SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN
by Lucinda Dhavan
“You really believe in this stuff, don’t you,” Eric had said, almost contemptuous with anger.
It still stings. Diana can’t quite get it out of her head, even as she sits in one of the world’s uglier bazaars in an open jeep, every metal part of which is hot enough to sear skin.
She thinks she knows why he said it. He’d just wanted her to stay on in Delhi for the entire ten days of his symposium. He wanted her waiting in that plush guestroom every night, available for screwing. It inconvenienced him that she itched to run off every time she got the vaguest hint of a new site.
So he’d said: “You really believe in this stuff,” sounding as though he’d seen inside her for the first time, and found a rotten core….
“That was the turning, the one we drove by,” her driver says as he climbs back in his side, sweating fiercely.
Balram, who came with the jeep arranged for her by the helpful director of a local museum, drives like a force of nature. Without a second thought, he plows through crowded streets, expecting people to scatter.
They do. He hasn’t so much as nicked anyone yet. She appreciates that useful confidence, and suspects he’s actually a fellow enthusiast. He grins while poking around narrow old-city alleys in the steamy heat, searching for remains of little-known temples. He looks in his element when he’s ordering urchins to drag logs over ruts in a mud path, so they can drive on to some remote village. When he was out there in the market with a thin towel tied around his head like a droopy turban, accepting a friendly cup of tea while asking directions, he looked like a happy fish in water.
“You mean they’d actually heard of Unchadih?” she asks. So far today they’ve wasted hours on wrong turns and dead ends while the sun went hotter and higher.
“They said it’s this way -- ” He laughs, stopping sharply as the road forks yet again, one half meandering off into an open space cluttered with buses and trucks, the other turning into a narrow lane between buildings.
“Right,” she says. “Definitely right.”
“That’s only a bus stand,” he argues and plunges into the gap between overflowing shops.
After squeezing through a herd of broad-beamed water buffaloes, snapping a rope that had held up an awning, falling through a culvert that would have swallowed any lesser vehicle than their old Willys jeep, they break through onto a one-lane paved road that looks like it might go somewhere, off through the countryside.
“You were right!” she grins, and settles back to watch the odometer. It should be 15 kilometers from the market.
The promising look of the landscape begins to give her goose bumps – or maybe it’s the heat. After a year in the field for her thesis research and intermittent trips in the five years since, she knows intimately the way extreme heat makes you shiver. But she’s noticing, too, that the featureless Gangetic Plain is suddenly not so flat. Abrupt little hills jut up here and there, created by long human habitation, mud houses melting down into mud mounds over generations. There are gougings of erosion from which bits of rock and brick stick out, tantalizing bones of a more interesting past.
The high banks of a canal appear along one side. Beside it, the fields are rimmed with white, leached out of the ground by all that imported water. Now there are foundations, roofless walls, piles of new bricks strewn near the road – buildings started, but never finished. What happened? Bad planning? Bad politics?
The ugly modern artifacts remind her of Eric again. If he were here, would he want her to ask – since his Hindi was so foul – questions about why there was such a “disproportionately high rate of failure”? That was how he always talked, about anomalous rates of this and that, “paradigms”, “projections” – nothing you could touch or feel.
Six months they’ve been married and she’s just realized he doesn’t want to feel. He’s content with saving the world from cool conference halls, with staring into computer screens and moving ideas from one side to the other. He’d die if he felt sweat running down his backbone, as she does at this moment. He’d hate to smell the dung and hot mud she smells as they drive between two huts surrounded by bamboos and cows.
And she lives for it, for the intensity of the search. For each stone eye, each smooth stone waist, each delicately curled beckoning, sculpted hand she finds.
Is this to “believe in” them? Does feeling something urgent and unutterable when you look at the image mean that you “believe in” it? Then she wouldn’t just “believe in” the Hindu gods whose images she looks at for a living. She knew she’d been changed, just a little, when she first saw the Winged Victory of Samothrace straining to take off, out over the stairway in the Louvre. The Kwan Yin in the Fogg. The Elgin Marbles….
“Yes!” she hollers over the noise of the engine and rushing air, but Balram has already noticed the small milestone beside the road that actually mentions the place. He’s racing now….
Forget Eric, she thinks, and his puerile “believe in”. He probably thought she was turning into a convert who’d embarrass him by murmuring “Hare Krishna” instead of saying “Hi!”. Or maybe he thought she believed in statues with glowing eyes, shooting out spectral Special Effects to melt the flesh off her enemies’ faces.
That was more like Eric. On dull Saturday afternoons when he didn’t want to think, he was still capable of turning to Lara Croft and Indiana Jones….
In the distance, thick trees hide whatever there is in the village, but she’s beginning to get a very good feeling about this one. Even Professor Mishra, conservative as he was, called it a “magnificent” site, so far explored only by a few local scholars whose notes were never published.
She’s seen two statues from the village in the Museum in town. One from the fifth century, another from the twelfth – which meant that for six or seven hundred years people must have been living here, making their temples over in the latest styles, getting rich off trade. (That’s what she tells people she’s looking for now, for her next project: towns along a trade route between ancient cities. The cities themselves may now be cleaned-out digs or modern messes, but nobody’s looked at the routes in between that could be dotted with other cities, smaller ones that no invader bothered to loot and smash.)They turn onto a rutted road, pass through a mango grove and then turn again and climb, driving up the beginnings of the mound. They cross a ditch, and immediately she spots two broken pieces of sculpture propped against a tree. She scrambles out to jot down in her notebook what she sees: Part of doorway. Poss. 12th century. Woman holding branch. Floral scrolls.
She takes a couple of quick photographs, since there’s no one to object, and then walks beside the jeep as it crawls up the rest of the way. The heat is heavy under the trees, but she only has one sense now – sight. She sees the remains of walls in ancient brick and stone rubble lining the mounting terraces of fields. She’s never seen intact walls in one of these little-known sites. The goose bumps return.
She leaves Balram and the jeep behind and climbs up a narrow path, regretting that habitation has made things so messy. It’s hard to see any traces of what may be underfoot or in the piles of swept-away dust and mud on the sides. Above, there’s a sad little temple, all modern rough brick and cracked plaster. There’s a ramp up to it, and finally some stone steps, bits and pieces jammed together.
Steps in scavenged stones. Shield border.
Left, on top: broken pillar. Praying couple; bodies turn to snakes below hips, twined in figure eights. V.fine work.
Very fine work. Exquisite, in fact. Every knot of their serpentine bodies is perfection itself, and gleaming….but that isn’t polish on the stone, it’s water. Each of the fragmentary statues around the crude shrine is damp, and has a fresh red hibiscus on it, a yellow trumpet flower or white star picked off the surrounding bushes. Someone’s worshipped every single one of them. She can even smell incense clinging in the damp.
Diana hears the sound first, and then sees a thin old man come around from behind the building, continually ringing a brass bell in one hand while flowers tremble on a tray in the other. His eyes turn toward her, but without missing a beat in his chanting, he goes into one of the two dark chambers, to sit down and go on talking to his Gods.
She loves that sound; the way it echoes; the way it hasn’t changed. It’s like a fourth dimension to the things she sees: depth of time. Tradition.
She walks around the building, taking notes: Damaged figures cemented in retaining wall. Poss. guardian figure, headless. Empty niche – sculp. removed?
“Hello. Namaste,” She says to a small girl in a dusty red dress who is solemnly peeping at her around the corner of the building.
“Where have you come from?” the girl asks; no beating around the bush.
“From the city,” Diana says.The girl looks skeptical. Diana smiles, then she smiles back.
“Vilayat,” Diana admits, which means “England”, literally, but more loosely, “abroad”…. “I’ve come to see your temple.”
“It’s my grandfather’s temple,” the girl corrects her.
“Is that him inside?”
She nods, shyly. She has very white teeth, nice features. She could even be pretty, without the dust. She fiddles with a fake gold chain around her neck, but her eyes stay on Diana.
“Tell me, was there a statue in this empty space?”
“One night somebody came and stole that one,” the girl nods. “Thieves take Gods and sell them. They get a lot of money. Did you come to take one too?”“I only came to study your temple,” Diana says. “If your grandfather lets me, I’ll take some pictures of it. Then maybe I’ll write about it and the pictures will be printed in some book or journal, so more people can know what beautiful things are here….”
“Then more people will come and steal statues,” the girl says, making Diana laugh at her tough little mind.
“People who study art don’t steal it.”
“The man from the city took three statues, Dadaji told me so.”
Maybe she’s talking about the things taken to the Museum. But Diana only saw two there.
Ask about poss. third statue.
“Tell me, whose statue is inside this room?”
“God.”
“And in that one?”
“Mother.”
So one cell is for the God Shiva, probably, and the other for the Goddess, in whatever form. More and more interesting. Her thesis was on Goddess figures.
The old man comes out. He tells her that this is an “ati prachin”, “very ancient” temple, which makes her sad. He should know better than to try to pull that one. She knows for a fact that it wasn’t here even back in the 1960’s, when the team from the museum came. She’s seen the pictures they took of the bare mound. All of these images must have been unearthed by the villagers since then.
The building is not very old, he admits, but the place is. And The Goddess in the temple is. She protects the village; they are Her children. No one will eat before they have worshipped Her.
Diana, though positively vibrating with eagerness to see what’s inside, catches the message concealed in this: he hasn’t had his breakfast yet.
She must be patient.Standing on the highest point in the whole area as they are, she can see now that the village huddles on the downward slope to a thin, looping silver line of water. On the other side is a thick grove of trees with a white temple spire sticking out. He says contemptuously that it’s just a temple people are building, collecting money from here and there….there aren’t many old things left that side.
She applies flattery, telling him that his temple is the one she really wants to see, but she’ll just go take a quick look at the other side while he has his meal. He seems relieved to be able to hobble down to a hut where a woman with her sari hanging over most of her face is waiting for him. Diana can see the gleam of a curious eye as she walks by.
The girl leads off through the maze of houses. Every few feet Diana catches sight of some fragment of stone jammed in mud plaster or oozing cement, and she stops to make notes, stunned by the profusion of pieces that are just there, in the open: Lotus medallion set in wall. Pillar base, urn with foliage, under tap, eroded to bowl-shape –
They walk on high mud dikes between fields of yellowing pea plants, snaking their way down to what may be a river in the rainy season, but can now be crossed easily on a low bamboo bridge.
“A big crowd comes here every Tuesday,” the little girl says, as they start walking up the opposite bank.
Diana can see it looks like that kind of place, a sort of religious picnic spot for the masses. The big white temple in the middle would be 80-90 years old, at the most. Probably the local landlord built it a couple of generations ago. But now the landlords were all gone, or at least their money was. With no more patronage to live on, priests had to bring in the crowds, and for that they need new things, novelty, attractions. A rash of coarse new shrines, small and multi-colored, cluster near the big one.
The ground around is beaten into barren dust, dotted with the litter of the Tuesday mob. Probably there would be merry-go-rounds and food stalls parked here on that day, along with hawkers of religious pictures, rosaries and lucky gemstone rings. There would be colored ribbons and even pink and blue bras hanging out for sale like so much stained glass in the sunlight; that’s what Diana’s seen before, so many places.
“I got this churi last Tuesday,” the little girl shows off a plastic bangle in vile pink. “And a balloon.”
Her suspicions confirmed, Diana doesn’t expect much as she goes inside. It’s a big, airy space – that’s the best she can say of it. A woman is leaning over an image set low, in the center of the floor. Diana can hear water being poured and whispered prayers. She imagines that the image will be nothing but a Shiv ling probably….And that brings Eric back again, because he’d said: “I’ll tell your feminist friends you’re a closet penis worshipper,” when she told him what a Shiv ling was. At the time, it had seemed funny.
When they’d just started dating, that had been. When his profile had still overwhelmed her with longing, and she could stare at the back of his neck, entranced. He’d been fingering the small sculptures that artistically cluttered the corner of her desk.
“What’s this?” he’d asked, picking up a small cylinder, with a rounded top, coming out of a looped base, “It looks positively…phallic!”
“It is,” she’d admitted, and tried rashly to explain in the face of his rambunctious disbelief that it was the generative power of the Universe that was meant, and that it rose from the surrounding female principle….That had only made him wrestle her to the bed, saying he knew where the phallus was supposed to go.
It had seemed funny then. Now she can only wonder what Eric would make of the woman in the green sari – the ordinary, housewifely, sweet-faced woman – putting her hands on the stone, bowing her forehead to touch the base, her eyes closed and soft prayers flowing out in a continuous stream. The whispered syllables brush by Diana’s ears; she wishes she could catch them.
When the woman leaves and Diana gingerly pushes away the heaps of damp flowers and leaves around the stone, there’s suddenly a face looking back at her.
It’s such a shock she falls from an uneasy squat, onto her knees, and stays there staring back into the long, brooding eyes. Hair is heaped in elaborate carved coils above, below, the lower lip is pouting. With shaking hands, she writes: Shiv Ling with one face on side. Poss. 5th-6th cent.? Eroded. Typical hair, elongated ears, “bee stung” lip.
Now she knows she’s onto something. This may not be a great piece, because the design is common, and it’s weathered. But it is real, and it is old, and where there is one, there will be others.
Her little guide seems to have vanished, so she pokes her head in doorways until she finds a young priest who tells her the image was discovered in the jungle by his ancestors when the wheel of their bullock cart struck it and then refused to move forward. They dug the dirt around it, but could not move it. They began to worship it. They found it brought prosperity, and so its fame and fortune grew….
She’s heard the same story a hundred times, with minor variations. She’s seen too many places like the small shrines around – dank cells for stiff images, and always, always, a quartz clock hanging above the head of Hanuman, or Sri Ram or Whoever, ticking away the moments of eternity in chintzy style.
She wonders where they got the hundred thousand rupees he says they spent on the new white marble statues that look like stone dolls, but most of all she wonders if there is anything else here that is old. He shows her a few broken cornices and doorframes heaped with miscellaneous rocks under a tree.
When she firmly declines to make a contribution to future development and admits she doesn’t write for newspapers or know any politicians who could get them piped water or a better road, the man loses interest. She walks back to the riverbank, and finds the girl in the red dress, who’s sitting there splitting grass and pressing it between her thumbs to make whistles.
“Are there any more old statues you can show me?” Diana asks, sure, now, that she’s asking the right person. The one who will tell.
“In the field,” the girl says.
But first they find the old man waiting. He gets up stiffly from his cot and leads Diana up the mound. She tells him that he was right; they have nothing much on the other side. She tells him how wonderful each of the broken carvings is, how old, how rare.
“That’s why I had them cemented into the walls,” he says. “People keep taking them away and the police won’t listen.”
Maybe it is the best way to protect them, but the contrast is so stark: sloppy brick walls with hunks of divine vision stuck in at random. She notes furiously: Couple (erotic pose?). Seated dwarf with vine growing from navel. Flying figure – unusual heavy, rolled cloth on hips. V. sensuous.
People still turn up things like this sometimes when they plow, he says. Like the Goddess. His father’s father found Her and his family started worshipping Her. Since they built the temple, others have also come. Since the image was installed, he informs her – as though there is no question in his mind that the image is the cause and this is the effect – there has not been a single murder in the village, no rape, no violence of any kind.
Diana’s eagerness swells. No one has mentioned a goddess here; not the museum team, not Prof. Mishra and his colleagues. Could it be hers, her discovery? Her own?
She steadies herself to follow the old man, not to rush him. In the first cubicle, below the rough pyramidal spire, is nothing but an un-extraordinary Shiv ling, very worn and plain. She just sticks her head inside for a quick look.
“And I had this room built for the Goddess,” he says as they turn toward the next room. Diana hurriedly begins to take off her shoes, eager to prove she knows what to do. She pulls her scarf over her head, anxious that he should see her reverence. He stands in the door, but she brushes by him, eyes downcast, not giving him a chance to refuse her.
What she sees inside is stunning. There is an almost stern expression on the dark stone face that gleams from its morning bath, even in that windowless cell. A halo of sharply cut radiating rays surrounds it. There is a carved crown that is square and solid and unusual. Everything suggests tremendous energy and power, even though the body is hidden, draped in a wet red cloth.
Diana thinks that she must get him to remove it somehow, or she will have to grab it away herself, which would be stupid. It is so important to keep him on her side. What if she tells him she wants to take pictures to study later, would that be enough to get him to unveil Her? She could start taking pictures, casually mention that she’d like one without the cloth….would that work?
He agrees to pictures, and she practically runs back toward the jeep to get the camera. Anxiety nips at her, fear that he won’t co-operate in the end, he’ll say that the goddess cannot be seen by anyone but the faithful, maybe, or that she should keep her distance because she might not know how to behave.
She looks around for the little girl, her guide, her contact, her character witness, and finds the child standing beside her, pulling at her hand.
“In here,” she says. “The one I told you about.”
Impatiently, Diana lets herself be led off between thick bamboo clumps, to a place beside one of the foundation walls she could see from below. The girl parts the healthy plants growing in the field to reveal a fragment still set into the reddish sandstone.
Feet standing on lotus. Poss. 11th cent.?
Diana mentally notes, but in fact she knows she’s never seen such a beautiful pair of feet in her life. The graceful curve of the arch and finely-etched toenails almost make her weep.
“Eat your heart out, Eric,” she thinks, with unaccustomed force, filled with a feeling of how serendipitous this all is. “You’ll be nothing but a dull footnote in a dull article in a journal that’s out of date by the next election. I have found something important, something eternal….”
“If you dig here, I think you will find many statues,” the girl tells her, confidentially.
Diana, full of the brilliant possibilities, begins explaining that this wall was probably just the outside of the platform below a big temple. To find out what was left, you’d have to carefully dig first, she explains, the whole area around, grid by grid.
“But that will spoil the fields,” the girl says.
Maybe Diana could find a way to explain that it might be worth not having grain for awhile, but then she sees Balram. He’d stayed behind to guard the jeep and seems to have struck up a useful acquaintance, as usual. He’s drinking tea in the pillared verandah of some village honcho’s house.
Diana hates the way the little girl hangs back, chewing on the ends of her hair and tongue tied, as soon as she sees the men. She wants the girl with them, but it’s more important just to go, to keep up the momentum.
“They say some people came from the University and took measurements about 10-15 years ago, but they didn’t come back,” Balram reports, anxious to prove he hasn’t just been enjoying himself unproductively.
Diana hears, but nothing matters as much now as getting that cloth off. Could she tell the old man that a picture will make his temple famous? Would that work? He seems indifferent, though. Maybe even indifferent to fame.
The problem is solved when he sees Balram. Diana thinks, ecstatically, that members of the high castes must have antennae for recognizing each other. Within minutes, the man has realized that Balram is a fellow Brahmin, and suddenly she can do no wrong. He’s letting her take pictures every step of the way.
“Do you think you could get him to take the cloth off?” she asks Balram, sotto voce, as she tries to get a light reading in the dark cell, and set up a perfectly useless picture of the Goddess in Her grubby finery.
As Diana sits in the dimness, staring into the broad sculpted eyes through the lens, she begins to feel the burning focus of the timeless gaze in her own eyes….
A thin pair of arms come into her field of vision.
The rough old hands shake a little as he unhooks the wet cloth. It drops.
Diana chokes on a laugh, caught before it escapes.
She realizes, when she can think again, that there’s some excuse for their mistake. The chest of the figure is a little high. The slightly swollen pectorals carved in the late medieval period could give the impression of being breasts, particularly in awkwardly-proportioned pieces like this one. By a certain period, in out-of-the-way places, the craftsmen seemed to have become like musicians who remembered the words, but not the tune. They remembered to make a twist here, a twist there, broad shoulders, narrow waist ….but they forgot the logic, and overdid it all.
Their Goddess is an amateurish, clumsily carved God, with four broken arms.
Diana takes pictures mechanically….
“For me, looking for these things is like eating salted peanuts,” is another thing she’d told Eric, coming down to his level, longing to make him understand what he’d been calling her “obsession”.
“You know, you keep popping one after another, looking for just the right amount of salt and taste, the perfect size – the Ultimate Nut. I’m always thinking the next one might be perfection , might even feel like the last one I need to see….”
Luckily, she thinks, she has a few more days; there are other sites on her list. She has enough to do, but cannot push back the emptiness that expands inside as she clicks away, studiously taking pictures of broken hands and feet, of cracked heads and chipped torsos. Of stones.
LUCINDA DHAVAN studied at Sarah Lawrence College, then went to India on a Fulbright grant and found she couldn’t tear herself away. After many years on the staff of a newspaper, The Northern India Patrika, she hopes she may have learned enough to finally write fiction. She is currently polishing a collection of short stories and working on a novel.