The Age of Kali (34 page)

The elephant was eventually driven away by its priestly
mahout
. By the light of the full moon, the cymbal-clashers led the way down the great flight of steps to the inner enclosure.

The Kali temple was brightly lit by a nimbus of smoky, acrid-smelling torches. As the devotees streamed in, two half-naked priests lit the last wicks of a great rack of flickering candles in front of the shrine. The priests opened the doors, and the pilgrims bowed down before the many-armed image of Parashakti-Kali.

I drew closer to try and catch a glimpse of the image in the flickering torchlight. The goddess was shown as a hideous black-faced hag, smeared with blood, with bared teeth and a protruding tongue. She was naked but for a garland of skulls and a girdle of severed heads; a
thug
’s strangling noose dangled from her belt.

Soon more half-naked Brahmins appeared. Their sweat-wet flesh glistened in the light of the lamps; they began to intone Sanskrit mantras to the goddess. As they chanted, the chief priest squatted
cross-legged on the ground, and I noticed for the first time the deep copper basins lying in ranks amid the shadows at the priests’ feet.

Then the possessed women were led in: twelve or thirteen young girls, mostly adolescent, and a single boy, in his late twenties. They were arranged in an arc around the shrine, and for a few minutes they stood quite still while the Brahmins continued to chant their mantras. Then the chief priest nodded to the cymbal-clashers, and the music began.

At first the cymbals merely kept time with the metre of the mantras, but then the conch-blowers and the trumpeters struck up too, and the band was joined by four priestly drummers, each holding a tall wooden
tabla
. Soon the mantras were completely drowned out by the primeval rhythm of the temple musicians.

In the shadows, I could see that the chief priest was now splashing the blood-solution around the shrine, literally throwing it out of the basins with cupped hands so that as it landed it splattered red over the other priests, then ran down towards a conduit that passed it in turn towards the roots of the Devil’s Tree.

The pulse of the drums rose to a new peak, the conch shells blew; then suddenly something very strange happened. One of the possessed girls started to shake, as if in the grip of a violent fever. Her eyes were open, but there was a lost look on her face. Beside her, the other girls were beginning to sway as well; the trance passed from one to the other, like a contagion.

‘Look!’ whispered Mr Venugopal. ‘See how powerful our goddess is! She is making the spirits dance. Soon maybe they will surrender to her.’

One girl in a blue sari was shaking her long mane of hair backwards and forwards as she was seized by a series of impossible convulsions. Behind her, a woman – presumably her mother – was trying to make sure her sari did not unwrap itself beyond the limits of Indian modesty. Every so often the girl’s hands would fly up in the air, her robes would fall out of place and her mother would rush forward and pull the material back in to its proper position.

Three of the other girls were by now writhing on the floor as if
in pain; a fourth was spinning like a top, screaming and shrieking as she did so. It was an extraordinary sight. I felt as if I had stumbled back several millennia in to some distant Druidical ritual. Yet no one except myself seemed in the least bit surprised by the spectacle, and of the several children who were present, a couple looked positively bored. One was playing with two glass marbles, rolling them from hand to hand, completely ignoring the unearthly commotion going on around him.

After about five minutes – though it seemed much longer – the music reached its throbbing climax. In front of the shrine the chief priest tired of ladling out his solution and began simply upending the bowls of blood so that the red liquid began to lap around the prostrate bodies of the women. The drums pulsed faster and faster; the cymbals clashed; more and more of the possessed fell twitching to the floor.

When the last one went down, a conch blew a deep note and two priests stepped forward and closed the doors of the shrine. The drums stopped dead. It was over.

As the limp, almost lifeless bodies of the possessed were carried away by relays of the younger priests, I asked Mr Venugopal whether the women were now cured.

‘Sometimes they are, sometimes not,’ he replied, inclining his head. ‘For a particularly troublesome devil it may take a month before the demon will surrender.’

We wound our way slowly back up the grand staircase.

‘Has anyone you know been cured?’ I asked him as we neared the top.

‘Oh, many people,’ he replied.

‘Tell me an instance.’

‘Well – last month a cousin of mine brought a boy from Bombay. The boy was from a good family, but he was deranged in some way: he wouldn’t eat, he quarrelled with everyone, and he refused to go out to work. Anyway, the boy was brought here, and he stayed inside the temple for five days.

‘Every night the goddess entered him and asked the demon to
leave. Then in the morning the priests fed the boy a little
ghee
that had been kept in the goddess’s shrine overnight. At first he refused more than a drop, but by the third day he was eating again – great plates of rice and vegetables. It was the first time he had touched real food for several weeks.

‘On the final day the chief priest did some special
puja
, and that night the devil finally left the boy. Now he is quite normal and has resumed work in his father’s insurance company as if nothing had ever happened. This I have seen for myself only one month ago.’

‘It sounds like a classic case of faith healing,’ I said – then, seeing Venugopal’s expression, immediately wished I hadn’t.

The old man shrugged his shoulders: ‘If after what you have seen this evening you want to call it faith healing, that is your affair only.’

He looked upset by my rudeness, and I began to struggle to explain myself. But Venugopal held up his hand for me to be silent: ‘Every day I see people coming and getting relief. For me that is enough.’

‘You think the goddess can exorcise any demon?’ I asked.

‘For me this is the most powerful temple in India,’ said Venugopal. ‘There is no doubt about it: this is the most powerful temple for destroying the evils of the world.’

We were at the outer gate of the temple now. The old man turned to go back inside. He said: ‘In India, if you wish to get something done it is best to go first to the Prime Minister. So it is with spiritual affairs. Parashakti is the Supreme Goddess. But to see her work …’

Here Venugopal turned and smiled at me.

‘To see her work, maybe you must first be god-fearing and god-loving,’ he said. ‘Only then can you really understand her power …’

FORT AGUADA, GOA
,
1993

The history of Goa is written most succinctly in the portraits of the Portuguese Viceroys that still line the corridors of the abandoned convent of St Francis of Assisi in Old Goa.

The early Portuguese Viceroys were giants among men: chain-mailed warlords like Pedro da Alem Castro, a vast bull of a man with great muttonchop whiskers and knee-high leather boots. The boots terminate in a pair of sparkling golden spurs; his plate-metal doublet is bursting to contain his massive physique. All around Castro are others of his ilk: big men with hanging-judge eyes and thick bird’s-nest beards. Each is pictured holding a long steel rapier.

Then, some time in the late eighteenth century, an air of ambiguity suddenly sets in. Fernando Martins Mascarenhas was the Governor of Goa only a few decades after Castro had returned to Portugal, but he could have been from another millennium. Mascarenhas is a powdered dandy in silk stockings; a fluffy lace ruff brushes his chin. He is pictured leaning on a stick, his lips pursed and his tunic half-unbuttoned; he looks as if he is on his way out of a brothel. In north India, a couple of generations in the withering heat of the Gangetic plains turned the Great Moghuls from hardy Turkic warlords in to pale princes in petticoats. In the same way, by the end of the eighteenth century the fanatical Portuguese
conquistadors
had somehow been transformed in to effeminate fops in bows and laces.

The Portuguese first visited Goa in the last days of the Middle Ages. In 1498 Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route from Europe to the Indies, and immediately began planning ways of wresting
control of the Indian Ocean from the Muslims, so diverting the spice trade to Portugal. By August 1507 Afonso de Albuquerque, ‘the Caesar of the East’, had built a fortress on the island of Socotra to block the mouth of the Red Sea and cut off Arab traders from India. In March 1510 Albuquerque arrived off the coast of Goa. With him came a fleet of twenty-three caravels, galleons and war barques. Albuquerque massacred the Muslim defenders of the local fort, then carved out for himself a small, crescent-shaped enclave clinging on to the western seaboard of the Deccan. From there the Portuguese controlled the maritime routes of the East.

The
conquistador
chose his kingdom well. Goa is an area of great natural abundance, and the state is envied throughout India for its rich red soils and fertile paddy fields, its bittersweet mangoes and cool sea breezes. From its harbours, Albuquerque’s fleet brutally enforced the Portuguese monopoly of the spice trade.

In its earliest incarnation Old Goa was a grim fortress city, the headquarters of a string of fifty heavily armed artillery bastions stretching the length of the Indian littoral. But by 1600, the process that would transform the
conquistadors
in to dandies had turned Old Goa from a fortified barracks in to a thriving metropolis of seventy-five thousand people, the swaggering capital of the Portuguese Empire in the East. It was larger than contemporary Madrid, and virtually as populous as Lisbon, whose civic privileges it shared. The mangrove swamps were cleared, and in their place rose the walls and towers of Viceregal palaces, elegant townhouses, austere monasteries and elaborate baroque cathedrals.

With easy wealth came a softening of the hard edges. The fops and dandies had no interest in war, and concentrated instead on their
seraglios
. Old Goa became more famous for its whores than for its cannons or cathedrals. According to the records of the Goan Royal Hospital, by the first quarter of the seventeenth century at least five hundred Portuguese a year were dying from syphilis and ‘the effects of profligacy’. Although the ecclesiastical authorities issued edicts condemning the sexual ‘laxity’ of the married women who ‘drugged their husbands the better to enjoy their lovers’, this
did not stop the clerics themselves keeping whole harems of black slave-girls for their pleasure. In the 1590s the first Dutch galleons had begun defying the Portuguese monopoly; by 1638 Goa was being blockaded by Dutch warships. Sixty years later, in 1700, according to a Scottish sea captain, the city was a ‘place of small Trade and most of its Riches ly in the Hands of indolent Country Gentlemen, who loiter away their days in Ease, Luxury and Pride’.

So it was to remain. The jungle crept back, leaving only a litter of superb baroque churches – none of which would look out of place on the streets of Lisbon, Madrid or Rome – half strangled by the mangrove swamps.

The most magnificent of the surviving buildings is Bom Jesus, the church which now acts as the enormous vaulted mausoleum of Goa’s great saint, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. To modern tastes, Xavier seems to have been a brute – when he visited Goa he was so shocked by the lingering pagan practices performed by the colony’s converted Hindus that he successfully petitioned for the importing of the Inquisition – but this does not stop Goans of all faiths revering his memory four hundred years later. Indeed, a decade ago, when the miraculously undecayed body of St Francis was last put on public display on the altar of Bom Jesus, one Hindu lady was so overcome with devotional fervour that she bit off the little toe of the saint’s left foot and smuggled the relic out of the church in her mouth. She was only apprehended when she removed it from her mouth in the queue for the ferry.

Ironically, the healing powers of St Francis are today particularly sought after by those same ‘pagan’ Hindus Xavier sought either to convert or to persecute. Outside Bom Jesus stand the usual lines of postcard- and trinket-sellers. But among the Catholics selling effigies of the Virgin and pictures of the Pope are a group of Hindus who squat on the pavement and sell wax models of legs, arms, heads and ribs. I asked them what the models were for.

‘To put on the tomb of St Francis,’ replied one. ‘If you have a broken leg, you put one of these wax legs on the Mr Xavier’s tomb. If you have headache, then you put one wax head, and so on.’

‘How does that help?’ I asked.

‘This model will remind the saint to cure your problem,’ replied the fetish salesman. ‘Then pain will be finished double-quick, no problem.’

Today the best view of the old metropolis can be had from the Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount. To get there you must climb a long flight of steps, once a
passeggiata
for the Goan gentry, now a deserted forest path frequented only by babbler birds, peacocks and monkeys.