A Temple, Two Workshops and an Orphanage

On Sunday, October 25th, we went to the thousand-year-old Brihadishwara temple. I forgot to bring my "temple socks" from the bus, so, like Sudha and the trip-leader-in-training, Stalin (he says that he wasn't aware of his namesake's reputation until he was grown), I went barefoot. You are not allowed to wear shoes in temples, so most tourists wear an old pair of socks that they don't mind getting dirty. Going barefoot was actually pleasant--the floors and grounds here were relatively clean. Although the temple was dedicated to Shiva, Sudha told us that the king who had had the temple built in the early eleventh century was himself devoted to another god, so there was a small shrine on the lawn, holding a statue of a boar dressed in women's clothes--one of the incarnations of Vishnu. Sudha brought us over and introduced us to the Brahmin priest, who had just spent a year in Boston, serving a Hindu community there. He was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing a topknot and the traditional kilt, the dhoti. We lined up around the enclosure and he gave each of us a blessing and the ubiquitous red dot, the bindi, in the middle of the forehead. Meanwhile, a man in yellow was blowing a conch shell on the temple steps. He then went to the Vishnu shrine and blew it there.

In front of the temple is a huge black statue of Shiva's main transport, the bull Nandi, and in a niche to the left of the door was a statue of Shiva's son, Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who someone that day told us is the most-worshipped god in India. Unlike in the temple in Kanchipuram, where we could take pictures if we paid a fee, signs everywhere proclaimed that no photography was allowed in the temple. But, as usual, once we got inside there were people flashing away at the huge, black linga stone representing Shiva. The bindi, Ganesha and the linga will be explained better in a future digression.

We got into a long, slow, single-file line, and worked our way to the front, where there were three priests, one of whom took our offering (I didn't see what it was), burned it in front of the god and brought back the ashes, which an older priest dotted on our foreheads. Behind us, a group of women was singing a hymn to Shiva, in Sanskrit, very beautifully.

As we came out of the temple, Sudha saw a group of people sitting under an arcade across the grounds, by the wall that surrounded the temple quarter. He thought that it was a couple of families arranging a marriage, and that's what it was. He introduced us to them and them to us: the prospective groom's family, the prospective bride's family, the mediator or marriage broker, and maybe the astrologer. Sudha was surprised that the couple themselves were there. The families were from separate places, twenty miles apart, and were now meeting each other for the first time. Since the family backgrounds were suitably matched and the astrological charts were harmonious, now the families were here to get a feel for each other, face to face. When our group asked them about how husbands and wives in arranged marriages managed to get along, the groom's mother (a banker) made a long (and, Mary Joy said, very eloquent--I wasn't positioned to hear) statement about the importance of family and one's place in one's society and how one needed to put love of others before one's own preferences, in order to arrive eventually at God. Later we saw the two young people, in western clothes (he had a smartphone) standing away from the others, talking, getting acquainted for the first time. Sudha said that based on their impressions of each other, either one could at this point put a stop to the whole thing. So their whole future lives could depend on this one, short conversation.

After leaving the temple, we took the bus into a wealthy neighborhood and got off. We saw a man ironing clothes by the side of a side street., using a very heavy iron with coals inside. Further down that street was a workshop where we were shown the lost-wax process of bronze-making. A wax model was made, covered with clay (the mold), the wax was melted out of a hole in the bottom of the mold, a mixture of copper, zinc and tin was melted and poured into the mold, the mold and figurine now inside were cooled for 24 hours, the mold was broken and the statue was filed and polished.

Afterwards, of course, we visited the shop. Mary Joy got a tiny Ganesha, made of metal with an enamel coating.

Later, we visited another workshop, where they were making vinas, a string instrument like a very large mandolin, but played on the floor, with a bulbous support under the neck, to keep it level. The vina is associated in Hindu iconography with Saraswati, the goddess of music. Mary Joy was in her element, learning the instrument's tuning, which she discussed with another musician on the tour, in terms above everyone else's heads. Although it is an ancient instrument, it was played every night in the musical ensemble at our hotel's restaurant.

The workshop was in back of the owner's house, and he invited us into his front parlor, where his wife played scales for us on their own vina.

At 4:30 we took a 45-minute drive out to an orphanage which is supported in part by funds from our tour company. We met the house mothers, and then we went to the assembly hall, where all the children, ages 6 to 17, were gathered, seated on the floor, girls to our left and boys to our right. Behind them were seated, in chairs, about fifty elderly persons (the orphanage has an attached home for seniors). The children were very excited to see us. After various introductions, etc., we all sang "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands." Then we went back and greeted the seniors. The oldest man there was 94. No one knew exactly how old the oldest woman was, because in those days no one kept track of such things.

As soon as we finished with the old people, it was time to go out and play with the kids. I was immediately kidnapped by some boys, nine, ten, eleven years old. It was frenetic chaos. I was dragged here and there, shown their schoolroom, shown a series of tiny puppies, played some sort of game involving trying to cover the other person's thumb with your own, taught them paper-scissors-rock, did my coin-disappearing trick (in this case, stone-disappearing), took pictures of them playing "monkey" (climbing a coconut palm tree), while they were trying to pronounce the name "Mike" on my big, lanyarded yellow name tag, and were saying (shouting) such English words as "photo," "belt," "monkey" and "bad boys" (some other boys who tried to horn in on their ownership of me). Meanwhile, Mary Joy was trying to do music with some girls, but they, while more focused and less awhirl with tornadic energy than the boys, had their own agenda, too. After 45 minutes, Sudha and the house mothers rescued us all, a girl and a boy named each of us, from memory, and we said a cordial goodbye and got on the bus to return to Thanjavur.