Relgious India

Amit has bought an armful - or should I say, backpack-ful - of the comic books he was given as a kid on his trips to India. I'm learning the myths of Hindu gods and heros from them. I have already read the great religious epic -The Mahabarata- in comic book form, "Krishna", "Ganesha" (known to us as Ganesh), and a comic life of the devotional poetess, Mirabai. Ironically, Amit is learning about Christianity from the same comics; one of the books he purchased was "Jesus Christ", taken from the Gospels.

As you can imagine, I've gained a great deal of knowledge about Hinduism from our visits to the pervasive temples in each city or town we visit. Likewise, here in the city of Trivandrum (in the state of Kerela), Amit is supplementing his knowledge of Christianity by visiting some churches with me. Inside St. Joseph's Cathedral today, I felt like I could have been in anywhere in the world. It looked like a church of my childhood; there was something disturbing about seeing the white faces of Jesus, the Virigin Mary, and the saints.

It turns out that there are benefits to being raised Catholic, even in India. When we strolled onto the grounds of another Christian church - this one a missionary church - and the pastor came out to meet us, his hand outstretched. He nodded at me when I told him that I had been raised Catholic, but, when Amit confessed that he had been brought up Hindu, we were promptly escorted away from the church.

Conversely, at the oldest temple in town, I wasn't allowed in. "Where are you from?" the gatekeeper asked Amit several times, dissatisfied with the answer, "From the United States." Once the gatekeeper learned that Amit's parents were from the state of Gujarat, he asked to hear some Gujarti, and, then - just like that - Amit was whisked away from me into the interior of the temple. I was told that they were sorry, but foreigners were not allowed in.

Today, we walked down the stairs of our hotel and found women in saris sitting all over the steps down into the lobby and inside the lobby itself. They lined the streets outside. Each had staked out a spot in the dirt with a metal pot, perched on top of triangulated bricks. In front of each pot were banana leaves topped with peeled bananas stuck with incense sticks and surrounded by orange marigolds. We walked down the center, the women surrounding us on either side.

We had wandered - unexpectedly - into a festival. Another backpacker told us that 25,000 to 30,000 women had arrived for it. (We would see them later towards nightfall leaving the city in crowded buses, many standing.) We had heard Hindi music throughout the night from loudspeakers that had been erected throughout the city, but we hadn't realized that this was festival-specific; we had thought Trivandrum always had this kind of atmosphere.

We still don't know whose festival it was, or much about it except what we saw. The streets were filled up with the women with their banana leaf offerings. We thought that they would pack into the temple, but, as we neared it, we saw that the women remained on the street as we had seen them throughout the city. When Amit went inside the temple, it was mostly empty, and was closing at noon.

While Amit was in the temple, however, as I sat against its wall waiting for him, I noticed smoke from the street. Standing and looking out, I saw that the women were starting fires underneath the metal pots they had perched on top of bricks. I could see the flames, and smoke furling up and wafting into the crowd.

We had dirty, sooty smoke in our eyes and mouths through many blocks on our walk back to the hotel. My eyes watered, but it was important to see since I didn't want my skirt to brush into the open fires. The women were cooking some kind of grains inside the pots; later, we learned that the recipe they used was thousands of years old, and the result was used as a kind of offering.

Seeing these women with their cookstoves and banana leaf offerings all over the steps of the banks, the hotels, and the shut-up shops impressed me with the pervasiveness of religion in India.

The women we saw today are practicing Hindus, but later that day in Trivandrum, we would visit a mosque and a church, as well as a temple. We could also visit a synagogue here. Everywhere we go in India, we see religious icons - Ganesh, Krishna, Shurnagi, many I don't know - inside restaurants and shops, on cabs, in the bus, inside the houses of middle-class urbanites. In fact, Amit and I have spent some time arguing about Hinduism (he, of course, was raised with a practical Hinduism, and I have been reading about it), so perhaps the atmosphere is getting to us too!

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