Nine Lives (37 page)
‘He looked at it very carefully in silence for a long time. Then he gave some small suggestions for corrections where some of the jewellery was not done exactly right. He said nothing more. I made the corrections as he asked, and the following week we had the eye- opening ceremony.
‘The god or goddess only fully enters a new idol when we open his eyes and carve in the pupils – the final piece of carving – and when the appropriate
puja
is performed. This is the most important and most intense moment. I am human: hard as I try, many times when I am carving I think of sales tax, family problems, getting the car repaired. But when the eyes are opened, and the appropriate mantras are chanted, I forget everything. I am lost to the world. I go into a state approaching meditation. Sometimes the devotees who sponsor the idol become possessed by the goddess, and dance around, speak in strange voices, or go shaking and shivering into a full trance. The priest has to wake them by putting
vibhuti
on their forehead and lighting a camphor light. This happened only last week: six or seven people who came for the ceremony were possessed, and one of them announced, “I am the goddess and have come to solve your problems.”
‘On this occasion it was especially intense. My father acted as the priest, invoking the deity to enter the statue, slowly chiselling open the eyes, and I sat there in a state that was part nerves, part excitement and part intense devotion. Only when the ceremony was finished and the deity was awakened did my father say that my workmanship had been perfect, and that he was very proud of me.
‘Since then, I have been working continuously for twenty-five years, and still get satisfaction from each and every piece I work on. I never get bored. Sometimes, with a large piece, it can be hard, long, difficult work. My father used to say that the chisel was his teacher. It moves in a way that even we cannot control – the heart is its driver, and God is in the heart. With every piece I try to improve my skills and to design more beautiful images, within the strictures of the
Shastras
. I still have much to learn, and don’t feel that I am yet the equal of my father, still less even comparable to my ancestors. Even now I am adapting the way we do the casting in an attempt to find a way to achieve what they were once able to.
‘Of course every human life has its problems, and there are stressful moments. But in general this is a peaceful life. It is also a good business, though I never think of it like that. No one can equal our skills, and so we almost have a monopoly, even though some of our rivals charge half what we do. We are now three brothers and I think forty-eight assistants. Each week we deliver four or five finished idols, and we have a one-year backlog on our books. Even if we were to do only urgent ones we would be busy for three months.’
I asked about the future: would the tradition continue?
‘Ah,’ he said, his face falling. ‘That is my only real worry: who knows what will happen after my generation has passed away? My son is saying that he wants to become a computer engineer in Bangalore, and that he will give up the family business, so breaking our lineage. His cousin – my elder brother’s boy – is much the same. He knows the skills here, and can make a decent sculpture, but he is not a master craftsman. I suppose he’s about halfway there. He studied computer science and is now doing a course in business administration. We hope he will come back here, but he’s more interested in the internet and what I think he calls online sales. He wants to expand the business, but is not really interested in making idols himself.
‘When I was a boy my father told me that I would be a Stpathy. It was almost incidental that I wanted to be one myself.
He did not give me a choice. I will not do that to my son. You cannot do that today. My son is obsessed with computers – he is always in front of the screen, always playing computer games. Certainly I will make sure that he has this skill – and already he can make good wax models. But if he gets good grades, and has the opportunity to study computer engineering at college, it would be unfair for me to deny him the opportunity he wants. Our work here is very hard. Computer work is not so difficult, and it pays much more.
I said: ‘That must worry you very much, after all these generations.’
‘I would be telling you a lie if I said I wasn’t upset,’ he replied. ‘We are inheritors of an unbroken tradition, generation after generation, father to son, father to son, for over 700 years. That’s part of what makes a difference with our sculptures.
I do feel there is something special in the blood. At some level this is not a skill which can be taught. The blood itself teaches us our craft, just as a fish’s blood teaches it to swim, or a peacock’s blood teaches it to spread its tail. In the West you say art is all about inspiration, not lineage, and it’s true that God can touch anyone, from any background. I’ve seen that with some of our assistants. But you cannot ignore blood, and all those countless generations of skill passed down. Somehow the gods guide us. When he was small – no older than six – my son did a drawing of Shiva of such power it made us all shake. I had very, very high hopes for him.
‘Still, every day, I pray to our family deity, Kamakshi Amman, to change his mind and preserve the lineage. I have even promised to renovate her temple if my prayers are answered. But I know that if my boy gets high marks he will certainly go off to Bangalore – and it looks as if he will do well in his exams. For some reason all the Brahmin boys do well in maths and computer exams. Maybe that’s in the blood too – after all we’ve been making calculations for astronomy for 5,000 years.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Srikanda, shrugging his shoulders. ‘It’s all part of the world opening up. After all, as my son says, this is the age of computers. And as much as I might want otherwise, I can hardly tell him this is the age of the bronze caster.’
‘Before you drink from a skull,’ said Manisha Ma Bhairavi, ‘you must first find the right corpse.’
We were sitting in a palm-thatched hut amid the dark woods and smoking funeral pyres of the cremation ground at Tarapith in Bengal – a
shakta pith
, one of the most holy places in India, and said to be the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. It is also the home of the great goddess Tara.
Tarapith is an eerie place, with a sinister reputation. In Calcutta I had been told that it was notorious for the unsavoury Tantric rituals and animal sacrifices which were performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumoured to take place after sunset in the riverside burning ground on the edge of the town, outside the boundaries of both village life and the conventions of Bengali society.
Here the goddess is said to live, and at midnight – so the Bengalis believe – Tara can be glimpsed in the shadows, drinking the blood of the goats slaughtered day after day in an effort to propitiate her anger, and win her favour. In this frequently vegetarian country, where blood sacrifice is growing rarer and rarer, the worship of the goddess at Tarapith is an increasing oddity, a misweave in the weft of things, where can be found scenes almost unknown elsewhere: at least twenty goats a day are dispatched here to satisfy her hunger.
Tara is believed to be especially attracted to bones and skeletons, and for this reason the dreadlocked and ash-smeared sadhus who live in the cremation ground above the river and under the great spreading banyan trees decorate their huts with lines of human skulls, many clearly belonging to children. They are painted pillar-box red, and built into the packed mud of the threshold of each house. There are other images too: framed and garlanded calendar pictures of the Devi in her different forms, prints of the great saints of Tarapith, and tridents strung with garlands of marigolds; but it is skulls and bones that dominate, and not just human ones, but those of creatures of the night such as jackals and vultures, and even snakes.
‘So how do you go about finding the right skull?’ I asked Manisha.
‘The Doms who administer the cremation ghats find them for us,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘They keep them for us and when we need them, they give them to us. The best ones are suicides,’ she added. ‘When someone has drunk poison or hanged themselves, their skulls are especially powerful. So are the skulls of innocent and pure
kumaris –
virgin girls.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, once you have a good skull, the next thing is to cure it. You must bury it in the earth for a while and then oil it. If you only want to use it for drinking, then it’s ready; but if you wish to use it as a decoration, then when it’s completely dry, you can paint it red. That way they don’t go mouldy in the monsoon.’
For all the talk of what might elsewhere be considered black magic, in the daylight at least, the cremation ground that surrounded Ma’s little hut made an oddly domestic scene. The Tantric sadhus who live here were all sitting around, ash-smeared, naked or half-naked, sipping tea and playing cards, as if living in a skull-filled burning ghat was the most normal thing in the world. While we talked about curing skulls, Manisha’s dreadlocked partner, Tapan Sadhu, was sitting at the back of the hut, with a radio clamped to his ear, and occasionally interrupting with the latest score from South Africa. ‘England are 270 for four!’ he shouted excitedly at one point.
Nor was Manisha in any sense a fearsome or sinister figure. Despite her matted, dreadlocked grey hair and ragged saffron robes, she was a large, warm woman in her sixties, quietly spoken, with gentle, vulnerable eyes. Her dark-brown skin was disfigured with large, creeping patches of white, the result of a skin disease. She attended dutifully to the devotees who came to her for blessings, looked after the sadhus who passed by, offering them water and chai, and was gentle and affectionate towards Tapan.
‘Whatever people think,’ she said, ‘this is not an evil or frightening place. People imagine all sorts of things about us – but we look after one another much better than people who live in proper houses in the cities. In Calcutta, if you fall sick, none of your neighbours may notice you’ve gone. Here if one of us is ill, the others make sure he is all right. When the floods come during the rains and the river rises to submerge our homes, we come to the aid of one another. If someone is ill, we all help pay for the hospital. If one of us dies, we all contribute to their cremation.’
Manisha shrugged. ‘People who don’t know what we do are afraid of Tantra,’ she said. ‘They hear stories about us abducting girl-children and killing them. Sometimes
gundas
come to the graveyard and insult us, or knock about the sadhus when they see them in the bazaars. Many times I have been called a witch.’
I had read a little about this in the newspapers: according to one report I had seen, Tantra in Bengal was now under threat from the ruling Communist Party, which occasionally sent out members of what were called ‘Anti-Superstition Committees’ to persuade people to reject faith healers, embrace modernity and return to more mainstream and less superstitious forms of Hinduism. This often involved attacking – rhetorically or otherwise – the Tantrics of the area, whom they depict as perverts, drug addicts, alcoholics and even cannibals. In the press in West Bengal there have also been reports of the persecution of poor, widowed and socially marginalised women, who are accused of practising witchcraft and ‘eating the livers’ of villagers, particularly when some calamity befalls a community; indeed they are still occasionally put to death, like the witches of Reformation Europe and North America.
‘
Several of my Tantric friends to the west of here in Birbhum have been badly beaten up,’ said Manisha. ‘But I am not worried. Our local Communist MP may tell his followers that what we do is superstition, but that doesn’t stop him coming here with a goat to sacrifice when he wants to find out from us what the election results will be. He was here only a fortnight ago. He is just afraid that people will come to the goddess and get power from her, and not from him. In his heart he believes.’
‘But why live in a cremation ground in the first place?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it asking for trouble? Surely there are better places to lead a holy life? In the Himalayas, or at the source of the Ganges . . .’
‘It is for her that we people inhabit this place,’ said Manisha, cutting me short. ‘Ma Tara pulled us here, and we remain here for her sake. It is within you that you find the loving
shakti
of the Mother. This is a place for its realisation, for illumination.’
As we spoke, a devotee approached and bowed his head before Manisha, who stopped her story to give him a blessing, and to ask how he was. As he left, the man slipped a few coins on to the cloth that was laid out for offerings in front of the largest skull.