Public Story
Thimithi
Arriving at dusk in Padappai, a small town in Tamil Nadu state, about an hour's drive from downtown Chennai, I passed people carrying trees to the nearby temple. It had rained the day before making the ground damp and muddy, making it harder to burn the firewood for the ash and coals. In the time it took the wood to be reduced to coals, a large crowd had gathered around the bed of coals. whilst another crowd, separated by a fence, watched from afar. I joined the mass of people on the outside of the fence as we were not to be directly involved in the ceremony but we felt included as a man in an orange skirt and large flower necklace threw large ladles of bright yellow, turmeric water into the crowd. As fun as this was, I could not help regret wearing white that day.
At the foot of the bed of coals, men adorned with large flower necklaces, readied themselves by kneeling down, holding a large tray with flames blazing and heads bowed in prayer. Then, they walked. The air above the coals shimmered, and from standing five meters away, I could feel the heat emanating from the coals. A man who spoke very little English standing in front of me explained that the people who were running on the coals had starved themselves for weeks to cleanse their bodies. As the excitement grew and the ceremony seemed to reach a peak, the crowd separated and a man brandishing a torch in each hand slowly walked through. As he approached the coal bed, what seemed like part of his outfit turned out to belong metal rods pierced into his body, sagittally radiating outwards. I could only guess that he was a high ranking priest. Unlike the others before him, this man walked calmly and peacefully on the bed of coals without hesitation or haste. As the crowd cheered and roared in excitement, the priest continued without a qualm in the world nor a falter in his step, almost as if he were walking through a heavily carpeted library. After he crossed the bed of coals, the excitement began to die down and the crowd began to dissipate as the ceremony came to an end.
I faded away with the crowds, wondering to myself what made them risk their wellbeing and walk on the blisteringly hot coals? I am not familiar with religion but what I saw was unlike anything I had witnessed before. How people believe in and rely on absolute and unknown beings, and sometimes for those invisible mystical beings, they can easily give up their precious possessions or achieve what seems impossible. I don't think of myself as very rational or skeptical, but religion is an unknown territory to me and a subject of exploration that is most closely related to human history and culture but difficult to understand.
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