Nine Lives Page 24

  “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.”

  The Lady Twilight

  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 shakti 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 Manisha’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.

  “Every night we believe she reveals herself here, just before dawn,” continued Manisha. “At that time you feel her very strongly. If she did not bless us in this way we would not be here. She takes us in. She takes care of us. She gives us help. Anyone who comes here and calls on her will overcome their difficulties. She is everywhere in Tarapith: in the leaves of the trees, the buds of the rice, in the sap of the palms, the clouds that bring rain. All we do is to light some fires in her honour, chant a few mantras, perform some rituals. She does the rest.”

  “But aren’t you scared to live in a place like this?” I asked.

  “Tara loves us,” replied Manisha. “So no, I am not scared.” She paused, then added, “And anyway the dead do not stay here in the burning ground. Only the bodies are here. The dead take birth again.”

  Manisha smiled. “We have been fetched by the Mother,” she said. “She has taken us away from the humdrum of normal life. She arranges everything for us: the gifts that come to us, the alms which allow us to survive. I feel her presence here. This is her home.”

  “Have you actually seen the goddess?” I asked.

  “The Mother has many forms,” she replied. “All the forms of Tara cannot be numbered. Recently, I saw a jackal—her vehicle. Sometimes in my dreams I glimpse her, but she has never yet appeared to me in a vision. I hope one day she will. If you call her from your heart, one day you will see her, floating before you.”

  Manisha fingered the beads of her rudraksh rosary. “Maybe I am not worshipping her in the right way. Unless you call her from with in, in a truthful manner, she will never hear you. It is a long struggle, and it’s not easy. But if you stay here, getting up at 2 a.m. to pray, and if you persist and do not give up, then surely you will see her.”

  I asked about the skulls that littered the graveyard: what did they actually do?

  “We cannot speak of everything,” she replied. “But the skulls give us power and charge our prayers with their shakti. The spirits help bring them to us, and they remain with the skull. We take good care of them, and feed them with rice and dal. Then they protect us, keeping us away from evil and death. They help us to awaken the goddess.”

  From the way that Manisha spoke, it was clear that for her the goddess was not something terrible. She talked intimately of her as Ma Tara—Mother Tara—as if she were a benign matriarch, quite a different image from that on the popular prints that I had seen in the bazaar on the way there. Here, it is true, Tara was sometimes shown as a nursing mother or enthroned in the Paradise of Kailasa or on the Isle of Gems. But usually she was depicted almost naked with matted hair and a blood-red lolling tongue and sitting upon a tiger’s skin with four arms, wearing a garland of freshly severed heads. She wielded a blood-smeared cleaver as she stood victorious, dripping with blood, over a dead corpse with an erect phallus. To my eyes she was unambiguously terrifying, weird and ferocious. I said as much to Manisha.

  “Ah,” she said. “This is true. This is her wild side. But all this just means she can fight the devils on your behalf.”

  “But she looks herself almost as much a demon as a goddess.”

  “Tara is my mother,” replied Manisha simply. “How can your own mother evoke fear? When I first came here in a distressed condition, Ma protected me. I had been beaten by my husband, rejected by my mother-in-law and had lost my home and my three daughters. It was she who brought Tapan Sadhu to protect me and give me love. In this place of death, I have found new life. Now I don’t want to go anywhere. To me, Ma is all. My life depends on her.”

  Tarapith lies in a great planisphere of flat, green country: fertile floodplains and rice paddies whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the Ganges Delta and the Bay of Bengal—a great green Eden of water and vegetation.

  The road from Shantiniketan is raised on a shaded embankment and passes through a vast patchwork of wetlands: muddy fields of half-harvested rice give way to others where the young green seed lings have been transplanted into shimmering rectangles in the flooded fields. Through all this runs a network of streams and rivers and frog-croaking, fish-filled, lily-littered duck ponds. These are surrounded by fishermen with bamboo fishing cages and lines of village women with earthen pitchers. Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires. Rising from the ripples of this flat waterland are raised mounds encircled with windbreaks of palm, clumps of bamboo, and tall flowering grasses. On these stand small wattle villages of reed and clay, with their bullock carts and haystacks, their thatched bus stops and the occasional spreading banyan tree. Sometimes, to one side, rises the brick estate house of the local grandee.

  From a distance, Tarapith looks like just any other Bengali village, with its palm-thatched huts, and still, cool fish pond. But here one building dominates a
ll the others: the great temple of the goddess. Its base is a thick-walled, red-brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like the snow capping of a Himalayan peak. Inside, below the low-curving Bengali eves, stands the silver image of the goddess with her long black hair, half-submerged beneath marigold garlands and Benarasi saris, and crowned and shaded by a silver umbrella. On her forehead is a patch of red kumkum powder. Onto this the temple priests place their fingers, then transfer the red stain onto the foreheads of the devotees. In gratitude the pilgrims then kiss her silver feet, and leave her offerings of coconuts, white silk saris, incense sticks, bananas and, more unexpectedly, bottles of whisky.

  Yet in Tarapith, those who live here are quite clear that Tara’s preferred residence is not the temple, but the cremation ground which lies above the ghats of the river on the edge of the village. Tara is, after all, one of the most wild and wayward of Hindu goddesses, and cannot be tamed and contained within a venerated temple image. She is not only the goddess of supreme knowledge who grants her devotees the ability to know and realise the Absolute, she is also the Lady Twilight, the Cheater of Death, a figure of horror and terror, a stalker of funeral pyres, who slaughters demons and evil yakshis without hesitation, becoming as terrible as they in order to defeat them: in the tenth-century hymn of a hundred names from the Mundamala Tantra, Tara is called She Who Likes Blood, She Who Is Smeared with Blood and She Who Enjoys Blood Sacrifice. And while Tara has a healthy appetite for animal blood, the Mundamala Tantra explicitly states that she prefers that of humans, in particular that taken from the forehead, hands and breasts of her devotees.