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Nine Lives(21)

By:William Dalrymple


I arrived early one morning, between the end of a night theyyam and the beginning of the day performance. People were milling about the clearing in the teak forest, plumping themselves down where they thought they could have the best view or, in the case of some of the ladies, moving white plastic chairs under a tarpaulin which had been erected to one side. The performers were sitting on a bench outside their makeup hut, yawning; one of the dancers was curled up on a palm mat snoozing in the shade nearby. Hari Das was again being made up to play the Vishnumurti theyyam, and while I waited for him to appear, I chatted to some of the devotees who had come for the performance.

Prashant, a large, dark-skinned man of around thirty, newly returned from the Gulf, had sponsored the performance, and was directing matters from his seat on a log at the side of the clearing. He had been away for two years in Saudi Arabia doing construction work and had liked it: “I made lots of money,” he said. “Those Saudis are tough fellows, but they know how to reward their workers.” He was sponsoring this performance to say thank you to his village theyyams for his safe return with all his savings intact. There was a nice irony, I thought, in the money of the most puritanical and intolerant of Wahhabis being used to fund such a fabulously and unrepentantly pagan ceremony.

Beside Prashant was his childhood friend Shiju, who had come all the way from his job working in the railways in Chennai for the performance. “In 1995, when I was thirteen years old, I was diagnosed with cancer,” he told me. “It was non-Hodgkins lymphoma and I underwent chemotherapy in Chennai. After a while the doctors said there is only so much we can do for you—now you just have to turn to God. My grandparents, who live in a village not far from here, came and told the goddess Bhagavati about me. She told them that within a month I would be completely well. Her power strengthened the hands of the doctor who took care of me, and I made an immediate, miraculous recovery. As no one—least of all the doctors—could explain it, we all believe that it was the goddess who cured me. Since then my family have never missed a single theyyam at this shrine. Each year we come all the way from Chennai to seek blessings and give thanks.”

We were still talking when the drumming began. Within a few minutes it was loud enough to hurt the ears, thumping into the body with an almost physical impact. I withdrew some distance from the shrine and the makeup hut, and took my seat in the front row of the crowd, as the thottam song of invocation was sung.

This time, Chamundi was the first deity out, a much more sinister theyyam than any I had witnessed the previous year. Red-faced, black-eyed and white-armed, with rouged lips, large red metal breasts and a halo of palm spines that looked like the blade of a giant circular saw, the deity emerged into the clearing rattling her bracelets and hissing like a snake. She circled the shrine, her face distorted and twitching from side to side, like a huge lizard. Her mouth opened and closed silently, her ruff of palm spikes swivelled and every so often she let out a loud cockatoo-like shriek. There was something agitated, disturbed and unpredictable about this eerie figure strutting malevolently around the edge of the crowd, glaring every so often at some individual who met her gaze; yet there was also something unmistakably regal about her, demanding attention and deference. Two priests, stripped to the waist, approached her, heads bowed, with a bowl of toddy, which she drank in a single gulp.

As she was drinking, the drums reached a new climax and suddenly a second deity appeared, leaping into the clearing with a crown of seven red cobra heads, to which were attached two huge round earrings. A silver-appliqué chakra disc was stuck in the middle of his forehead, and round his waist was a wide grass farthingale, as if an Elizabethan couturier had somehow been marooned on a forgotten jungle island and been forced to reproduce the fashions of the Virgin Queen’s court from local materials. His wrists were encircled with bracelets of palm spines and exora flowers. It was only after a minute that I realised it was Hari Das. He was unrecognisable. His eyes were wide, charged and staring, and his whole personality seemed to have been transformed. The calm, slightly earnest and thoughtful man I knew from my previous meetings was now changed into a frenzied divine athlete. He made a series of spectacular leaps in the air as he circled the kavu, twirling and dancing, spraying the crowd with showers of rice offerings.

After several rounds in this manner, the tempo of the drums slowly lowered. As Chamundi took her seat on a throne at one side of the main entrance to the shrine, still twitching uneasily, the Vishnumurti theyyam approached the ranks of devotees, in a choreographed walk, part strut, part dance. All of the devotees and pilgrims had now respectfully risen from their seats or from the ground, and stood with heads bowed before the deity.