Public B&E

Men on hooks and crickets in the dark

Throngs of people, but of you I saw no sign. Did my diversion work? Are you in Jaipur, perhaps, riding past its pink walls on the back of a painted elephant? Or further south, floating down the Kerala backwaters, shaded by the curved thatched roof of a rice barge?

Wherever you are, I hope the weather is pleasant.

***

Kuala Lumpur in January is thirty degrees and festival season, which is to say: it is loud and crowded and nobody is watching anyone. Thaipusam brings a million people to Batu Caves. I have always found crowds more navigable than empty streets.

The procession begins before dawn in the city and winds its way north. I joined it for the last hour, which was enough.

Have you experienced the kavadi? You will have read about them at least. The photographs don’t prepare you. Elaborate metal frames, some of them taller than the person carrying them, fixed to the body by skewers and hooks through the skin. Cheeks, tongue, chest, back. The devotees walk for hours this way. They do not look like people in pain. They look like people who have gone somewhere else entirely.

The piece from Pondicherry rode at my hip, wrapped in a scarf. On the last mile it grew warm. I blamed the weather until the warmth rose and fell with the crowd itself. It ran hottest beside the men on the hooks, the ones who had gone furthest. This was new.

The statue of Murugan at the entrance is forty-two meters tall and gold. Everyone walks past it looking up. I did too.

The 272 steps to the Cathedral Cave are painted in bright colors with monkeys collecting their toll of treats at the edges. I climbed with the crowd, which had its own momentum. Halfway up, on the left, a wire fence and a locked gate.

The gate presented no difficulty.

***

Inside, the silence was a shocking contrast to the tumult without. The festival was a vibration in the rock, muffled and distant. But I had a flashlight, the thing I took from the Ashram, and another piece to find.

The floor was guano, decades deep, and everything that fed on it lived blind. White crickets. Centipedes the length of my hand. Just past the last survey marker the ceiling dropped, and I went the rest on hands and knees, flashlight in my teeth, the beam held anywhere but the floor. The skittering carried on under my hands either way. Seeing it was an option I declined. I was glad I brought gloves.

Past the crawl the passage widened, and the piece stirred. It pulled me to a wall with a niche cut at shoulder height. Its edges were rubbed smooth. Old soot above, where lamps had burned. Empty.

***

All that and it was not there. Someone must have moved it. Centuries ago.

But my search was not wasted. The one I held... reacted. It revealed a sign. A sigil. I do not yet know what it means. I will decipher it before you do.

— N.

Murugan is the Hindu god of war, victory, and wisdom, and one of the most widely venerated deities in Tamil culture. The Batu Caves temple is among the most significant sites of his worship outside India.

The Dark Cave, a separate cavern within the Batu massif, is closed to the public for conservation. Its two kilometers of passages host an ecosystem fed entirely on bat guano, including the Batu Caves trapdoor spider, Liphistius batuensis, found nowhere else on earth.