Kali
Brahman is Atman, say the Upanishads and the sages. God is the Self. The Self is God. We are all one, part of the great and cosmic whole. We are all god and the only reason we do not understand this is because our perceptions are flawed. We have forgotten who we are, and are trapped in a world of illusion. The only atheists, say the naked sages sitting smeared in ashes, are those who do not believe in themselves.
A week and a half ago a friend and I were walking in the markets of the Theagaraya Nagar district of Chennai. (Known to all locals as T. Nagar.) Around us were a thousand street peddlers, little road-side shops and stands fronting massive emporiums advertised by life-sized trees made of gold, showing the way to five stories of gold jewelry. In these stores we were shown to a seat, offered tea and sweet lime juice, and had a dozen beautiful women, elegant as swans in saris of silver and blue, parade a thousand types of golden bangles for our inspection. As soon as we walked out the door the children descended upon us. None were older than 8, and the eldest carried two babies not more than 2 in her arms. They showed us their sores from sleeping on the street and never being able to bathe, they displayed their emaciated ribs, bulbous bellies, and crooked spines while pushing their fingers at their mouths to indicate that they needed food.
When I first came to India sights like that were enough to bring tears to my eyes. I would not pay the children even then, because I know the terrible machine that lies behind the begging children, but I would feel this profound moment of pity and terror at looking at the face of a child, deformed and starving, who pleaded with me for the spare change in my lard-dripping pocket. But on this day I looked at the children and felt very little at all. I was not annoyed with them, I was not moved by them. I simply looked at them and said no and felt nothing at all. They were persistent though, and began to crowd around me, to poke at me and pull at my clothes. I still felt nothing, and repeated "No, no no, No. Ille, ille ille, Ille." The ragged ones, the ones with the bites from spiders and rats that had started to fester began to push in around me and my friend then, a dozen of them maybe. She started looking panicked, and I must have looked annoyed – though I don't remember feeling anything but a sense of being crowded.
The shop keepers of the area, seeing us in the midst of the mob of children, came out from behind their stalls with sticks and drove the children away, threatening to beat them if they came back. The fact that I was western and wealthy, and might leave if I was annoyed had brought men with bats to beat away the starving children who would now go away empty handed to lie down in the filth of the streets and wait for someone else to toss them a coin so that they could eat that night and not be beaten by the horrible men who prostitute their destitution.
If you are lost and have nothing on you other than your name, you can walk into a small rural village in India and ask to speak to the headman. If you tell him that you are lost and alone, that you have no food and no money, he will arrange to have you put up in the village while they find a way to get you back to where you need to be. You will probably sleep on the ground in someone's thatched hut, but this is no surprise as your host will be sleeping in the dirt right next to you. You will be given poor food to eat, mostly rice with some bean or curd, but this will be enough when you see that your host is eating much the same food as you. But if you are a child born of India, living in the city, this is not the same thing. In exceptional moments people do exceptional things, but in the grind of every day they are just people who feel very little when children with lesions ask them for money. There is a difference between the moments of epiphany and the moments of mortality, and it is in those latter moments that we doubt both God and ourselves.
Three days after that this same friend was traveling across India. She was in a good car with a good driver, going from a good hotel to a good hotel and looking forward to seeing the Taj Mahal, most perfect of buildings. Due to a late start they were driving across a semi-deserted area late at night. A drunk driver hit them, and when her driver got out to check on the damage the drunks in the other car got out and beat him brutally. While he was lying unconscious they attacked the car, screaming and beating at the windows, trying to kick in the doors so they could drag my friend out into the street. She prayed and prayed until the words had no meaning anymore while these men pounded on the doors, hurled themselves against the windows until the whole car was shuddering around her. Her driver got up, found a rock, and tried to drive the men away. They begin to beat him again, breaking his hand. Finally other drivers stopped, and made the men stop attacking the car for long enough for the driver to get back in and get the car down the road. An hour later the police arrived, and only then did my friend stop believing, down deep in her gut, that she was going to be killed by the side of the road in the dark heart of nowhere.
When Mo first came to India she spoke often of how safe she felt here. When we looked lost on the street people would come up to us and offer help, giving us directions and advice, even offering us money or food if we looked particularly out of it. Many a time one or the other of us had commented that one of the things we would miss about India was that here if you smile at anyone, anyone at all that you just met on the street, they will smile back at you. The night after our friend was assaulted we went out to Mariana Beach, the second longest beach in the world and a regular hangout for Chennites looking to escape the pollution of the city heart. That night there was no sense of safety, even here in this city that has been so good to us for two months. The faces on the beach were blank and hostile in the darkness, and they did not smile when we smiled back. The terminal end of it was a commotion in the darkness which resolved with sudden violence into a group of young men fighting, sweeping up the beach in a gang and nearly ramming into Mo in their melee. It was like we had wandered into a foreign land, a place much like the India we had started to believe we knew, but where we were unwelcome and intrusive and where violence could lurch suddenly out of the dark. We left much earlier than we had planned.
On the trip to Chennai, in Delhi again, I remember a place in the road that my taxi took between airports that was long and dark and without habitation on either side. At that moment I had a profound and sudden understanding that I could vanish forever in that place and no one would ever know for sure what happened to me. They could track me to the airport and maybe to the cab, but in that dark heart of nowhere I was nothing more than a brief spark that could vanish without leaving so much as a wake of light to mark the passing. Unlike Mo I did not feel safe from knowing it was India, because I know how suddenly hatred and malice can erupt here, turning men and women who looked at each other and smiled one day to murder three million of each other on the road the very next day. At the time I made it through that moment without fear because of faith and later I covered it up with humor. That is our way, or at least my way, to hide those most profound and terrifying moments when something in you realizes how very small and alone you are. After all, who wants to hear about that? Who wants to look you in the eyes and know that they know your fear and you know theirs? And who, most of all, wants to hear about faith in the world bright and secular?
How many of you, those who know us, are comfortable in this moment reading this? People live with terror and the specter of death everyday, and Mo and I could be killed in Toronto. In fact, it is more likely that violence would happen to us at home than abroad. But when we are far away the terror is different. It is the terror not just of violence, but of not knowing. Of not knowing where it will come from or what will happen next. And when we admit to it a silence falls in the room, the specter of an unwelcome guest falling over the conversation. I should only post this once we are safe at home, the trip to the far away place over so that in comfort we can laugh and shake our heads and end it all with "but now we are safe, and that is all behind us."
Kali is the goddess that gives most westerners trouble when they encounter Hinduism. She is a horror to behold in western eyes, black as night with her red and thrashing tongue lashing up the blood that rains from her sword, her noose, and the garland of skulls that she wears around her neck. She dances destruction, trampling the world into ash beneath her feet. She haunts and howls in the graveyards, consorting with vampires and ghouls that pick the last shreds of meat from the bones of those who died unhallowed and uncremated. And yet she is a goddess, a figure of love and veneration, a popular deity in the most unlikely of places. It is not just the warrior castes of India who worship her in the violent lands of the North, it is the common and smiling farmer in the settled lands of Tamil Nadu, and the lost and abandoned children in the streets of Kolkata. "How" we ask "how can a people who say that God Is Love and that All Is One, a people who invented satyagraha, worship such a horrible thing? Love her the way they love Krsna or Vishnu or Christ?"
Next week Mo and I are going to the Taj Mahal, we will travel back to Delhi and from there to Agra. We are going by train and not by car, we will be carrying pepper spray, we will go with forewarning and with our eyes open. We will go with the thousands and thousands of tourists who make that trip every single day without incident or injury. And we will go with the knowledge that from time to time in this trip people are beaten and dragged from their cars. I go not because I deny this, but because I accept it. And beyond that I accept that I am not large, but I am not alone. I do not doubt God, I do not doubt myself. Brahman is Atman.
This is why they worship Kali, the all destroyer, the dancer in the ashes. Because she reminds us that we are mortal and that all things end. She holds the severed head of time and mortality in her hands and lets the blood fall down around us that we will remember that all our moments are exceptional. She drags out our fears, unspoken at that liminal level, and makes us face the fact that we are all afraid, that we all are vulnerable, that we all are alone and starving and could vanish like a spark in the eternal darkness. She dances us through that and reminds us that despite that we still live, we still hope, we still stand together. Death is Life is Death is Life, and as we are all afraid we are all together, we are all One. Atman is Brahman, and Kali's gift is that unlike gentler Gods she does not let you slowly come to this realization. She rips away the blinders and makes you look at life full in its black, bloody, dying and birthing face.
A week and a half ago a friend and I were walking in the markets of the Theagaraya Nagar district of Chennai. (Known to all locals as T. Nagar.) Around us were a thousand street peddlers, little road-side shops and stands fronting massive emporiums advertised by life-sized trees made of gold, showing the way to five stories of gold jewelry. In these stores we were shown to a seat, offered tea and sweet lime juice, and had a dozen beautiful women, elegant as swans in saris of silver and blue, parade a thousand types of golden bangles for our inspection. As soon as we walked out the door the children descended upon us. None were older than 8, and the eldest carried two babies not more than 2 in her arms. They showed us their sores from sleeping on the street and never being able to bathe, they displayed their emaciated ribs, bulbous bellies, and crooked spines while pushing their fingers at their mouths to indicate that they needed food.
When I first came to India sights like that were enough to bring tears to my eyes. I would not pay the children even then, because I know the terrible machine that lies behind the begging children, but I would feel this profound moment of pity and terror at looking at the face of a child, deformed and starving, who pleaded with me for the spare change in my lard-dripping pocket. But on this day I looked at the children and felt very little at all. I was not annoyed with them, I was not moved by them. I simply looked at them and said no and felt nothing at all. They were persistent though, and began to crowd around me, to poke at me and pull at my clothes. I still felt nothing, and repeated "No, no no, No. Ille, ille ille, Ille." The ragged ones, the ones with the bites from spiders and rats that had started to fester began to push in around me and my friend then, a dozen of them maybe. She started looking panicked, and I must have looked annoyed – though I don't remember feeling anything but a sense of being crowded.
The shop keepers of the area, seeing us in the midst of the mob of children, came out from behind their stalls with sticks and drove the children away, threatening to beat them if they came back. The fact that I was western and wealthy, and might leave if I was annoyed had brought men with bats to beat away the starving children who would now go away empty handed to lie down in the filth of the streets and wait for someone else to toss them a coin so that they could eat that night and not be beaten by the horrible men who prostitute their destitution.
If you are lost and have nothing on you other than your name, you can walk into a small rural village in India and ask to speak to the headman. If you tell him that you are lost and alone, that you have no food and no money, he will arrange to have you put up in the village while they find a way to get you back to where you need to be. You will probably sleep on the ground in someone's thatched hut, but this is no surprise as your host will be sleeping in the dirt right next to you. You will be given poor food to eat, mostly rice with some bean or curd, but this will be enough when you see that your host is eating much the same food as you. But if you are a child born of India, living in the city, this is not the same thing. In exceptional moments people do exceptional things, but in the grind of every day they are just people who feel very little when children with lesions ask them for money. There is a difference between the moments of epiphany and the moments of mortality, and it is in those latter moments that we doubt both God and ourselves.
Three days after that this same friend was traveling across India. She was in a good car with a good driver, going from a good hotel to a good hotel and looking forward to seeing the Taj Mahal, most perfect of buildings. Due to a late start they were driving across a semi-deserted area late at night. A drunk driver hit them, and when her driver got out to check on the damage the drunks in the other car got out and beat him brutally. While he was lying unconscious they attacked the car, screaming and beating at the windows, trying to kick in the doors so they could drag my friend out into the street. She prayed and prayed until the words had no meaning anymore while these men pounded on the doors, hurled themselves against the windows until the whole car was shuddering around her. Her driver got up, found a rock, and tried to drive the men away. They begin to beat him again, breaking his hand. Finally other drivers stopped, and made the men stop attacking the car for long enough for the driver to get back in and get the car down the road. An hour later the police arrived, and only then did my friend stop believing, down deep in her gut, that she was going to be killed by the side of the road in the dark heart of nowhere.
When Mo first came to India she spoke often of how safe she felt here. When we looked lost on the street people would come up to us and offer help, giving us directions and advice, even offering us money or food if we looked particularly out of it. Many a time one or the other of us had commented that one of the things we would miss about India was that here if you smile at anyone, anyone at all that you just met on the street, they will smile back at you. The night after our friend was assaulted we went out to Mariana Beach, the second longest beach in the world and a regular hangout for Chennites looking to escape the pollution of the city heart. That night there was no sense of safety, even here in this city that has been so good to us for two months. The faces on the beach were blank and hostile in the darkness, and they did not smile when we smiled back. The terminal end of it was a commotion in the darkness which resolved with sudden violence into a group of young men fighting, sweeping up the beach in a gang and nearly ramming into Mo in their melee. It was like we had wandered into a foreign land, a place much like the India we had started to believe we knew, but where we were unwelcome and intrusive and where violence could lurch suddenly out of the dark. We left much earlier than we had planned.
On the trip to Chennai, in Delhi again, I remember a place in the road that my taxi took between airports that was long and dark and without habitation on either side. At that moment I had a profound and sudden understanding that I could vanish forever in that place and no one would ever know for sure what happened to me. They could track me to the airport and maybe to the cab, but in that dark heart of nowhere I was nothing more than a brief spark that could vanish without leaving so much as a wake of light to mark the passing. Unlike Mo I did not feel safe from knowing it was India, because I know how suddenly hatred and malice can erupt here, turning men and women who looked at each other and smiled one day to murder three million of each other on the road the very next day. At the time I made it through that moment without fear because of faith and later I covered it up with humor. That is our way, or at least my way, to hide those most profound and terrifying moments when something in you realizes how very small and alone you are. After all, who wants to hear about that? Who wants to look you in the eyes and know that they know your fear and you know theirs? And who, most of all, wants to hear about faith in the world bright and secular?
How many of you, those who know us, are comfortable in this moment reading this? People live with terror and the specter of death everyday, and Mo and I could be killed in Toronto. In fact, it is more likely that violence would happen to us at home than abroad. But when we are far away the terror is different. It is the terror not just of violence, but of not knowing. Of not knowing where it will come from or what will happen next. And when we admit to it a silence falls in the room, the specter of an unwelcome guest falling over the conversation. I should only post this once we are safe at home, the trip to the far away place over so that in comfort we can laugh and shake our heads and end it all with "but now we are safe, and that is all behind us."
Kali is the goddess that gives most westerners trouble when they encounter Hinduism. She is a horror to behold in western eyes, black as night with her red and thrashing tongue lashing up the blood that rains from her sword, her noose, and the garland of skulls that she wears around her neck. She dances destruction, trampling the world into ash beneath her feet. She haunts and howls in the graveyards, consorting with vampires and ghouls that pick the last shreds of meat from the bones of those who died unhallowed and uncremated. And yet she is a goddess, a figure of love and veneration, a popular deity in the most unlikely of places. It is not just the warrior castes of India who worship her in the violent lands of the North, it is the common and smiling farmer in the settled lands of Tamil Nadu, and the lost and abandoned children in the streets of Kolkata. "How" we ask "how can a people who say that God Is Love and that All Is One, a people who invented satyagraha, worship such a horrible thing? Love her the way they love Krsna or Vishnu or Christ?"
Next week Mo and I are going to the Taj Mahal, we will travel back to Delhi and from there to Agra. We are going by train and not by car, we will be carrying pepper spray, we will go with forewarning and with our eyes open. We will go with the thousands and thousands of tourists who make that trip every single day without incident or injury. And we will go with the knowledge that from time to time in this trip people are beaten and dragged from their cars. I go not because I deny this, but because I accept it. And beyond that I accept that I am not large, but I am not alone. I do not doubt God, I do not doubt myself. Brahman is Atman.
This is why they worship Kali, the all destroyer, the dancer in the ashes. Because she reminds us that we are mortal and that all things end. She holds the severed head of time and mortality in her hands and lets the blood fall down around us that we will remember that all our moments are exceptional. She drags out our fears, unspoken at that liminal level, and makes us face the fact that we are all afraid, that we all are vulnerable, that we all are alone and starving and could vanish like a spark in the eternal darkness. She dances us through that and reminds us that despite that we still live, we still hope, we still stand together. Death is Life is Death is Life, and as we are all afraid we are all together, we are all One. Atman is Brahman, and Kali's gift is that unlike gentler Gods she does not let you slowly come to this realization. She rips away the blinders and makes you look at life full in its black, bloody, dying and birthing face.
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