— 8 —
From fifty Sundarbans villages, people streamed toward the shrine at Sajnekhali. Every few minutes, it seemed, another large motor boat pulled up to the jetty at the Mangrove Interpretation Center and poured forth more passengers: fishermen and farmers, woodcutters and merchants, wives and children, all dressed in their crispest pajama suits, their finest saris, their best Western slacks and shirts or their cleanest lungis.
The shrine was a simple wood and tin building open at the front, like a lidless shoebox on its side; but it, too, was elaborately dressed this day. Tissue-paper cutouts latticed the walls: auspicious lotus and datura flowers, geese, conch shells, peacocks, Bengali script spelling out MA BONOBIBI. A thick rope of yellow marigolds draped the roof’s tin eaves like bunting. Festive foil mobiles hung from the ceiling. Fresh banana leaves carpeted the floor.
But what was most striking about the shrine this day was that all the images inside were new: a plumper, shorter Bonobibi wore a dress of fresh crimson satin and a crown encrusted with gold paper and plastic jewels. Bare-chested Daksin Ray rode a different tiger, this one with glass eyes and long white claws. Sha Jungli wore a new gold tunic, and his long club was now wrapped in gold ribbon. All twelve human figures boasted freshly painted skin the color of the double yellow line on American highways.
At their feet offerings piled high. On platters of freshly washed banana leaves, artfully arranged mounds of cooked rice overflowed with sliced bananas, fat yellow raisins, the red blossoms of hibiscus, cut apples and oranges, and the sweet white flesh of coconut. Newspaper bags brimmed with sweets. A dish heaped with coins. Along with these offerings, some people brought a household item—often a bolt of cloth—to leave in the shrine during the puja, sharing the company of the gods. Later they would retrieve it and take it home, drenched in blessings.
Incense smoked. Candles glowed. Cloth wicks burned in brass bowls of mustard oil. A twisted newspaper wick flamed in a plastic Wesson oil bottle. Over it all presided the gap-toothed, gray-haired priest, Phoni Guyan, clad in his white shawl. A scar shaped like a fishhook split his upper lip. Nine years ago Daksin Ray sent a tiger for him; the tiger leaped at him from the forest and raked his face with its claws. But Phoni Guyan survived. So it was particularly appropriate that he should officiate at the puja on this day.
Each January, on the day the Bengali calendar calls Makara Sankranti, the story of Bonobibi and Daksin Ray is celebrated in pujas held in villages throughout Sundarbans. This one, hosted by the Forest Department, is the most elaborate. Thanks in part to hefty donations from visitors at the tourist lodge next door, this puja offers fanfare that others cannot: the Forest Department even provides a sound system to broadcast incantations to the crowd. The system is powered by a car battery, itself so valued that someone has honored it with its own covering of banana leaves. The Forest Department’s staff prepares for the puja for weeks.
Everyone was exceptionally anxious to please the gods on this day, for Daksin Ray was angry. “Yesterday, four man, tiger accident,” Girindra told me. In this case I knew that “yesterday” could stretch back in time only three weeks, for it was only that long that I had been away. When the violence over Ayodhya had finally subsided, Rathin had come to fetch Dianne and me in Monorama so that we could return to the States for Christmas. Now, less than a month later, I had returned, this time with my friend Eleanor Briggs, a photographer with the freedom to travel wherever interesting images beckon.
“Tiger, village tour,” Girindra joked. None of the attacks occurred in a village; all had happened in the forest, while the victims were fishing or cutting wood. But Daksin Ray, Girindra was saying, had selected each victim from a different village: Dayapur, Lahripur, Ampur, Shomshenagur. One of the men, a woodcutter from Dayapur, the village next to Girindra’s, had been attacked only five days before. He’d been cutting wood from the forest with a party of others at ten in the morning when the tiger came and carried him away.
Later I spoke with the area range officer, Kanchan Muhkerjee, whose English is better than Girindra’s. He was hesitant to talk because none of the deaths were official: none of the victims held legal permits to be in the area where they were killed, so the Forest Department isn’t expected to know anything about such cases. But of course Kanchan knows, and because his office has a two-way radio, his sources are better informed than Girindra’s. The actual number of tiger victims, he told me, was fifteen. And they had all been killed in the last eight days.
The puja, he said, was desperately needed.
Eleanor and I had caught up with Girindra near the jetty early on the morning of the puja. Forest Department staff, the clay artists, the priest, and the reader were still making the final preparations, garlanding the appropriate idols with lei-like pouler malas and moving the images around on the shrine’s stage. It was odd to see deities carted around like furniture—valuable furniture, but furniture nonetheless. (Later, back in Calcutta, on the night before the puja for the goddess of learning, we would see whole trucks crowded with identical Sarasvatis, all facing the cars in back of them, their faces in newspaper purdah to protect the delicate clay features during the trip.) But of course the images were not yet deities. Only when the priest blew the holy conch shell would the gods—if they chose—accept the invitation and come to inhabit the clay bodies the artists had so carefully prepared.
While Eleanor photographed, I asked Girindra to introduce me to some of the lesser-known gods.
I pointed to the four-foot-tall image of an old man, to whose chin the artist was still gluing the last ash-blond ringlets of a beard. “Tini ke?” (“Who is he?”) I asked.
For a moment, Girindra looked at me as if I had fallen out of a tree. He pointed to the white cardboard label attached by a straight pin to the idol’s blue satin pants, where the name was clearly printed in Bengali script.
Then he remembered that I am illiterate.
“Gazi Saheb ache.” Girindra spoke very clearly and slowly, as if talking to a child.
“Mussulman nam?” I asked. In Bangladesh I had heard “Gazi” applied to Muslim holy men, teachers, and saints.
“Mussulman, Hindu,” Girindra replied, hobbling his head both yes and no. Gazi Saheb, he was saying, may be Mussulman, but he is worshiped by both Hindus and Muslims. To try to clarify, he said in English, “Gazi Saheb Sundarbans man.”
Next I pointed to a small figure of a woman. Leaning against a clay tree, she was weeping flat white tears. “Tini ke?” I asked.
“Gulalbibi ache,” he answered. “Mother, Bonobibi.”
Bonobibi’s mother! But why was she crying? Was she herself a goddess? I tried to ask, but my question only brought forth an incomprehensible stream of Bengali. It began to hurt me almost physically to see how frustrated Girindra became when I could not be made to understand. So I asked him only for the names. A few days later, when we were scheduled to meet up again with Rathin, I would ask him to explain in English.
What about the figure of the woman standing near Gulalbibi? “Fulbibi,” Girindra answered. Some sources list “Bibi” as a suffix derived from Urdu, but others say it is derived from Persian. And in primarily Islamic villages, the goddess of smallpox and cholera is often called Ola Bibi. In primarily Hindu villages she is called Ola Candi or Sitala, and she is often worshiped along with her male attendant, Jvasura, the three-eyed, blue-skinned fever demon. (There is also a god of boils and carbuncles, named Ghantakarna, and one for itches, named Ghentu.)
Next to Fulbibi stood the figure of a man, his expression dismayed, his palms held facing him as if he were reading a book.
His name?
“Ibrahim.”
Yet at the feet of figures bearing Persian names, worshipers were piling objects sacred to every Hindu puja: vessels filled with milk and the clarified butter called ghee, celebrating the goddess Cow; pots of rice, coconut, and bananas, symbolizing bounty; hibiscus, showing the purity of the devotees’ hearts. Burning candles evoked the power of the ancient sun god, Surya, the day-maker and king of the planets, who is asked to witness all important ceremonies. Jars of fertile, healing Ganges water cradled the living goddess Gonga. Each item speaks deeply to the Hindu heart.
“That which is good and dear to us we offer to our gods,” Amarendra Nath Mondal, a schoolteacher from Dayapur, later explained to me in lilting, singsong English. “Suppose you are my guest. I do everything for your enjoyment. The gods and goddesses are similarly our guests, so we must see to their comfort.”
Indeed, he said, for certain types of gods, Hindus consider the temple or domestic shrine the deity’s literal house. The figure who dwells there may be treated to devotions throughout the day to provide for its well-being. The god must be awakened in the morning, bathed, fed, amused with songs or poems or dance and put to bed at night. The image is often offered the hypnotic betel nut to chew, tobacco to smoke, pillows on which to recline. Priests tend to the comfort of the idols in temples, but for household gods the homeowner must perform these duties.
Eleanor was familiar with these devotions. She explores her spirituality at both a church and a Hindu ashram, and she brought with her to India a two-by-four-inch card bearing the four-armed image of Laxmi, the goddess of success and wealth. Periodically during our trip, Eleanor would take Laxmi out of her purse, set her upon a blue brocade pillow, and offer her songs and sweets. We had done a Laxmi puja on our way to India. Next to a koi pool at the Singapore airport we offered the goddess Gummi Bears in an effort to recoup a missed flight connection—which, to my surprise, succeeded. Once we got to India, though, we had a problem; Eleanor explained that Laxmi likes a clean place, and once we left the Tolly Club, clean places were scarce, so Eleanor didn’t often taken Laxmi out.
The whole thing reminded me of playing dolls—which of course is playing God. How moving that the gods and goddesses want us to sing to them and feed them, dress and bathe them—the way a child tends to her baby doll, the way a mother cares for her child. Are we not acting out what we ask our gods to do, in turn, for us?
As the Bonobibi puja begins, in front of the forest gods stretches a thick carpet of flowers and food, a feast of scent and sound, a luxurious stage upon which the gods can play, seduced and intoxicated with comfort and delight.
The priest, kneeling and bowing to the images, tweaks his own ears, then his nostrils. This is a way of purifying himself and apologizing for any errors he might commit in the puja, a young Calcutta college student later told me; with his own hands the priest mimics the tweaking a Bengali mother might use to gently reprimand a naughty son.
Finally he folds his hands. A shimmering, shivering “Uluoooooooooooooo” goes up from the assembled crowd; someone blows the sacred conch shell. The people are welcoming the gods, who have now arrived and dwell among us.
A reader wearing a white shirt and a pink lungi begins chanting from a hymnal. “Bonobibi hisstory,” Girindra whispers: this is the Bonobibi story, an epic poem of how the goddess came to dwell in the mangrove tigerland ruled by Daksin Ray.
As the reader finishes a page, he folds it back from left to right. The book begins where an English or Bengali book would end—but where an Arabic text would begin. Yet the words are written not in the long scimitar strokes of Arabic script, but in the shorter, ornamental tendrils of the Bengali alphabet.
I recognize only a few words. One of them is “Allah.”
The notion seems at first impossible. Hinduism and Islam are basically antithetical: contrary to Hinduism’s colorful, crowded pantheon, Islam’s fundamental concept is one omnipotent god: “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” Throughout the rest of the Indian subcontinent, and even into Europe, Hindus and Muslims had only weeks ago been murdering one another by the hundreds over the irreconcilable differences in their beliefs.
But the people of Sundarbans remained at peace.
Islam came to Bengal in a form vastly different from the Islam of Arabia. It was brought by the Sufi mystics, the spiritual gift of saints who performed miracles, received revelations from the dead and, in some cases, reveled in an eroticism through which, by losing oneself in orgasmic union with the lover, the devotee achieved union with God.
A scholar at the University of Dacca, Razia Akter Banu, published a study of these mystics and their effect on the religion of the region. The Sufi interpretation of the Koran, she explained, “is vastly different from the dogmatic creeds of Islam.” Bengal’s Sufis preached the imminent unity of a god who may manifest in many ways: in trees, in water, in the bodies of birds or tigers, in the guise of a many-armed goddess or a Jew named Jesus. Instead of the orthodox Islamic view of the soul—an individual entity created by Allah, subject to his punishment but destined never to merge with him—the Sufis preached that each human soul is part of the divine soul. From the Koranic verse “We [Allah and his prophet] are nearer to him [man] than his jugular vein,” the Sufis conclude that all people may join God in a state like the Hindu mystic’s nirvana.
“Islam, in Sufi garb,” Banu wrote in her 1992 study, “was intelligible and psychologically acceptable to the people of Bengal.” Sufi saints, or pirs, were and are beloved by Hindus and Muslims alike. One of them, Pir Kabir, was also a renowned poet. His disciples included the devout of both religions. When he died, it is said, the Hindus wanted to cremate his body, while the Muslims wanted to bury it. The dead saint himself had to intervene to prevent strife between the two sets of believers. Kabir caused his own body to vanish, and in its place mourners found instead a bouquet of flowers.
In the cities Bengalis of both religions have become more orthodox than they were in the centuries following the Sufis’ arrival. But Banu’s surveys in Bangladesh, at least, show that in rural areas nearly half of the Muslims attend Hindu pujas, consult dead pirs, and believe in the influence of five kinds of Hindu ghosts, as well as the even more fearful Muslim ghosts called mamdos. All these practices are strictly forbidden in orthodox Islam.
Traveling in the Bangladeshi Sundarbans, Dianne and I had seen evidence of the melding of the two religions. The fishermen all wore red cloth bracelets on the right hand and flew small red flags at the bows of their boats. Red, we were told, attracts the attention of a particular pir, sometimes called Barkan Gazi, sometimes called Shagazi, who will protect his supplicants from the tiger. Later I learned that in the myths and legends of Sundarbans, Barkan Gazi, Shagazi, and Gazi Saheb are one and the same. Although he is an Islamic saint, the Bangladeshi Muslims assured us, the Gazi would aid his supplicants, whether Hindu or Muslim, as long as they flew his color.
Red is the most sacred and beloved color of the Hindus. On the Indian side of Sundarbans the bowsprit of almost every boat is painted red or tied with red cloth. And red, the color of our blood, as Girindra told me, is the favorite color of Daksin Ray, the ancient tiger god, whose wrath binds Hindu and Muslim together and under whose transforming spell alien worlds converge.
Seventy-year-old Bakher Gazi, wrapped in a red and silver embroidered shawl, looked uncomfortable sitting on the bench below the deck of Monorama. He was probably wishing that Rathin had never summoned him from his home in Dhusnikhali on my behalf. Bakher Gazi had a fever, for which Eleanor and I gave him medicine. He was so thin that the veins on his nearly black arms stood out like ropes on a flagpole. He seemed frail and vulnerable. Only two of his upper teeth were intact. The right lens of his black plastic-rimmed glasses was cracked. But Bakher Gazi, Rathin told me, is considered one of the most powerful men in Sundarbans.
“He claims to have prevented between fifty and seventy incidents of tiger attack,” Rathin said. “Never has a man been killed by a tiger in this man’s presence.” In some cases he was not present at the actual moment of attack, “but even in these cases, he has always managed to bring back the body of the victim, preventing the tiger from eating it, so that the body could be returned to the relatives and give them some peace. He has rescued seventy bodies from the jaws of the tiger, and he himself has always remained unscathed.”
Crocodiles, the shaman claimed, flee from his presence; tigers obey his commands.
Now, as he unwrapped his shawl, he showed us why.
Lodged in his left shin, inside a layer of skin formed like a pouch, lies a matchstick-sized sliver of wood taken from the sundari tree. Between the second and third fingers of his right hand rests another sliver of sundari. And the skin on the palm of his left hand holds a third piece of wood. These charms, he explained, have been blessed by Allah himself. By their power he is immune to attack from crocodiles, to the dangers of snakes and pirates in the night, and especially, because of the wood embedded in his leg, he is protected from the jaws of the tiger.
Bakher Gazi is a fakir, a Muslim shaman. His powers are believed to be so effective that they can clear an entire section of forest of danger, allowing the fishermen, woodcutters, or honey collectors in his company to work there safely. He is in great demand in Sundarbans. His powers work equally well for Hindus and Muslims, he claims.
Rathin interpreted while I asked Bakher Gazi how he engaged his shamanic power and why it worked.
The magic wood is called ascan, Rathin translated. When Bakher Gazi leaves the forest, though, he must remove the piece from his leg. He keeps it in a matchbox.
To protect large groups of workers, he uses a much larger piece of wood, which he calls asabari. First he gathers a branch of sundari and cuts a piece three feet long, then trims it to a few inches in diameter. With a hand drill he bores a small hole in the top. The shaman chants the names of all the workers with him, one by one, and as each is spoken, another small piece of sundari is dropped into the hole at the top. Then the hole is sealed with mud, and a new handkerchief is tied at the top. Finally the asabari is planted on the bank—much as the sliver of wood is planted in his flesh. Now it will protect the people who are working in the forest.
How did he learn the sacred powers of the asabari and the ascan? His father was a great fakir, as was his grandfather before him. His grandfather was also a renowned herbalist, who learned the powers of Sundarbans’ roots and leaves and flowers to cure disease. It was he who discovered that wood of the sundari tree would, when enhanced with holy words, repel the tiger. “Just as different plants are used for different types of diseases, but one plant cannot cure another disease, so sundari timber is used for this purpose, to protect against the tiger, and no other plant will do,” Rathin translated. “But it will not work without the magic words,” he stressed—and the words must be uttered by a man of pure heart. Now, with his father and grandfather dead, Bakher Gazi is the only man living who knows them.
Each shaman in Sundarbans uses his own kind of holy process. Rathin introduced me to a Hindu gunin, the spiritual equivalent of a fakir. His name was Ksab Chandra Kayal; he was about fifty-five years old. “There are many wizards who possess these powers, to combat tigers by magic,” he explained to me through Rathin. “There are different strains of these powers coming down.” His own methods combine chants invoking Gazi Saheb and hymns to Bonobibi to enchant trees, water, and mud, which in turn protect his men.
First, he explained, each man in the work party must wash his hands and face in the river. Then, speaking the name of Bonobibi, Ksab Kayal sprinkles blessed water on the mud banks. He looks for a tree to stand as the workmen’s guardian. The first tree they encounter on their right side will be chosen. Everyone places their hands on that tree, and while Ksab Kayal utters the Bonobibi Hukkum—the command of Bonobibi—the tree absorbs the spell. Mud from the base of the tree is touched to its trunk, then to their own foreheads; now they may start their work, safe.
How does the water confer blessing? Why is the tree holy? How does the mud protect them?
If they sprinkled a bucket of water from their village on the mud banks, that would not work, Ksab Kayal answered; neither would part of a tree taken from a courtyard, or mud from the marketplace. “It was his guru’s command that only the water and mud and trees from the forest be used,” Rathin interprets.
And his guru was a very wise and powerful man indeed. Ksab Kayal himself saw him bind a tiger motionless with blades of grass. While the men were working in the forest, the tiger approached. The guru chanted, touched the grass, and threw some at the tiger; the tiger became statue-still and did not move until the men had finished their work. Then it simply turned and walked away.
Mud charged with magic powers, river water conferring blessing, a holy man who merges his flesh with wood to make himself one with the powers of trees. We did not meet these shamans until weeks after the puja at Sajnekhali; but unbeknown to me at the time, their knowledge was at the core of the story that the puja was playing out.
“Gazi Saheb, Sundarbans man,” Girindra stressed to me that day at Sajnekhali. Whether a saint or a god or a supplicant is Hindu or Muslim is not of crucial importance; in Sundarbans, it is the land itself that gives its saints and its people their wisdom, their power, and their peace.
“Gul-al-bi-bi, Ful-al-bi-bi, Ib-ra-him sha-mi. . .” The reader at the puja chanted on and on, the tale of Bonobibi and Daksin Ray spreading like ripples over a pond. The song sounded like a cross between a Gregorian chant and a nursery rhyme, a repetitive drone with the hypnotic effect of a mantra.
To the villagers sitting in the hot sun, to the supplicants who streamed past the shrine to remove their shoes and kneel before the gods to make their offerings, the words spoke of miracle after miracle. I could not understand the meaning of the words, but I listened with an older ear, feeling the sound and cadence of the story being sung, the way a snake might hear. “Bon-o-bibi, Bon-obi- bi, cho-to bhai ac-he. . .” Instead of a chronicle of events, I heard the same sounds surface again and again, like a heartbeat, a repetitive, mesmerizing promise: so it was then, so it is now, so it will ever be.
The miracles of Bonobibi, the exploits of Daksin Ray happen over and over again, the song’s cadence assured. For in cultures older than our own, the concept of time is not linear but circular, a truth learned from watching the rising and falling tides, the waxing and waning moon. This circular concept of time was recognized in Western culture before we turned our attentions away from the cycles of the earth to the idea of a forward-marching progress composed of individual human histories. In the days of Plato and Aristotle the Greeks asserted that every art and science had been established before, had perished, and awaited rediscovery.
There are, according to Hindu knowledge, no single epoch-making historical events in the eternity of time; rather, each age is marked by mythological events that recur in cycles in the great, affirming wheel of life, death, and rebirth.
“Bon-o-bi-bi, Bon-o-bi-bi, Sun-dar-ban ja-be. . .” It is this understanding of time, perhaps, that bestows the serenity you see on the faces of the gods portrayed in the art of so many Asian cultures. Heinrich Zimmer describes Durga, the tiger-riding goddess who saves the world by annihilating a demon buffalo, as she is portrayed in an eighth-century Javanese stone sculpture: even in the moment of dealing the death blow to the enemy, the goddess’s face shows “no trace of wrathful emotion; she is steeped in the serenity of eternal calm. Though [her] deed is bound to be accomplished. . . for her, the whole course of this universe, including her own apparition in the role of its rescuer, is but part of a cosmic dream.”
For three hours the song of Bonobibi continued like the voice of the hypnotist, like the breath of the hatha yogi, and its sound and rhythm worked their transforming magic. When the chant finally concluded—Gulalbibi’s mysterious tears dried, Sha Jungli’s club stilled—the great wheel of time had spun again, and calm and peace were again restored. The recent spate of tiger attacks, it seemed, was no longer terrifyingly random: it had its place as part of the circle of time, in the cosmic dream of God-play we mortals see only as Maya.
A pot of stew called khicheree, made from the vegetable bounty blessed at the gods’ feet, was now served to the worshipers, lovingly ladled out by park staff onto clean banana leaves. As we sat on the Forest Department’s folding chairs, eating our warm food in the golden, late-afternoon sunshine, villagers visited with their neighbors, children played on the green grass, and a handful of fat-bottomed gray and white geese, the wards of one of the forest officers, waddled about with outstretched necks, honking fearlessly.
Later we visited with Girindra at his cool, smooth mud home. Girindra’s five daughters, aged eight through sixteen, welcomed us with an intimate grooming. Assisted by their beautiful mother, Namita, the girls combed our hair, slicking it with coconut oil until the comb slid like a fish through water. They pinned our hair flat with giant bobby pins, to which they later affixed big red bows and bright hibiscus. They adorned our brows with bindis. Our feet they painted vermilion. And because I am married, they covered the part in my hair with a thin, knife-edged stripe of vermilion powder like Namita’s, applied with the back of a comb. Rathin later told me that this, the traditional Hindu mark of a married woman, originated with the Mogul invasion: each day the husband would cut himself and apply his blood to the head of his wife, his visible vow that he would protect her honor from the invaders with his very life. But months afterward, when I mentioned this to Girindra through a translator, he told me Rathin was wrong. “We do this,” he told me, “because the goddess has willed it.”
The goddess, of course, has willed it all. This was the message of the poem at the puja; this was the chant honked by the waddling goose and gander; this was the mantra spoken by the comb smoothing through our hair: “all is as the goddess has willed it.” Surely, it seemed, nothing bad could really happen here.
Aboard the little wooden boat Rathin had arranged for us, Eleanor and I slept deeply that night, floating on the waters where Vishnu slumbers upon the coils of his cosmic snake, secure and serene as the dreamy, graceful Durga riding on her tiger.