The Age of Kali (29 page)

As I watched, a pretty Tamil bride of no more than seventeen entered the cloister surrounded by a gaggle of ten of her girlfriends. They surrounded her on all sides and, holding up an unwound sari, allowed her to remove her garlands and change in privacy out of her heavy red silk marriage sari and in to a less formal cotton one. Other guests appeared carrying the accumulated wedding presents, while to one side, on his own, stood the groom, if anything even younger than his bride, and looking profoundly dazed and uncertain
about the day’s events. After some of the older villagers had blessed the couple by touching their feet, the girls led the bride purposefully off. Intrigued, I followed at a discreet distance to see where they were taking her.

They led her through the temple’s labyrinth of halls and passages, eventually coming to a halt before a carved pillar. The girls bowed before the image, then anointed it with powder from a small pot carried by one of the bride’s friends. After they had gone, I went up to see which god or goddess they had dedicated themselves to. In fact the image was not of a deity, but of some sort of fertility
yakshi
, a naked, heavy-breasted and heavily pregnant sprite shown bent-legged in the act of giving birth. The entire image glistened with oil where devotees wishing for a child, or an easy delivery, had covered it with
ghee
, while around the breasts and navel it was heavily stained with vermilion and
kumkum
.

Nearby, among the caryatids carved on each of the temple’s ten thousand pillars, I found many other images of fecundity. One, for example, showed a Tamil village woman with a coir shopping basket and a baby strapped to her breast. Her head was turned so she could see a second baby she was carrying in a backpack, while beside her walked a third child, a little boy eating an apple; the women’s hand rested gently on her son’s head. It is an image of startling humanity – the same sight can be seen today in any bazaar in Tamil Nadu – yet the statue predates the beginning of the Italian Renaissance by over a century.

‘Just to enter the goddess’s temple brings great good fortune,’ explained K.R. Bhaskar, a tall,
dhoti
-clad devotee who had come up and introduced himself as I wandered around. ‘Meenakshi
ammah
certainly blessed my family: we now have two children after coming to pray here.’

‘And the villagers believe this? That you only have to come here and children miraculously appear?’

‘Not just the villagers,’ replied Mr Bhaskar, ‘the educated class too. I myself am a financial consultant in Bangalore. I have a postgraduate MSc in biochem from Mysore University. But I believe in
Meenakshi. This is my sincere feeling. I know she exists. I myself have seen her, in the mist, in shadows. She comes in my dreams, my subconscious. What is going on here is 100 per cent truth.’

‘When you say you can see the gods, do you actually believe that they look the way they do in temples, with three faces and six arms and so on.’

‘No, no,’ said Mr Bhaskar patiently. ‘These things are symbols only. Not all devotees have the same level of spiritual achievement. Some people can see god in a flame when they meditate, but most others need something more concrete, something on which they can focus their devotion. These images here are just indications of the different moods of the gods, mere reflections. They are paths to reach the infinite, not an end in themselves.’

‘And do many educated people feel like you?’ I asked.

‘Many,’ said Mr Bhaskar. ‘At one time maybe the educated stayed away from the temples, thinking they were backward, but these days educated people are coming back in ever-increasing numbers. You see, this is not superstition. This is our culture. It is in our blood, in our veins. It is not so much a religion as a way of life. It is not something that will stop when our people are educated. Hinduism will never die. Already it is beginning to make a comeback in our India.’

‘Why do you think that is?’ I asked.

‘When you come to the temple you feel total peace of mind,’ said Mr Bhaskar. ‘You feel total involvement in the spiritual powers of God. In Bangalore many people have made much money, but they found that this did not satisfy them. It was not enough.

‘Only with faith in God,’ said Mr Bhaskar, ‘can they have full satisfaction.’

The next evening at ten o’clock I again made my way along the dusty, pilgrim-clogged streets of Madurai, and through the labyrinth of horn-hooting, rickshaw-squealing lanes leading up to the great sacred tank.

Everything had been transformed since the morning procession. Temple bells rang out over a hot, thick blanket of darkness, lit here and there by the naked electric lights of the tea-stalls and the flickering camphor flames of the pilgrims’ lamps. Around the side of the tank the crowds were massing, all dressed up in their neatly-pressed new
lungis
and their best silk saris. Some sat up on the parapet, nibbling from cones of chickpeas and roasted
dal
, while all around them balloon-sellers and ice-cream wallahs, peanut-roasters and sweetmeat vendors sold their wares. Here and there, among the sea of milling pilgrims and townsfolk, stood crowded bullock carts full of families who had driven in from their villages to see the festival: burly, moustachioed farmers and their womenfolk and children. From their eminence they peered eagerly over the heads of the crowd towards the illuminated spire of the island temple rising in to the sky, its image perfectly reflected in the still waters of the tank.

‘We come for every festival,’ said Pandyan, a farmer sitting in the front of one especially-heavily laden cart, bearing no fewer than fifteen women and children from his extended family. ‘Our village is only twenty kilometres away, so if all goes well we can get back home before dawn.’

‘In our village we have a small temple to Meenakshi,’ said Pandyan’s wife, Kasi Ama. ‘But it is better to come and give our offerings to her here.’

‘On a festival day,’ said Pandyan, ‘
Ammah
cannot refuse anything, if you ask her with a clean mind.’

It was now well after eleven, an hour after the ceremony should have begun, and the Brahmins were still waiting for the exact moment, determined by the astrologers, for Meenakshi and Sundareshvara to begin their journey around the lake. As we spoke, a ripple of expectation passed through the crowd. From the small
Maryamman temple by the lakeside the Brahmins were now emerging in a file, their oiled bodies glistening in the light of their flickering camphor torches. As they processed out, the crowd parted before them, and they made their way slowly to the
ghat
steps leading down to the waters of the tank, where the raft was waiting. In the morning it had looked a rather flimsy and makeshift object, with its crude woodwork and naïvely painted
papier mâché
; but now, ablaze with lamps in the burnished darkness, it was transformed in to something gilded and magnificent: a huge floating temple, suspended on the dark waters of the tank. In the centre of the raft, reclining in their silken
palkis
amid their robes and garlands, were the golden images of Meenakshi and Sundareshvara.

With a beating of drums, forty or fifty well-built villagers filed out of the temple and took up their stations along the side of the tank parapet.

‘These are villagers from Antonedi,’ said Mohan Pundit, a temple priest I had met earlier that morning. He had just helped me manoeuvre through the police cordon to a spot on the edge of the
ghat
from where I was now watching proceedings. ‘It has been the privilege of these people to pull rope since the time of our King Tirumala Nayyak, four hundred years ago.’

At a signal from the head priest, the men picked up a great thick rope several hundred feet long that was attached to the raft, and with a fanfare from the temple band – all wailing
nagashwarams
and dancing drums – they shouldered the burden and began to pull.

Slowly the raft began to move around the tank, followed by a small flotilla of Brahmins in overloaded dinghies, some of which contained as many as twenty people and were listing dangerously. As the villagers pulled, and the boat slowly circled the tank, the overexcited crowd surged around the tank, cheering and clapping and singing
bhajans
.

For an hour the raft circled and the crowd sang and cheered. Children giggled on the shoulders of their fathers, licking ice creams
and begging their parents to buy them more chickpeas, or perhaps some milky
ladoos
from the
mithai-wallah
. The band played and the crowd clapped. This, I thought, not for the first time that day, is what one of the great medieval festivals must have been like.

Finally it was time to prepare the goddess for her final seduction of Lord Sundareshvara. The raft pulled in to the
ghat
and the idols, still on their palanquin, were raised on to the shoulders of the priests and carried ashore. It was a heavy burden, and as the priests staggered to the top of the steps, bowed under the weight, the crowd let out one last great cheer.

‘I’ve never seen a crowd enjoying themselves so much,’ I said to Mohan Pundit.

The people come here,’ he replied, ‘and for one day they forget that they are hungry and poor. The goddess takes them away from themselves.
Ammah
does this for them, and for this reason they love her and are happy.’

HYDERABAD
,
1998

‘Fibs,’ said Mir Moazam Husain. ‘That’s what everyone of your generation thinks I’m telling, at least when I talk about Hyderabad in the old days. You all think I’m telling the
most
outrageous pack of fibs.’

The old man settled back and shook his head, half amused, half frustrated. ‘My grandchildren, for instance. I can see the wonder in their eyes as I talk. For them the old world of Hyderabad is almost inconceivable: they can hardly imagine that such a world could exist.’

‘But what exactly can’t they imagine?’ I asked.

‘Well, the whole bang-shoot, really: the Nizam and his nobles and their palaces and their
zenanas
and the entire what-have-you that went with old Hyderabad State. But it’s all true. Every word.’

Mir Moazam was a sprightly and intelligent eighty-four-year-old with a broad forehead and sparkling brown eyes. Though he talked elegaically about the past, there was no bitterness in his voice. ‘The palace I grew up in,’ he continued, ‘had a staff of 927 people, including three doctors. There was even a small regiment of women, eight or ten of whom were of African extraction, who were there just to guard the main gate of the
zenana
. But tell that to my grandchildren. They’ve seen how we live today, and they just think that I’m making it up. Especially when I start telling them about my grandfather.’

‘Your grandfather?’

‘My grandfather, Fakrool Mulk. The name means “Pride of the
Realm”. He was a remarkable man, a great servant of the state, but he was also – how shall I put it – a larger-than-life character.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘You probably wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Try me,’ I said.

‘Well, where shall I start?’ said Mir Moazam. He paused while he cast around for a suitable place to begin his tale.

‘You see, although my grandfather was Deputy Prime Minister in the Nizam’s government, his real passion was building.’

‘Building?’

‘Building. It was like an addiction for him. He just had to build. Over the course of his life he built this great series of vast, rambling palaces, one after the other. But he was never satisfied. As soon as he had finished one, he immediately began to build another. Sometimes he would just give an entire palace away. Once he heard that the Nizam had privately said that he envied him owning a palace looking on to the Fateh Maidan, where all the tentpegging and polo matches took place on the ruler’s birthday. At the first opportunity he just gave the Asad Bagh to the Nizam, even though it was his principal residence and all nine of his children had been born there. But that was absolutely typical of him and his buildings. He never lived in half of them, yet even when he was seventy-five he was still at it. Of course, he built up enormous debts in the process.’

‘Was he a trained architect?’

‘Well, that was precisely the problem. No, he wasn’t. But every evening he would go out for a walk, and with him he would take his walking stick and this great entourage of his staff, which always included his secretary, his master mason, his builders, a couple of his household poets and the paymaster general of his estates – some thirty or forty people in all.

‘Anyway, on these walks, when the inspiration came, he would begin to draw in the sand with his walking stick: maybe a new cottage, or a new stable block, or possibly a new palace, or whatever it was, according to how the fancy took him. The draughtsmen he
had brought with him would jot it down on paper and then draw it up when they got back. The next day he would be shown the pictures after breakfast. He would say, “No, enlarge that tower, and let’s put two cupolas on top.” Or maybe: “That’s good, but it has to be triple the size.” His buildings were always something of a hotchpotch, as he would change the style according to his mood. Some have a classical ground floor, a tropical Gothic first storey, and then change to art deco or even Scotch Baronial halfway up.