preparing for the festival

Easwar had brought the first couchsurfers to his family's home town 5 years before us. I had contacted him through the website about our trip to Kerala and he invited us to his family’s annual Hindu festival, following that we would help with the preparations. 

The stately yellow house was surrounded by trees, and you entered the festival grounds, a clearing in their land, from a gate by the driveway. Through the trees, we saw workers tying lines across the treetops for the canopy.

One evening before the day of the festival, I stepped away from my partner who was, since noon, still skinning coconuts. (Our hosts had asked him, perhaps jokingly, to skin something like 100 coconuts, and he wouldn’t leave until he had accomplished that difficult task).

Night was falling. As I meandered, I crossed paths with a woman, who had stopped and bowed her head. I looked over and saw a small house on a platform. The door was guarded by two faces with red tongues rolling out, and it was glowing. I stopped and watched, too. 

The owner of the house, Babu, stepped up the stairs to the temple and rang a loud bell. The door opened. Inside, a man was bringing a tray of incense to the head and shoulders of a statue of a goddess, adorned in red garments and flower garlands.

Babu continued to ring the bell; the resonance shot out at us observing. It felt like our energies were blasted away as the priest summoned the goddess to attend the festival. 

A song came over the house's PA system, and the priest came out to us with the tray of burning incense and smudged us. The door closed. You could see light and movement inside. You could hear the priest chanting.

Finally the door opened again, and the priest gave one to Babu and one to me: A green leaf functioning as a palate with white flowers, red powder, brown clay, and a black oil.

“Blessings from the Goddess,” Babu said. I looked at him. I didn’t know what to do. He shrugged.

“It is what we believe,” he said, and turning to a mirror, he dabbed the clay onto his forehead.