TN Temples, part 2: drama

The next day we drove back to Trichy (not good planning, I know; so much for the travel agent) to see the largest active Hindu temple in the world, on the island of Srirangam in the river north of the city. Angkor Wat is larger, but it is not an active temple. This temple is to Vishnu, and the most important temple for the Vaishnavite strand of Hinduism. The temple complex covers 156 acres! It is an entire city within the walls of the temple, an ideal city designed with perfect geometry. There are seven concentric walled ramparts with 21 gopurams (entrance gates). You drive right in through the first few outermost rings. We saw a temple camel walking by:

 And a temple elephant:

Mr Prabhu, our driver, said he would help us get a guide, and we were glad for the help because we'd heard that it is a somewhat chaotic scene with potential guides accosting clueless foreigners like ourselves. We parked and stowed our shoes, and then a guide appeared who walked us into the temple. There was a ticket counter where we could pay 20 rupees to go up onto the roof and look around. The guide and the ticket seller got into a long, animated conversation. We went up to the roof.

You can see something of the vast extent of the complex from up there; the tower Michael is looking at in the distance in the photo above is the tallest gopuram in Asia, 240 feet tall. There is apparently a gopuram made entirely of gold, protected by an electric fence! We didn't see it.

We came down from the roof but both our guide and the ticket seller had disappeared. We waited, watching people prepare their offerings and get organized for their temple visits. We called Mr Prabhu and said we didn't know what happened to our guide but we were just going to walk around by ourselves. Then a man with excellent English but not so many teeth approached us. He had offered his services as a guide earlier, while we were standing around waiting, but we had declined, saying we already had a guide (though he had disappeared). Now he said he had talked to our driver: the other guy was not really a guide; he was a tuk-tuk driver. A drunkard! We stood there, blinking and confused. Then the ticket seller materialized, grinning. "He's my friend," he said. 

"Wait, did you run our guide off then?" I asked. At that, the new guide got angry, called me a name, and stormed off. I burst into tears. (Agatha, who is reading over my shoulder as I type, says that is not accurate. Actually I was fine for about two minutes and then I started crying.)

 So we walked around the temple on our own. It was full of surreal and mysterious sights. There was a walled garden with two snow-white horses.

There were hallucinogenically-painted monkey gods.

There were beautifully dressed people partaking in the daily free meal.

There were these Vaishnavite symbols painted and sculpted everywhere, and replicated in ash and pigment on people's foreheads.

As we walked around, we tried to figure out what had happened. Had the ticketseller run off our guide in favor of his friend? Was our "guide" really an illegitimate drunk, and was Mr Prabhu at fault for hiring him? Was the "guide" actually just a middleman tasked by Mr Prabhu to find us a real guide? But if so, why didn't he follow through on his job? (We hadn't yet paid anybody, so no one ran off with cash.) If the toothless name-caller was actually the guide engaged by the broker, then why didn't he introduce himself to us as such? Why didn't the broker say to us, "here is your guide?" Why did everyone just disappear and then reappear? When we got back to the car, we tried to sort it out with Mr Prabhu, but we really didn't get very far between the language difficulties and the cultural differences. At one point, Mr Prabhu called someone named Moorthy on the phone and tried to get me to talk with him. Was Moorthy our guide? If so, which one was Moorthy-- the drunken tuk-tuk driver, or the toothless name-caller? In the end, we just agreed that some things will remain mysteries. We patched it up with Mr Prabhu and went to lunch, and everyone felt better after that. Still, we had had enough for one day. We scrapped the plan to climb the 400 steps of the Rock Fort temple and instead headed to Tanjore/Thanjavur to our hotel. We swam in the pool and ate dessert. The next day when we were looking at sculpture in the museum, Michael noticed it: Moorthy! Dakshinamoorthy! There he was at last.