A Moveable Feast (24 page)

Dharamgiri pulls the lid off the pot and peers inside. A puff of steam envelops his face, followed by a sweet smell. He grasps a pair of iron tongs and lifts the pot off the coals, then pours the fragrant brown chai, speckled with blackened bits of ginger, through a sieve and into several steel cups lined up beside him.

‘Om Shiva,’ he intones, pouring a bit onto the fire. The coals hiss a reply.

‘Babas must share their meal,’ he explains. ‘One quarter for Shiva, one quarter for guests. Two quarters for us.’

He passes the cups around, to me first, then Mauni Baba, the other sadhus, the initiate, and finally himself.

It’s the best chai I’ve ever had, sweet and milky and strongly caffeinated. The poorer sadhus don’t eat much, usually just round unleavened loaves called chapati, so they get most of their energy from endless rounds of chillum and chai. They say there are three C’s in sadhu life: chai, chillum and chapati.

‘So what’s it like being a sadhu?’ I ask Dharamgiri.

‘Baba life good life, but very hard. Every morning I get up to do one hour yoga, one hour meditation. Then I go bathe in the river. The afternoon is the same.’

‘Where were you before this?’

‘At a monastery. Many Juna there. All the time smoking, all the time chillum.’ He gives a chesty cough as if to emphasise his point. ‘Too much smoking there, I’m not smoking so much at Kumbh Mela.’

‘What will you do after this?’

‘Go to the forest. Too many people here. All the time they come around to look at babas. All the time asking, “Baba give me
darshan
. Baba, tell me how to live my life.” I go to the forest. Meditate. Be quiet. Rest.’

‘Why did you become a baba?’

‘I join the Juna when I was twelve. My parents brought me to Juna. I grow up a baba.’

‘You must travel a lot.’

‘I’ve been all over India. Down to Goa, down to Tamil Nadu. One time Sri Lanka. Goa was a good place. Lot of foreigners like you, very friendly. They want to meet the babas, smoke chillums. I’ve been to the Himalayas. Good place. No people.’

I catch Mauni Baba’s eye as we both raise our cups of chai. He stops mid-sip and points to me, then extends his arm at a high angle, pointing to the far distance, and brings it palm downwards to the spot where we sit. He passes his hand to encompass our circle, points to the pot of chai, and gives me a smile of radiant joy.
Welcome to Kumbh Mela
, it says.

Welcome indeed.

Stefan Gates is a food adventurer and award-winning writer/TV presenter renowned for his perceptive, witty and unconventional approach to food and cooking. He particularly loves wild culinary quests and extraordinary food adventures. His food and travel books and TV series have won many awards, including Best TV Series at the Bologna Food on Film Festival, and his documentaries have been shown in over thirty countries. Stefan wrote and presented
Cooking in the Danger Zone
for BBC2, presented the prime-time magazine show
Full on Food
and hundreds of episodes of the studio show
Food Uncut
. His food/travel series
Feasts
took him to the greatest feasts on earth. Stefan has just finished
E Numbers: An Edible Adventure,
a myth-busting food science series, and he has also written an accompanying book. He chairs events, performs cookery demos, writes for newspapers and magazines, and regularly appears on radio and TV shows as a guest. He has written five books, the latest of which is
The Extraordinary Cookbook,
on unforgettable food adventures. He is also the author of
Gastronaut, In the Danger Zone
and
101 Dishes to Eat Before You Die
.

It was never meant to be like this. Look at me: a bloodied, bedraggled waif staggering around a beautiful Shinto temple courtyard drunk as a skunk and soaked to the bone, bare bottom on display for all the world to see, only a thin strip of cotton hiding my genitals and above all else, desperately,
desperately
hungry.

In an unwise moment of blinding clarity, I catch sight of my reflection in a window and look deep inside my soul to ponder what brought me to this. Despite selling my soul to the evil gogglebox as a TV presenter five years earlier, I had, up until now, largely managed to preserve my dignity by sticking to serious documentaries, arcane food stories and explorations of the complex relationship between people and food. Sure, I had done a few wild things for TV, gone to war zones more dangerous than a food writer really needed to go, eaten bull’s perineum for the thrill, and palm weevils for the flavour. But that had all been in the legitimate chase of knowledge and adventure rather than a good set of viewing figures. Now I stand at the top of my modest mountain of achievement, about to cast the whole shebang into the air to crash on the rocks of naked indignity. Worst of all, I know something extraordinarily important has just happened, but I have no idea what it all meant.

There is a valid(ish) reason for me being in this state of disarray. I am making a TV series for the BBC (the largest broadcaster in the world and, up until now, probably the most respected) called
Feasts,
which is about … well … feasts. I have been touring the world to find out why food has the power to bring people together, to channel grief, joy and God, and to see if I can use these feasts to get a deeper understanding of the world’s more enigmatic people. I’ll be honest with you: it had seemed like a cushy gig when I first suggested it. But now I have come to Japan, a country I have always loved but oddly never really felt a deep connection with, to see if I can dig deeper into the Japanese soul by joining in some of their more dramatic shared experiences.

The 1200-year-old Naked Man Festival is probably the most dramatic shared experience in the world, and it’s also a Shinto ceremony that tells you all you need to know about repressed emotions (more of which later) and the Japanese obsession with superstition. Although Japan is often considered a Buddhist country, most Japanese people I know practise a pragmatic syncretism, combining elements of Buddhism and Shintoism (which is itself more of a philosophical path than a religion), neither of which require a traditional monotheistic profession of faith to allow you to be a believer.

If that sounds complicated, it is. Unless you’re Japanese, in which case it’s simple: most say that they aren’t religious, but they often visit both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, picking whichever elements they feel they need. My friend Junko explains that she will drop into a Buddhist temple to show respect for her ancestors, but tie a wish ribbon at her Shinto shrine to ask for good luck with her driving test. She sees Buddhism as a faith for the afterlife, and Shintoism as a set of principles and superstitions that can affect everyday current life. But when I ask her if she’s religious, she curls her nose up and squirms, ‘Noooo!’

The Naked Man Festival is a thoroughly Shinto affair: an opportunity to banish bad luck for the year ahead, to make wishes for yourself and your family’s health and happiness in a dynamic and dramatic way, and at the same time express your basest, most primal feelings by getting drunk, naked and violent. And it’s all based around a cake. I’ve come to Nagoya, which throws the most spectacular version of the festival, to try to get to grips with the whole thing.

Let’s start from the beginning: firstly a man is selected to be the Naked Man, or Shinotoko. He is kept in isolation for three days for spiritual purification, although this isolation includes his being regularly dragged out for display for TV cameras and meetings with local dignitaries and businessmen (he’s not
allowed to talk – apparently that keeps him pure). He’s grateful for this period of relative calm, because in a few days he’s going to be stripped naked and thrown into the arms of ten thousand drunken, semi-naked men desperate to slap him on the head or grab hold of an arm in order to pass all of their bad luck and evil deeds onto him, as he struggles to make his way back to the temple. It sounds like the very definition of bad karma.

During this period of isolation, local groups of people come together around the district to pound rice into flour and then use it to cook a series of vast rice cakes, the largest weighing in at around four tonnes. Because this cake is made using everyone’s hard work and communal dedication, it begins to take on a spiritual power that is ratified and blessed upon delivery (by twenty-tonne hydraulic crane) to the main Shinto temple. The cake now has
intense
spiritual power.

Up to this point, all is well and calm and the festival is merely an interesting anthropological, socio-religious quirk, of which there are so many similar events around the world. Soon, though, the spiritual shit is destined to hit the fan in a big way.

There are lots of different theories about this festival’s meaning, and many different versions around Japan. I don’t want to offer the ultimate definition, as I don’t think there is one, and in any case it’s too complicated to pick apart, but this is my first-hand experience of the festival.

I meet an amiable elderly Japanese gentleman by the name of Kosaki-san, who has invited me to join him to celebrate the Naked Man Festival (this isn’t the sort of gig that anyone, let alone a foreigner, should do on their own). Kosaki-san is small, formal, humble, smart and smiley. His wife is the same, but smaller. They invite me into their home for dinner and we spend
a few days getting to know each other. They are prototypical Japanese straight from the cultural copybook: wonderful hosts, generous and kind, hard working and successful (Kosaki-san is an engineer with his own small but high-tech factory that makes lift parts) and, crucially, they seem chronically unable to express emotion. (Now, if you think I’m guilty of cultural stereotyping here, you’re probably right. I’m sure there are plenty of expressive, emotional and argumentative Japanese; I just haven’t met any of them. I nonetheless have a deep affection for my many wonderful but less expressive friends, Japanese or otherwise.)

After spending several days getting to know them and experiencing, amongst other things, an intriguing but painfully formal tea ceremony, I decide to break with convention and ask the Kosakis some difficult personal questions. I start by asking Mrs Kosaki if Japanese men hide their emotions. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. Kosaki-san looks particularly ashen-faced.

‘Yes, I think so.’

Has her husband ever told her that he loves her?

‘No.’ (They have been married for twenty years.) ‘I think Japanese men find it difficult to say such things.’

Kosaki-san laughs nervously and says, ‘I don’t say it, but she knows it. She knows what’s in my heart. The Japanese don’t often thank their wives to their face. That’s not to say we don’t feel grateful. We just aren’t very good at expressing that.’

Mrs Kosaki looks at me with her eyebrows raised and a ‘What can you do?’ expression on her face. She takes a breath before commenting judiciously, ‘It would be nice if they could actually say thank you out loud.’

‘Do you think it’s a good idea for Kosaki-san to join in the Naked Man Festival?’

‘I look at them and wonder what on earth makes them want to get naked with other men every year. The Naked Man Festival is
all about men.’ But she says this without malice, rather with the tenderness of a mother watching a toddler running happily around with a dustbin on his head. Kosaki-san looks intently at his feet.

I realise that I’ve probably crossed the line of formality and I’m in danger of upsetting my hosts and the rules of Japanese hospitality, so I take Kosaki-san up on his offer of dinner with some of his friends, bid goodnight to his lovely wife and we go out to get thoroughly, uproariously pissed.

The next day is the day of the festival itself. It’s a freezing-cold, sunny morning and around twenty friends gather at Kosaki-san’s house. I am feeling extremely anxious, but Kosaki-san is like a kid at Christmas, running around welcoming everyone and handing out cups of water. He hands me one and I take a large swig. I nearly spit it straight out: it’s not water, it’s
sake.
It’s only 10am, for Christ’s sake.

We gather cross-legged around a long low table to consume a small meal of sushi alongside a vast ocean of alcohol. Huge bottles of sake and smaller bottles of beer are passed around the table, and everyone drinks heavily. No-one is excused: the entire purpose of the next two hours is to get comprehensively, dangerously inebriated. ‘You’ll need this,’ says Kosaki-san, ‘otherwise you won’t be able to join in.’

I tank down as much booze as I can, and watch as the men around me descend into giggling, slurring and staggering. Eventually, once we are all well pickled, Kosaki-san rouses us to get changed. The ladies withdraw and we all strip off and jump into Kosaki-san’s ridiculously small bath to purify ourselves for the coming ritual. When we emerge, we dress each other in a long thin cotton cloth that wraps unflatteringly up our bum cracks and over our genitals, before being tied around our stomachs. Kosaki-san takes great pleasure in yanking mine up to give me what I can only describe as an excruciating wedgie, just
for the fun of it. Ooooh, that smarts. Basically, we’re wearing cloth G-strings that leave our flabby pink behinds poking out for all the world to see. But by now we’re too drunk to care, and there’s much cock-waving and arse-slapping before we’re all ready.

One man collapses unconscious, too drunk to continue, and we drag him back to the sushi room to brew up his beastly hangover in relative safety. We write our wishes for health and happiness on strips of cloth and tie them to a long bamboo branch that Kosaki-san has found, and then a fat permanent marker appears and we all write mobile phone numbers on our arms in case of emergencies. I, for no good reason, decide to write in huge letters on everyone’s back ‘The BBC loves Japan’. Classy.

Fired up and staggering drunk, we set off at a terrifying running pace, holding our bamboo branch aloft as we head across the city to the Shinto shrine. At the same time, ten thousand other drunk men across Nagoya set off in groups of twenty or thirty to converge on the temple, and the city looks like a scene from a zombie porn movie. As I meet more and more semi-naked strangers, we slap each other’s backs and share bottles of sake like old lost friends, and I engage in emotional conversations with people I’ve never met, discovering a deep connection with them, despite the fact that neither of us understands what the other is saying.

We arrive at the road in front of the temple and the ceremonial driveway is packed with men in the same inebriated half-naked state as us. We race along with our pole and run into the temple grounds to deposit it with the priests, nearly stabbing one of them as we throw it into the melee. We retire to the driveway to wait for the main event as tens of thousands of onlookers and umpteen TV camera crews, including my own team, head for safety onto rooftops and up trees. A voice comes over the loudspeaker warning that people are being crushed and
collapsing from the stress. Kosaki-san and I have managed to get a prime position just outside the temple, and we are crammed in by hundreds of other men, buttock to sticky, sweaty buttock.

Suddenly there is a roar from afar. The Shinotoko has been released into the baying crowd, with all ten thousand men desperate to touch him. We all crush towards the noise, even though he is a kilometre away at the far end of the crowd, making his slow and painful way towards us. A great clamour breaks out from behind us as a team of men begin running with buckets of water through the crowds to douse the Shinotoko and his assailants to cool them down and reduce the danger of heat exhaustion. The water steams off the crowd as they scramble over one another, jumping on top of each other in desperation.