At the age of 70, Arun dropped out. He gave away his money and possessions, traded in his trousers for a loincloth, and embarked on a new career as a sadhu, or holy man, travelling between the temples of south India in search of enlightenment. ‘I am waiting to die,’ he said happily. ‘I am hoping it will be in a temple. Already I am counting the days.’ He sounded like a schoolboy joyfully anticipating the end of term.
Arun was among a flock of saffronrobed sadhus perched along a wall in the temple of Arunachaleswar at Tiruvannamalai. Somewhere smeared with ash as a sign of their abandonment of the material world. Others had confined themselves to elaborate toka marks on their foreheads. Arun had a bald polished head, a white beard, and the kind of giggly sense of humour that seems obligatory for Indians of a philosophical bent. He told me about the god Shiva. ‘Have you seen his phallus?’ Arun asked. This was Shiva’s night, and his lingam was hard to avoid. Beneath a full moon, all south India seemed to be converging on Tiruvannamalai to worship Shiva’s lingam. On the mountain behind the temple, it was represented by a pillar of flame penetrating the dark sky. In countless shrines throughout the temple, it appeared in the form of a short stone pillar. As we spoke, women were queuing at a nereby shrine to smear the lingam with sandalwood oil. ‘The symbol of renewal,’ said Arun. ‘Very exciting for pilgrims.’
I had joined the throng heading for the temple through lanes of gaudy stalls selling charms and offering for the gods – garlands of flowers, coconuts, bags of camphor, fruit, tika powder, sandal-wood. Beneath the vast pyramidal tower of the temple, with its giddy tiers of demons and gods, a huge fire burned as if we had arrived at the gates of hell. Tripping over prostrate devotees, I pushed my way inside through apocalyptic clouds of smoke.
In the shadow of the gods, people were getting on with the banalities of domestic life. Families spread out elaborate meals, mothers suckled babies, men read news papers, children ran after one another, and old people settled down to complain and gossip. At the temple bath, pilgrims had stripped down to their underwear to immerse themselves in water that nobody had bothered to change since the death of Methuselah. A row of men wrapped in winding sheets slept against the outer wall, with a stillness that suggested they could doze through the Apocalypse.
In this swirl of life Arun had the detached air of a village elder. He introduced himself in an archaic English, full of the colonial colloquialisms of the 1930s. ‘Jolly good,’ he said when he heard I was touring the temples of south India. He had been an engineer and had decided to abandon his sedentary middle-class existance when his wife died. Despite his ascetic life he was an erudite and worldly fellow, with an Anglophile bent. After Shiva, Arun worshipped Shakespeare. His world was strangely compressed, as if he had been too busy chatting to the gods to notice the passage of time. He spoke with concern about the Great Fire of London, as if we were still picking through the embers. He hoped I had not been too disappointed when Churchill lost the 1945 election.
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