The Cauliflower (7 page)

God bless the Rani! Let's throw our hats into the air—
en masse
.

Can we try that again, please, on the count of three (it's the soundman's fault—he'd nipped off for a quick smoke)? Okay, one … two …

Hair! Makeup! Repair the Rani's
chignon
! Apply some powder to that beloved chin! It's
hot
down here! Deepen her blush! Redden her sweet lips! Prepare our star for her next big close-up …

Because in the not-too-distant future our beloved Rani will be slapped in the face while worshipping Ma Kali in the temple that she built herself, by a lowly—and seemingly demented—temple priest (
gasp!
).

Any ideas who? Go on. Go on. Take a guess.

Once again, we ask
 …

Sri Ramakrishna—

Who gave you this moniker?

What is your true name?

1878. The grandmother of a woman who will eventually become one of Sri Ramakrishna's most devout female disciples (Yogin Ma) asks a stranger in the Dakshineswar temple garden for directions.…

Yogin Ma's Grandmother (
having just alighted from a barge into the exquisite and fragrant temple gardens and happening across a man in a plain white wearing cloth and shiny black slippers or “scuffs” gathering armfuls of red hibiscus, whom she presumes to be a gardener
):
“Excuse me, sir, I have come here to see Ramakrishna
Paramahamsa
. Can you please direct me to his room?”

Sri Ramakrishna (
gazing at Yogin Ma's grandmother, blankly
):
“Pardon?”

Yogin Ma's Grandmother (
slightly irritable
):
“The
Paramahamsa
. Ramakrishna. I have read several articles about him in the papers by the
Brahmo
's Keshab Chandra Sen. I wish to meet with him and see what I make of him.”

Sri Ramakrishna (
with contempt
):
“Argh. What do I know about him? Some people call him
Paramahamsa
 … (
shrugs
) … others call him ‘young priest,' and still others call him Gadadhar Chatterjee (
turns away, bored
).… Please ask someone else to direct you to him.”

(
Yogin Ma's grandmother scowls, disgruntled, then goes for a stroll around the grand temple and its gardens, promptly abandoning all interest in this so-called God-man
.)

In 1886, a few months before Sri Ramakrishna's death, on being told that a famous holy man of Ghazipur has a photographic image of him hung on his wall …

(
Haiku to be read in a hoarse whisper
):

Sri Ramakrishna

Points to his shrunken torso:

“Just a pillowcase!”

Twelve slightly impertinent questions about Ma Kali:

  1. Why on earth is she spitting out her tongue like that?

  2. She appears to be resting her foot on the chest of a prostrated, pale-skinned man. Who is he? Is he dead? Has she killed him?

  3. Hang on a second—is she … is she
stark naked
?

  4. She looks rather tipsy! Is she drunk?

  5. Is that a necklace of human skulls around her neck?

  6. Is my mind playing tricks on me, or is she actually wearing some kind of—of weird
skirt
made out of severed human arms?

  7. Is she black?

  8. Why is her hair such a dreadful mess?

  9. How can people
love
this horrible creature? Aren't they afraid of her? Isn't it merely a love born of fear?

10. Do people honestly worship her in cremation grounds?

11. Why is she surrounded by howling, blood-smattered jackals? Are they her familiars?

12. Is it true that Hindus actually
feed
their statues of Kali, and dress them up, and moisturize them, and dab them with perfume, and cool them with fans, and put them to bed in the afternoon for a quick snooze?

1857, at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple (six miles north of Calcutta)

Rotting food everywhere, Uncle says, everywhere you looked. Of course, I was not yet serving Uncle at this time, but Uncle has told me many things about the very early days of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple. There was so much food, Uncle says—spicy curries and steaming breads and delicious sweets and tempting side dishes, all prepared by the clever
Brahmin
cooks—but nobody wanted to come to eat it. Not at first. Not even the poor and the starving. Instead, Uncle says, the temple authorities were obliged to feed it to the sacred cows, or to the flocks of geese, or to the wild cats and dogs that scavenged within the temple walls, or to the raucous crows who filled the trees in huge flocks, or—as a final resort—to throw it into the great river Ganga for the fish and the giant eels to argue over.

All because the Rani—who had built this beautiful temple for a tremendous amount of money, Uncle says—was a
Sudra
, and a
Sudra
is not permitted to offer cooked food to the deities (only a
Brahmin
may perform this special service). It is a law of caste. But the Rani had built her temple and she wanted to offer cooked food there for the poor, the
sadhu
s, and the pilgrims to partake of.

Perhaps some people find it difficult to comprehend why it is that we Hindus offer food to our deities. Well, our faith is a humble one, and much of our religious observance takes place in our homes. Our gods are like members of our extended family, and we treat them as such—with love and with reverence. If a god visited your home, would you not water him and feed him and show him every kind of hospitality?

We Hindus like to call the food offered to our deities
prasad
. If it has been offered to the deities then naturally it is blessed by them—it is pure and purified—and so when we eat what they leave behind it is a holy act. (In larger temples the offered food is added—once the deities have partaken of it—to giant cauldrons of other food, and the blessings from the
prasad
infiltrate the whole so that many people may eat and then benefit.) Uncle tells me that Christians also enjoy
prasad
, but that in their faith the food is plain bread and the water is wine, and when they consume it they believe that they are eating the body and the blood of Jesus the Christ. Uncle never lies, so I must believe that this is true, no matter how much my nature rebels against it.

Long before the temple was opened, Uncle says, there was great opposition from the pandits to the idea of a
Sudra
—even a rich, much-respected, and devout one like the Rani—offering cooked food in a place of worship. She had been desperate to find a way to sidestep these caste rules. There had been many consultations, Uncle says. She had asked many opinions. She had sought much advice. But no respectable pandit would countenance the idea, Uncle says. Not, at least, until she happened across a
Brahmin
by the name of Ramkumar Chatterjee, who was then running a struggling
Sanskrit
school in Calcutta (and living with his young brother, Gadadhar, who was adding to their mean kitty by conducting private worship in people's homes). Ramkumar responded to a letter that the Rani had sent him by saying that according to his understanding of the scriptures he saw no good reason why the Rani might not offer cooked food in her new temple so long as she made a formal gift of the temple property to a
Brahmin
and allowed him to oversee the installation of the deities and the cooking of the food to be offered therewithin.

The Rani was ecstatic, Uncle says, when she received his advice and so proceeded accordingly. The temple was formally signed over to her family
guru
and when it was opened she invited the
Brahmin
whose advice had been so helpful to her to officiate over the installation of the image of Kali and to stay on as a priest until another could be found.

Unlike his older brother, Uncle was very contented with his life working as a household priest in Calcutta. His employers were always charmed by his intense devotion and made a great fuss of him, Uncle says. They gave him free rein. Some priests will just go through the motions, but definitely not Uncle. Uncle's love of God spills from his every pore and flows through his every vein. And he sings so sweetly, and dances so beautifully. He is so handsome and so innocent. Who can fail but to be bewitched by him?

I believe I may already have hinted earlier that Uncle had become much more strict in his adherence to the rules of caste since his boyhood misadventures. Uncle was now nineteen. His family was still very concerned for his mental well-being. Uncle had a profound contempt for all worldly things—“for woman and for gold.” The love of God was his only interest. And when Ramkumar gave his advice to the Rani, Uncle was not entirely happy with it. Uncle was a wet blanket. Uncle was very concerned at the idea of a
Sudra
serving cooked food—even under his brother's strict provisos. My, how things had changed! Now Ramkumar was playing fast and loose with the laws of caste and Uncle was trying and failing to make him conform to a more conservative way of thinking.

Surely God works in mysterious ways! Perhaps we are all destined to make our own mistakes and then to suffer the indignity of living through them again and again in the mistakes of those closest to us?

So Ramkumar installed the beautiful black basalt image of Kali in the Dakshineswar Temple and then stayed on as priest. There was much celebration and feasting. Considerable amounts of money were spent, Uncle says, and many precious gifts handed out to pandits and pilgrims. Ramkumar—true to his word—accepted the cooked
prasad
from the temple. But when Uncle attended the grand festivities he refused to eat the food, preferring to receive uncooked provisions from the temple store and then make his own private dining arrangements. Uncle is stubborn. And as soon as the deity was installed he returned to Calcutta, by foot, fully expecting that his brother would follow on shortly after.

But Uncle was wrong. He waited and waited for Ramkumar's return, yet Ramkumar never came. Another priest could not be found to officiate at the Kali shrine and so the Rani respectfully asked Ramkumar to stay on. Which he did. Ramkumar believed that the Dakshineswar Kali Temple was a good environment for Uncle, a place where he might prosper, find new opportunities, and move forward with his life.

It would take some considerable amount of time before pilgrims and visitors felt ready to accept the cooked food at the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, Uncle says. People are naturally suspicious and also stuck in their ways. The Rani had thrown money at the problem, but life teaches us that money will not buy you everything. Uncle suspected that it may have bought the Rani the services of his brother, and this thought made him very unhappy. But after a few weeks of living on his own he was obliged to cave in and move to the Kali Temple to be with Ramkumar. His brother was much older and Uncle loved him very dearly—almost like a father—although God teaches us that all human attachments will ultimately end in tragedy. They are impermanent. They are a part of the bewitching illusion of
maya
. They are fleeting and unreal. Because only the love of God, as Uncle never tires of telling us, is completely real, after all.

If you were a little Indian swift (
Cypselus affinis
) dashing around catching insects in the newly opened Dakshineswar Kali Temple grounds circa 1855, what great delights might you espy with your tiny, beady, and perpetually darting swifty eye?

Well, let's get one thing straight right off the bat: cute and charming as this idea undoubtedly is, an Indian swift is not remotely interested in aesthetics or in architecture. All objects—no matter how grand or ornate—are merely objects to a swift, just abstract shapes, and are of interest only insofar as he/she can avoid them, eat them, shit on them, or construct a nest upon them. Swifts—unlike swallows—do not tend to perch. The Indian swift has funny little feet that aren't shaped as other birds' are. The claws are powerful (designed for hanging on to things), but the individual toes are splayed out, not unlike a gecko's, and this makes it more tricky for them to both hop around and stand about. They live on the wing. In fact, the only time an Indian swift stops (either its shrill screaming or its acrobatic flying) is when it enters its nest (which is made of mud, feathers, and copious quantities of sticky swift spit).

Perhaps rather than relying on the little swift's eye and limited brain capacity (not to mention its fractured swift thoughts of “
Safe … DANGER … left, right, SWOOP, avoid, quick, BIG, empty, light, dark, hungry, mosquito
…” et cetera) we should attach a tiny camera to our circa-1855 Indian swift's compact torso and proceed gingerly on that basis. Let's catch one. Go and fetch your butterfly net. This shouldn't be too difficult because the circa-1855 Indian swift is quite silly and highly accident-prone.…

Excellent! In the blink of an eye the job is done. A miraculously tough but tiny and portable technology is deftly applied, suspended (on a modern twine as flexible, light, and strong as a spider's silk) so as to hang at the bird's throat, just under its beak. You will observe that we have even coordinated it with the circa-1855 Indian swift's greenish-black plumage, and if you look especially closely (with the aid of a magnifying glass, perhaps) you will see our tiny Cauliflower™ logo exquisitely painted just below the camera's lens, which—in its entirety—is only the size of a large pinhead. The whole piece of kit is, in fact, lighter in weight and smaller in diameter than a midsized, blood-bloated tick.

Right. Let's toss him up into the air and see what he can find out for us … whoosh! Fly, little swift, fly!