far and near

lila with nandi
Tue, 27 Sep 2005

Good Morning,

Paying attention to everything and knowing all the while that infinite intricacies of this land are far beyond comprehension...all that's leftover is to surrender and know for certain that its all blessing! Dance class has been brutal and fabulous all at the same time. I'm in the end strokes of notating everything that Shyamala taught me. This always feels like the ultimate survival of the dance rests on my ability to be able to draw stick figures...the pressure is on!..but this time I have a back up plan, Lila has been enjoying (asking for more and more) her dance classes with Shyamala, so if I can't pull it off maybe she can.

Who would have suspected that a day vesting temples would result in scorched feet? I truly feel as though I walked over, under, around and through the proverbial AND literal fires. Stone floors get VERY hot in the mid-afternoon sun of these equatorial regions. We hired a taxi to drive us the 2 hours to Kanchipuram. This town is home to the Kamakshi Temple, who we pay much homage to in our dances. Kamakshi is a goddess possessing 3 eyes, each eye bestowing the grace of a different goddess: Lakshmi, Saraswati and Durga.

Sri Kamakshi Devi

There are several temples which refuse to let "non-Indians" past the outer sanctum, the Kamakshi Temple being one of them. I'm not sure if I'll ever get used to "breaking the law" in order to lay myself at the feet of the divine but ...ya gotta do what ya gotta do and I guess that's what it is for me this time around. I tell Lila to keep her head down, avoid all eye contact...and don't worry, its no big deal! It generally seems to work, we've only once been escorted out of a temple by the police....neat huh?

Back to the story, Kamakshi is sublime! Her eyes follow her devotees, seeing, cutting through and gracing everything. After making our way through the crush of humanity I was utterly entertained by watching the temple cats scale the (1500 year old) stone carved walls to procure precariously high perches ...all the better to pounce on the green temple parrots from. And from that vantage point, if one turns 180 degrees north, one might see 3 elephants getting the total brillo pad scrub down. We stood and watched as a man scoured the third eye of one pachyderm for at least 15 minutes (they were covered in technicolor paint)...now tell me - who wouldn't be enlightened after a scrubbing like that!

4 temples later, we made our way to the Amanakshi Aman Temple where Srimati Balasaraswati (Shyamala's dance guru) gave her arangetram offering (debut dance performance).... back in the days when temple dancing wasn't a crime.... this is a sacred site, especially for anyone in our dance lineage...a visit there is like stepping into the river of past, present and future.

I've now come to consider any scooter with less than 5 people on it as 'empty' and unless 3 of those people are not priests with top knots fluttering in the breeze and the other 2, 70 year old grannies perched sidesaddle as their saris lingering frighteningly close to the back wheel...well then, its just a waste of petrol (which by the way is about $4.50 per gallon here).

One of our nightly rituals: Shyamala hears a cow a kilometer off, scrambles for the bananas and we all head for the door. Let me mention here that the cows move very fast through certain neighborhoods, mostly those that have ALOT of dogs.... such as ours. We have yet to see this drama play out fast enough for her to feed any cows, dang they're quick! But it’s totally fun to watch everyone wielding bananas and chasing cows...