Temple Of Dawn (8 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: Temple Of Dawn
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The Princess spoke, and at once the ladies stirred about. They surrounded the child and bustled off with her like a rolling whirlwind, leaving a surprised Honda alone. He grasped the meaning of their actions when he saw the small building that was their destination. She wanted to go to the bathroom.
A princess going to the toilet! Honda was aware of a sharp pang of affection. He had previously imagined having a small daughter and feeling a fatherly love for her, but having never had any child, his imagination had always been limited. His response to the charming idea of the little Princess going to the bathroom was an intimation of flesh and blood and a totally new emotional experience. He wished it was possible for him to hold the Princess’s smooth brown thighs in his hands as she urinated.
She was shy for a while upon returning, saying nothing and avoiding looking at him.
After lunch they played games in the shade.
Now Honda could not recall how the games went. They had sung simple, monotonous songs over and over, but he was ignorant of their meaning.
He could recall only the scene where the Princess stood in the center of a sun-dappled lawn under the trees, and around her the three old ladies were sitting at ease, one with one knee raised, the others with their legs crossed. One of them seemed to have entered the play just to be sociable; she kept smoking tobacco wrapped in lotus petals. Another had a lacquered water bottle inlaid with pearl shells by her knee in readiness for the Princess who complained so often of thirst.
Probably the game had something to do with the
Ramayana
. The Princess resembled Hanuman when she wielded a tree branch like a sword, assuming a hunchbacked stance and holding her breath in a comical way. Each time the ladies clapped their hands and chanted something, she changed her stance. By tilting her head slightly she was a delicate flower nodding to a fleeting breeze or a squirrel stopping to cock its head in the midst of its travels through the tree branches. Again, transformed into Prince Rama, she pointed gallantly heavenward with the sword held by a dark, slender arm extending from her gold-embroidered white blouse. At that instant a mountain pigeon swept down in front of her, obscuring her face with its wings. But she did not move. Honda discovered that the towering tree behind her was a lime. The broad leaves hanging at the tips of the long stems on the gloomy growth rustled at every soft touch of the breeze. Each green leaf was stamped with distinct yellow veins, as though tropical sunbeams had been woven into it.
The Princess grew warm. Rather peevishly she asked something of the old ladies. They consulted together, and standing up, signaled to Honda. The party quit the shade of the woods and moved on to the boat landing. Honda gathered they must be going home, but he was wrong. They gave the boatman an order, whereupon he brought out a large piece of printed cotton.
Holding the fabric, they moved along the shore with its coiling mangrove roots until they found a more secluded spot. Two of the ladies lifted their skirts and walked into the water, holding either end of the cloth, which they completely opened when the water was hip high, so as to provide a screen that shut out the view from the opposite shore. The remaining lady accompanied the now naked Princess. The light reflected from the water on the emaciated thighs of the old women.
The Princess cried out in delight when she caught sight of some small fish that had gathered round the mangrove roots. Honda was surprised that the ladies-in-waiting should act as though he were simply not there, but he assumed that that too must be some aspect of Thai etiquette. Seating himself at the base of a tree on the bank, he watched the Princess bathe.
She was never quiet. Lit by the sunbeams dancing through the stripes in the cotton print, she smiled constantly at Honda. She made no effort to conceal her quite plump, childish belly as she splashed water on the ladies. When she was scolded she dashed away. The stagnant river water was not clear, but rather a yellowish brown, similar to the Princess’s skin. But even that turned into limpid, sparkling droplets when splashed in the light that filtered through the cotton print.
Once the little girl raised her arm. Involuntarily Honda looked intently at her left side, at her small flat chest usually hidden by her arms. But he did not see the three black moles that should have been there. Whenever he could, he stared at the area until his eyes watered, thinking that perhaps the light moles were indistinct against the tan skin.
6
 
 T
HE LAWSUIT
Honda was handling came to an unexpected conclusion when the plaintiff, realizing he was at a disadvantage, suddenly dropped charges. Honda could have gone home at once, but as a token of their gratitude Itsui Products wanted to present him with a bonus in the form of a pleasure trip. He wished to go to India and expressed this desire. The administration replied that it would probably be the last opportunity for anyone to go to India since there were signs of approaching war; they promised that all Itsui offices would do their best to assure his every comfort. Honda prayed that that would not entail the kind of consideration they had imposed upon him by assigning Hishikawa as his guide.
Honda sent word to his family in Japan. At once he took pleasure in scheduling his itinerary with the aid of an Indian timetable featuring steam engines that traveled only fourteen or fifteen miles an hour. Upon consulting a map, he saw that the places he wished to visit—the Ajanta caves and Benares on the Ganges—were so far apart that he almost felt faint. Yet each attracted equally the magnetic needle of his desire for the unknown.
His intention of taking leave of Princess Moonlight was dampened as he was faced with the nuisance of asking Hishikawa to interpret for him. Using the urgent preparations for his trip as an excuse, he simply wrote a thank-you note on hotel stationery for the outing to Bang Pa In. He sent it off to the Rosette Palace by messenger moments before his departure.
Honda’s trip to India was marked with colorful experiences. But it is enough to describe one profoundly moving afternoon spent in the Ajanta caves and the soul-shaking sight of Benares. In these two places, Honda witnessed things extremely important, things essential to his life.
7
 
 H
IS ITINERARY
included a voyage by boat to Calcutta; then one whole day by train to Benares, which was 350 miles from there; a trip by car from Benares to Mogulsarai; then two days by train to Manmad; and finally another car trip to Ajanta.
Calcutta in early October was bustling with the annual Durga festival.
The goddess Kali, the most popular of the Hindu pantheon and especially venerated in Bengal and Assam, had innumerable names and avatars, as did her husband Shiva, the god of destruction. Durga is one of Kali’s metamorphoses, but her bloodthirstiness is less pronounced. Gigantic effigies of the goddess had been erected everywhere in the city. They showed her in the act of punishing the deity of water buffalos, and beautiful, angry eyebrows were depicted on the valiant face. At night the statues, standing out sharply against the bright lights, received the adulation of the crowds.
Calcutta is the center of Kali worship, with its temple, the Kalighat; and the activity there during these festivals defies the imagination. As soon as he arrived in the city, Honda hired an Indian guide and paid a visit to the temple.
The core of Kali is
shakti
, the original sense of which is “energy.” This great mother goddess of the earth imparts to all female deities throughout the world her sublimity as mother, her feminine voluptuousness, and her abominable cruelty, thereby enriching their divine nature. Kali is depicted in an image of death and destruction, doubtless the two essential elements of
shakti
, and she represents pestilence, natural calamities, and various other powers of nature which bring death and destruction to living things. Her body is black, and her mouth is red with blood. Fangs protrude from her lips and her neck is adorned with a necklace of human skulls and freshly severed heads. She dances madly on her husband’s body which lies prostrate in fatigue. This bloodthirsty goddess brings epidemics and calamities as soon as she feels thirst, and constant sacrificial offerings are necessary to keep her appeased. It is reputed that the sacrifice of a tiger quenches her thirst for one hundred years, that of a human for a thousand.
Honda visited the Kalighat one sultry, rainy afternoon. Before the entrance, hordes of people were noisily jostling about in the rain while beggars everywhere pleaded for alms. The temple precinct was extremely small, and the temple itself was packed with people. A throng had congregated around the high shrine with its marble base, jostling, eddying back and forth, packed so closely together that there was no place to stand. The marble base, wet with rain, gleamed especially white, but it was daubed with brown mud by the feet of the worshippers who were trying to climb up and with spatterings of the cinnabar that was to be applied to their foreheads along with a blessing. It seemed like a sacrilegious turbulence, but the intoxicating din went on and on.
A priest, his black arm extended outside the temple, was painting small, round holy dots of red cinnabar on the foreheads of the devout who had thrown a coin in the box. In the pressing crowd of those wishing to be so decorated were a woman with a blue, rain-drenched sari that clung to her body, molding the contours of her round back and buttocks, and a man in a white linen shirt, whose neck was a pile of shiny black wrinkles. They were all jostling toward the red-stained black fingertip of the priest. Their movements, their paroxysms, and their devotion reminded Honda of the crowd depicted in the “Almsgiving of Saint Rocco” by Annibale Carracci, a painter of the eclectic Bolognese school. However, in the inner part of the temple, somber even in the day, a statue of the goddess Kali, with her protruding red tongue and her necklace of fresh heads, quivered in the candlelight.
Honda followed his guide to the back garden, with its irregular, rain-drenched flagstones, that occupied an area of less than four hundred square yards. He found only a few people there. A pair of pillars stood like low, narrow gateposts, with a trough of carved stone at their base. There was also a small, partitioned enclosure like a sort of washing place. Then immediately beside them stood smaller but exact replicas. The shorter pair of posts was wet with rain; and in the trough at their base lay a pool of blood, and dots of blood smudged the rainwater on the stone floor. The guide explained to Honda that the larger one was the altar where water buffalo were sacrificed and that it was no longer in use. The smaller replica was one used to sacrifice goats; and particularly during important festivals like that of Durga, four hundred goats would be slaughtered there.
When Honda looked at the back of the Kalighat which had previously not been clearly visible because of the crowds around it, he found that only its base was constructed of pure white marble, the central stupa and surrounding chapels being decorated with a mosaic of brilliantly colored tiles reminiscent of the Temple of Dawn in Bangkok. The rains had washed the dust from the exquisite floral patterns and arabesques of affronted peacocks, and the brilliantly colored edifices towered arrogantly over the gory mess below.
Large raindrops fell in sporadic flurries; and the water-laden air, carried inside, created a misty warmth.
Honda saw a woman unprotected by her umbrella come to kneel reverently in front of the smaller altar. She had the round, sincere, intelligent face found so frequently in middle-aged Indian women. Her light green sari was drenched. She carried a small brass kettle containing holy water from the Ganges.

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