Nine Lives(82)

“Still, every day, I pray to our family deity, Kamakshi Amman, to change his mind and preserve the lineage. I have even promised to renovate her temple if my prayers are answered. But I know that if my boy gets high marks he will certainly go off to Bangalore—and it looks as if he will do well in his exams. For some reason all the Brahmin boys do well in maths and computer exams. Maybe that’s in the blood too—after all we’ve been making calculations for astronomy for 5,000 years.

“I don’t know,” said Srikanda, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s all part of the world opening up. After all, as my son says, this is the age of computers. And as much as I might want otherwise, I can hardly tell him this is the age of the bronze caster.”





The Lady Twilight


Before you drink from a skull,” said Manisha Ma Bhairavi, “you must first find the right corpse.”

We were sitting in a palm-thatched hut amid the dark woods and smoking funeral pyres of the cremation ground at Tarapith in Bengal—a shakti pith, one of the most holy places in India, and said to be the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. It is also the home of the great goddess Tara.

Tarapith is an eerie place, with a sinister reputation. In Calcutta I had been told that it was notorious for the unsavoury Tantric rituals and animal sacrifices which were performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumoured to take place after sunset in the riverside burning ground on the edge of the town, outside the boundaries of both village life and the conventions of Bengali society.

Here the goddess is said to live, and at midnight—so the Bengalis believe—Tara can be glimpsed in the shadows, drinking the blood of the goats slaughtered day after day in an effort to propitiate her anger and win her favour. In this frequently vegetarian country, where blood sacrifice is growing rarer and rarer, the worship of the goddess at Tarapith is an increasing oddity, a misweave in the weft of things, where can be found scenes almost unknown elsewhere: at least twenty goats a day are dispatched here to satisfy her hunger.

Tara is believed to be especially attracted to bones and skeletons, and for this reason the dreadlocked and ash-smeared sadhus who live in the cremation ground above the river and under the great spreading banyan trees decorate their huts with lines of human skulls, many clearly belonging to children. They are painted pillar-box red, and built into the packed mud of the threshold of each house. There are other images too: framed and garlanded calendar pictures of the Devi in her different forms, prints of the great saints of Tarapith, and tridents strung with garlands of marigolds; but it is skulls and bones that dominate, and not just human ones, but those of creatures of the night such as jackals and vultures, and even snakes.

“So how do you go about finding the right skull?” I asked Manisha.

“The Doms who administer the cremation ghats find them for us, she replied matter-of-factly. “They keep them for us and when we need them, they give them to us. The best ones are suicides,” she added. “When someone has drunk poison or hanged themselves, their skulls are especially powerful. So are the skulls of innocent and pure kumaris—virgin girls.”

“And then?”

“Well, once you have a good skull, the next thing is to cure it. You must bury it in the earth for a while and then oil it. If you only want to use it for drinking, then it’s ready; but if you wish to use it as a decoration, then when it’s completely dry, you can paint it red. That way they don’t go mouldy in the monsoon.”

For all the talk of what might elsewhere be considered black magic, in the daylight at least, the cremation ground that surrounded Manisha’s little hut made an oddly domestic scene. The Tantric sadhus who live here were all sitting around, ash-smeared, naked or half-naked, sipping tea and playing cards, as if living in a skull-filled burning ghat was the most normal thing in the world. While we talked about curing skulls, Manisha’s dreadlocked partner, Tapan Sadhu, was sitting at the back of the hut, with a radio clamped to his ear, and occasionally interrupting with the latest score from South Africa. “England are 270 for four!” he shouted excitedly at one point.

Nor was Manisha in any sense a fearsome or sinister figure. Despite her matted, dreadlocked grey hair and ragged saffron robes, she was a large, warm woman in her sixties, quietly spoken, with gentle, vulnerable eyes. Her dark-brown skin was disfigured with large, creeping patches of white, the result of a skin disease. She attended dutifully to the devotees who came to her for blessings, looked after the sadhus who passed by, offering them water and chai, and was gentle and affectionate towards Tapan.