I asked about the skulls that littered the graveyard: what did they actually do?
“We cannot speak of everything,” she replied. “But the skulls give us power and charge our prayers with their shakti. The spirits help bring them to us, and they remain with the skull. We take good care of them, and feed them with rice and dal. Then they protect us, keeping us away from evil and death. They help us to awaken the goddess.”
From the way that Manisha spoke, it was clear that for her the goddess was not something terrible. She talked intimately of her as Ma Tara—Mother Tara—as if she were a benign matriarch, quite a different image from that on the popular prints that I had seen in the bazaar on the way there. Here, it is true, Tara was sometimes shown as a nursing mother or enthroned in the Paradise of Kailasa or on the Isle of Gems. But usually she was depicted almost naked with matted hair and a blood-red lolling tongue and sitting upon a tiger’s skin with four arms, wearing a garland of freshly severed heads. She wielded a blood-smeared cleaver as she stood victorious, dripping with blood, over a dead corpse with an erect phallus. To my eyes she was unambiguously terrifying, weird and ferocious. I said as much to Manisha.
“Ah,” she said. “This is true. This is her wild side. But all this just means she can fight the devils on your behalf.”
“But she looks herself almost as much a demon as a goddess.”
“Tara is my mother,” replied Manisha simply. “How can your own mother evoke fear? When I first came here in a distressed condition, Ma protected me. I had been beaten by my husband, rejected by my mother-in-law and had lost my home and my three daughters. It was she who brought Tapan Sadhu to protect me and give me love. In this place of death, I have found new life. Now I don’t want to go anywhere. To me, Ma is all. My life depends on her.”
Tarapith lies in a great planisphere of flat, green country: fertile floodplains and rice paddies whose abundant soils and huge skies stretch out towards the marshy Sunderbans, the Ganges Delta and the Bay of Bengal—a great green Eden of water and vegetation.
The road from Shantiniketan is raised on a shaded embankment and passes through a vast patchwork of wetlands: muddy fields of half-harvested rice give way to others where the young green seed lings have been transplanted into shimmering rectangles in the flooded fields. Through all this runs a network of streams and rivers and frog-croaking, fish-filled, lily-littered duck ponds. These are surrounded by fishermen with bamboo fishing cages and lines of village women with earthen pitchers. Kingfishers watch silently from the telegraph wires. Rising from the ripples of this flat waterland are raised mounds encircled with windbreaks of palm, clumps of bamboo, and tall flowering grasses. On these stand small wattle villages of reed and clay, with their bullock carts and haystacks, their thatched bus stops and the occasional spreading banyan tree. Sometimes, to one side, rises the brick estate house of the local grandee.
From a distance, Tarapith looks like just any other Bengali village, with its palm-thatched huts, and still, cool fish pond. But here one building dominates all the others: the great temple of the goddess. Its base is a thick-walled, red-brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like the snow capping of a Himalayan peak. Inside, below the low-curving Bengali eves, stands the silver image of the goddess with her long black hair, half-submerged beneath marigold garlands and Benarasi saris, and crowned and shaded by a silver umbrella. On her forehead is a patch of red kumkum powder. Onto this the temple priests place their fingers, then transfer the red stain onto the foreheads of the devotees. In gratitude the pilgrims then kiss her silver feet, and leave her offerings of coconuts, white silk saris, incense sticks, bananas and, more unexpectedly, bottles of whisky.
Yet in Tarapith, those who live here are quite clear that Tara’s preferred residence is not the temple, but the cremation ground which lies above the ghats of the river on the edge of the village. Tara is, after all, one of the most wild and wayward of Hindu goddesses, and cannot be tamed and contained within a venerated temple image. She is not only the goddess of supreme knowledge who grants her devotees the ability to know and realise the Absolute, she is also the Lady Twilight, the Cheater of Death, a figure of horror and terror, a stalker of funeral pyres, who slaughters demons and evil yakshis without hesitation, becoming as terrible as they in order to defeat them: in the tenth-century hymn of a hundred names from the Mundamala Tantra, Tara is called She Who Likes Blood, She Who Is Smeared with Blood and She Who Enjoys Blood Sacrifice. And while Tara has a healthy appetite for animal blood, the Mundamala Tantra explicitly states that she prefers that of humans, in particular that taken from the forehead, hands and breasts of her devotees.