Nine Lives(12)

For twenty minutes now a troupe of six sweat-glistening half-naked, dark-skinned Dalit drummers have been raising their tempo: the insistent beats they are rapping out on the goat-hide cenda drums with their small, hard tamarind-wood drumsticks are getting gradually yet distinctly louder and faster and more frenzied. The song telling the myth of the god about to be incarnated has been sung, and in front of the shrine, at the centre of the clearing, the first of the dancers has just been possessed—seized by the gods, as they put it. Now he is frenetically pirouetting around the clearing, strutting and jabbing, unsheathed sword in one hand, bow and a quiver of arrows in the other. Instinctively, the crowd draws back, towards the shadows.

Behind the shrine, on the edge of the clearing, there is a palm-thatch hut, and this has been commandeered by the theyyam troupe as their green room. Inside, the next dancer to go on, a fanged female figure representing the goddess Bhagavati, with a red-painted face, supporting a huge red-gilt, mirrored headdress, is getting ready to summon the deity. The young male dancer who is about to take in the goddess is putting the final touches to his breastplate and adjusting the headdress, so that the facets flash in the flames.

Prostrate on a palm mat amid the discarded clothes, the unused costumes and the half-made headdresses, immobile at the rear of the hut, lies the dark and muscular figure of the man I have come to see. Hari Das, one of the most celebrated and articulate theyyam dancers in the area, is naked but for a white lungi, and he is lying on his back as a young boy applies makeup to his face and body. His torso and upper arms are covered with yellow paint, and his cheeks are smeared with orange turmeric, which gives off a strongly pungent smell. Two black paisleys are painted around his eyes and a pair of mango-shaped patches on his cheeks are daubed with bright, white rice paste. On these, using a slim strip of coconut leaf, the makeup boy is skilfully drawing loops and whorls and scorpion-tail trumpet spirals, then finishing the effects with a thin red stripe across his cheek bones.

I sit down on the mud floor beside him, and we chat as the makeup boy begins the slow transformation of Hari Das into the god Vishnu. I ask whether he is nervous, and how the possession comes about: what does it feel like to be taken over by a god?

“It’s difficult to describe,” says Hari Das. “Before it happens I always get very tense, even though I have been doing this for twenty-six years now. It’s not that I am nervous of the god coming. It’s more the fear that he might refuse to come. It’s the intensity of your devotion that determines the intensity of the possession. If you lose your feeling of devotion, if it even once becomes routine or unthinking, the gods may stop coming.”

He pauses as the makeup boy continues applying face paint from the pigment he is mixing on the strip of banana leaf in his left hand. Hari Das opens his mouth, and the makeup boy carefully applies some rouge to his lips.

“It’s like a blinding light,” he says eventually. “When the drums are playing and your makeup is finished, they hand you a mirror and you look at your face, transformed into that of a god. Then it comes. It’s as if there is a sudden explosion of light. A vista of complete brilliance opens up—it blinds the senses.”

“Are you aware of what is happening?”

“No,” he replies. “That light stays with you all the way through the performance. You become the deity. You lose all fear. Even your voice changes. The god comes alive and takes over. You are just the vehicle, the medium. In the trance it is God who speaks, and all the acts are the acts of the god—feeling, thinking, speaking. The dancer is an ordinary man, but this being is divine. Only when the headdress is removed does it end.”

“What is it like when you come to from the trance?” I ask.

“It’s like the incision of a surgeon,” he says, making a cutting gesture with one hand. “Suddenly it’s all over, it’s gone. You don’t have any access to what happened during the possession or the performance. You can’t remember anything that happened in the trance. There is only a sensation of relief, as if you’ve off-loaded something.”

The second dancer is now gazing intently in a small hand mirror at the entrance of the hut, identifying himself with the goddess. As I watch, the dancer stamps his feet, ringing the bells and cowrie shells on his anklets. He stamps again, loudly and more abruptly. Then he jerks his body suddenly to one side, as if hit by a current of electricity, before stretching out his hands and sinking into a strange crouching position. His body is quivering, his hands shaking, and his eyes are flicking from side to side. The figure who had been still, silently staring, only seconds earlier is now transformed, twisting his head in an eerie series of movements that is part tropical fish, part stinging insect, part reptile, part bird of paradise. Then he is gone, bounding out into the clearing, under the stars, closely followed by two attendants holding burning splints.