes, makes a gesture as if he were taking over the place, or entering some private space of his own. His voice is so rich, so full of feeling and melody, it is enough in itself. But after a few verses he is ready to quit: I see darkness, he says. A cave. Someone should assist you, it is suggested. Yes. Who but the boy gets up and approaches, and between the two—a shaky yet not unintimidated boy, and the master—they take it away.

A girl sings plaintively: I don’t know you, and neither do you know me, but our love has happened.

It’s an old song that I know. To whom does she sing those words?

This is still a land of romance, I tell myself, of song and love. Hearts still are given and taken away. It’s a place of signals, with looks, and handkerchiefs, and small gestures. A place of laughter. How well do I recognize these, how utterly have I lost them. The
cynicism is reserved for politicians, among this middle-class crowd, the irony for foreign consumption.

The Jagannath temple complex in Puri is one of the four major dhams, or holy centres of Hinduism. Even the self-proclaimed non-believers must have a go at it, get the darshanas, if not for themselves then at least for their neighbours, their friends, their mothers. The reigning deity of this temple is Jagannath, Lord of the Universe, the All-Seeing One, worshipped by followers of Vishnu and Shiva, Buddhists and Jains, and even Muslims. In the middle of every July, pilgrims pour into town for the annual chariot festival, in which chariots forty feet high and more, red and yellow, bearing Jagannath and his sister and brother, are conveyed in a symbolic procession round the universe. But it is January and we are not so lucky as to witness such a spectacle.

Shoes are not allowed in the temple, and some therefore alight from our two buses enthusiastic and already barefoot, and walk the grimy, sandy, squelchy way to the temple. It’s a longish walk, along a busy commercial street crowded with pedestrians and pilgrims and lined with shoe stands where one may remove one’s shoes and take a token as a receipt. Only Hindus are allowed into the temple, a sign says, but who is to check and how? What exactly is a Hindu? I have not denied any Hindu god.

The temples are famous for their intricate architecture, patient work of decades, details into which one could get easily lost. But few here are conscious of this, the atmosphere is one of a fete—no, a market—crowds of worshippers, gangs of hustlers. It seems like an offence, to the outsider, that a visit to such historic sites, national monuments, iconographic representations of mankind’s spiritual strivings, should be greeted by beggars and hustlers, self-proclaimed guides, who simply cling and cling, are not, are never, shaken off until the end of the visit when you get back on your bus.

And then the sheer uncanniness of it: amidst the sordidness, the hustling, the thieving, the bargaining with the priests, a professor covers her head, goes for, tolerates, the darshana—because she has to; something deserves respect, only she can tell what that something is for her. The humility, the grace of such a worshipper is astounding, before the Brahmins with the blessings, and the icon of Shiva, and the attendants who make space for her by pushing others aside because she’s a “Madam,” a respectable lady, who has brought rupees, and they are merely the poor supplicants with nothing but endless woes.

A beggar woman calls out, Help a poor woman, Bhagwan will give you a boy. A boy and girl in rags, of about five, come to beg. The heart melts. What will you buy with the money? Come on, tell, my companion, who’s just prayed, says in mock sternness. The two break into fits of giggles. They get a rupee. As we walk away, a pulling match. The boy gets to hold the coin.

Back in the bus, a box of prasad arrives, sweetmeats blessed at the temple. Yes, I remember, it has to be taken with the right hand. One crumbles in my hand: an exploding ladoo, I exclaim. Every one laughs. But the spilt crumbs have to be carefully collected and thrown away, not stepped upon. There are some who would not even throw them away but consume them; but this is an educated crowd.

Orissa is a land of temples, profusely ornamented on the outside and plain and dark inside. They were built between the sixth and thirteenth centuries
AD
, by artisans who remain unknown. Bhubaneswar alone boasts more than five hundred temples of this period. The Rajarani temple is a tourist site, surrounded by a well-tended lawn. A magnificent temple of red sandstone, completely covered on the exterior with intricately carved nymphs inside stone niches; but it is unused, there is no deity here. We take walks and group photographs, undisturbed, unmolested. The sense of mystery within the hollow, empty interior is deep, the imagination free to roam. A
short walk away is the Lingaraja temple complex, dedicated to the deity Shiva. Outside, shoe and prasad stalls, catering to the pilgrims. This is a shrine in use and crowded. Inside the compound a single priest also accepts homage to the god Vishnu.

One can visit temple after temple here. At a simple one in the middle of a busy street, two women at a shrine, eyes beseeching, pleading to a god. This human sight, so private a moment so publicly displayed, is the one that ultimately touches the most, leaves one humbled, feeling ignorant, superfluous. Universal mysteries aside, what domestic calamity, what private problems do these two bring? How would they be resolved? How mysterious, unreachable, the secret pains of another heart. I, too, recall women of my family, similarly beseeching, utterly helpless (they thought); some resolutions come, but never that elusive happiness, even in old age.

Scenes outside the temple at Puri:

A boy walking, his hands thrust inside his shorts, clutching at his crotch; a mangy dog limping along with bloody testicles. In the crowd outside the temple, outside the curio shops and tea stalls and clothing stores for visitors, a pigtailed girl of about eighteen in trouser suit weaving in and out on a bicycle, her school books on the carrier at the back. A scene so much from my own experience growing up in Dar es Salaam, I feel I could trace the rest of the girl’s day.

A Sense of the Private: The Governor’s Special Quota

At this point I would have preferred to make Calcutta my next stop. It is the closest large city. I have a recommendation from Toronto to a literary, not an academic, group. I suspect I will see a more intellectual, more left, and certainly very different crowd from the career academics I have so far been with. It seems like time to get that other perspective—a sharp jolt as it were, and a different, more
open view of what is happening in India. With the happy, satisfied crowd I am with, the sense of emergency and crisis seems far away.

But Trivandrum, Kerala, needs me; there are two emissaries from the south to tell me that, to beseech me to come; there is a workshop there they would like me to attend. Trivandrum it has to be, except that with the airline strike on, trains are booked solid, weeks in advance. There seems no hope. But in India, as I am learning, there is always a way.

One of the guests happens to know the Governor of Orissa’s aidede-camp personally. Off we drive to Government House, but we find there that the ADC has gone home for lunch. With great pains, a sentry and a woman, perhaps a secretary, direct us to the eminence’s house. After a few wrong turns we find it. As we walk up a garden path, the ADC is putting his relatives into his Maruti wagon, to take them to the train station. He is a tall and youngish military man, a captain, and a north Indian. My case is explained to him: foreign visitor, a conference in Trivandrum. When does he want to go? the ADC asks. Tomorrow, they tell him, by the Coromandel Express; he has to give the inaugural lecture. The ADC could have hummed and hawed, he could have asked to see my passport. But he simply writes a chit, tells my companions, Buy a ticket and take it to the station master; I’m on my way there, I’ll meet you.

And so, within an hour, a ticket on the Coromandel Express, on the Governor of Orissa’s Emergency Quota.