“Close your bag, there are pickpockets here,” Latika said, putting a protective arm around her. “What a relief you’re here safe. We wondered what we’d do if the guide whisked you away somewhere! Stranger things have been known to happen in temple towns.”
The beggar rattled his tin again. “Spare a coin, God will bless you, haven’t eaten all day, Ma. .”
“Ssh,” Gouri said to Latika in a whisper, gesturing towards Badal. “He’ll hear you!” But she was smiling.
*
The women walked barefoot on bricked paths and dirt tracks, buffetted by other pilgrims who pushed past them to get ahead. Inside the shrines the stone floors were so slippery with grease and water that they had to edge along the walls, holding them for support. They bowed their heads at a dozen altars. In the sanctum sanctorum, lit only with flaming torches, priests brought oil lamps towards them, dispensing benediction, their shadowy faces menacing in the flickering light. Latika wanted to find her slippers, run away, scrub her feet, never return, but she trudged behind the others admiring whatever she was told to admire: the austere grandeur of the stone Narasimha; the richness of the brocade that clothed an image of Krishna. Her legs were aching by the time Badal took them into a secluded square where an old banyan tree sheltered a tiny circular shrine. A particular guide to the temple many centuries ago, Badal said, a man who did the same kind of work that he did, had fallen into a dry well there. At that time this banyan tree was no more than a few leaves. Immediately the earth at the rim of the well had collapsed inward and buried the man alive, as if God wanted to keep him close to Himself, within the temple forever. The shrine marked where the well had been. The tree had let out dozens of branch-thick aerial roots, enclosing it within a forest. Every year, when the caparisoned temple elephants were taken out in a holy procession, the dead man’s effigy was mounted on one of the elephants as a reminder of his sacrifice. The temple’s most respected guide was chosen to sit on that elephant, holding the effigy.
Badal’s deep-set eyes glittered, and his ivory-coloured art silk kurta shone as he said, “The guide who holds that effigy on the elephant. . he always dies within weeks of the ceremony.”
He spoke to them, but he was far away, being churned in a heaving mass of pushing, milling, screaming, ecstatic pilgrims, watching the temple elephants lumber past, as huge up-close as hillocks, their gold headdresses gleaming in the light of flaming torches, their trunks swaying. It was at last year’s procession. He still had not worked out how he had done it or where he had found the footholds, but insensible with passion he had flung himself towards one of the elephants and tried clambering up its flanks to reach the effigy of the guide and to sit holding it, up on the back of the elephant. He had not managed, of course. He had been pulled away by other pilgrims who had cried out in the din that he would be killed. Later, he was sure he had been possessed for those moments by some divine insanity, some primal urge for annihilation that would have fulfilled a destiny he could neither escape nor understand.
But he had not been crushed by the elephants. He was alive. God had wanted him to live.
Would He want him to live now — after what he had done with Raghu? A boy. So young.
He was saved from his agitated thoughts by Latika, who had heard his last few words and let out an involuntary giggle, which she tried to smother with her handkerchief. Badal looked at her with a questioning frown.
“If the temple guide knows he’s going to die, how do you get any of them to do the ceremony?” she said. “How is the victim chosen?” Her voice had that mischievous lilt her friends dreaded as much as they enjoyed.
It was as if her words instantly rolled a set of iron shutters down Badal’s face. Latika knew right away she should not have spoken. She should never have spoken. But it was too late, as always it was too late. She had resolved to cultivate the kind of solemnity expected of an elderly woman at this holiest of temples, but she felt too angular here, her hair felt too red, her malachite necklace too green. She could sense her friends were exasperated with her. Gouri began to babble: “She doesn’t know much, she. . she has always lived abroad.” Vidya had moved away to the other side of the square and was feigning interest in a carved pillar. Latika felt her blouse stick damply against her shoulders. From beyond the courtyard she could hear the homeless widows chanting, and another guide’s voice saying, “Now come this way, this way, this holiest of courtyards is where a temple guide hundreds of years ago fell into a dry well. .”
Fury split Badal’s words into syllables hard as stone chips. “Madam, for us temple guides, it is the greatest honour to be chosen, to be assured a death so holy. To die for God is what we live for.”
It was true. He knew it to be so, had known it ever since his first lisping, toddling visit to the temple in his father’s arms. He remembered his own fierce intensity, his infantile scholarship. He had mastered every twist and turn in the epics, the intricate ancestries in the Mahabharata unknotted themselves in his childish mind when he was only eight. If someone said “Arjuna”, he would chirrup, “Born of Indra!” He knew even then that Vyasa was the father of Vidura and Gandhari the daughter of Subala. He could fast all day and never ask for a drop of water. Neighbours wondered if he was a child saint.
He longed to be with real seekers, those who would understand the depth and gravity of his words. He turned away from the women, knowing his contempt would show on his face. He cut short their round of the temple and shepherded them to another courtyard to watch the nightly pennant-changing ceremony. Hundreds of people waited there in orderly, patient anticipation. He showed them to a place where they could sit and then walked away, merging into the crowds.
*
One moment here, the next moment gone: had they not been warned never to lose sight of the man? Latika wondered where he had disappeared to. Perhaps to a toilet? Were there toilets at the temple? She wanted one with a sudden desperation and made noises about following him. But Gouri was now even more ostentatiously the expedition leader and paid Latika no attention. She had been in a state of otherworldiness since they had entered the temple, and it was impossible to communicate with her about matters as lowly as toilets. Latika clenched her muscles and hoped she would survive.
The main shrine had three connected towers, the tallest of which seemed as high as a ten-storey building. They stared at the flags fluttering at their tips, trying not to blink and lose the first glimpse. A man began to climb the stone peaks of the temple’s lowest tower. Latika saw Vidya clutch Gouri’s hand, so she clutched Vidya’s. Shouts and murmurs. How his yellow dhoti flared and fluttered against the black sky! As he climbed, unprotected by net or rope, his figure grew small, then smaller, until by the time he had reached the pinnacle of the tallest tower he was a tiny mannequin that might any moment be swept off by the gusts of wind gathering strength in the Bay of Bengal. Anxiety rippled through the crowd. There, on top, as frail as a scarecrow against the immense darkness, he began the process of taking down the old flag and unfurling and positioning the new. Would that flag billowing in the high wind twist around him and tug him into the sea beyond? Would it become his shroud?
With the new silk flag in its place at last, they realised that alongside the hundreds around them they had been holding their breath, which they let out all at once. The wind too seemed to sigh and die down. People began to exclaim and chatter, recognising an intermission. A child near them demanded a biscuit. Latika said, “Now I really must find a bathroom, or I’ll burst.” A few minutes later, at the end of an unusually hot day, it started to drizzle, the air grew dense with the scent of water meeting dry earth, and everyone fled for cover. Scurrying to the gates, saris over their heads to shield themselves from the rain, Gouri said to Vidya, “She has no sense of occasion. Couldn’t she wait two minutes before she said something so tasteless?”