Happy Ant-Heap (12 page)

The city is, in effect, a show-window of religions and sects. The earliest Christians were here, followed by Arabs newly converted to Islam, although both were preceded, it is claimed, by ‘black’ Jews, who arrived as refugees after Nebuchadnezzar’s occupation of Jerusalem in 587
BC
. There is no solid evidence to support the contention that Christianity came over with St Thomas the Apostle in
AD
52, but Syrian Orthodox churches were established by the sixth century, and many of them are still active and independent of Latin Catholicism.

The present synagogue, built in 1568 and the oldest in the Commonwealth, is embedded in a crooked street of spice merchants in the heart of the city: a tiny, polished jewel of a building with a floor of unique Chinese tiles flooded with the bluish light of antique Belgian lamps. At a favourable moment back in the tenth century, the community was so powerful that King Ravi Varma seems to have considered sanctioning the creation here of a Jewish state in miniature, for he presented their leader with copper plates engraved with title to a substantial grant of land. Nothing came of the project. In later centuries the tolerance of native rulers was replaced by the Inquisition-bolstered fanaticism of the Portuguese, and prosperity, prestige and numbers began to dwindle. In recent years emigration of the young to Israel has brought the Jews of Cochin to the brink. One guidebook put their numbers at about fifty, a figure that had declined by the time of our visit to twenty-seven, drawn from seven families. There is no longer a rabbi and, although all the elders are qualified to perform religious offices, it is sometimes necessary to borrow visitors of the Jewish faith to make up the minimum of fifteen worshippers without which the Saturday service cannot be held.

Whenever tourists congregate and linger—as they do in these historic surroundings—attempts are made to engage their interest in performances of a kind abhorrent to the authorised image of India today. Few spectacles in the Orient attract foreign onlookers as surely as the common one of indignities inflicted upon snakes, and it was inevitable that the immediate vicinity of the synagogue should be viewed as prime territory for this kind of entertainment. One operator would hold up a passerby long enough for a second to rake a cobra out of its tiny basket and subject it to the attack of a mongoose on a leash. The performance—since it was repeated several times a day—was necessarily a listless one. The cobra uncoiled itself with evident reluctance, spread a flaccid hood, and the mongoose, shuffling backwards and forwards in a desultory fashion, finally caught it briefly by the neck before a blow with a stick compelled it to release its hold. Onlookers who appeared to approve were rewarded with the promise of a treat in which the mongoose would be fed a live mouse. Indians, who on the whole are kind to animals, stand aloof from such spectacles.

There were more cobra and mongoose pitches outside the Mattancheri Palace, built in the rectilinear European style of the day and presented in 1558 by the Portuguese to the Cochin Raja Veera Kerala Varma, in the expectation—which was to be fulfilled—of a valuable
quid pro quo
in the matter of concessions. It is now a museum of a sort, housing in the Durbar Hall a display of the Cochin Rajas’ ceremonial gear.

The murals with which the palace is densely painted throughout are regarded as outstanding examples of the Indian art of the period: allegorical scenes, based largely on the stories of the
Ramayana,
but accepted as illustrating aspects of the court life of the seventeenth century in which they were completed. Inevitably those decorating the walls of the harem attract the greatest interest.

The problem of fertility or its lack seems to have been easily disposed of. The wonder drug of the day,
payasa,
was freely supplied by a powerful monk. King Dharatha’s three wives (one fair, one medium and one black) conceived promptly and were brought to bed of three strapping boys—each destined to become a hero of the
Ramayana.
The King looks on exultantly while the meticulously painted processes of birth take place. Eroticism in Indian art produces problems of excess and confusion. The viewer is confronted with unnatural agility and a baffling confusion of torsos and limbs. Which leg and which arm belongs to whom? (Eight of the arms belong to Shiva.) Among the gods and their paramours depicted in athletic strivings on these walls, only Krishna, lord of forests and music, is instantly identifiable, engaged in amorous dalliance while playing the flute—with the dexterity to be expected of a god who in one incarnation or another possessed 10,000 wives.

Not long ago a ban on photographs of these goings-on had been imposed. But why should this be? Was it possible that such scenes of legendary self-indulgence could be in any way linked with snake and mongoose acts as a reflection of an unprogressive past? If so, how long would it take for a request in writing, in proof of serious purpose, for a photographic visit to the old harem to be approved?

A call at the State Tourist Office reinforced my worst suspicions. Permission to take photographs might be granted in special circumstances, said the man in charge, but application had to be made to Delhi, which could be expected to take three months to reach a decision. This seemed to be the moment to enquire about the possibility of visiting the shrine of Bhagavathi, some twenty miles away at Chottanikara, celebrated all over India as the Temple of Exorcism, where persons suffering from mental disorders are treated by an energetic form of psychotherapy based on song and dance. The official’s response was guarded. After a moment’s reflection he said, ‘I am hearing of this place, but it is only for inspecting the exterior. Entrance prohibited for foreigners.’

Nevertheless, a taxi driver from the rank at the Malabar Hotel saw no obstacle to the visit. There was something special about the hotel’s Ambassador taxis which, despite appearing like all others to be copies of the Morris Oxford of about 1953, gave the sensation of concealed power in their corpulent bodies. They were fitted (unnecessarily one would have supposed) with fog lamps and police-style revolving blue lights. Perhaps there was something special about the number plates, too, for traffic blocks opened up and dispersed in magical fashion at their approach. The driver imposed his own conditions: one hundred rupees, a half-hour’s waiting on arrival and no camera-showing at the temple. OK? By this time Mr Williams had left. I was at the driver’s mercy, and agreed to listen to his terms. He lit a joss-stick, stuck it in a holder, and we set off down the traffic-choked country lanes, along the banks of canals dense with Chinese nets, then tearing into a market crowd, scattering both buyers and sellers, but slowing to negotiate our passage round an introspective and unbudging Brahminy bull.

The temple was an unimpressive building at the end of an approach glutted with foodstalls and souvenir booths. In India, religious observance and discreet fun mingle easily, and most of those who visit temples enter the presence of their gods in holiday spirit. Devotees and visiting patients were arriving by the busload, engulfed instantly in a swarm of beggars, astrologers and sellers of shrine decorations, of ear-splitting rattles for children, paper windmills and sweets packed in bird-shaped containers which actually flapped their wings.

A trayful of plastic busts of Karl Marx, adorned with garlands of real flowers, attracted the driver’s attention. He bought one, then led me to an office where a man in uniform with a severe expression regarded me with evident mistrust. A muttered discussion followed. The driver was conciliatory and persuasive, and we were waved through into the temple compound. The large open space was crowded. In Cochin a goddess waits round every corner, and people came here not only to pay their respects to the goddess of the insane, but for the performance of marriages and a great variety of small ceremonies, such as the feeding of a child for the first time with ritual rice, and the cropping of a boy’s infantile top-knot in properly sanctified surroundings. For the majority of those present, said the driver, this was a pleasant family outing.

Worshippers were streaming through the temple doors into a brilliantly lit interior, though the diminutive but powerful image of Bhagavathi was not in sight. A row of small windowless buildings with bright blue padlocked doors encircled the courtyard. In these the patients—the majority of them young girls—were confined between doses of treatment in which they were encouraged to dance until they fell exhausted to the ground. These remedial activities peaked twice a day, when a procession of musicians led by the temple elephant carrying the idol made a tour of the compound. No foreigners, said the driver, were allowed to be present on these occasions.

By this time it was clear to him what I had come to see, and he led me to a small low-walled enclosure in which five patients, appearing to be girls in their late teens or early twenties, were receiving emergency treatment. They had been seated in a circle, each one with an attendant, his fingers entwined in her hair, and each was rotating her torso and jerking her head backwards and forwards in time with a four-man orchestra playing cymbals and archaic horns. When the rhythm speeded up, the patient’s gyrations and contortions increased in violence, so that only the hold on her hair prevented damage to her head against the wall of the enclosure or on the ground. Abruptly the music stopped, and with it the moaning and the frenzy. There would be a few minutes’ respite before therapy recommenced. The ancient tree under which this took place bristled with nails that had been driven into its trunk. There were hundreds, possibly thousands of them, each representing the cure which, said the driver, was obtained in two-thirds of the cases accepted for treatment.

At the far end of the courtyard, steps led down to a pleasant, well-maintained garden in which family groups strolled, sometimes with the daughters they had come to visit. Once in a while a stunning report from the recreation area suggested that small charges of dynamite were being exploded in a festive manner. Small boys dashed about, twisted their rattles, played hide-and-seek among the bushes, and went in hopeless chase after the big sombre butterflies frequenting the flowers. A smiling out-patient wearing a crown of frangipani skipped along at her father’s side. In the distance the compulsive beat of the temple music had started again. Apart from that the principal sound was that of the crows in every yard of the sky.

I went back to my driver. Together we made a small donation to the temple funds and the men who collected it daubed our foreheads with grey sandalwood paste carried in a jam-jar. The driver asked for a little extra, and this was given him in a twist of paper. He was a religious man, and in the car he spread a little on each of the two idols fixed to the dashboard, sparing a trace for an icon of the Virgin and Child which, thus anointed, he replaced in the glove box. We set out on the return journey, and he offered to show me round the city for a cut price; but I told him that I had already seen the sights.

1989

I
WAS STUDYING THE
endemic lizards of the island of Kos when I spotted an intriguing news item in a Greek newspaper. This reported an investigation by the police into rumours that women on the small island of Anirini in the Cretan sea were disposing of unwanted husbands by throwing them down dry wells. It was a moment when, after some months of largely routine and statistical work, I felt in need of stimulation and variety. I looked into the shipping situation, finding that there were no ferries to Anirini but that sponge-fishing boats from the nearby island of Kalimnos touched there with fair regularity on their way to North African waters. It turned out that one would be leaving in a matter of days, so I went over to Kalimnos and arranged a passage.

What fascinated me about this story of homicidal wives—and raised so many questions—was that what was supposed to have happened here in the Cretan sea bore a remarkable resemblance to sinister occurrences elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Something of the kind had been reported from an ex-penal island off the coast of Sicily, and while I was in Ibiza some years before, the police had investigated the cases of several married men said to have emigrated to Argentina whose remains were found at the bottom of wells. Here again the wives fell under suspicion, and although the evidence proved insufficient to bring them to trial, the view of the islanders was that boredom had probably driven the wives to desperate ends.

I raised the question of boredom with the sponge fishermen with whom I travelled, but it was a subject of which they showed little understanding. What to us was an exceptional and usually temporary frame of mind was to them a normality to which they surrendered themselves without protest. There were three of them, in addition to the crew of two, all in their forties, with torsos and limbs brine-cured like hams, and given to long hours of silence. They carried a prostitute with them, a sharp-faced waif called Penelope from the Piraeus waterfront, whom they indulged like a spoiled child and decked with cheap jewellery and rare and extraordinary coral collected from the depths of the sea. They spent the three days of the crossing from one island to the next eating, sleeping and making love—the last on a strict rota—in this way preparing themselves for the stresses to be faced when the diving began. There were a few second-quality sponges to be fished in the shallow waters surrounding Anirini, then they would move on to Benghazi to venture into the great depths and fish with the blood vessels exploding behind their eyes and fighting off the cheerful apathy induced by the nitrogen forced into the blood.

Anirini was all I expected it to be: a brief sketching of cypresses and rocks on a glassy sea, silence, whiteness, harsh scents, egglike domes and a slow-moving, calm yet histrionic population, like bit-part actors waiting to go on stage in a Theban play. The earth that sustained life had been brought here and unloaded from boats over the centuries; subsequently it was enriched with the manure of donkeys, which were a principal form of wealth. The islanders grew figs and olives of the bitter kind and made cheese from the milk of their goats. On this plain fare, enlivened in spring by fledgling seagulls collected from their nests on the cliffs, and at other times by the small, spiny fish to be netted in these waters, they lived on in a vigorous fashion into ripe and supremely uneventful old age.