Hello everyone, its Christmas, or so it appears in rickety old Kolkata now that Durga Puja is in full swing. The town has been taken over by lights and shoppers, eager to be ready in time for the festival. The actual festivities involve walking around “trick or treat” style to visit the many temporarily erected shrines to the Goddess Durga who slayed “Asura” to reestablish peace and sanctity for all. The shrines range from the dramatic to the caricaturesque with all themes and mediums in between. Amanda was recently reading about one eco-friendly shrine, erected by a group of students, that won an award and praises in the press for its design. The ones we got to see included small, local shrines made in the traditional reds, oranges, and golds, a handful of bizarre neon stands with mechanical tributes to Britney Spears and the popular “Three Idiots” from the more popular feature film, one Egyptian themed pyramidal shrine, with Durga represented as an Egyptian Pharaohess( I know I’m making up words as I go but India has a way of invoking its own lexicon), a couple of decked out, regal shrines complete with fancy chandeliers and heavy traffic at little fairs in which we got to ride the sketchier incarnations of dragon rides and Ferris wheels. One of my personal favorites was one done entirely in white with the exception of the faces of Durga, her beasts, and her victim, thereby heightening the tension encompassed by this epic moment and highlighting the dramatism of each figure’s expression. All modes of Indian expression seem to carry with them this high drama, this need for color and embellishment, be it a Bollywood movie, a traditional dance, a mystical prayer, or the laments of a beggar trying to inspire pity in a couple of naive foreigners, however no place that we’ve visited so far comes close to the pure, unadulterated carnage and chaos of Kalighat, a temple for Kali, the goddess of destruction, where the tension is literally “cut through with a knife” each time a goat is slaughtered to the booming of drums and the violent exclamations of violent worshippers.
Inside Kalighat, or under Kalighat, in a tiny alleyway separating the throngs of Hindus making offerings from the… I hesitate to call them priests but the men more or less receiving the offerings and crowding the black plastic shrine itself, is where we found ourselves. Looking up at the chaos and being flanked and bombarded by people passing or jumping down from the temple “just to see that tiny plastic figurine…it is Kali, right?” says Tiana skeptically after getting a sight of “that little thing” that everyone is fuzzing or more like frenzying over. Oddly enough, seeing a goat slaughtered is hardly the craziest thing we’ve witnessed, taking into account the organized ritualistic mode in which it was performed. What seemed more scaring about it was looking at a live creature and knowing it was about to be dead for some and seeing the severed head gushing blood in one corner while the twitching body kept moving for what felt like an eternity in the opposite side of the pen. An odd family affair, this butchering, but the temple was nonetheless crowded by entire families with children and babies embellished with eyeliner, black bindis and all. We saw worshipers put their head between the two little pillars where the goat was later decapitated and men breaking coconuts, splashing the contents and breaking the shell as a prelude to the massacre. My natural instinct was to hide behind Tiana and close my eyes, India is a lot like that, it throws shit your way without really giving you time to think about how you want to act so all you have to fend for yourself is your gut reaction. Defenseless in the face of clashing consciousnesses, all crowding the space and making navigation in both the physical and spiritual sense dizzying and all but impossible. JUST NOW Titi and I were forced to leave this computer so as not to miss a throng of dancing men accompanying a statue of Durga that is about to be disposed of somehow and we wonder, in lieu of a holy river, what creative option will be coined. In terms of clashing consciousnesses we now find ourselves in Bodhgaya, the birthplace of Buddhism, where most of the team sits and meditates in a peaceful gompa with monks, nuns, and sanghas, at the Root Institute, just a rickshaw ride away, separated from us and the Durga commotion by a handful of monasteries and temples crowded into this tiny town.
Other highlights include:
John, our “FRIEND NOT TOUR GUIDE,” falling off of a moving bus as he attempted to get us home safely after herding us around the Kolkata Pujas.
Most of us projectile vomiting within a day and half, I’ll refrain from going into the details, we’re all okay now. (This is also the reason why my blogging was delayed, and for that I sincerely apologize.)
Finishing our volunteer work and being left with all the lingering questions that such work inspires.
And just all around having to watch our heads, our belongings, where we step, where we eat, where the rest of the group is, where we’re going, and where we are, not to mention the moving traffic and occasional cow.
(Hola Ma, Hola Pa! Estoy en I
ndia!)
Cheers!
Andi
