The Rat Temple
(Delhi, India 19:52.17.7.2004)
“If I tell people India is dirty or even really dirty, people back home in Holland won’t understand.” A Dutch guy told me. “If I tell them it’s hard to travel or really, really hard to travel, they still won’t know what it’s like.”
I had been more or less awake for forty hours, experiencing varying degrees of sleep deprivation that diminished my alertness and glazed my eyes with zombielike detachment. I began in Dharamsala in northern India, where Tibetan monks sought refuge after Mao Zedong’s communist bulldozer pushed them off of their homeland some sixty years ago. I consulted a monk who took my palm and birthdate and revealed that I was a merman in my previous life, which explains my morbid fascination with the ocean. He then told me I should buy a horse. I went to the Dalai Lama’s house, but nobody answered, so I left.
The first leg of the journey, an overnight bus ride to the capital Delhi featured a woman beautifully draped in a forest green sari. She sat directly in front of me, threw her head out the window and vomited. My window was also open. I will let you connect the dots from her mouth to my arm and face.
Usually I’m able to sleep in buses, able to prop my knees against the seat in front of me, wedge my head between the window and seat and achieve a physically balanced – albeit silly – pose. Once that point is reached, fatigue does the rest and I’m knocked out for hours at a time, waking up only for an occasional security check. A quick pat of my left pant pocket, the permanent home of my wallet. A lift of my small over-the-shoulder day bag assures me its contents haven’t been removed. Carrying this bag everyday in an increasingly widening cleft on my right shoulder has acquainted me deftly with its exact weight. Digital camera plus guide book plus three pens plus mini-flashlight plus bug bite ointment called Monkey Holding White Peach I bought in Koh Phangan equals just this much when lifted.
But tonight I couldn’t sleep. I was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, where this vomitter was concerned. Her initial upchuck was substantial, but is wasn’t over. Anyone who’s ever fallen victim to the stomach flu or cheap tequila knows that vomiting is an ordeal that doesn’t end unambiguously. The final surge – whether it is a shallow trickle or a mad surge – always leaves you definitely relieved. No doubt about it. This woman continued to hang her head out the windows, awaiting a reprisal. And so was I. Why not close the window? Suffocating in the heat and aroma of fellow travelers could very well induce me to vomit myself.
After the bus arrived in Delhi at 6am, I hired a rickshaw to take me to the train station. I had no idea when the next train would leave for Jaipur, my next stop. My large backpack, which is about the size of three huddled toddlers, has the same effect on conmen and touts that steak has on Dobermans. It’s an attraction beyond desire or desperation. It’s cosmic law, a universal invariable like magnets of opposing charges on a collision course.
“Where are you going?” asks one.
I don’t answer. My sleepless night on the bus waiting for vomit has dulled me so comprehensively that I walk through the mob unfazed. The woman never did finish her business.
“The ticket office isn’t open.”
I don’t care.
“You can buy a ticket at my office.”
Sure pal, get out of my way.
“Let me give you a billion rupees.”
Whatever.
In the time it took me to find the tourist booking office, roughly three minutes, no less than half-a-dozen men stood in my path and tried to redirect my destination to their ‘office’ or wallet. One of them, as it turned out, did tell the truth. The office was indeed closed and wouldn’t open for another ninety minutes. I was the only one waiting, discounting the poor girl sleeping on the ground just outside the entrance. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t so eager to buy a first class seat to Jaipur that she’d camped out the whole night.
A couple arrived. I smiled at them, a welcome-to-the-club smile that probably surfaced like a grimace. They didn’t react. The woman’s frown was so severely arched that it pulled her entire face down to her shoulders. Even her eyebrows were depressed. The man was sweating as if he’d just sprinted three miles wearing polyester and then ordered the wrong dish at an Indian restaurant. They looked wretched. They threw their bags down, collapsed on top of them and refused to speak to anyone or each other for an hour and a half. Looks like they had a worse time getting here than me.
And then a woman came. From her accent, she seemed French. She was given incorrect information or foolishly believed a man on the street and ended up at the wrong station, missing her train. Yet she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she was also vomited on last night? That wasn’t the reason. She lives in Pakistan, volunteering with Afghan refugees. To her, this was a vacation. Seeing people, especially women, live active, relatively free lives was such a welcomed change from the fundamentalist conservatism of Pakistan, that these minor disasters just bounced off her proudly exposed skin.
“In Pakistan, I’m the only woman not wearing a bourka on the streets,” she said, “that’s if you see any women at all.”
A man came, an American in his late twenties who’d left his job as a programmer for Microsoft. He lived in Seattle but found himself at a crossroads. Was considering maybe moving to San Francisco. Maybe not. As Yann Martel wrote in his introduction to Life of Pi, “…a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature. “ He arrived just four days ago and had the wide-eyed optimism of a mountain climber who’d decided to climb a peak he didn’t quite realize was Mt. Everest.
“Have you been on a long bus ride yet?” He asked.
“What do you consider long?”
“Over six hours.”
“Yes. I just got off a 12-hour joyride.”
“How are they, in general?”
“Well they’re alright.” I didn’t want to unnecessarily frighten him, even if to make my own adventures seem heroic. “But one bus actually did lean over the edge of a cliff in Himachal Pradesh. I almost died. “
“Oh,” he said. He began flipping through his guidebook.
A Sikh man has come and opened the door to the tourist office, gently nudging away the slumbering girl. I go in, followed by the now disenchanted ex programmer, the only woman in Pakistan not covered head to toe and the couple who, for all anyone knew, had just passed through hell on their way to the New Delhi Railway Station.
Tourist offices are set up in major train stations as air-conditioned havens for travelers who’d had it with conmen and humidity. Inside these offices, travelers are unafraid to speak their native languages or to openly check how much they’ve got left in their wallet. It’s as much a psychological reprieve as it is physical.
Experiencing the ‘real’ India is a noble pursuit, but buying a ticket in the ‘real’ line involves a confusing transaction with a teller who may not speak English. And that’s if you manage not to get pushed out of line. Everybody who comes to India will inevitably experience the ‘real thing’ whether it is being the only foreigner on a bus, or eating with local businessmen or playing a pick-up game of cricket. If there is an easier alternative, why not? Besides, even the hardiest backpacker will never know what it’s like to live in India – even if they’ve begun to drink tap water or figured out how Indians poo without using toilet paper – because of a single mental distinction: Even if it’s in the back of their mind, they know they can leave to go home.
To go home. For the first time in months as I had finally made it on the train from Delhi to Jaipur, I wished for home. I missed the Western interpretation of personal space. I missed driving my car on the freeways. I missed the convenience of eating, the availability of sashimi, carne asada burritos and bul go gui within a twenty minute drive. The juice of a medium-rare steak and a waitress whose fingers weren’t dipped in the food I was about to stuff in my face. I missed the stress-free environment of fixed price retailers, buying things without haggling, without resorting to a negotiations showdown for a bottle of Aquafina. I missed the absence of odors. I missed bathrooms and electricity that won’t die in the middle of nighttime showers.
“I’ve been through India,” a French guy told me outside a bar in Nha Trang, a beach town in central Vietnam. “They say if you can travel India, you can travel anywhere in the world.”
I find that statement a bit conservative. I’m convinced a space bound shuttle with a quickly vanishing oxygen supply would involve less trauma. Chances are, a small boy won’t be on board to beg for money. “Houston, we have a problem. The boy says he wants rupees.” The boy wipes the ground as he passes through the cabins. He has stopped in front of my feet and is scratching my shin, which has the effect of stretching thin my patience and compassion. As a matter of personal constitution, I never give beggars money. As this boy stares into my still zombied eyeballs, trying to impart guilt or a sense of humanitarian duty, I quickly fear I’ve become calloused to the needs of the less fortunate. Before I came to India, I always thought poverty was the result of an unborn baby choosing the short straw. It was a matter of chance, that’s all. Equally, it was a matter of luck that I happened to slide down my mother’s birth canal. I could easily be this boy on the ground. There’s nothing that separates me from him, us from them, but a bit of prenatal luck. But how soon this boy forgets that I had already given him my one and only piece of food – a half-melted Snickers bar – on his last go-round.
At the tourist office, I was told the ride from Delhi to Jaipur was a painless one. Quick and easy. You don’t need first class, the man said. Save yourself some money. Seemed sensible. Only five hours away anyway. Here’s some bite-sized facts I picked up from an issue of India Today. The Indian Railway operates the largest transportation system in the world; is the single largest employer, with 1,500,000 workers; serves 4.5 billion travelers each year; and runs 9000 passenger trains out of 7000 stations everyday on a network of tracks that stretch 63,000 kms. Here’s some bite-sized opinions: The trains are excruciatingly slow and reliably late. I was once six hours late on a ride that was supposed to take four hours. Even if you consult a recent Trains at a Glance and it lists a ride from Delhi to Jaipur to take no more than five hours, don’t believe it. Faith has no business in the transportation system. Being immersed in Indian mass transit quickly makes an agonistic out of the even the most hopeful or naïve traveler: You will get there when you get there.
And what was it for? Dharamsala to Delhi to Jaipur to Bikaner to a small town in the desert? All of these commuting debacles.
Rats.
Rats?
Rats.
It’s an event so deeply entrenched in my memory that it seems dreamlike, but when I saw a National Geographic program profiling the rat temple, I promised myself I’d go there one day. I suppose it isn’t the expected reaction from a 9-year-old who’d otherwise preoccupied himself with rocky road ice cream and the Jetsons. And yet a Hindu temple Westerners and health inspectors would deem infested intrigued me as a cultural freakishness so different and beyond my suburban concept of right and wrong that it seemed otherworldly, exotic in it’s truest sense. After spending some time in India, I know better. India is indeed another planet. Its diversity is unmatched and its uniqueness could easily justify India having not only its own continent, but its own orbital plane.
Perhaps the rat temple is the perfect symbol of this, as the Eiffel Tower marks French innovation or the Colosseum reminds us of Roman largesse, or the Great Wall of Chinese industriousness and xenophobia. The rat temple symbolizes Indian insanity. What self-respecting civilization devotes a fraction of its culture to carriers of The Plague? Only crazy Indians.
I had planned to wear long pants tucked inside tube socks that were strangled tight by big black boots. I imagined rats smelling a foreign, delicious body, assembling themselves in small legions that would corner me from all sides, including the ceiling, and mount my body. The tiny panicked scratches as they crawled up my legs. The excited high-pitched squeals as they smelled the grease off my fingers. Rats coming down from the roof as they dived on my head and encircled my neck as a tightening, furry leash. Their frayed tails whipping and tickling the corners of my lips. And then the brave ones jumping for my ear lobes, sticking their officious snouts inside. The sudden loud sound of moist squirming as if I’d been pushed into a pool of saliva.
You can come wearing a chain-link suit or a fireman’s coat, but know this: No shoes allowed.
As I enter the temple a man has yelled for my attention and motioned for me to prepare my camera. In one smooth movement he dunks his head in a vat of milk, where several rats are lounging, and takes a few festive gulps. Some rats are drinking the same milk, though with less fanfare. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite get the picture. Graciously the man grants an encore. In a country whose roads display billboards about AIDS prevention (two men shooting up with needles and a two-way arrow between them; the silhouetted profile of a pregnant woman with an arrow pointing to the fetus) it’s incredible that the sharing of bodily liquids between man and rat isn’t an issue taken up by the surgeon general. I’m told later though that while The Plague has affected parts of Rajasthan, the state in which this temple sits, these rats, inexplicably seem immune to it and haven’t passed it to any humans. There are also no reports of rat-cat violence. Magical animals indeed.
The inner temple is forbidden to non Hindus, so while the guide/jeep driver I hired to take me from Bikaner through the desert paid his respects, I explored the corridors of the complex.
The first thing I noticed is an undeniable laissez faire with which these rats seemed to live. They know this is their hood. They know nothing about the constant state of paranoia and scurrying of their urban cousins, the ones behind refrigerators, in a perennial struggle against mouse traps and cats. What these temple rats resemble are elderly folks in the South, sprawled on balconies, sipping lemonade, talking about the heat of a summer that might never end. Few things – maybe a call from a grandchild or the oven timer going off – could shake their resolve to stay put.
These rats clump together in corners and around holes in the walls. Even when I get close, they do not react. In fact, some were completely still. It was the first time I’d seen a sleeping rodent. I wondered if these ones were dead. But no sooner that this thought came did I spot one covered with ants. So that’s what a dead one looks like, in case you’re confused about whether you should step quietly around one or stop and pray for its salvation.
Behind the forbidden inner sanctum is a small u-shaped passageway completely devoid of light. I had made it through, up to the first turn of the hall when I realized that this is where the majority of the rats were. There were hundred on the floor, yet I could still see the path of the tiles. If I stepped on one, would its first impulse be to run away or bite? And if one attacked, would it then signal the intruder alert and trigger an all out offensive? As I considered the instinctive predisposition of the rat – fight or flight – I stood still and heard the voice of JFK. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” He may have been talking about the Soviets or space exploration but generations and several thousand miles away, he spoke to me, as he does often when I find myself in these fixes. He makes up my mind: The onset of fear becomes a greater source of concern than an army of rats.
So I walked nervously, my shoulders raised up to shield my neck. I slide my way through. I took off my shoes and decided that these socks were not coming back to America, or even the jeep. I witnessed varying shapes of grays and blacks shift around me. Each time I stepped on a branch or an abandoned flip flop, I was startled into a girlish panic. It raised the hair on my neck and made me jump. I would’ve been able to jump on a table or compete in the high jump, but temple corridors are hardly the setting for fine dining furniture or regulation Olympic apparatus. But I was beyond the point of embarrassment, even as I made it through the dark passageway and into the daylight.
I continued to be startled by stray rocks and hard pigeon poop. And I tried to play it off by darting off to the side to review pictures I’d taken just two minutes ago. The local worshippers were amused but sympathetic, but more than that, I knew the rats had seen and were probably laughing at me. “Did you see that Japanese guy just jump up and squeal like a girl? These tourists are so squeamish.” And then they’d sit back again, relax in the still, humid air and watch the day pass.
(Delhi, India 19:52.17.7.2004)
“If I tell people India is dirty or even really dirty, people back home in Holland won’t understand.” A Dutch guy told me. “If I tell them it’s hard to travel or really, really hard to travel, they still won’t know what it’s like.”
I had been more or less awake for forty hours, experiencing varying degrees of sleep deprivation that diminished my alertness and glazed my eyes with zombielike detachment. I began in Dharamsala in northern India, where Tibetan monks sought refuge after Mao Zedong’s communist bulldozer pushed them off of their homeland some sixty years ago. I consulted a monk who took my palm and birthdate and revealed that I was a merman in my previous life, which explains my morbid fascination with the ocean. He then told me I should buy a horse. I went to the Dalai Lama’s house, but nobody answered, so I left.
The first leg of the journey, an overnight bus ride to the capital Delhi featured a woman beautifully draped in a forest green sari. She sat directly in front of me, threw her head out the window and vomited. My window was also open. I will let you connect the dots from her mouth to my arm and face.
Usually I’m able to sleep in buses, able to prop my knees against the seat in front of me, wedge my head between the window and seat and achieve a physically balanced – albeit silly – pose. Once that point is reached, fatigue does the rest and I’m knocked out for hours at a time, waking up only for an occasional security check. A quick pat of my left pant pocket, the permanent home of my wallet. A lift of my small over-the-shoulder day bag assures me its contents haven’t been removed. Carrying this bag everyday in an increasingly widening cleft on my right shoulder has acquainted me deftly with its exact weight. Digital camera plus guide book plus three pens plus mini-flashlight plus bug bite ointment called Monkey Holding White Peach I bought in Koh Phangan equals just this much when lifted.
But tonight I couldn’t sleep. I was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, where this vomitter was concerned. Her initial upchuck was substantial, but is wasn’t over. Anyone who’s ever fallen victim to the stomach flu or cheap tequila knows that vomiting is an ordeal that doesn’t end unambiguously. The final surge – whether it is a shallow trickle or a mad surge – always leaves you definitely relieved. No doubt about it. This woman continued to hang her head out the windows, awaiting a reprisal. And so was I. Why not close the window? Suffocating in the heat and aroma of fellow travelers could very well induce me to vomit myself.
After the bus arrived in Delhi at 6am, I hired a rickshaw to take me to the train station. I had no idea when the next train would leave for Jaipur, my next stop. My large backpack, which is about the size of three huddled toddlers, has the same effect on conmen and touts that steak has on Dobermans. It’s an attraction beyond desire or desperation. It’s cosmic law, a universal invariable like magnets of opposing charges on a collision course.
“Where are you going?” asks one.
I don’t answer. My sleepless night on the bus waiting for vomit has dulled me so comprehensively that I walk through the mob unfazed. The woman never did finish her business.
“The ticket office isn’t open.”
I don’t care.
“You can buy a ticket at my office.”
Sure pal, get out of my way.
“Let me give you a billion rupees.”
Whatever.
In the time it took me to find the tourist booking office, roughly three minutes, no less than half-a-dozen men stood in my path and tried to redirect my destination to their ‘office’ or wallet. One of them, as it turned out, did tell the truth. The office was indeed closed and wouldn’t open for another ninety minutes. I was the only one waiting, discounting the poor girl sleeping on the ground just outside the entrance. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she wasn’t so eager to buy a first class seat to Jaipur that she’d camped out the whole night.
A couple arrived. I smiled at them, a welcome-to-the-club smile that probably surfaced like a grimace. They didn’t react. The woman’s frown was so severely arched that it pulled her entire face down to her shoulders. Even her eyebrows were depressed. The man was sweating as if he’d just sprinted three miles wearing polyester and then ordered the wrong dish at an Indian restaurant. They looked wretched. They threw their bags down, collapsed on top of them and refused to speak to anyone or each other for an hour and a half. Looks like they had a worse time getting here than me.
And then a woman came. From her accent, she seemed French. She was given incorrect information or foolishly believed a man on the street and ended up at the wrong station, missing her train. Yet she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she was also vomited on last night? That wasn’t the reason. She lives in Pakistan, volunteering with Afghan refugees. To her, this was a vacation. Seeing people, especially women, live active, relatively free lives was such a welcomed change from the fundamentalist conservatism of Pakistan, that these minor disasters just bounced off her proudly exposed skin.
“In Pakistan, I’m the only woman not wearing a bourka on the streets,” she said, “that’s if you see any women at all.”
A man came, an American in his late twenties who’d left his job as a programmer for Microsoft. He lived in Seattle but found himself at a crossroads. Was considering maybe moving to San Francisco. Maybe not. As Yann Martel wrote in his introduction to Life of Pi, “…a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature. “ He arrived just four days ago and had the wide-eyed optimism of a mountain climber who’d decided to climb a peak he didn’t quite realize was Mt. Everest.
“Have you been on a long bus ride yet?” He asked.
“What do you consider long?”
“Over six hours.”
“Yes. I just got off a 12-hour joyride.”
“How are they, in general?”
“Well they’re alright.” I didn’t want to unnecessarily frighten him, even if to make my own adventures seem heroic. “But one bus actually did lean over the edge of a cliff in Himachal Pradesh. I almost died. “
“Oh,” he said. He began flipping through his guidebook.
A Sikh man has come and opened the door to the tourist office, gently nudging away the slumbering girl. I go in, followed by the now disenchanted ex programmer, the only woman in Pakistan not covered head to toe and the couple who, for all anyone knew, had just passed through hell on their way to the New Delhi Railway Station.
Tourist offices are set up in major train stations as air-conditioned havens for travelers who’d had it with conmen and humidity. Inside these offices, travelers are unafraid to speak their native languages or to openly check how much they’ve got left in their wallet. It’s as much a psychological reprieve as it is physical.
Experiencing the ‘real’ India is a noble pursuit, but buying a ticket in the ‘real’ line involves a confusing transaction with a teller who may not speak English. And that’s if you manage not to get pushed out of line. Everybody who comes to India will inevitably experience the ‘real thing’ whether it is being the only foreigner on a bus, or eating with local businessmen or playing a pick-up game of cricket. If there is an easier alternative, why not? Besides, even the hardiest backpacker will never know what it’s like to live in India – even if they’ve begun to drink tap water or figured out how Indians poo without using toilet paper – because of a single mental distinction: Even if it’s in the back of their mind, they know they can leave to go home.
To go home. For the first time in months as I had finally made it on the train from Delhi to Jaipur, I wished for home. I missed the Western interpretation of personal space. I missed driving my car on the freeways. I missed the convenience of eating, the availability of sashimi, carne asada burritos and bul go gui within a twenty minute drive. The juice of a medium-rare steak and a waitress whose fingers weren’t dipped in the food I was about to stuff in my face. I missed the stress-free environment of fixed price retailers, buying things without haggling, without resorting to a negotiations showdown for a bottle of Aquafina. I missed the absence of odors. I missed bathrooms and electricity that won’t die in the middle of nighttime showers.
“I’ve been through India,” a French guy told me outside a bar in Nha Trang, a beach town in central Vietnam. “They say if you can travel India, you can travel anywhere in the world.”
I find that statement a bit conservative. I’m convinced a space bound shuttle with a quickly vanishing oxygen supply would involve less trauma. Chances are, a small boy won’t be on board to beg for money. “Houston, we have a problem. The boy says he wants rupees.” The boy wipes the ground as he passes through the cabins. He has stopped in front of my feet and is scratching my shin, which has the effect of stretching thin my patience and compassion. As a matter of personal constitution, I never give beggars money. As this boy stares into my still zombied eyeballs, trying to impart guilt or a sense of humanitarian duty, I quickly fear I’ve become calloused to the needs of the less fortunate. Before I came to India, I always thought poverty was the result of an unborn baby choosing the short straw. It was a matter of chance, that’s all. Equally, it was a matter of luck that I happened to slide down my mother’s birth canal. I could easily be this boy on the ground. There’s nothing that separates me from him, us from them, but a bit of prenatal luck. But how soon this boy forgets that I had already given him my one and only piece of food – a half-melted Snickers bar – on his last go-round.
At the tourist office, I was told the ride from Delhi to Jaipur was a painless one. Quick and easy. You don’t need first class, the man said. Save yourself some money. Seemed sensible. Only five hours away anyway. Here’s some bite-sized facts I picked up from an issue of India Today. The Indian Railway operates the largest transportation system in the world; is the single largest employer, with 1,500,000 workers; serves 4.5 billion travelers each year; and runs 9000 passenger trains out of 7000 stations everyday on a network of tracks that stretch 63,000 kms. Here’s some bite-sized opinions: The trains are excruciatingly slow and reliably late. I was once six hours late on a ride that was supposed to take four hours. Even if you consult a recent Trains at a Glance and it lists a ride from Delhi to Jaipur to take no more than five hours, don’t believe it. Faith has no business in the transportation system. Being immersed in Indian mass transit quickly makes an agonistic out of the even the most hopeful or naïve traveler: You will get there when you get there.
And what was it for? Dharamsala to Delhi to Jaipur to Bikaner to a small town in the desert? All of these commuting debacles.
Rats.
Rats?
Rats.
It’s an event so deeply entrenched in my memory that it seems dreamlike, but when I saw a National Geographic program profiling the rat temple, I promised myself I’d go there one day. I suppose it isn’t the expected reaction from a 9-year-old who’d otherwise preoccupied himself with rocky road ice cream and the Jetsons. And yet a Hindu temple Westerners and health inspectors would deem infested intrigued me as a cultural freakishness so different and beyond my suburban concept of right and wrong that it seemed otherworldly, exotic in it’s truest sense. After spending some time in India, I know better. India is indeed another planet. Its diversity is unmatched and its uniqueness could easily justify India having not only its own continent, but its own orbital plane.
Perhaps the rat temple is the perfect symbol of this, as the Eiffel Tower marks French innovation or the Colosseum reminds us of Roman largesse, or the Great Wall of Chinese industriousness and xenophobia. The rat temple symbolizes Indian insanity. What self-respecting civilization devotes a fraction of its culture to carriers of The Plague? Only crazy Indians.
I had planned to wear long pants tucked inside tube socks that were strangled tight by big black boots. I imagined rats smelling a foreign, delicious body, assembling themselves in small legions that would corner me from all sides, including the ceiling, and mount my body. The tiny panicked scratches as they crawled up my legs. The excited high-pitched squeals as they smelled the grease off my fingers. Rats coming down from the roof as they dived on my head and encircled my neck as a tightening, furry leash. Their frayed tails whipping and tickling the corners of my lips. And then the brave ones jumping for my ear lobes, sticking their officious snouts inside. The sudden loud sound of moist squirming as if I’d been pushed into a pool of saliva.
You can come wearing a chain-link suit or a fireman’s coat, but know this: No shoes allowed.
As I enter the temple a man has yelled for my attention and motioned for me to prepare my camera. In one smooth movement he dunks his head in a vat of milk, where several rats are lounging, and takes a few festive gulps. Some rats are drinking the same milk, though with less fanfare. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite get the picture. Graciously the man grants an encore. In a country whose roads display billboards about AIDS prevention (two men shooting up with needles and a two-way arrow between them; the silhouetted profile of a pregnant woman with an arrow pointing to the fetus) it’s incredible that the sharing of bodily liquids between man and rat isn’t an issue taken up by the surgeon general. I’m told later though that while The Plague has affected parts of Rajasthan, the state in which this temple sits, these rats, inexplicably seem immune to it and haven’t passed it to any humans. There are also no reports of rat-cat violence. Magical animals indeed.
The inner temple is forbidden to non Hindus, so while the guide/jeep driver I hired to take me from Bikaner through the desert paid his respects, I explored the corridors of the complex.
The first thing I noticed is an undeniable laissez faire with which these rats seemed to live. They know this is their hood. They know nothing about the constant state of paranoia and scurrying of their urban cousins, the ones behind refrigerators, in a perennial struggle against mouse traps and cats. What these temple rats resemble are elderly folks in the South, sprawled on balconies, sipping lemonade, talking about the heat of a summer that might never end. Few things – maybe a call from a grandchild or the oven timer going off – could shake their resolve to stay put.
These rats clump together in corners and around holes in the walls. Even when I get close, they do not react. In fact, some were completely still. It was the first time I’d seen a sleeping rodent. I wondered if these ones were dead. But no sooner that this thought came did I spot one covered with ants. So that’s what a dead one looks like, in case you’re confused about whether you should step quietly around one or stop and pray for its salvation.
Behind the forbidden inner sanctum is a small u-shaped passageway completely devoid of light. I had made it through, up to the first turn of the hall when I realized that this is where the majority of the rats were. There were hundred on the floor, yet I could still see the path of the tiles. If I stepped on one, would its first impulse be to run away or bite? And if one attacked, would it then signal the intruder alert and trigger an all out offensive? As I considered the instinctive predisposition of the rat – fight or flight – I stood still and heard the voice of JFK. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” He may have been talking about the Soviets or space exploration but generations and several thousand miles away, he spoke to me, as he does often when I find myself in these fixes. He makes up my mind: The onset of fear becomes a greater source of concern than an army of rats.
So I walked nervously, my shoulders raised up to shield my neck. I slide my way through. I took off my shoes and decided that these socks were not coming back to America, or even the jeep. I witnessed varying shapes of grays and blacks shift around me. Each time I stepped on a branch or an abandoned flip flop, I was startled into a girlish panic. It raised the hair on my neck and made me jump. I would’ve been able to jump on a table or compete in the high jump, but temple corridors are hardly the setting for fine dining furniture or regulation Olympic apparatus. But I was beyond the point of embarrassment, even as I made it through the dark passageway and into the daylight.
I continued to be startled by stray rocks and hard pigeon poop. And I tried to play it off by darting off to the side to review pictures I’d taken just two minutes ago. The local worshippers were amused but sympathetic, but more than that, I knew the rats had seen and were probably laughing at me. “Did you see that Japanese guy just jump up and squeal like a girl? These tourists are so squeamish.” And then they’d sit back again, relax in the still, humid air and watch the day pass.
