8.01 / January 2013

An Offering

 

As he finished an incantation in a language few understood, the saffron-clad pandit pointed to the fire. This gesture was signal for Kris to (1) pinch his right ring-finger and thumb into a small stainless-steel bowl containing a mixture of soil, clarified butter, and camphor and (2) drop this pinchful into the flames. The fire, ritually ablaze in a disposable aluminum roasting pan, sat surrounded by the pandit, Kris, Kris’ parents, framed portraits of idols, and perhaps thirty-to-thirty-five guests.

As the mélange fell from Kris’ fingers, the pandit would, from the space right below his lungs, bellow one word: “svaha.”

Svaha could mean: “an exclamation made upon giving a burnt offering.” Or: “to give a burnt offering.” Or even: “the personification of a burnt-offering as the wife of the God of Fire.”

Which one would Kris be as his skin began to bubble under the heat of the fire? As he was offered to the gods?

 

It took Kris six hours to traverse 2000 miles, and yet it was only noon by the time he reached the airport’s curb. The transition from the climate-controlled terminal to seventy-two degree midday sun sent a tickle across the back of his neck. California, he thought as he scanned the dance of vehicles, no fucking weather. Even in November.

He found his father waving at him from the driver’s seat of the family’s champagne-colored Toyota Camry. Kris heaved his black carry-on suitcase into the car’s trunk and slammed it shut.

The drive home featured scenes passing at 65-to-75 miles per hour: a miles-long bridge connecting oceanside city to inland suburb; the FasTrak section of a twelve-lane toll plaza; and twisting, stacked overpasses.

“How’s the job search?” His father finally asked as they pulled into the garage of their two-story suburban house.

“Okay. No luck yet, though.”

“Today will help, beta. Today will help.”

 

“Didn’t you sleep on the flight? We need you to help set up,” his mother replied after he proclaimed a nap to be the one and only object of his desire. A skinny six-foot-one, with most of his height below his waist, comfort remained elusive in thirty-four inches of legroom. “And anyway, maybe if you slept less, you might even have a job right now.”

These were words spoken through genetics: the honesty of X and Y-chromosomes mixed with memory. He had acquiesced to the calls of these cellular bonds and followed them home, but-to his consternation-these calls had also insisted upon a puja on the day of his arrival. When Kris had asked why, his mother’s reply was twofold. The rationale: “Oof, no more of this resume-dot-com nonsense, God will help you find a job.” The date: “The temple astrologers said it will be the most auspicious day for you and your job.”

“But-” he pleaded.

“You’re a big boy now,” she sighed into the phone, “you can handle this.”

Kris did not feel like a big boy. His four-day jaunt back home was supposed to be an Away. An Away from the daily life of an alarm clock, internet, café-sitting, resume writing, resume submitting, post-café mid-afternoon pornography and masturbation, early-evening cans of cheap beer, internet, perfunctory night resume, and sleep. An Away filled with the homemade: samosas, bhindi, puri, and chicken cooked with garam masala and fried onions.

Though the air wafted thick with the odor of these deep-fried daydreams, his fantasy was to be consumed by the puja’s guests. He could only nibble when his mother had her back turned.

“What do you want me to do?” Kris asked, longingly eyeing the couch that would have been the locale for his first Away Nap.

“The panditji can’t drive. We need you to go pick him up.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. He’ll be waiting in the temple office.”

 

The local mandir, the Tri-City Hindu Community Temple (though what three cities it referred to remained unclear), was reached by a short drive on a meandering four-lane-in-each direction highway. As the car glided over two lanes of traffic, his eyes focused on the bumper of the tortoise-like white SUV in the far-right lane.

I want my nap.

All this shit is scheduled on the day I arrive.

I want sleep. I want samosas.

Even if today is auspicious.

Whatever that means.

The mandir wasn’t too far from the freeway. An exit, a left turn, a right turn, a right turn, a left turn, another right, and there it was: a shrine to a vaguely South Indian medieval architecture surrounded by two-story ranch-style homes. One-and-a-half acres of Hinduism, penned in by manicured leprechaun-green lawns and grey concrete driveways.

The temple consisted of three towers: a slender trapezoidal tower in the center, perhaps 50 feet in height, flanked on left and right by twenty-foot-shorter mirror images. All three towers were linked to each other by a low-lying one-story structure with a columned facade. The towers themselves were built of white limestone, their bottom halves smooth, their tops covered in carved statues of gods and goddesses-stories from Ramayana for all to see. It was a variant on medieval Indian temple complexes-a generic California landscape calling out to the ancient city of Khajuraho.

The temple “office” was in actuality a windowless brown wooden portable situated to the left of the temple. Kris parked the Camry into the lot behind the portable, locked the doors, and walked in.

The pandit was sitting in a black folding-chair in front of a table and was the only person in an otherwise barren room. The table, a forest green folding card table, was buttressed against the back wall and sat between two metal filing cabinets. A large framed photo of the actual Khajuraho hung slightly off-center on the left wall. A poster of the blue-tinged Krishna playing a flute in a green meadow was taped above the table.

The pandit was wearing a white kurta and, instead of pants, a loose saffron dhoti. His hair had migrated from atop his head to form a bush underneath his nose and ring connecting his ears. His belly, a small hill, was jutting from underneath his kurta. Short, bald, fat: not quite the best human specimen. Yet, birth had made him Holy.

He reminded Kris of the television pandits he had watched with glee back when he believed. From eight to thirteen years old, he would get headaches and stomachaches with unusual regularity. In response, he would do what the television told him to do: put his right ring finger wherever it hurt and mouth the Gayatri Mantra. Five to ten (to thirty, to three-hundred sixty) minutes later, it would be gone, just like that: God channeled from heaven to television to finger to stomach.

“Krishna?” The pandit asked.

“Kris.”

“Your mata-pita said your name was Krishna.”

“It is, but I go by Kris.”

That poster on the wall used to be him: the divine incarnation that inspired Arjuna to action, Gandhi to non-violence, and thousands of shaved heads to prance around airport terminals. At twenty-one, just before graduating from college, he was Krishna.

“How are you, Kris?” the pandit asked as he sipped water from a small paper cup.

“I’m tired. I just got off a flight, actually. I’m not sure why mom scheduled all this,” Kris paused and waved his hand towards the temple, “on the day I arrived.”

“Any day is a good day for a puja. Any day is a good day for God.”

“I guess,” Kris said, pausing to stifle a frown. “I mean, of course.”

Was this the place to argue theologies? Surely it wasn’t the place for Kris to finally come clean and confess that the banalities of everyday life had made him neither atheist nor agnostic, but simply lazy. It wasn’t the place for Kris to sigh and look at the pandit and announce that he no longer felt God channeled from heaven, but instead saw gaps and silences to be filled in with distraction. It wasn’t the time to announce that his whispers and shouts to heavenly abodes no longer traveled upwards, but instead stayed side-by-side with stubbed toes, ignored resumes, orgasms, and blood-alcohol contents risen to excess. At twenty-five, what was once a childhood nickname gained permanence.

Not willing to ask or answer any of his own questions, Kris, who was still in the frame of the open door, pointed his thumb to the parking lot. “Should we go?”

“Okay,” the pandit replied, bobbling his head from side to side in that prototypically Indian way that could both mean I agree and I couldn’t disagree more. He got up from his chair with a slight oof and grabbed a black leather tote containing his holy supplies.

“Your parents love you very much,” the pandit said as they merged onto the freeway.

“Mhmm.”

“They planned this for you, you know. So you can find yourself a job.”

“Oh, wow.”

In his transition from faith, Kris had, at times, fantasized about how easy it would be if he were a lapsed protestant. Listening to the solemn sermons of a Congregationalist preacher would perhaps afford an hour or two of daydreaming: moments that would blockade thoughts about in-home displays of faith and family.

Why? He wondered, why do I do this?

“You’ll be helping me in the puja.

Duty. A sense of duty to his parents.

“Oh, really?”

Or culture. A sense of acting out his culture.

“You’ll be sitting next to me. This puja is for you.”

Kris’ eyes narrowed as he exited the freeway. Fuck, he thought, losing track of his previous question, I’m the fucking point person.

Kris believed every puja to have a point person. This was different from the pandit: the man who uttered lines of Sanskrit-the indecipherable language of the Gods-in order to act as a holy intermediary in the world of men. Different from those who planned the entire event: they were to be the direct beneficiary of any blessings channeled into their home. Wholly different too from the audience of family friends, who, by the very virtue of being present represented a sort of collateral damage of blessing.

The point person assisted. He would take items that ranged from the semi-quotidian (coconuts, incense, aluminum roasting pans, clarified butter) to the ceremonial (small pieces of dried wood, vermillion powder, camphor, water from the Ganges) and hand them to the pandit as per his requests: place the sacred thread around the coconut, place the coconut on this water jug, light the incense. The point person too would, upon the pandit’s command, offer some of these items to the sacred fire.

“God helps us in all things. God is always there for us. He’s even in your name, Krishna,” the pandit said in response to Kris’ laconic driving.

“I know,” Kris replied, bobbling his head back and forth.

The freeway faded into an exit, faded into a main road, faded into a familiar suburban development: back again were the two-story white ranch houses. They alternated roof colors: gray, peach, black, gray, peach, black, graypeachblack.

The car was parked. For now, there was to be no time for rumination: the puja was to begin.

 

Svaha.

A pinchful of soil, clarified butter, and crushed white camphor. Seeing the signal and hearing the word, Kris dropped the mixture into the holy fire.

(Svaha)

The crackle of the ghee-soaked camphor yelled outwards and upwards. An effort towards otherworldly transcendence.

(Svaha)

Crumbled bits of camphor stuck to the crevices of Kris’ fingerprint. In awe of the sizzling holy pyrotechnics, his hand hovered for the briefest of seconds over the ritual fire. Over the personification.

(Svaha)

Transcendence travels upwards to the Gods.

(Svaha)

His hand was simply in the way.

(Svaha)

Those in the room who hadn’t dozed off from the melodic, meditative chants of the pandit and cackle of the fire remember that moment in slow motion. As the fire made its way upward, it held onto his hand. Onto the bits of camphor. Onto the clarified butter. The fire saw him as a new oblation. It made an offering.

(Svaha)

Camphor burns cool: its menthol-like effects tingle and tickle the skin, even as it spreads across appendages, exciting chemical reactions in its wake. Perhaps because of the roasting pan holiness, or perhaps because of the prickling camphor, Kris didn’t look. He first felt the burning camphor as an itch. An itch, rather than an exclamation.

Or a verb.

Or even a personification.

(Svaha)

Instead, his body registered the inconvenience and attempted to rub it off. Within milliseconds of feeling the irritating numbness, he brought his offering hand up to the left hand sleeve of his white silk kurta and wiped it off.

(Svaha)

The inferno leapt off his hand and migrated up his sleeve. His eyes caught up with his fingers. FIRE-THERE. NO-FIRE ME, the thought of being engulfed in flames entered his brain. His body thinking ahead had begun to flail his arm up and down, but the fire simply danced and leapt with his body. Upwards, always upwards, always looking towards transcendence.

(Svaha)

Mouths were agape in the audience. They were mostly thinking in unison: someone is on fire. Kris is on fire. The thought was there, but few sprang to action. The whole situation was complicated by a second thought: it is inauspicious to extinguish the holy fire. The holy fire which, at the moment, was successfully melting silk to skin, skin to silk.

(Svaha)

Spiritual health was to be reassured. The pandit dove sideways, his legs remaining firmly crossed, body and arms stretched towards a vase of flowers meant as an offering. Flowers whipped out, the mixture of water and petals were thrown at his right arm. The fire whispered and hissed. An offering had precluded an offering.

Svaha.

 

In a haze, Kris remembered a puja from years ago. It was here where another pandit had told him how the true self could not burn. “The embodied self,” Krishna declared to Arjuna on the Kuru fields of battle, “discards/its worn-out bodies/to take on other new ones//weapons do not cut it/fire does not burn it/waters do not wet it/wind does not wither it.”

“The burns are in between first and second degree,” the ER attending told his father. “Mainly quite a bit of redness, and a few blisters, as you can see.”

“What does this mean?” His father asked, worry plaguing his cracking voice.

“Think of it as an awful sunburn with blisters. He’ll need to keep the area clean to prevent an infection. It’ll be painful for him. We’re going to prescribe some painkillers and antibiotics to help manage the pain and possibility of infection.”

Kris heard these voices as one would from underneath the surface of a pool. The plastic pipe of an IV was jutting out of the crook of his left arm. It snaked its way up to a clear plastic bag of liquid pain relief. All that was left of reality were apparitions of family and medicine surrounding his gurney. Everything was coated with bliss and fog.

“Fire does not burn it,” Kris heard from what only hours ago was the silence of his faith.

Even if he hadn’t studied or read or cared for the Bhagavad-Gita in the past few years, the lines shook around in his pain and drug-addled brain. None of this could possibly mean that he was suddenly religious again, right? The faithless man is not embodied. The faithless man burns. The faithless man is doused by water.

But, what if? What if he had simply put his ring finger where the burning met skin: would Agni have extinguished his flames? What if he had ignored the silence and instead whispered prostrate prayers to Laxmi, who in her holy abode administered all comings and goings of coins and bills: would he have found all his résumés read?

The apparitions began to drift away, leaving one sitting next to him. “Rest for a little bit,” it told him, “we’ll be going home soon.”

The faithless man will die and be reborn again and again and again for all eternity. This line bounced off of the walls: of his head, of the room. It may have been a line in some holy text. It was probably some pithy pseudo-philosophical kernel that morphine and memory conjured up.

Svaha could mean: “an exclamation made upon giving a burnt offering.” Or: “to give a burnt offering.” Or even: “the personification of a burnt-offering as the wife of the God of Fire.”

The faithless man. Svaha. The faithless man. Svaha.

The faithless man.

Svaha.

 


Nishant Batsha (http://nishantb.tumblr.com) is a writer and historian in training. He lives in New York.
8.01 / January 2013

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