The makeup boy was now cleaning the pigment, the sweat and the congealed chicken blood off his face.
“Is it hard going back to normal life?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course. All of us find it so.” He smiled. “At the end of the season we just pack up our things and prepare to go back to our jobs—to being a bus conductor, or a well builder, or life in prison. There is a total disconnect with this life. We are all sad. But at least we all know it will come back the next season.”
Hari Das got up and together we walked down towards the steps of the makeshift ghat where Chamundi was already neck deep in water, washing himself clean.
“The other ten months are very hard,” said Hari Das. “But there is no way around it. That’s reality, isn’t it? That’s life. Life is hard.”
The Daughters of Yellamma
Of course, there are times when there is pleasure,” said Rani Bai. “Who does not like to make love? A handsome young man, one who is gentle …”
She paused for a moment, looking out over the lake, smiling to herself. Then her face clouded over. “But mostly it is horrible. The farmers here, they are not like the boys of Bombay.”
“And eight of them every day,” said her friend Kaveri. “Sometimes ten. Unknown people. What kind of life is that?”
“We have a song,” said Rani. “‘Everyone sleeps with us, but no one marries us. Many embrace us, but no one protects.’”
“Every day my children ask, ‘Who is my father?’ They do not like having a mother who is in this business.”
“Once I tried to open a bank account with my son,” said Rani. “We went to fill in the form, and the manager asked: ‘Father’s name?’ After that, my son was angry. He said I should not have brought him into the world like this.”
“We are sorry we have to do this work. But what is the alternative?”
“Who will give us jobs? We are all illiterate.”
“And the future,” said Kaveri. “What have we to look forward to?”
“When we are not beautiful, when our bodies become ugly, then we will be all alone.”
“If we live long enough to be old and to be ugly,” said Kaveri. “So many are dying.”
“One of our community died last week. Two others last month.”
“In my village, four younger girls have died,” said Kaveri. “My own brother has the disease. He used to be a truck driver, and knew all the girls along the roads. Now he just lies at home drinking, saying, ‘What difference does it make? I will die anyway.’”
She turned to face me. “He drinks anything he can get,” she said. “If someone told him his own urine had alcohol in it, he would drink that too.”
“That can’t be easy to live with.”
Kaveri laughed harshly. “If I were to sit under a tree and tell you the sadness we have to suffer,” she said, “the leaves of that tree would fall like tears. My brother is totally bedridden now. He has fevers and diarrhoea.”
She paused. “He used to be such a handsome man, with a fine face and large eyes. Now those eyes are closed, and his face is covered in boils and lesions.”
“Yellamma never wanted it to be like this,” said Rani.
“The goddess is sitting silently,” said Kaveri. “We don’t know what feelings she has about us. Who really knows what she is thinking?”
“No,” said Rani, firmly shaking her head. “The goddess looks after us. When we are in distress, she comes to us. Sometimes in our dreams. Sometimes in the form of one of her children.”
“It is not the goddess’s doing.”
“The world has made it like this.”
“The world, and the disease.”
“The goddess dries our tears,” said Rani. “If you come to her with a pure heart, she will take away your sadness and your sorrows. What more can she do?”
It was the goddess Yellamma we had come to Saundatti to see—Rani Bai, Kaveri and me. We had driven over that morning from Belgaum, through the rolling green plains of cotton country high on the Deccan plateau in northern Karnataka. The women, who had been dedicated to the goddess as children, normally took the old slow bus to visit their mother’s temple, so they had jumped at the chance to make the journey to see her in the comfort of a taxi.
It was hot and muggy, not long after the end of the rains, and the sky was bright and cloudless. The road led through long avenues of ancient banyan trees, each with an intricate lattice of aerial roots. These were cut into an arch over the tarmac so that at times the road seemed to pass through a long dark wooden tunnel, with the roots rising above and to either side of the road, like flying buttresses flanking the long nave of a Gothic cathedral.