The Night the God Spoke Malayalam

The Theyyam I attended was in a grove outside Kannur, on the advice of a homestay owner who drew the route on the back of an electricity bill. I arrived at midnight to a shrine lit by coconut-oil lamps and a crowd of perhaps two hundred, wrapped against the mild cold, children asleep on shoulders. The performer (by day, I was told, a house painter) sat for hours as artists built the goddess onto his face. Around four a.m. drums that had been patient all night stopped being patient. What followed I will not fully attempt: a figure in a towering headdress and a skirt of palm fronds, moving in ways the human knee should not permit, circling a bonfire, at moments walking through its edges. And then, this is the part that stays, the god sat down, and villagers approached one by one with their troubles, and the god listened. A woman spoke of a sick husband. A man of a court case. The god replied to each in old, formal Malayalam, offering counsel, rice, and turmeric. At dawn the performer removed his crown and became a house painter again, visibly exhausted, drinking tea in the corner of the grove. I have stood in some of the grandest temples in India. I have never felt the distance between the human and the divine shrink so small as in that grove, where it was, for one night, the width of a painted face.

From Chapter 4 of 28 Shades of India. Read the opening of the chapter on the Kerala journey page.