Amar was a billy goat.

Amar was a billy goat.

Police Staions in Bengal have a tradition of worshipping the godess kali. On a new moon day in autumn the Godess is worshipped by all and sundry and by policemen too often with legendary fervor. Its Diwali elsewhere in India. Kali in her deity is black or blue in body hue, nude, with a girdle of severed human hands, strung together and wrapped around her waist as a skirt for a dress. She is bare chested and has four hands. She holds the scythe in one, a severed human head in another, the third is in a pose that assures and the fourth is in a blessing posture. By the myth, she went so berserk killing demons that her husband, Shiva had to lie supine on her path till she tripped on him and that stopped her in her tracks. Her embarrassment is expressed by her tongue that lolls out. Of course she has a third eye .It is in that way she is worshipped in Bengal.

She is also called the shakti or power. It is perhaps for this aspect of her existence that the policemen worship her perhaps with a wish to gain some of it back from the middle class perpetuating cliché of a politician who rules the roost through different local committees and unions in the Marxist state. It was in one such police staion in a small town in West Bengal that Amar was brought for the first time to be sacrificed to the mother goddess. Sacrificing a goat and then cooking the meat and devouring it with some country liquor which has also been pre offered to the goddess is a tradition that perpetuates from the tantric days of Bengal.

It was night, the drums were increasingly moving up the tempo. The purohit or the priest’s chant was increasingly shifting from Sanskrit verbal mantras to tantric phonetic sounds of profound resonance. The hrings , srings and fats were the sounds that were being heard instead of the conjoined epithets common in Sanskrit Mantras. The priest changed into a vermillion silk instead of the tussar he normally wore and threw dollops of ghee into the fire. His face lit up with the crimson hue of the flames, down lighting his bushy eyebrows to cast a pair of crescent shadows on his fore head. Beads of perspiration were defying the November cold .

The time was ripe. Amar was readied. The whole day he had spent tied to a tether near the canopy under which the worship was being performed. He nonchalantly chewed grass and contemplated of greener grass and juicier leafy vegetable that the coming winter promised. He lifted up his snout time and again as his jaws moved sideways. Come the hour, he was dragged to the nearby well and was splashed with a couple of buckets of water. Before he realized what was happening some vermillion was splashed on his little forehead and he was dragged into the arena. He bleated and his nasal sound was interpreted by the worshippers as the human sound of ma (mother) and it was reverently concluded that Amar had also joined them in their worship of the mother goddess. What is better than a willing sacrifice? He was dragged to the altar where a piece of wood styled like a “y” was burried in the ground upto the base of the V. Amar’s neck was put in between the two arms of the V and holding him by his unfortunately long ears, his little neck was streched between the arms of the V and locked.

Religion demands that the sacrificial goat should be an all black male. Amar satisfied both the requirements and in addition he was a not exactly a kid. He was , lets say, a strapping teen in human equivalent. The people who were entrusted with the task of buying the sacrificial goat wanted to buy a slightly larger animal looking at the number among whom the resulting flesh had to be divided .This resulted in choice of Amar who was a rather well grown specimen than what is normally offered to the goddess.

The sacrifice is generally made by a non Brahmin, often a blacksmith by caste. Traditionally they were the ones who made the weapons, were deft in their use and were strong enough to wield them with ease. The Brahmins condescended to delegate this gory duty to the lesser mortals. In this case it was the Head Constable of unknown caste who dawned this crown. He was a dark short person of stocky built. His paunch brimming out of his dhoti which was tightly held in by his service belt. His hairless girlish chest was compensated by hirsute ears ( The barber trimmed them once a month). The kind weather of Bengal ,both political and otherwise, had robbed him of his ferociousness before he realized it. However he was handling the scythe. It was made of a truck spring element. The far end was gently rounded to fit the neck of a goat as in this case. Some imaginative blacksmith had etched an eye on each side of blade. He swung it up with much fervor, which I suspected to be alcohol induced rather than religious. He brought it down on Amar’s stretched neck.

So many things happened at that moment simultaneously. The Head Constable’s fatigue and lack of strength wavered the blow . Amar’s relative maturity gave him the courage and strength of contracting his neck muscle. The person who held Amars ears had a sweating palm which allowed Amar to move his neck. All things combined and the scythe bounced.

The rest is history. In the bedlam that followed who let Amar loose and where Amar went immediately thereafter, among the sounds in drawing breath of worshippers fearing the dark goddess’s wrath for a failed sacrifice, was never exactly known. Tradition says that he cannot be sacrificed again as the mother has apparently refused the sacrifice and that was a bad omen. Without a lot of fanfare the worship was completed of course without the sacrifice. The worshippers went home silently with the foreboding of the Goddesses wrath that they may have to bear for the next one year.

We saw Amar years later when he was a fully bearded, horned and stinking billy goat. He used to sleep in the police station , the same place that was supposed to be his slaughter ground. Come morning, he would walk to the nearby wholesale vegetable market where a chai walla gave him about two glassful of the brew poured in a depression on the earth. Amar lapped it up before it could permeate into the soil. He then moved to some vegetable sellers who presented him with some choicest vegetable of the season. He always asked never took. Sated he ambled to the outdoor hospital building and reclined on the verandah. In our adolescent years we whispered that he contributed to the society by impregnating the female of his species for a fee. The fee was collected by the same constable who tried to severe his head from his body. Is that what you call poetic justice? Who knows….at least I don’t.