PilGrim
I will never understand this thing with pilgrims. My earliest memories of anything to do with pilgrims is a sense of dread that would fill my stomach, crawl up my food pipe like viscous smoke and smear the insides of my mouth with the taste of barf.
A coiled dread snake made the pit of my stomach its home every time “Vellankanni” was mentioned. It stirred a little, loosening its coils ever so slightly, when the “mentioning” became a “perhaps”. When the “perhaps” became “planning” the snake would shift its head to expose one malicious beady eye. And when the “planning” became “waiting at the railway station for our train”, it flicked its enquiring forked tongue, processing information. Smells - the signature smell of the Indian railways - top notes of public toilets, morning anatomical businesses, urine and a wisp of phenyl and the musk of iron-railings intermingling with the crisp milk-tea scented, morning air that takes on the lethargy of humidity with every passing second. The tongue catches something else hidden under the complex layers of overflowing bladders, emptied bowels, bad hygiene and goodbyes. The tongue flicks again - this time predatory. It catches it again. Sweaty palms, childish reluctance, grown-up impatience and small lungs bursting at the seams with trepidation. Fear. The snake raises its head in interest, its permanently caffeinated eyes shining with poison.
There was no joy in those train journeys. Just the claustrophobia of a big family suddenly tucked into a small space of allocated berths. A mini concentration camp. A night’s journey, a full-bladder and a reluctant mindset. The flesh is willing but the soul is weak. Dragging feet stumble out on to a grimy railway platform. Disgust filling the nostrils - the snake registers a new smell. Loosened coils become a taut whip of near horror. The first sighting of fresh human pate, an exposed black bum. Horror registers in full, the snake begins to dance. You realise how clingy a bad smell can be. Everything smells like shit. The bad breakfast, the hotel rooms where your parents have forbidden to walk barefoot, the newspaper-lined toilet seats, the snappy father, the sulky mother, the indifferent infant sister, the best-friend-turned-enemy grandparents, the glaring eye-boring sunlight, the Mother Mary statue you touch and kiss, your fingertips - seriously Mother Mary, couldn’t you pick a place with a cleaner sense of hygiene to make an appearance? The snake spreads its poison and you begin to register everything with a shadowy vignette of a high fever. It passes. You board the train back to Cochin. The snake recoils and becomes comatose.
Every time I encounter the word “Pilgrim”, I feel the scales of the snake gliding in my insides. A sort of gag reflex. The easy personal space intrusions, the stampedes, the debasement of all that is human in the pursuit something higher, it’s the same knot - making its presence known every time I read the news. I remember dreading the pilgrim season, when Kerala would be engulfed in a black-clad, dust-covered tide. Every beautiful face now rendered bandit-like, with their unshaven, unwashed faces. I was afraid of them, their raucous voices and their fervour. All I saw was the same lack of hygiene, the camping on railway station platforms, the surrender to bad food and zero-privacy and a general descent to feral sensibilities that I’d associated with my limited experience in making pilgrimages. I didn’t understand their abstinence then. I don’t understand their abstinence now.
