Nicola Barker - The Cauliflower

In the beginning (if there ever was a beginning — was there ever a beginning?) there were three powerful forces: creation, preservation, and destruction. Over millennia these three competing and often complementary powers or concepts were deftly sewn into an exquisite weave of ornate characters and stories in four of Hinduism’s principal religious texts, the Veda s. The creator is Brahma, Vishnu is the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. Shiva has a wife. Her name is Kali (the feminine form of kalam , which means “black,” or kala , which means “time”). When fierce Kali died, Shiva became uncontrollable with grief and rage. He carried her corpse on his shoulders and performed a violent dervish dance of anger, smashing his feet down upon the earth. The other gods became concerned that unless Shiva could be persuaded to relinquish Kali’s body he would destroy the world altogether, and so Vishnu took a blade and threw it at Kali’s corpse, which was then scattered in fifty-two chunks across the earth. The little toe of the right foot landed next to the great river Hooghly, in Bengal, and a temple was built there to mark the spot. This temple was — and is — Kalighat. This place was — and is — Kali-kata.

In the beginning was Job Charnock. And Job Charnock was named after the biblical character famed for being sent endless trials by Satan, with God’s permission, to test whether his love for God was truly sincere. Job is celebrated for his righteous suffering. Our Job — Mister Charnock (who suffered righteously) — was born in London although his family originally hailed from the north, from Lancashire. He was a loyal, highly valued employee of the English East India Company in Bengal. He was a moral man and a devout Christian. In 1663, he took a common-law wife — a Hindu widow, a sati —who he was reputed to have snatched from her husband’s funeral pyre. She was fifteen years old, and he renamed her Maria. They had four children together. They all lived in Cal-Kali-kata-cutta. One of the daughters, Mary, went on to marry Bengal’s first president, Sir Charles Eyre. Job was devoted to Maria, and they lived happily together for twenty-five years until her tragically premature death in 1688. A devastated Job built a garden house in the northern suburb of Barrackpore, Cal-Kali-kata-cutta, in order to remain close to her grave, where, rumor had it, every year he slaughtered a cock in a Sufi ritual on the date of her death. Maria was buried as a Christian, although Job Charnock was accused of converting to Hinduism and his life story was later — with considerable bile and aplomb — employed as a cautionary tale of moral laxity and improbity. When Charnock died, Eyre, his powerful son-in-law, erected a monument in his honor — which made no mention of his beloved wife — constructed from a form of shimmering granite which in the year 1900, after briefly apprehending it, the famous geologist Thomas Henry Holland would christen “Charnockite.”

In the beginning was the word, and the word was Cal-Kali-kata-cutta, but there is no word, and the person who created the word is no person, only rock, and if there was a person he was a most loathed, mistrusted, morose, and morally degenerate company administrator. So it’s probably better that we waste no more of our precious time and energy thinking about him here.

1857, the Kali Temple, Dakshineswar (six miles north of Calcutta)

What better place in the world for one such as Uncle to be born than deep in the bosom of the Chatterjee family? Both Kshudiram and Chandradevi had been blessed with many divine visions. Uncle’s brother Ramkumar had special spiritual gifts and foretold his own wife’s early death. Uncle’s sister, Katyayani, was prone to erratic behaviors and was once possessed by a bad spirit which Kshudiram exorcized with a pilgrimage to Gaya to worship at the feet of Vishnu. Kshudiram’s sister, Ramsila, would sometimes believe herself to be possessed by the spirit of the Goddess Sitala (the Disease Goddess, the Goddess of Smallpox, who brings coolness to victims of fever). I was very afraid of Ramsila as a boy, but Uncle — only four years older — showed no fear of his aunt during her transformations. No, the young Uncle was not remotely afraid. Uncle was fascinated. Uncle calmly observed the reverence and awe with which Ramsila was treated in their humble Kamarpukur household during these special occurrences. He watched her intently. He studied her closely. One time he even quietly whispered in my ear, “Ah, wouldn’t it be just splendid if the spirit who now possesses my aunt would someday possess me?”

Uncle was set apart from the very beginning. I have often been told that he was a beautiful baby and a beautiful child, and when I look back on those early years that is very much what I, too, remember. He was always cherished and celebrated. Uncle was handsome and charming. His face was full, like a shining moon. He was greatly loved and admired in the small village where he was raised. One village elder was so besotted by Uncle that he would even take the young Uncle out into the rice fields, hang scented garlands around his neck, then secretly feed and worship him there as an incarnation of the young Krishna. Village religion is a private religion. It is a householder’s religion. The Christians have one God and one way to worship him. We Hindus have a thousand gods and a thousand ways to worship them. The gods call to us — they speak to us — and whoever speaks the loudest or the most persuasively we respond to with a most profound sincerity. We make the best choices we can and then try to cultivate as deep a love as we can possibly muster.

Uncle was always an impressive actor and a mimic. He made everybody laugh with his delightful pranks. The village women constantly sought out the wonderful Gadai to sing and to dance for them. He was one of their very own. Throughout his life women have treated Uncle as a girl, and men have happily indulged their wives and their mothers and their daughters in this curious whim of theirs. Uncle is so sweet and so innocent. They have nothing to fear from him. Uncle could never pose any threat. The very thought of it is laughable! He is a child. Untarnished by the world. And for this very reason Uncle could go wherever he chose. No door was closed to Uncle. The womenfolk of Kamarpukur were all completely devoted to him. Even as he grew from a child into a young man he continued to possess a feminine quality that made him at once their confidant and their plaything. Nothing could be kept hidden from the young Uncle. He could not be curtailed.

There was one exception to this rule, however, in the shape of a successful trader by the name of Durgadas Pyne. Durgadas Pyne was as fond of Uncle as everybody else, but he maintained a strict system of purdah in his home and would often brag to other villagers about how nobody in Kamarpukur had ever seen the women of his family. On one occasion he made this brag within Uncle’s hearing, and Uncle was greatly provoked by this statement. He immediately insisted that he could know and see everything that happened among the women in Kamarpukur, even those cloistered in Durgadas Pyne’s household. Durgadas Pyne merely laughed at Uncle. He did not take this brash boy seriously.

A short while later, at sunset, an impoverished weaver woman dressed in a filthy sari and veil and coarse ornaments arrived at Durgadas Pyne’s home, her basket of wares tucked under her arm. She told Durgadas Pyne that she had come to the market at Kamarpukur to sell yarn but had been unexpectedly abandoned by her thoughtless companions. She then asked — in pitiful tones — if he might provide her with a shelter for the night. After a brief interrogation of her story Durgadas Pyne was satisfied by her tale and sent her to his women’s apartments to be cared for there. The weaver woman spent the entire evening with Durgadas Pyne’s womenfolk, eating, laughing, and engaging in gossip for many hours. She was finally distracted by the frantic calling in the street outside of Rameswar Chatterjee, who was then searching for his missing brother, Gadadhar. I think you can probably work out the end of this story. Suffice it to say that Gadadhar had hoodwinked Durgadas Pyne and all the members of his family with this prank, and while at first Durgadas Pyne was very angry with Uncle, he soon saw the humor of the situation and commended the young man for his impressive disguise.