Escaping Samsara

Sacred Violence

Existence precedes essence.

– Jean Paul Sartre

When I was eight, I would cycle a hundred meters down from my backyard into a vast expanse of fields girdled with coconut palms. The post-harvest green of the earth was enticing because the land would be in a restive mood and would pass it on to you. It was also the time that birds came out to nest: the crows, the eagles, and the woodpeckers would have access to the upper heights of the tallest trees, like the coconut or areca nut palms. The clumsier and smaller birds, like the sparrows, would nest in thickly braided vines and shorter portions of the trees. But the flightless birds like the white-breasted water hen or the rain quail are left to raise their progeny on the perils of the ground.

It was the nest of one of those birds that I encountered in the middle of the field that day. It was abandoned and defenceless. There were three tiny lime-coloured eggs neatly arranged within a circle of dried grass. A snake, a rodent, or a bird of prey might devour them in seconds.

It soon became my object of curiosity. I had never seen anything of the sort before. I was aware that life was contained in the delicate shells of those eggs. I circled around the nest on my bicycle. If the foetal creatures in there could see me, I would have looked like a vulture circling prey.

I was unusually curious about the deepest secrets of the eggs. I was ignorant of anything about being an egg, but at that moment, I had an overwhelming desire to know precisely what I could never comprehend. I wondered what multitudes the eggs had contained.

But as I decided to return home, without thinking, I rode my bicycle over the nest. I felt at least one or maybe all of them crack. I did not look back. The contents of the eggs did not leave residues on my tires.

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I have been told that I drowned a kitten once when I was a child. It was an incident that my cousins loved to bring up during my childhood and adolescence.

I had no memory of doing it, but every time they mentioned it, I would freeze, and a singular shiver would run down my body. I would apologetically look around at the cats around the house that lived off the fish and meat my mother fed them, wondering if I were still a danger to those creatures.

 I would regretfully remember every instance that I have patronised the cats that lived in the periphery of our home.

My paternal grandparents’ house was ancient. After renovating it, my grandparents decided to keep the tiled portions of the roof where the cats would litter every few months. But occasionally, there would come a point when there were too many kittens and cats running around than my grandparents liked. Grandchildren like me were then tasked with rounding them up, taking them to a faraway place and letting them go to fend for themselves. It was better than calling animal control since that would mean a death sentence sooner or later, there were too many cats around for people to bond with an individual cat. It was perhaps one of those kittens that I had drowned.

The taunting from my cousins intensified after I became a vegetarian in sixth grade. They would mark me a cat-killer of a hypocrite when I politely refused the chicken and beef curries that my aunts and uncles cooked on family reunion lunches.

As a child, I had no idea what I was doing to the kitten. I was perhaps trying to induce the creature to an activity that I loved so much, and my mother made me do thrice a day. I was too young to have imagined that kittens were averse to water and had no cultural inclination to bathe so many times. But I remember, from the times that I had participated in rounding the cats up, that I had a desire to touch and tame them, make them understand that what we were doing was for their own good, the same way I felt when I saw the eggs in the field. A curiosity that kills. A curiosity that turns into frustration when you realise that you can never gather the essence of things.

I can never understand what it feels like to be a faction of existence outside of me, no matter if I split it open, dissect, crush or dilute it. They contain worlds and worlds within worlds.

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I stood by the sanctum with my eyes fixed on the ground as my father held the rooster’s neck before the priest’s sharpened blade. The high-pitched moans of the creature ceased as soon as it entered the sanctum and its dazing light. The copper golden lamps and pitchers rendered the burning wicks resplendent, glowing all around the thatched eaves and the shrine’s dome like a halo. The lamps lit up the tussock upon which the shrine stood, and one could easily discern the path and its neatly cut grass, that led to my home.

The priest fed the rooster a gulp of water from his cupped left palm and slit its throat with the blade in his right hand.

The creature spasmed and pummelled its headless body against the floor of the shrine and tumbled down its steps into the ground where I stood, my head bowed. Even in death, it refused to be silenced. The rooster bespattered the earth with blood. Its raging muscles battered the ground in desperate protest.

The pool of blood on the floor tinged the golden glow of the light with red.

I was the only one still paying attention to the rooster’s thuds ricocheting off the ground. My father stepped down from the sanctum and stood watching the priest finish the ritual. He shouted to let my mother and my little brother know that the sacrifice was made, and they could come to offer their prayers. Those who were averse to the slaughter could desist from attending until the rooster was fully dead. The priest put the blade away, took a lantern in his hands, made circles with it, around the stone-cut idol of Vishnumaya, The Existence-Sustaining Illusion, and turned towards us to make circles around our heads, blessing us. He sprinkled us with sandalwood-infused water from a copper pitcher. The rooster’s spasms fully subsided. It splayed itself upon the ground.

My father took it home with us, ripped the feathers off, slit its joints with a dagger, and extracted the internal organs to dispose of them. He handed the rest of the meat over to my mother. She cooked it in a blend of cardamom, fennel seeds, cinnamon, chilli powder, cumin, and an assortment of other spices and vegetables to make it taste as unlike meat as possible.

I was often embarrassed that we sacrificed roosters to deities. “At least we are not like the forest dwellers I see on National Geographic, sacrificing human beings and whatnot,” I would say to myself. But then I questioned if that thought was entirely mine. If something or someone had placed the thought there? As I grew up, I had to closely examine the origin of my thoughts as I became less and less an extension of my parents and the people immediately surrounding me.

I found it hard to come to terms with the extent to which I was a product of my environment. I find meaning in the world through the patterns that someone else created and left behind generations ago. Like the haruspex of ancient Rome, where divination was based on the entrails of sacrificial animals like poultry and sheep, my family sought divine favour with the flesh of roosters. This practice transformed the relationship you had with the being you consumed. The carcass was transubstantiated into divine auspice. It gave my parents a reason to treat the rooster with a higher degree of dignity and keep it well fed. And most importantly, you watched it die. You listened to the creature’s pleas and solicitations as if before a lawful court. It was a form of violence that you did not have to hide.

And I was embarrassed because we did not hide it. That we let the rooster bloody the ground, instead of dying in a mechanised abattoir, enclosed by clinical sterility.

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I traced the origin of my embarrassment further, to a violence that is hidden behind sweet dispositions, politeness, and sermons of love.

I read Romila Thapar and Shashi Tharoor, whose historical tomes informed me that the Portuguese came first, enticed by the muslin and the spice. The meagre portions that reached Europe on foot or through the Arabian middlemen on the Silk Road, all the way from Eastern Asia, were insufficient. So, they brought ships through the treacherous Indian Ocean, risking death and drowning.

They sought to know the unknowable. And perhaps, in frustration borne out of incomprehension, they unleashed a volley of violence that made the world later question what or who a human being is and what separates us from the animals we kill, hunt, patronise and consume.

I gleaned from the books that there were wars and naval conflicts between the Portuguese and the people of the Indian peninsula. Outnumbered on the land, the Portuguese circled about the Coromandel Coast, disrupting ancient maritime trade routes. When they met with the Keralite naval commanders of the Marakkar clan, there was even battle and prolonged crossfire. But when the Portuguese captured one of their opponents, and if they were Muslim, they would tie the detainee to a cannon’s mouth and bespatter their entrails over the shoreline as their frigates traversed beside the coast. Once they were powerful enough to build fortifications in the port city of Goa, Inquisitions were set up that interrogated your masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, and hereticism. Then, they burned people in the flesh and effigy before the cross or on it.

Once I finished reading the texts, I felt like I was never fully equipped with enough resources to come to terms with history. My body began shivering, my eyes brimmed with tears. To read and digest how the bloody curtain of colonialism that systematically wiped out at least 34 million Indians was raised, was harder than I ever imagined.

I cannot pin-point what makes human beings act in the violent ways that we read about in history books. But we are all shaped by violence in uncountable ways and, it does not take much for people to turn into the agents of violence under the commandments of authority. Perhaps it was the fear of the unknowable that drove their actions, perhaps it was biblical greed. Perhaps it makes it easier to love your neighbour if they look, act, and believe in the same ways you do.

Sometimes, we must be comfortable with acknowledging our ignorance. The army of anthropologists, cartographers, ethnographers, and photographers who sought to boil the colonies down to their essence created spectacles of the exotic that we still consume with the same patronising fervour with which we watch zoo animals.

When we fail to comprehend the limits of our knowledge, we might end up making certain people less than human, less than who they are. When I take inventory of the acts of violence that I have perpetrated, I begin with the animals, for all the times that I have been made to feel less than myself, animalised, disenfranchised, I identify a similar spiral in the lives of the creatures that humanity pushes to the periphery.

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All images shot on Olympus E-M10MarkIV by Sreekuttan “Sree” P S unless otherwise credited.

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