All Kinds of Magic: One Man's Search for Meaning Across the Material World (18 page)

We chatted for the next few hours as we walked. She seemed, I reflected, both the promise and the drawback of the new India. With her modern clothes and an Ipod in her pocket, she represented the dream of so many young graduates, most of whom, prompted by television, still believe America to be the promised land. She was almost a fully qualified doctor at twenty-five, a keen advocate of women’s rights, and had probably never known a moment’s hardship in her life. And equally, the garish gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon were for her little more than backdrops to a series of rituals that had little importance in her life. She’d spent far more time than I in India and yet, until now, she’d somehow never seen or interacted with the countryside, nor felt the power of the great spiritual current which keeps India’s heart beating.

‘It’s so funny,’ she said, ‘how many of my friends do meditation and all this stuff. And they think just because I’m Indian I must know all about it. But I haven’t a clue. Why should I?’

‘It’s a stereotype, isn’t it?’

She leaned forward to whisper. ‘For the same reason, every guy I meet brings up the
Karma Sutra
– thinks I’m going to be some kind of expert. I mean,
Jesus! 
’

We strolled on. I had never seen so many people. Everyone was moving at their own pace; some trundled in ancient wheelchairs, the small ones carried aloft on the shoulders of parents. One
sadhu
, whose retinue carefully swept the path in front of him free of sharp objects, rolled along like a barrel, his face locked in a mask of self-absorbed devotion. To our right side, the hill loomed, its top obscured now by a wreath of clouds. Do the Saivites believe that the hill is actually animate or is it a metaphor for God’s presence on earth?

Rabindranath Tagore, I would later read, had his own theory about why so many Hindu sacred sites correspond with the landscape itself. ‘India chose her places of pilgrimages on the top of hills and mountains, by the side of the holy rivers, in the heart of forests and by the shores of the ocean,’ he wrote, ‘which along with the sky, is our nearest visible symbol of the vast, the boundless, the I.’

But what was this boundless I? Increasingly now, I thought about it, peering beyond the signs and metaphors of Hinduism for the essence that lay beneath. It was the ineffable mystery itself – what the Tibetans call
Tong-pa-nnid
. Many other cultures hinted at it too: the ancient Scandinavians used the word
Ginnungagap
, meaning ‘yawning or uncircumscribed void’; the Chinese called it
tsi-tsai
: the self-existent. All of these words pointed at something limitless, the womb of all cosmic existence.

Neela and I fell silent for a while. It was sweltering now, the air pregnant with moisture; added to this, the fug of incense, chatter and the singing of
bhajans
, devotional songs expressing love for the divine. There was indeed something stirring about processing within the flow of a vast crowd, if only for a sense of uniformity, of being part of a larger entity than oneself. I imagined staring down at the hill through the window of a small plane and seeing the immense crocodile of devotees, perhaps half a million strong, weaving their way clockwise around this hill. A majestic sight.

In Sanskrit, the circumambulation of Arunachala is known as
Giri Pradakshina
.
Pradakshina
– walking in a circle – is a common practice in both Hinduism and Buddhism, as any morning visitor to a temple will have noticed. Hindu devotees walk clockwise around the innermost chamber of the shrine housing the temple deity, often chanting to keep their minds clear. Indian marriage ceremonies also involve a sacred circle, as the wedded couple walk around the fire seven times to seal their vows. There are many theories about why the circle is important, the most obvious being that circular movement mimics the spinning of the earth upon its axis. Other explanations involve the representation of cosmic unity and the infinite, perhaps the reason that both Hindu temples and Buddhist
stupas
have based their architecture on the circle.

At lunchtime we stopped for a rest at a
dosa
stall, where there were lines of makeshift tables and benches, beside which sizzling pans fried the fermented rice-batter pancakes, with their distinctive sour taste, which are such a feature of the South Indian meal. In all my worldwide travels I have never known such good value. For just five rupees (three pence), it was possible to eat as much as one wanted. No sooner had one
dosa
been devoured than a boy would come past with a stack of fresh pancakes, rolled up like papyrus scrolls, or a great vat of piquant coconut chutney, to replenish the plate.

It was a good opportunity, too, to rest my feet. Neela had sensibly opted to keep her trainers on, while my unseasoned soles were smarting with a thousand tiny scrapes and bruises. (‘Very pious,’ she said with a grin, ‘but I prefer my Nike airs.’) A few metres away, the great retinue continued onwards, like some vast migration. We watched them pensively, and had no sooner finished our plates than it began to rain. Grape-sized balls rattled the corrugated shelters, and a thousand concealed umbrellas bloomed in an instant.

A little tiredly, we rejoined the throng. The ground underfoot was already slick from the multitudes. The coconut fronds were jerking in the rain. Ahead of us, buffalo were moving across the highway to a different pasture. We navigated through them, their chocolate-grey muzzles puffing steam, their eyes enviably still. They walked with their heads down, their mouths chomping in small concentric circles. The smell of them, bestial, elemental, seemed as timeless as India itself.

Soaked to the skin, we walked on. Children splashed in the puddles, while those who’d forgotten their umbrellas tore banana leaves from the wayside and held them over their heads. Neela and I quickly embraced the soaking, joining a group who were splashing about jubilantly in a newly formed stream. The sheer intensity of this sudden rainfall was magical: it had the capacity to wash away everything. We held up our faces to the onslaught, children ourselves again, shrieking with laughter. And when the rain stopped, the jungle to either side of us rang with that peculiar silence that succeeds a storm: a sense of the world slowly emerging again, flower buds creaking open to the nascent sun.

Several hours passed. Conversations began and finished. Neela and I soon felt like old friends. She told me of the clinic she’d been working at in Bangalore, a refuge for those without the necessary funds for Western medicine. Her stories disproved my theory that she knew nothing of India’s underbelly: she’d seen children dying from cholera, and dysentery and typhoid fever. What had most shocked her, she confided, was the plight of the women – who could they turn to if abused? Some of them looked to her, she said, because she was independent and, as a foreigner, seemingly empowered. She felt helpless. Five thousand years were against her.

Along the road, we stopped at the site of each sacred
lingam
, placed at a different compass point around the hill. The
lingams
were surrounded by devotees, for whom they were resonant with power: women with pleated marigolds in their oiled hair, men chanting with their hands in prayer. Before each
lingam
, a fire was burning in an ornate brazier, and devotees would come and throw balls of camphor on the fire, sending the flames roaring. One man knelt in the dust beside his small daughter, a girl of about five dressed in marshmallow pink. To see him showing her how to pray, how to pass her hands through the flame, was extraordinary.

By the evening, with aching limbs and glowing cheeks, we neared the town of Tiruvanammalai. With dusk falling, the whole town was lighting their
agal vilakkus
– tiny earthen ghee lamps that give off a warm yellow light. In every door, window and balcony, and in some cases arranged along the eaves, scores of these tiny lamps were being lit. The effect was magical, each lamp representing a small human connection with the divine. To blur one’s eyes was to see a kaleidoscope of flame.

An old man, hearing me speaking English, addressed me. ‘Lamps are warding off evil forces,’ he said. ‘And they are also small version of
Tejolingam
.’

‘What is
Tejolingam
?’ asked Neela.

‘Great fire on Arunachala.’ He grinned, exposing ruined teeth. ‘When fire is lit, light of Shiva will be there. Mind and intellect will be illuminated. Ultimately, heart will be illuminated!’

We walked on towards the temple, pushed back and forth by the enormous crowds. A few young men were jostling each other excitably and I sensed that, before too long, this crowd would become a writhing mass, like a hundred football matches in one. Those that lived along the roadside were standing on their balconies, dressed in their finest clothes, while still more candles were appearing, so that the whole town seemed to shimmer with light, with spirals of smoke rising over the streets.

As darkness fell, the atmosphere grew more and more frenetic. Approaching the Arunachaleswarar temple, Neela stayed close to me as pilgrims began to let off firecrackers, fiery red
petard
lit from a small fuse. Unlike the tiny bangs I remembered from childhood, these were like primitive bombs and it was necessary to keep a vigilant eye out to avoid being caught in the blast. Bonfires were also being lit in the streets, fed with ghee, camphor and anything else which happened to be lying around: a broken chair, the stump of a palm, armfuls of leaves that caught like moths’ wings. To stand too close to one of these was to risk a serious burning, as at any minute a pilgrim might throw on a handful of some accelerant, sending the flames leaping.

More than anything, the atmosphere itself seemed to be approaching boiling point. The crowd was filled with a mounting excitement that was beyond that of, say, watching a sporting event. One might call it religious fervour, save for all the distasteful associations that such a term brings with it. Rather, it was as if they were simply letting go of all their conditioning and their routine, to fall into step with something larger themselves, a belief in the total harmony and structure of the universe. It was fire worship – that most primeval of human beliefs – and to see the people dancing and holding up their hands to the flames was to be suddenly cast back to a time older than civilisation itself, when the first Indo-Aryan peoples began to forge together their beliefs, when fire protected them from the dark.

Just as the noise began to reach thunderous proportions and the explosions to be so excessive that I feared for our very safety, a profound hush descended over the crowd. It was as if a switch had been flicked. Instantly, I felt a chill run down my spine – it was impossible to remain dispassionate as, up through the gloom, glimmering on the distant peak of Arunachala hill, something began to shine. No one made so much as a whisper – not even a child cooed. All of us, in harmony, strained our necks to see upwards to where the great pyre was being sparked.

Suddenly, prompting the loudest roar I have ever heard a crowd muster, the hilltop flame caught and surged up. At first a tiny glow through the smoke, then growing in size and ferocity, eventually it was a giant luminous tear of fire, many metres high. Instantly, all about the town, around all fourteen miles of Arunachala hill, the people bent their knees and began to chant
Om
, the one sound, the ineffable sound of the universe.
Om, Om, Om
, the people chanted, and the noise of it was so loud I thought my heart would break.

Om
, they chanted, every man, woman and child bending their knees and touching their foreheads to the ground.
Om
, came the prayers, until I too found myself turning and bowing to the mountain, that vast conical godhead, which represented if not exactly Shiva in my own mind, then the goal of human existence – an ultimate truth, a unity, which was perhaps what Shiva represented anyway.

Om
, they chanted, again and again in great rumbling waves, and at the same moment, all the thousands of
sadhus
and the most ardent of the devotees – clutching their vats of ghee – began to run towards the hill. On the summit – several hours’ climb away – they would add their own fuel to the fire, so that the flame itself, burning throughout the night, would come to reflect their own ardour. Never, as long as people live in India, will that ardour die out.

For a second, I was apart from the crowd again – a mere witness – and I felt something of my old loneliness course through me. I couldn’t yet believe, with
all
of myself, that we were doing anything but going through the motions here – putting our faith in a structure that, when investigated, might prove an empty shell. But then the wonder and immediacy of the moment washed my fears away and I was a participant again, just happy to be there, alive, to be looking for something that seemed – even if I had yet to find it – the most important thing there is.

Mata-ji: the Divine Mother