apnaapan

my spiritual journey has had the distinct pleasure-pain of tumult.

i grew up in a malayali-hindu family. perhaps it was easier to engrain “culture” in me by means of a rather blissful yet fear-inducing ignorance, so i grew up chanting hymns i didn’t know the meanings of, inheriting superstitions and fears i couldn’t make sense of, and visiting “famous temples”, i.e., temples that garner the bhakti (devotion) of tens of thousands of visitors.

in kerala, visiting famous temples meant standing in tightly packed lines¹ for hours on end, all to get a ten—or, if you’re lucky or strong, a twenty—second darshan (view) of the temple idol. by the time of darshan, i couldn’t tell if the sweat covering my body was “my own” or that of the people engulfing me. we all melted into one big mass of prayer, dissolving all sense of “mine” and “yours”, as aarati bells and surrender and hope competed in decibels. a devotional moshpit.

these are my earliest memories of Guruvayur.

i had my crisis of faith, like all well-timed crises, at 18. perhaps even exactly on my 18th birthday. i declared with all the surety of an 18-year-old that i could not understand or believe in an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God while the world outside looked like this. never mind that the world outside has kind of always looked like this. the truth was that one of my ardent prayers, performed in exactly the way i was told, was unanswered. in retrospect, it was answered better than the prayer itself. but it was easier to justify my newfound non-faith using the world’s ugliness than my own bitterness, lest i rightly be called selfish. so, i became agnostic. or atheist. i couldn’t decide. so perhaps agnostic?

one of the gifts my non-faith presented me was freedom. freedom from all the rituals faith seemed to be accompanied by. i no longer needed to visit famous temples (or any temple), i didn’t have to sing bhajans at sunset, i could cut my nails when i wanted, shower when i wanted, and hope the way i wanted. so, i replaced faith-based fear with secular anxiety.

six years later, the rupture of coming out to my family, COVID seclusion, and corporate banality had beaten blue the same ego that had declared so surely that it was post-faith. i needed a tether, and i found it with a bunch of elderly aunties at satsang sessions. they spoke of God as the limitless compassion and kindness within our Self. i could put my faith in that. it was, after all, exactly what i longed for during that time.

and thus began my rebuilding of faith in a Higher Power, or “universe” as i called It at the time. i was starting from ground zero. i had no blueprint. or rather, i was collecting all the blueprints i could find and then seeing which parts of each i liked. i was mambo no. 5-ing spirituality. “a little bit of satsang in my life, a little bit of meditation by my side, a little bit of ramzaan’s all i need, a little bit of buddhism’s what i see…”

eventually, i found a spiritual home or guide in advaita (non-duality). advaita is so absolute at its pinnacle that it is so capacious in its acceptance and encouragement of so many different sadhanas (techniques of spiritual effort, or more simply, daily spiritual practices). so, i still indulge my mambo no. 5 tendencies when it comes sadhana, ironically to quell those very same mambo no. 5 tendencies of a scattered mind.

i meditate, i do yoga, i chant, i read, i contemplate. i try to be Present. but the one practice i have found most difficult to cultivate is a bhakti practice. what does the love for Being, for a formless, shapeless, attributeless, infinite, all-pervading God look like?

i found that the easiest and most unserious starting point in answering that question was to create a spotify playlist of bhakti songs. one of them, oru neramenkilum, was about Guruvayurappan, the temple diety at Guruvayur, sung by legendary malayali-christian singer K.J. Yesudas. Yesudas, whose name literally translates to “servant of Jesus”, is perhaps the most prolific recorder of devotional songs to Guruvayurappan and has yet infamously never been allowed to enter the inner sanctum sanctorum of Guruvayur, despite holding many concerts in the temple grounds, as he is “not a hindu.” a commentary for another time.

oru neramenkilum crashed onto my shores riding a towering wave of nostalgia. having heard it passively many times before, i found myself enchanted with these words upon its homecoming.

“avathaara Krishna, nin kalla nottam.”
“oh incarnate Krishna, your naughty glance [glitters].”

i was in my race, religion, and sexuality graduate class when oru neramenkilum returned to me. we exclusively read texts that dealt with Abrahamic Gods, mostly christian, none of which ever came close to describing God as naughty, mischievous, or playful.

“kalla nottam” (naughty glance) began strumming at my heart’s arteries—where i unscientifically believe memory resides—and, in its harmonies, excavated another memory from Guruvayur. playing with vivid, vibrantly red, tiny seeds called manjadikuru.

every malayali can perhaps feel the textured, tactile remembrance of these tiny red seeds when they hear the word manjadikuru. for me, they appear in the large brass vessel in Guruvayur, where we were told as kids that if we gathered two handfuls of these manjadikuru three times, we would be as naughty as baby Krishna. so, i would gather them in multiples of three—six, nine if i was feeling extra inspired—just for good measure. one can’t be too naughty or too like Krishna, i figured.

wrong. girls are indoctrinated into the pseudo-seriousness of adulthood quite early. as womanhood approaches like a thick cloud of fog, we are told we must swap subversion for submission, pranks for properness, and uninhibited laughter for inhibited giggles. the fog of adulthood is perhaps just as thick, if only slightly more forgiving in its delayed onset.

“kalla” has many translatable forms. as a noun, it can mean thief, cheat, liar. as an adjective, it can mean naughty, playful, mischievous, false. kalla’s translation, like its meaning itself, is interstitial. its essence lays in the crevices of a perceptible “good and bad” and out of the reach of language and surety and definition. kalla, like naughtiness, is both subversive and discursive. it is formless until a moment, an event, gives it form.

kallataram, or naughtiness, requires a profound attunement to audience and acceptability, and an even more profound attunement to the ways in which an audience can be invited into the destabilizing of acceptability without becoming destabilized itself. naughtiness thus unveils the unseriousness of worldly worries and accepted norm. it is a joyous hymn to the fertile lands between “good” and “evil”, where surprise, bewilderment, novelty and acceptance grow fruits of laughter and glee.

let’s examine naughtiness through the anatomy of a jumpscare.² a jumpscare’s audience and acceptability can be broken down as such: first, a jumpscare requires an audience of at least two, of which one must be the subject of the jumpscare, and the other, the agent of naughtiness. second, its acceptability is composed of (i) expectation, i.e., the assumption of knowing the next moment and (ii) reception, i.e., how the jumpscare is received by the audience.

a perfectly executed jumpscare picks its audience perfectly and perfectly destabilizes expectation while preserving reception. it often, if not always, ends with the subject of the jumpscare enjoying the event. destabilize expectation too much and reception is affected (e.g., you jumpscare someone who’s driving) and destabilize expectation too little and the subject is un-jolted, unaffected, and, ultimately, unimpressed. naughtiness is thus a discipline that demands deep Presence, which is why children are its leading experts.

naughtiness is also a transformative force. it channels the forces of change to rebirth change. all great protest movements are birthed by naughtiness. a naughty disobedience ridicules injustice and humors choice. look the exquisite gaaliyan (insults) of the recent indian youth protest movement.³ or look at how it was led by a meme political party, literally called “cockroach janata party”. and see how amusing it is that protests are sometimes called riots, perhaps precisely because they are f u n n y, and those who cannot indulge their humor are called the riot police.⁴

even the origin story of manjadikuru in Guruvayur is a story of Krishna’s naughtiness. the story goes that it was an elderly devotee’s one wish to visit Guruvayur. she was too poor to take much as an offering, so she began collecting manjadikuru as a gift to her God. despite being jeered at by her neighbors for collecting seeds as though they’re precious stones, she filled a bag with carefully collected and polished manjadikuru and set out on a strenuous, forty-four-day journey to Guruvayur by foot. she arrived on the first day of the month, the day the naduvazhi (local king) would visit the temple and gift an elephant as an offering to Krishna.

in kerala, is it custom that the naduvazhi enter the temple before the common people. so, clearing the path for the naduvazhi, his officers push people out the way. they mocked and shoved this devotee to the ground, scattering her carefully collected manjadikuru everywhere. as her teardrop fell on to the temple grounds, the elephant lost it, running wild and destroying the temple. a voice is heard from inside the temple, “where is my manjadikuru? where is my gift my devotee lovingly gathered?” cheeky, indeed.

the elephant calmed down once the devotee was helped up and led to the temple deity after gathering her manjadikuru. some might say, “that’s not an example of Krishna’s naughtiness. that’s an example of Krishna’s wrath.” i would argue that such an analysis is half-baked. naughtiness can channel wrath. e.g., the wrath of the oppressed being channeled into protest movements. or, when my brother, aged around four or five at the time, poked an elderly uncle with the pin of his nametag because this uncle spanked our other brother. we could only laugh at the creativity of my brother’s wrath. he lost his nametag that day because that uncle threw it out the window, but he added to his naughtiness lore.

the sadhana of naughtiness thus lies in the fact that it forces us to continually recognize “good and bad” by their ever-moving outer boundaries. to dance in the infinite space between these concepts requires that we be supremely attuned, aware, and present. it requires that we detach from our ego that tells us that we are always right and always good. kallataram is like the sunlight that clears the thick fog of adulthood, the one that tricks us into passively submitting to a defined, static notion of good and bad.

i learnt in my race, religion, and sexuality class that the forbidden fruit from the story of Adam and Eve was from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. i chuckle.

yours in mischief,

1. it’s funny to say “line” to describe indian forms of organizations around the act of waiting. there is no linearity to this organizational structure. one is surrounded by people and can be pushed not just forward or backward, but in any direction, which one may consider as the “line” moving. ↩︎
2. a jumpscare is the act of scaring, jolting or surprising a subject. it suddenly disrupts a moment’s expected outcome. ↩︎
3. some of my favorite creations from these protests can be found linked here, here, here, and here. sorry to those who don’t understand hindi. translation would truly dampen the force of this art. ↩︎
4. the layers of jokes really do write themselves. i think it’s hilarious that fascists complain that they can’t joke anymore while literally trying to create a world order that is overly punitive, forbids any form of subversive play, and cannot see the beauty of the in-between—conditions that kill jokes, laughter, and naughtiness. ↩︎