Nine Lives(73)

As we were talking, there was a roll of drums and a fanfare on the nadeswaram, the giant Tamil oboe whose raucous notes fill the air with a noise like the screech of peacocks. Two musicians whom I had earlier spotted sheltering from the rain in a nearby hut now appeared between the chariot and the elephant, and as they struck up the music, the street quickly filled with people, including a number of fruit and balloon vendors who had appeared, as if by magic, with carts displaying their wares.

By now the rain had completely stopped and the evening light was beginning to filter through the clouds. Farther up the street, the girls of the village were busy sweeping the fronts of their houses and making rangoli patterns with rice powder on their doorsteps. In twenty minutes the mood had completely changed—not for nothing are such festivals known as “utsavas”—“that which drives away sorrow.”

As I watched, Srikanda walked up to the chariot and presented a silver thali plate of offerings to the Brahmin: inside were coconuts, pieces of jackfruit, two bananas, some incense sticks and a small pile of ladoo milk sweets. The Brahmin cracked the coconuts on the side of the cart, then lit the incense sticks and circled the plate of offerings in front of the two idols.

From every house devotees, most of them women, now emerged holding thali plates, jasmine garlands and other presents for the deities. For twenty minutes coconuts were cracked and offerings made. Then the Brahmin shouted out a word of command, and all the cricket players and their equally ragged sisters began pushing the chariot from behind, while the fathers and uncles of the village pulled at the ropes that had been attached to the front. As the chariot began to creek slowly up the street with the elephant in the lead, the goats and chickens scattered and some of the villagers went down on their knees before the idols. Despite the damp and puddles, a few even performed full-length prostrations in the street.

I asked Srikanda if he shouldn’t be taken in the chariot alongside his gleaming new idols, as I heard happened during certain festivals. “Not on this occasion,” he said. “They are deities. I am not on their level, so I cannot have equal rank. But if we give a new chariot to a temple, then the Brahmins there will give us new gold rings and turbans and we are given a round—a parikrama—of the four gates of the temple in the chariot we have built. On that occasion only we are given the same level of respect as an idol.”

“Now,” he added, “I will only walk alongside them.”

In the end, we walked together. At one point, the top of the chariot pulled down an illegal electricity connection that was strung across the road to draw power from the grid, and there was a small stampede to avoid the fizzing wire; but otherwise the procession made slow and stately progress past the byres and hayricks and cowsheds of the village, stopping briefly to pay respects at the small shrine of the other protector deity of the village, Mariamman. Every twenty or thirty yards the temple chariot came to a standstill so that the deities could receive the offerings of each new group of householders.

“Look at all the people honouring the gods,” said Srikanda happily. “It is very good for me to leave the workshop occasionally to see such festivals. We get so buried in the daily detail of our work that sometimes we forget that idols are the base of our Hindu worship: everything else is built on top of this. Without a murti, there could be no puja, no temples, nowhere for people to come with their prayers and their problems. Really—a devotee can tell an idol secrets they can’t tell even to their wife or children.”

Srikanda gestured to the devotees now surrounding the chariot on all sides. “All these people have a lot of worries—about money, about family, about work. But when they come to the god in a temple, or a festival like this, for a while their problems vanish and they are satisfied.”

He smiled. “When I see the worshippers praying to a god I helped bring into being, then my happiness is complete. I know that though the span of my life is only eighty or ninety years, the images live for a thousand years, and we live on in those images. We may be mortal, but our work is immortal.”



There are few places in the world where landscape and divinity are more closely linked than in southern India.

In the sacred topography of the south, every village is believed to be host to a numberless pantheon of sprites and godlings, tree spirits and snake gods, who are said to guard and regulate the ebb and flow of daily life. They are worshipped and propitiated, as they know the till and soil of the local fields and the sweet water of the wells, even the needs and thirsts of the cattle and the goats of the village.