After that night, the night of the burning lizard, Kuttadan locked himself inside the shrine. He sat in blind and fierce tapas before Nallamma, the Goddess of Smallpox. News of this penance spread in Khasak and soon to the villages beyond the paddies. On the seventh day Kuttadan flung open the door of the shrine and came out upon Khasak with oracular cries. He smote his head with the curved sword of the goddess. Oracles did smite their heads in frenzy and infliction, but the cuts seldom went deep. What Khasak now witnessed was not just ritual: the sword left yawning gashes across the scalp and blood clotted on the oracle’s matted hair ... In the days that followed Kuttadan did not cease chastising his flesh. He walked over a bed of live cinders.
‘Truly,’ said the witnesses, ‘the Sheikh has blessed him. Now we shall hear the Devi who has possessed him.’
Kuttadan’s frenzy abated, but painful like the sword’s edge, scorching like the fire-bed, one insistent memory pursued him, blotting every other. There, amidst the abysmal bafflement of the phonemes stood the girl after her bath, the pavu mundu round her waist, the red underclothing showing through the diaphanous wrap like a hibiscus flower. In the lunacy of his penance he wrapped the mundu around the goddess’s waist. He prayed until the red hibiscus blossomed beneath her granite navel.
Kuttadan’s little temple grew out of dereliction into a place of trance and prophecy. The goddess spoke through her oracle two days every week, sometimes oftener ...
On a Sunday, after breakfast, Ravi reclined in an easy chair. He was at peace, and into that stillness came noises from far away, the cry of pain, of ecstasy, as the sword cleaved the flesh. The rhythmic clangour of bronze anklets blended with the oracle’s cry. Ravi listened with rapt attention, and the cry sounded even more distant as he listened, as though the sword of the oracle was calling him to an unknown wilderness for cleansing and baptism.
That evening he told Madhavan Nair, ‘Let us go to Kuttadan’s shrine. Say, the coming Sunday?’
‘To hear the oracle?’
‘Well, yes.’
Madhavan Nair smiled and was curious.
‘But why, Maash?’
Why was he going to the shrine, Ravi asked himself, why to a little hole in which stood a weird idol? Ravi sensed a great love welling within him. Devi, Ravi despaired, why have you chosen this lowly incarnation? Had she sought refuge from her own awesome cosmic self in the womb of Khasak? He thought to himself he was her kin, and would discover their twinhood in this intimate sanctuary. Then would he share his sorrow with her, the placental sorrow, generation after generation; as he thought this, the sorrow spilled over to become the sorrow of karma, it was the scar of the sinner, the orphan’s pining, the despair of the one who thirsted for knowledge.
Ravi never made that pilgrimage.
‘Poor Kuttadan has come by money at last,’ Madhavan
Nair observed on one of their strolls through the fields.
‘Then his goddess must be real,’ said Ravi.
Devotees from Khasak were soon outnumbered by those who came from outside. There were offerings in kind to be managed, accounts to be kept. Kuttadan acquired a handyman, Theinagan, who had once worked with the timber-thieves on the mountains ...
One day, after a whole crowd of migrant canal-diggers had visited the shrine, put money into the hundis and gone, Kuttadan sat cross-legged in the shrine and pondered over many things.
‘We are no longer a little shrine,’ he spoke to Theinagan with great solemnity.
‘True, O Oracle.’
‘We are a temple. We must have an annual festival.’
‘We must, O Oracle.’
The core of the festival consisted of the mounted dancers, masked men in Kathakali costumes wearing enormous tinsel crowns, carried atop bamboo platforms on which they stood grimacing and yelling. There would be pipes and drums, and fireworks in the evening. At midday there would be a slaughter of chickens and a display of oracular frenzy.
The day of the festival arrived. Ribbons hung over the Mosque of the King and Maimoona’s shop-front, garlands decorated the slender neck of Madhavan Nair’s Singer sewing machine. By late forenoon a crowd had gathered in the central square, idlers from the nearby villages, and of course the grateful canal-diggers. Pedlars wove through the crowd, rustic toy-makers, sellers of cheap and abrasive cosmetics, women with trayfuls of knick-knacks. Both the mullah and the Khazi came to the shrine and burnt incense sticks. All was set for the festival, for the goddess to lead her oracle to the heart of Khasak.
Inside the shrine, Kuttadan donned the scarlet saree of the warrior goddess who would descend on him at any moment now. The worshippers would not be allowed to get too close to the shrine at such a time, but Madhavan Nair sought to have a word with the oracle.
‘The venerable tailor-Nair seeks the Bhagavati’s blessing,’ Theinagan whispered, conveying Madhavan Nair’s request.
‘What might be his affliction?’ the goddess enquired.
‘He waits outside.’
‘Ask him to come in.’
Madhavan Nair entered and bowed.
‘What is it, Venerable Nair?’ the goddess asked.
‘It is for the Maash that I come, O Mighty Goddess.’
‘We are pleased,’ the goddess said, now fully come into Kuttadan’s mortal frame, ‘the Maash can come.’
‘I shall bring him when the frenzy mounts.’
‘Yes, that is better. And let the world know that great people seek Bhagavati’s protection.’
Madhavan Nair left. Theinagan peeped in again.
‘O Mighty Goddess,’ he said, ‘they are townsfolk. The frenzy must be spectacular, so that more schoolmasters will come to your altar.’
‘Of course they will come.’
Now Theinagan was caught between two worlds.
‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘the oracle’s mortal frame was troubled by a headache. We should not let that happen today. I have brought an offering of illicit brew, it is Chatthelan’s very personal blend.’
‘The Bhagavati needs no such stimulation.’
‘Of course, Mighty Mother.’
The goddess grew thoughtful. ‘What about the sulphate?’ came the query from the other world. ‘We presume the old sinner has not blended it with too much manure.’
‘Just the right mix, O Mighty Goddess.’
Theinagan brought in pots filled with the chemical that cheers.
‘Keep it there in the corner,’ came the command, ‘and let the dancers partake of it, and those that carry the dancing platforms.’
Kuttadan himself drank generously, and found it good.
The dancers came in their regalia, crowns on their heads, crowns firmly fixed with twine and gum. They entered the shrine one behind the other, drank in haste and in large quantities and left. The oracle’s mortal frame sat cross-legged on a wooden stool, the mortal brain ratiocinated, the wayward phonemes, the diaphanous mundu, the crescent marks, the occult lizard. Soon the regressing mortal habit passed. Outside, a giant cracker exploded, and the goddess reponded with the oracular roar, ‘Aaaaaaahhhh!’
The outcaste dancers replied from atop their platforms, ‘Hooyyah!’
The festival began. Theinagan peeped in again and, raising his voice over the drums, supplementing speech with grimacing lips, said, ‘The Maash is coming.’
The oracle’s mortal frame stamped the ground, the bronze anklets clanged, the cry of the oracle resounded from the shrine again. The crowd waited, breathless. But something unforeseen was happening—the manifest goddess, as she cried out again, was also mysteriously making her presence felt on mortal innards. Kuttadan stood leaning on the sword, his legs striving in vain to twine round each other, like a woman in travail. Theinagan could see that the oracle was trying to say something, but the phonemes were lost in eddies of pain. A slimy serpent was coursing through his guts, the miraculous creature of the sulphate. In demented syllables the oracle gave Theinagan the message to be communicated to the crowd, ‘No manifestation—Bhagavati—angry—tell—’
Theinagan raced out with the precious words: ‘There is no festival, the goddess is angry!’
The crowd was in tumultuous disarray, all the platforms were down on the ground and the dancers squatted on them more dead than alive, abandoning themselves to their own helpless mess and stench. No one heard Theinagan’s precious words. Three crowned dancers were racing towards the fields, chased by dogs. O Mighty Goddess, Theinagan lamented, why have you undone us? As though in reply, a noise rose from his innards, the conch call of the avenging goddess; he pressed his palms hard on his stomach, but nothing could stop the cosmic deluge. Theinagan too followed the dancers, running for the fields.
The crowd was gone, and so too the dogs. Ravi stood, looking out towards the screw pine bushes where Appu-Kili hunted his dragonflies. Behind the bushes crouched the dancers, he could see only their tinsel crowns as they glittered in the sun.