Vishu

Saree being pinned on after much effort, I duly admire myself in the mirror. Twenty minutes later I catch my breath, duly admiring the decorations at the temple. It's very inconspicuous, this temple - it doesn't have a dome or a fancy gate, or imposing sculptures. It's tucked away into a dingy street somewhere with dingy houses in it. You walk in through a normal iron gate with boring designs on it into what looks like a complex. Then you realise you have walked into something that isn't a ground floor at all, but the inside of a dim sanctum sanctorum. It's a feeling of being in a labyrinth, of going beyond a series of coats in a wardrobe and finding snow. Of tumbling into a hidden cellar. I can suspend all the rationality I pride myself on for this one moment and be mesmerised at the first impulses that come rushing at me.

You don't Believe, my brain tells me through the taking in of reams and reams of pink and white garlands. I don't Believe, I tell myself. Then the sandal and the stone come into view, then the yellow light from flickering lamps that washes over a crowd of white sarees, then the glint of gold at the borders and in bangles and earrings. More gold in the ornaments of an unmoving deity (although nothing like what you see in the big temples, my head tells me, why are you looking this way?). Then more extensions of white in flowers tucked into black braids.

If I narrow my eyes and then unscrew them it is like zooming in and out through a lens, like catching detail and blurry outlines all at once. Click in my head. There are chants from somewhere within, and muffled drumbeats - all this in a yellow building with a drain outside? I smother the voice and drum my toes on the floor in time and watch the stacks of plantain hanging from the ceiling. Towards the left fresh sandal paste is being ground with rose water, and bunches of tulsi leaves are being brought in on brass platters, and I feel a sudden hunger for breakfast, and come flying back. Five minutes later I leave.

I still don't Believe, but if to see all this I need to belong to a faith, count me in as an admirer. There are so many things that fall under the definition of worship, which by itself is a word that reminds me of a hidden cellar in the mind. Private, musty, closed to outsiders.

Until the day it is discovered. Or attacked.