The Pain Chronicles (29 page)

And that was what happened.

ONLY NOT SHOWING YOU MY DEVOTION IS PAINFUL

We had been married a year, and everything was almost perfect, but I still wanted not to have pain. In the back of my mind was the irksome image of the Hindu pilgrims during the festival of Thaipusam merrily mortifying their flesh for the benefit of some god or other—dancing with weighted fishhooks jangling from their pectoral muscles while crushingly large altars were balanced on their heads.

By this point I understood something of the physiology of acute pain: I had read of the ways in which the brain can temporarily block pain in a state of trance, like the nineteenth-century mesmerists, or through the release of endorphins triggered by a threat to survival, like a soldier in a battle (the phenomenon termed
stress-induced descending analgesia
). But I didn’t fully believe any of it. After all, if it were really true, why couldn’t
my
brain block
my
pain? I felt the need to prove the pilgrims’ serenity untrue: a parlor trick, perhaps, the way I had heard that coal walking could be done painlessly if the coals were covered with a layer of ash and the participant walked quickly and had callused soles. Or perhaps the pilgrims were masochistic or smoking opium—or—who knows? So, although I wanted to stay home and celebrate our first wedding anniversary (our paper anniversary!), I decided to go by myself to watch the festival in Kuala Lumpur, one of the places where the holiday draws a large number of celebrants.

_______

The festival marks the birthday of the god Lord Murugan, the Emancipator, when he received a sacred spear that he used to vanquish a demon that had been tormenting mankind. This divine spear, representing the power of mind over matter, is the power that pilgrims are said to channel through the ritual piercings of their bodies during the festival.

Self-inflicted pain struck me as a curious way to celebrate liberation from a demon. Isn’t pain the demon that is always tormenting us and from which we still need to be free?

“When a Hindu child is hurt,” Shree—a Hindu guru who had participated in the festival—explained on my first day there, “they are not fussed over or encouraged to be afraid of pain, the way you are in the West.” As a small child, he had handled a cactus that left hundreds of spiny needles in his hand. There was no remedy but to have them pulled out needle by needle. His mother gave him a statue of Lord Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, to look at while she worked. During the hours of the extraction Shree focused on Ganesha’s contemplative elephant face instead of the pain. “After that, I wasn’t afraid of pain,” he concluded.

The story made no sense to me. Pain usually causes more—not less—fear of pain.

“When you are in pain, you have lost yourself, and you start to cry, not because of the pain, but because you have lost yourself. Pain can be mastered and controlled by one’s own self,” he said.

“You think?”

He recalled a childhood biking accident in which he fell off his bike and discovered that his torn, bloody knee didn’t hurt. “Subconsciously, I already believed I had conquered pain. I prayed to the gods, ‘Thank you for letting me believe I have conquered pain.’ ” Another time, he said, a school friend unexpectedly stabbed Shree’s hand with a skewer. Alarmed, he felt pain and started bleeding profusely, reinforcing his belief that controlling pain was a function of mental preparation. “You know about the placebo effect. For you, you have placebo, but placebo was invented by scientists. For us, we have belief, which comes from the gods.”

He recalled how once, walking on coals in a temple in India, he came to the cooling pot of milk at the end of the walk in front of the statue of the god and he chose not to step in it, despite his sizzling soles, because “I wanted to show the god:
for me pain is nothing now.
For me, only not showing you my devotion is painful.”

He had been to Thaipusam many times, he said, and none of the rituals had ever hurt him. The ability to master ritual pain makes the Indians (a minority subject to discrimination by the Malaysian government) feel more powerful. The least powerful members of society, the poor and uneducated, are most often the piercers. “If we control pain, don’t think we can’t control the government,” he told me, narrowing his eyes.

KAVADI

Each year, just after midnight during the first full moon of the Tamil month of Thai, a bejeweled wooden chariot containing a statue of the god Murugan is taken from a temple in downtown Kuala Lumpur. Barefoot pilgrims carry the chariot eight miles to the sacred Batu Caves on the outskirts of town. They arrive at daybreak and carry the chariot up the 272 steps into the largest cave, where they place the statue among the ornate shrines to other deities.

Hundreds of other devotees flock to the cave carrying their own
kavadi
(“burdens”) in the form of shiny pots of milk, piercings, or homemade altars that rest on their heads or shoulders. They believe that if they bring Murugan these
kavadi
, he will release them from the real burdens of their lives—poverty, illness, infertility, misfortune. The larger, more grotesque and spectacular the
kavadi
, the greater the relief it is believed to engender.

The homemade altars—huge canopies weighing more than thirty pounds and embroidered with peacock feathers and images of the god—are held by wooden bows carried on the devotees’ shoulders and attached by hooks that pierce the chest. There are also
kavadi
in the form of ceremonial carts pulled by ropes hooked into the pilgrims’ backs, like ones I had seen in photographs.

The first morning of the festival, devotees gathered at a nearby river for a ritual cleansing. Although it was early, the sun was eviscerating. The stagnant river looked as filthy as the dusty shores. The men climbed out of the water, their bodies gleaming, and readied themselves for the piercing and the placing of the
kavadi.
I tried to persuade my translator—a plump young Indian woman who worked for the local English-language newspaper—to translate the questions I wanted to ask them, but she didn’t want to. She was hot and bored. “I need a Coke,” she complained.

Next to us, an older, gray-haired man pierced his ruddy cheeks with a gray metal skewer that looked like it was intended for shish kabob. A wave of dizzy nausea came over me. His grown daughter explained to me in English that her father had been bitten by a snake as a teenager and his mother had vowed to Lord Murugan that if he healed her son, her son would pierce his cheeks each Thaipusam for the rest of his life. Another daughter chimed in that after years of marriage she had still been childless, so her father asked Murugan for a child, and by the next year, the wish was granted. That year, her father was requesting a second child for her. I asked the daughters if they would ever pierce themselves, and they laughed shyly and said no—their father’s sacrifice served the whole family.

“Ask him if it hurts,” I told my translator.

“It doesn’t.”

“Just ask.”

“He says the god comes into him, and he feels no pain,” she translated.

I remembered how Shree told me that he feels that many of the pilgrims’ understanding of Hindu theology is unsophisticated. “They say the god comes into them, but in Hinduism everything is god,” he complained. “I am god and you are god. How can something come into you that you already are?” Rather, Shree said, the true meaning of the festival is to remind people of their own innate powers. “When we pierce, we are using the divinity we always possess to control our consciousness,” he said.

Nearby, a priest stitched a crochet-size needle through the tongue of an older woman in a scarlet sari as nonchalantly as if he were pinning a mannequin. The woman’s eyes looked sorrowful, but she did not flinch. The long needle forced her pierced tongue to stick out, as the needle caught against her cheeks. Women do not pierce their backs or chests, because it would be unseemly, my translator explained, but piercing their tongues is considered befitting because female tongues are often loose. On top of their heads, women carry milk pots as
kavadi.

A beautiful young man with a crown of dark curls climbed up the riverbank and sat astride a stool before a priest, as water dripped off the young man’s bare chest. The priest gathered his materials to perform the piercing. When he was eleven, the man explained, government soldiers came to his house and destroyed it and beat his family and took their land. He recalled the sight of his mother bleeding and how the pain of his own injuries disappeared. “What is painful like seeing that?” he said. The pain of that sight is a pain he can never forget. Through piercing, he believes he is improving his own karma, while the government’s bad karma will eventually cause it to fall. “Seeing the Indian people suffer—that’s what causes me pain now,” he said.

I told my translator to ask him about the pain of the fishhooks.

“He’ll be in a trance,” she said impatiently.

“Ask him to explain in his own words.”

She rolled her eyes and spoke to him. “He says the pain no longer belongs to him. The god frees him from this pain.”

“But will he be in pain?”

“Lord Murugan’s lance, the
vel
, vanquishes the pain.”

Others gathered around the pilgrim, chanting “
vel, vel
” and beating drums as the priest deftly began threading the hooks into his back. At the end of each hook the priest hung a lime. The pilgrim’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his tongue—dyed bright red with a special paste to look like a god’s tongue—lolled forward. As he stood, the limes trembled on his back like charms on a bracelet. He stomped his feet, tossed his head back, and bellowed—a huge, terrifying sound. Then he knelt, and the enormous
kavadi
was hoisted on his shoulders. As his followers cheered, he began to dance.

“See, I told you, he’s in a trance,” my translator said. “Normally, he could barely lift it, but now he can dance.”

Tourists pushed their way through the circle of followers and snapped pictures of the moment the hooks pierced the skin, as if trying to document the dream world they stumbled into on their vacation:
Look, look—look at the way it looks like it doesn’t hurt.
I half worried that the gawkers would break the spell and the devotee would suddenly be as agog—revolted or frightened—as we were and wake to the pain. But the worshippers seemed as indifferent to the tourists as if we were looking at them through a one-way mirror.

If I were in that sacred space, would I be free of pain? Despite everything around me, I could feel my pain decorating my body. If I asked the priest to thread the hooks through my skin, would my pain be transformed into an offering so I could ask the god for something in return?

How much would it hurt?

“What about infection?” I asked my translator.

“No one gets infected during Thaipusam.”

“Just ask the priest.”

“He says the god takes care of it,” she said without asking him.

I decided that my pain could be my
kavadi
—invisible to others, but seen, perhaps, by the gods with their extra eyes. I bought a wreath of yellow flowers from one of the stands that lined the way to the caves and carried it around my neck as I joined the crush of thousands of people processing up each side of the stone steps. Just ahead of me, a couple lugged a child in a saffron-colored sling hanging from sugarcane stems over their shoulders. Children conceived after a request to Murugan are traditionally brought back on Thaipusam to show the god his handiwork. In the center of the steps, roped off from the throng, the pilgrims bearing
kavadi
marched to drumbeats and flutes. On the jutting sides of the cliff, small long-tailed monkeys darted and screamed. My translator, holding hands with her boyfriend, lagged farther and farther behind.

The steps led up into a cave whose stone ceiling arched a hundred meters high. Its rock walls looked like the drips of a melted candle. Murugan’s shrine was at the top of the cave, guarded by a priest. Pilgrims discarded their sandals and approached the god barefoot, single file, with offerings of milk and flowers and coconuts. I took off my sneakers, but the priest came over and stopped me, asking in a British Indian accent if I was menstruating.

I flushed, startled at being asked the intimate workings of my body by a strange man, and said (fortunately) no. I told him I had brought the wreath around my neck as an offering.

“You can’t give that,” he said shortly.

“Why not?” I asked timidly, expecting him to tell me that I wasn’t a Hindu.

“It’s
used.
You can’t give the god something that you have already worn.”

“Oh . . . I was just wearing it on the way . . . I see . . . Can I still ask for something?”

“You do not need to bribe the god,” he scolded. “What do you want?”

I hesitated.

“Not to be burdened by pain. To be unburdened.”

He snorted and threw up his hands, and then gestured toward the procession of devotees flooding into the caves.

I remembered how—as the enormous
kavadi
were first lifted onto the pilgrims’ shoulders—the pilgrims’ knees buckled slightly as they rose and took their first slow steps up toward the mountain. Then, as their followers cheered and chanted, they would begin to dance: limes jingling on their bodies, peacock feathers trembling over their heads, their burdens light.

V

TO CURE THE MIND:

Pain as Perception