Nine Lives Read online

  “The next day I rang home. After thirty years I was able to talk to my brother, though I couldn’t understand very much, as he was crying so much. He told me all my other brothers had died, and it was just the two of us who were left. He said that the Chinese had taken the family house, and our land, and all the yak and dri, saying that we were landowners and so Class Enemies. They gave the yaks to a collective farm and made the family live in the yak shed. But that was all I could really hear. My brother kept sobbing and asking me to return. ‘Just come back, come back, and everything will be all right.’ I wondered whether I should. But then I thought: what help could I be at my age? I will just be a burden.”

  As we walked back to the veterans’ home in the evening light, with the sun setting behind the peaks, the crows were calling to roost, wheeling and croaking in the deodar slopes around us. Passang was silent, so I asked: “But wouldn’t you like to go back to Tibet, even just to see it one last time? Isn’t that where you should be ending your days?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “I always thought I would return to Tibet in this life,” said Passang eventually, as we climbed down the path to the home for the last time. “That was why I joined the army, to fight for it. India is still a foreign land for me, even though I have been here forty years and the people have been very hospitable.”

  I could see the prayer beads whirring in Passang’s hand—always the sign that he was thinking hard.

  “And of course,” he continued, “I am sad that I have been separated from my country and my family, and that even now, in old age, I am not back home. I am sad that there has been so much violence and suffering in my life. I am now seventy-four. I am still in exile, and Tibet is still not free.

  “I still hope that one day Tibet will be free, and who knows? Even the Chinese do not believe in communism any more, so maybe in time the dharma will spread from Tibet into China? Maybe before I am finished, I will get to go back home. That is my last wish, to go back to Tibet and die there.”

  Passang looked down the wooded slopes to the Kangra Valley, far below the veterans’ home. “But you know … I have always felt that all of us fled together, and I should wait until a time came when we could all go back together.

  “It wouldn’t be right to go back alone,” he said. “After all this time, it just wouldn’t be right.”

  The Maker of Idols

  The gods created man,” said Srikanda Stpathy, “but here we are so blessed that we—simple men as we are—help to create the gods.”

  Rain was coming down in sheets, and we were sitting looking out onto the downpour from the veranda of Mr. Krishnamurthy’s house. Men in white lungis bicycled past, their right hand on the handlebars and their left holding up an umbrella. Rickshaws sluiced through the flooded streets, their wheels cutting wakes through the ankle-deep water, like motorboats on a canal.

  Earlier, Mr. Krishnamurthy had seen me caught in the downpour and had beckoned me over. While we waited for the rain to end, and the annual procession of the village gods to begin, he had introduced me to his friend. Srikanda, explained Mr. Krishnamurthy, was a Brahmin and an idol maker, or Stpathy: the twenty-third in a long hereditary line stretching back to the great bronze casters of the Chola empire, which had ruled most of southern India until the end of the thirteenth century. His workshop was a short distance away in the great temple town of Swamimalai. There he and his two elder brothers plied their trade, making gods and goddesses in exactly the manner of their ancestors.

  Srikanda was a plump, middle-aged man with a side parting and a slightly slow left eye. He wore a freshly laundered white lungi and a long baggy white shirt which nearly, but not quite, hid the swelling bulge of his rice stomach. On his left breast he wore a small enamelled star which, he explained proudly, was his badge of office as president of the Swamimalai Lions’ Club; our host, Mr. Krishnamurthy, who was the proprietor of the Sri Murugan Hotel, and also headed the local temple committee, was his vice president. It was Mr. Krishnamurthy who had commissioned Srikanda to cast the new pair of idols that were about to be processed around the village for the first time, before being taken off to visit the great Murugan temple in Swamimalai.

  I had arrived in Tamil Nadu only a couple of days before. It was the week of Tamil New Year, and I had come to see one of the many temple chariot processions which each year mark the occasion. The monsoon had not yet broken, yet already the humidity was high, and the rains which fell late each afternoon were heavy and insistent. Sheet lightning quaked sourceless beyond the distant thunderheads. For an hour each day, the dark archipelagos of cloud bank massing over the Kaveri Delta let loose a great white waterfall that flooded the rice fields and washed clean the dusty fronds of the palm trees, ran down the tumbling eaves of the temple gopuras and soaked the palm thatch of the village huts.

  The village, when I finally found it, did not look as if it was about to celebrate its annual festival. It was true that an improvised rath, or chariot, constructed from a farm cart topped with a brightly coloured wooden canopy, was parked outside the temple, under a makeshift rain shelter of bamboo and palm leaves, and that inside the chariot were the dressed, anointed and garlanded images of the village’s deities. But although the procession was due to set off at 5 p.m., when I arrived only half an hour earlier no crowds had assembled in the wet village street, and there was no Brahmin there to supervise. Instead, the area outside the temple was deserted except for a kneeling calf, a pair of wet black goats drinking from puddles and several roosters who strutted around, eyeing up a nearby gaggle of hens. Farther up the road, a group of barefoot children were playing cricket in the rain, with a broken stool for a wicket.

  Mr. Krishnamurthy, however, was confident that, despite the downpour, the festival would go ahead and the procession would take place: “No problem,” he said. “Pundit will come. Time is there.”

  As we waited for the rain to end, we talked about Srikanda’s business, and he told me the story of his family. The Stpathys, he explained, had been sculptors of stone idols in Vellore before being called to Tanjore to learn the art of bronze casting at the time of Rajaraja I (AD 985–1014), one of the great kings of the Chola empire. After assisting in the construction of the two greatest Chola temples, at Tanjore and Gangakondacholapuram, they settled in Swamimalai in the thirteenth century. This happened after one of his ancestors discovered by accident that clay made from the especially fine silt at the bend in the Kaveri on the edge of the town was uniquely well suited to making the moulds in which the bronzes were cast. The bronze idol business had now kept them in work for nearly 700 years. “It is with the blessings of the Almighty,” he said proudly, “that we have taken this birth, and are able to make our living in this way, creating gods in the form of man.”

  In fact, added Srikanda, business was very good at the moment, and the workshop had a backlog of orders that would take at least a year to clear. There was a growing market for what he called “show pieces” for tourists and collectors, but the family’s main work was idols created in exactly the manner laid down by the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Shilpa Shastras, and specifically designed for temple worship. These days, he said, most of the orders were no longer from the Kaveri Delta, their traditional market, nor even from Tamil Nadu, so much as from the new temples springing up wherever the Indian—and especially Tamil—diaspora had settled around the world, from Neasden to New Jersey. Their largest order ever had been from Iskcon, the Hari Krishna headquarters in California.

  As we sat sipping a cup of hot, sweet south Indian coffee brought by Mrs. Krishnamurthy, I asked Srikanda what it was like to forge the idols that other men worshipped.

  “When I see one of the idols that I have made used in a temple, or in a procession,” replied Srikanda, “I try not to think that this is something made by me, or even something made by man. I don’t even think this is a good or bad statue. I think: this is a deity.

  “Of course I do feel very proud,” he added. He smiled, and sl
owly wobbled his head from side to side. “That is only human.

  “God is inside us,” he said. “It is from our hearts, our minds and our hands that god is formed, and revealed in the form of a metal statue. My statues are like my children. As we say, silpi matha, pitha shastra: the sculptor is the mother and the sacred shastras are the father. Usually I want to keep them, but this is my profession, so sooner or later they must leave me, just as a daughter leaves her father when she is married. Once the eyes are opened by having their pupils chiselled in with a gold chisel, once the deity takes on the form of the idol and it becomes alive, it is no longer mine. It is full of divine power, and I can no longer even touch it. Then it is no longer the creation of man, but a god only.”

  “It contains the spirit of god? Or it is a god?”

  “It is a god,” he replied firmly. “At least in the eyes of the faithful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Without faith, of course, it is just a sculpture. It’s the faith of devotees that turns it into a god.”

  It seemed to me that Srikanda had mentioned three quite different ways in which an inanimate statute could become a god: by the channelling of divinity via the heart and hands of the sculptor; a ceremony of invocation when the eyes were chipped open; and through the faith of the devotee. I pointed this out to Srikanda, but he saw no contradiction; all that mattered was that at a certain point a miracle took place and the statue he had made became divine.

  “Our mind should never go back to what it was or how it came into being,” he said. “It is the same as with a baby, or a small child. When it is young you play with it, but once it has grown up you treat it differently—as an adult, with more respect and more reverence.”

  Outside in the street the rain had almost stopped. As we talked, a large, burly, bare-chested Brahmin, hair cut into a topknot, clambered up onto the temple rath. He began to take the old garlands off the two idols, and from a big, bulging plastic shopping bag he produced a fresh set: red hibiscus for the goddess and white jasmine for the god. These he placed reverently over the deities, then applied a new sandalwood-paste tikka to the forehead of each. As he was working, a temple elephant ambled along the street, a mahout on his back and his tail swishing from side to side; bells rang from around his neck. Within a few minutes, the street had begun to fill with curious onlookers; even the cricket players left their game to see what was happening.

  The festival was in honour of Valli, the second wife of Murugan, who was believed to be a girl from this village. She was born from a deer made pregnant by the glance of the sage Sivamurti, and was adopted by the king of the hunters, Nambiraja. Valli was the most beautiful girl in all Tamil Nadu. One day, when she was out in her father’s fields, guarding the millet with her slingshot, Lord Murugan, the son of Shiva, happened to pass that way, and immediately fell in love with her.

  To test her, he assumed the form of a feeble old man. First, he asked her for a drink of water, which she gladly gave him. He then asked for some food; this too she gave. Finally the old man asked for her hand in marriage, at which Valli of course hesitated, saying that how could she, such a young girl, marry such a very old man, and in any case she could only marry the man her father chose for her.

  Realising that he needed some help, Murugan prayed to his brother Ganesh and immediately the latter appeared in the millet field, taking the form of a crazed wild elephant. Valli was terrified, and embracing the old man, promised him that she would indeed marry him if he saved her from the trumpeting elephant that was about to charge her and trample her underfoot. With a single wave of his outstretched hand, Murugan drove the elephant away, but once it had gone, Valli again hesitated, saying she could only marry a man her father chose. So Murugan prayed to Ganesh a second and then a third time, but each time Valli agreed and then hesitated about marrying such a very decrepit old man.

  Only on the fourth occasion did Murugan finally reveal himself in all his divine beauty, and immediately, and inevitably, Valli fell in love. All this, said Mr. Krishnamurthy, had taken place in the fields of this very village and the festival they were holding today was to celebrate the divine marriage. Murugan and Valli were already waiting for the marriage ceremony in their temple at Swamimalai. It was the traditional privilege of this village to escort Valli’s family from their home to the great temple in town. Previously the villagers had had to take a pair of very simple iconic stone idols on the barat procession to the wedding. Now, thanks to Srikanda, they had glistening new bronze idols, the equal of any in Swamimalai.

  “Normally we have to go to the temple to pray to the gods,” said Mr. Krishnamurthy, “but today they come to us in our houses in the village. For us it is the most auspicious day of the year.”

  “If you pray here today,” added Srikanda, “your prayers will certainly be successful.”

  “More than on other days?”

  “Of course,” said Srikanda. “God is everywhere, but just as we feel that an idol can be the focus for a god’s power, so there are certain days when your prayers are more readily heard and fulfilled.”

  It was, I thought, a lovely idea: that just as there were sacred images and sacred places there were also pools of sacred time. For faithful Hindus it was as if a window momentarily clicked open in the heavens, allowing devotees direct access to the divine.

  As we were talking, there was a roll of drums and a fanfare on the nadeswaram, the giant Tamil oboe whose raucous notes fill the air with a noise like the screech of peacocks. Two musicians whom I had earlier spotted sheltering from the rain in a nearby hut now appeared between the chariot and the elephant, and as they struck up the music, the street quickly filled with people, including a number of fruit and balloon vendors who had appeared, as if by magic, with carts displaying their wares.

  By now the rain had completely stopped and the evening light was beginning to filter through the clouds. Farther up the street, the girls of the village were busy sweeping the fronts of their houses and making rangoli patterns with rice powder on their doorsteps. In twenty minutes the mood had completely changed—not for nothing are such festivals known as “utsavas”—“that which drives away sorrow.”

  As I watched, Srikanda walked up to the chariot and presented a silver thali plate of offerings to the Brahmin: inside were coconuts, pieces of jackfruit, two bananas, some incense sticks and a small pile of ladoo milk sweets. The Brahmin cracked the coconuts on the side of the cart, then lit the incense sticks and circled the plate of offerings in front of the two idols.

  From every house devotees, most of them women, now emerged holding thali plates, jasmine garlands and other presents for the deities. For twenty minutes coconuts were cracked and offerings made. Then the Brahmin shouted out a word of command, and all the cricket players and their equally ragged sisters began pushing the chariot from behind, while the fathers and uncles of the village pulled at the ropes that had been attached to the front. As the chariot began to creek slowly up the street with the elephant in the lead, the goats and chickens scattered and some of the villagers went down on their knees before the idols. Despite the damp and puddles, a few even performed full-length prostrations in the street.

  I asked Srikanda if he shouldn’t be taken in the chariot alongside his gleaming new idols, as I heard happened during certain festivals. “Not on this occasion,” he said. “They are deities. I am not on their level, so I cannot have equal rank. But if we give a new chariot to a temple, then the Brahmins there will give us new gold rings and turbans and we are given a round—a parikrama—of the four gates of the temple in the chariot we have built. On that occasion only we are given the same level of respect as an idol.”

  “Now,” he added, “I will only walk alongside them.”

  In the end, we walked together. At one point, the top of the chariot pulled down an illegal electricity connection that was strung across the road to draw power from the grid, and there was a small stampede to avoid the fizzing wire; but otherwise the processio
n made slow and stately progress past the byres and hayricks and cowsheds of the village, stopping briefly to pay respects at the small shrine of the other protector deity of the village, Mariamman. Every twenty or thirty yards the temple chariot came to a standstill so that the deities could receive the offerings of each new group of householders.

  “Look at all the people honouring the gods,” said Srikanda happily. “It is very good for me to leave the workshop occasionally to see such festivals. We get so buried in the daily detail of our work that sometimes we forget that idols are the base of our Hindu worship: everything else is built on top of this. Without a murti, there could be no puja, no temples, nowhere for people to come with their prayers and their problems. Really—a devotee can tell an idol secrets they can’t tell even to their wife or children.”

  Srikanda gestured to the devotees now surrounding the chariot on all sides. “All these people have a lot of worries—about money, about family, about work. But when they come to the god in a temple, or a festival like this, for a while their problems vanish and they are satisfied.”

  He smiled. “When I see the worshippers praying to a god I helped bring into being, then my happiness is complete. I know that though the span of my life is only eighty or ninety years, the images live for a thousand years, and we live on in those images. We may be mortal, but our work is immortal.”

  There are few places in the world where landscape and divinity are more closely linked than in southern India.

  In the sacred topography of the south, every village is believed to be host to a numberless pantheon of sprites and godlings, tree spirits and snake gods, who are said to guard and regulate the ebb and flow of daily life. They are worshipped and propitiated, as they know the till and soil of the local fields and the sweet water of the wells, even the needs and thirsts of the cattle and the goats of the village.