The Call of the South

Part One: Padmanabhaswamy Temple, Trivandrum

How quickly one goes from complaining about the cold to complaining about the heat! It had been barely a few dozen hours earlier that we had moaned about the New York winter, unfolding with cruel frigidity and stretching endlessly ahead while our eyes gazed blearily at the bleak, wind-whipped, snow-swept landscape all around, draped in monotones of white, gray and brown.

 And now, here we were in Trivandrum, my daughter and I, in front of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple, hot and thirsty, hopping from one bare foot to the other on the scorching, sharp-pebbled ground, our delicate, tender and utterly spoiled urbanized feet sending us indignant messages of shooting pain at swift intervals.  We must have been quite a sight, particularly as our lower extremities were clad, as temple custom dictated, in mundus.  Women who are not in saris are provided these pieces of cloth by the temple authorities; men have to enter the temple bare-chested, and they too have to wear dhoties or lungis or mundus.

Our grimaces of pain soon turned to smiles of awe and wonder, however, as we gazed at the graceful Padmanabhaswamy Temple, its squat, tiered, intricately carved gopuram a lovely weathered cream color. This temple, the place of worship for the Travancore kings, took its present form in the 1730s thanks to the renovation efforts of the colorful and powerful king Marthanda Varma. 

We entered the cool interior, and were accosted straightaway by a priest-like character (perhaps he really was a priest; I am singularly unqualified to tell a priest-like character apart from an actual priest) who thrust a tray into our hands, each filled with little containers of oil. There was no choice.  We had to pay for the oil, and then, feeling like Alice in the Dodo race, were swept with the crowd towards a beautiful lamp, into which we poured the oil. Almost immediately after, we walked right into a posse of more priest-like characters, and succumbed to their – I am trying to find the right word here: demand is too strong, request is too weak; the reality lies in-between – insistence that we needed to buy coconuts and bananas as offerings for the deities inside.

Clutching at our load with oil-slicked hands, we wandered around this lovely old temple with its long, beautifully carved corridors - where, alas, electric lights were now strung up where oil lamps used to be used – utterly clueless as to what to do next. Obviously we needed to divest ourselves of the bananas and coconuts (although, with hunger pangs beginning to rumble, we were seriously tempted to just eat the bananas and offer the coconuts to some of the many poor people who huddled in the shady corridors). Neither of us had any idea how to go about it.

I visit temples out of a sense of historical and cultural interest, not religious or spiritual fervor. Darwin and Dawkins speak to me more than any religious rituals or scriptures. Here, in this temple, I felt like a fraud. All around me were true devotees; I could sense the sincerity of their piety, I was moved by  their despair, their sorrow, their anxiety as they prayed, beseeching the lord to hear and heed their words. I could feel, with a sort of detached envy, their absolute conviction in their belief, their unwavering trust in their faith, unruffled by skepticism or irresolution, the peace and serenity that came from the confidence that they had done everything they could, and that it was now all in the hands of a higher power.

I am not a true devotee; I am not even a devotee. But there we were, with a handful of coconuts and squishy bananas and wilted flowers. We meandered over to the front of a small sanctum, where we handed over our stuff to the priest and stood by in uncomprehending uncertainty while he muttered something at a rapid fire pace, and then handed us back the coconuts and bananas and flowers, all liberally dabbed with kumkumam powder. We collapsed into giggles - were we doomed never to be parted from those bananas and coconuts? - and fled back to the corridor. A line was forming, to view the main deity of this temple, Lord Padmanabha, depicted here lying on his serpent, Anantha. The idol, cast almost entirely in gold, is so long that it can be viewed only in parts, through three different doors – the head, through the first door, the chest through the second, and the legs through the third. It is this deity that gave Trivandrum its name – Thiruvananthapuram, the abode of Lord Anantha.

The line, when we joined it, was already snaking around to one of the long corridors. There were dozens of high-spirited young men clad in black, Sabarimalai devotees on their way to or from Sabarimalai. There were wailing children and large families of parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. There was a group of shy young women, fingering their beads and muttering prayers. There were toothless old women and potbellied old men. There were people speaking Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Telugu and other languages we could not recognize.

And us, my daughter and I.  Hot, hungry and thirsty. We were told that the door to the sanctum would open only after another forty five minutes or so. With such a long line, inching forward, it would be well over an hour before we could hope to get a glimpse of the beautiful Anantha Padmanabha. We showed ourselves to be fake devotees. Bogus believers. We left the line and walked out of the temple, into the bright sunshine.

Alas, I did not have my camera with me at the temple. But I will leave you with this image for today. You will see why Kerala is called God’s Own Country.

To be continued.