It is confirmed now that I am a crazy person. I concluded this one April morning as I stood nearly naked in a temple in South India while a stranger in a loincloth hauled a bucket of water from a suspicious-looking well and poured it over my head.
The water, I was assured, is holy. It comes from one of 22 theertha kundams, or wells, at the Sri Ramanathaswamy temple on Rameswaram island at the southern tip of the state of Tamil Nadu. The temple is famed for its sculptured pillar hall, said to be the longest in the world; its immense central tower, riotous with the usual celestial mob scene; and its associations with the Ramayana, the Hindu epic no one has ever been able to get all the way through. More than anything, though, it is known as a pilgrimage place, the only one in India where believers can participate in a particular sequence of purifying baths.
I should note that I am not a believer, having given up decades ago on the solitary God I was raised with. And yet there I stood in a temple consecrated to a pantheon that by some estimates is populated by 330 million gods, lips and eyes squeezed tight as I tried to put from my mind other assorted entities invisible to the naked eye, things that lack poetic appellations like Ardhanarishvara or Parvati, things with scary Latinate names instead: staphylococcus streptococcus and Escherichia coli.
How did I come to be here?
The simple answer was that I drove from a village in the middle of nowhere, a singular no-place I return to often, on roads that passed through an emerald patchwork of rice paddies and palms and into another so sandy and arid that in places it resembled the African savanna. The simple answer is that good friends -- two Frenchmen who have restored a vast 19th-century mansion in the area -- had insisted over a typically late-night dinner that I must see the great temple and that to visit it without partaking of the ritual baths was to squander an opportunity to experience grace. That may not have been precisely how they put it. Some wine had been consumed by that hour.
Yet I had woken up the next morning at 5 and hopped in a car to Rameswaram with Jayapaul, the driver I hire each year. The roads were good and the landscape placid, and considering that it was already late April, the heat was not as intolerable as it would soon be. Before leaving Karaikudi, the village where I stay in the rural Chettinad region, we stopped first for garlands at a flower vendor's stall.
And here things become more complex.
In the 20 years since I began traveling in India, I have seen more than my share of temples and stupas and monasteries and mosques. I have been duly mystified at the ruins of the Buddhist center at Sarnath and duly grossed out at the blood-washed temple dedicated to the goddess Kali in Kolkata. I have been bewitched at the pillared Jain temples at Ranakpur in Rajasthan and oddly unmoved by the marmoreal chill of the Taj Mahal.
I have never experienced anything remotely resembling a flash of illumination; I am not among the many who visit India looking for God. Yet somehow across the years I began to find something here that I had not encountered elsewhere, a pleasurable release from ordinary rationality. Where at home I seldom do anything without giving thought to its outcome, in India logic tends to take a back seat to instinct. Perhaps this is not all that unusual or so unlike life in Manhattan. Yet New York is not a place where people worship gods in living-room shrines or where sanctified spaces are created at a bend in the road or a crotch in a tree. And while plenty of people in the United States advertise their piety on bumper stickers, one seldom sees anyone except cabbies driving cars with an elephant-headed deity riding shotgun on the dashboard.
So whether I believe in the power of Ganesha to safeguard my trip to Rameswaram is beside the point: I am content to observe the customs of the place. And here I would like to point out something that guidebooks do not. Even the dullest spirit -- and I have traveled with many -- at some point in South India will be affected by the numberless ways that ritual underscores the holiness of daily life.
You see it in the rice-flour diagrams called kolam that female members of a household draw each morning on the earth outside the doorstep, geometric figures intended to invite prosperity or thwart evil spirits or provide an easy meal for ants. You see it in decorative rings painted on the horns of the Brahma bulls pulling an ox cart along a country road. You see it in the clumps of sweet grass plaited ornamentally to feed to Ganesha at Hindu temples. You see it in the garlands knotted into the lush, oiled braids of any self-respecting south India woman, regardless of her caste.
Which brings me back to that flower stall, where we stopped on the way to Rameswaram. It was a stall opposite a Shiva temple, a literal hole in the wall adjacent to a bus stand and run by a scrawny man of indeterminate age. Five-face is his name in translation. Five-face is named for an avatar of Shiva, the creator and destroyer of life. Five-face is my go-to flower guy. I would like to note that if flowers are wealth, it is easy to be rich in India. There are vendors everywhere but probably in no place more ubiquitously than in the south.
The south, and Tamil Nadu in particular, is where one finds many of the country's great flower plantations and where the bounty of those fields is trucked daily to a wholesale market at the perimeter of the temple town of Madurai. There, in a series of sheds, on any given early morning one sees flame-of-the-forest flowers from Dharampur; water lily blossoms harvested at Salem; tiny Kolkata marigolds from West Bengal; Technicolor button and stem roses sent across the subcontinent from Kashmir; tuberose and jasmine harvested from the plantations across Tamil Nadu (the same fields that yield the essential oils used in the world's great perfumes). There, one sees also all sorts of flowers -- kagda, kapri, gulchadi -- for which I do not know the English names.
There will be garlands available at Rameswaram, of course; every temple town has a lane selling puja, or worship, items. But I prefer the ones strung by Five-face and his daughters, and so I spent $8 on a thick rope of roses and marigold blossoms and also some lengths of intricately knotted jasmine buds. As a bonus, Five-face threw in a small necklace of tuberose that Jayapaul draped around the dashboard Ganesha. Then we set off.
The drive took just over three hours. For much of the way, we were traveling through Chettinad, an area that for a very long while was not so much off the beaten track of Indian tourism as altogether invisible. Traffic of any kind was scant when I began visiting this semi-arid region, ancestral homeland to clans of Tamil speakers from an ancient trading and money-lending caste.
The mansions that the Nattukottai Chettiars built there over the past century and a half were fabled in their glory days for the costliness of their materials and equally for their massive scale. With wealth acquired through domination of trade throughout South and Southeast Asia -- Burma, Ceylon, Vietnam, Malaysia -- the Chettiars erected monuments of giddy and un-self-conscious opulence. Mansions of 100 rooms are not unknown in Chettinad. What is more, they were often built side by side in tightly supersized village grids.
By the best available estimates, there are 74 Chettiar villages remaining of the 96 that once dotted a 600-square-mile region. The rest have been erased, lost either to neglect or to the avarice of antiques dealers who bought and razed them after first stripping out their irreplaceable materials. Forests of pillars carved from Burma teak went into the building of the great Chettiar mansions, whole quarries of Italian marble, miles of intricately carved rosewood panels, immense chandeliers of colored Bohemian glass, archways carved from African tusk ivory and Cyclopean furniture hewn from blocks of granite mined at Jaipur.
Over the past 20 years it has been rare to visit a village here without coming across the awful groan of old mansions being pulled down and the telltale cloud of dust as dying houses exhale their last breaths. Lately, though, another noise has been heard: the hammering of renovation as hoteliers are drawn to the region, seeking alternatives to the stultifying backwaters tours of Kerala or the hackneyed forts-and-palaces trails of Rajasthan. Within a 20-minute drive of the region's main town, four hotels have opened in the past five years, inspired largely by the success of the Bangala, a tidy hotel opened in 1999 by the family of a Chettiar widow named Meenakshi Meyyappan.
Aside from temple-hopping, there is precious little to do in Chettinad, and that is precisely what draws me back. It is no cinch to reach the area, whose central town of Karaikudi lies eight hours by road from Chennai, the state's capital, or two from the newly expanded airport in Tiruchirappalli (a town whose Tamil name is so tongue-twisting that even locals shorten it to Trichy). What lured me there in the first place was access to a placid agricultural landscape first impressed on my consciousness by the films of Satyajit Ray. True, the great Bengali filmmaker shot his movies in an altogether different part of the subcontinent, but never mind. In Chettinad, the village India that everyone from Gandhi on has asserted is the soul of the country still exists, and in nearly unaltered form. The hit makers of Bollywood certainly know this and increasingly film their Hindi blockbusters in a region whose unspoiled rustic landscapes are passed off for the ones fast disappearing almost everyplace else.
It is not that Chettinad is a backwater, precisely. Tamil Nadu is a rich state, with good roads and fine schools and a burgeoning tech industry. Even small holders in Chettinad tend be literate, to own motorbikes and cellphones. Yet the conservative ways of Chettiar clans have helped to preserve many of the folkways and customs that are vanishing as fast as the untrammeled landscapes in a country that sometimes seems to be barreling toward modernity and double-digit growth.
By contrast, life tends to be slow in Chettinad; it revolves around worship and food. At the Bangala and elsewhere, staff still use grinding stones to pulverize spices for the masalas worked into dishes like a sinus-clearing black pepper chicken that is a local specialty or the tamarind crab curry that is irresistible. At the Bangala, one eats long lunches off banana leaf plates and then settles into a nap, waiting out the steamy shank of the day before resuming visits to the area's temples as evening's cool descends.
There are temples throughout Chettinad, neolithic cave temples and 16th-century clan temples and tidy ancient structures erected during the artistically nonpareil reign of the great Chola kings. There are animist Ayyanar temples set in rural groves, their grotesque deities guarded by life-size terra cotta horses. There are temples as architecturally impressive as those on any tourist map, places like the 11th-century shrine to Shiva at Avudayarkoil, a place of baffling architectural geometries.
How exactly the temple there was constructed so that the rays of the sun are drawn into the sanctum sanctorum at dusk has never been explained satisfactorily, at least not to me. And that is one of the many reasons why Avudayarkoil remains a site on my pilgrimage route. It is not rare to be the sole visitor there, aside from some holy man circumambulating the inner core of the temple, intoning the syllables of the Panchakshara mantra.
Mystic configurations and holy utterances hold no great meaning for me and yet, as a similarly agnostic Indian friend once said, ''Prayerful intention never harmed anyone.''
I thought about this as we crossed the Annai Indira Gandhi Road Bridge to Rameswaram island, parking behind the great temple. There I made my way past the countless beggars to a shop where I purchased a white dhoti to wear in the temple, along with a flat cotton cloth optimistically sold as a towel.
It is not surprising that after 10 centuries or so, a precise procedure has evolved for taking the ritual baths at Rameswaram. As it happens, the first holy dousing bath takes place not inside the temple at all but in the sea nearby. Modestly ducking behind a column at the public bathing ghat, I stripped out of my polo shirt, jeans and underwear and knotted the dhoti around my waist. Handing Jayapaul my glasses, I stepped into the shallows and made my way out through low waves afloat with abandoned garments to immerse myself.
I did it quickly, holding my nose. Then I dashed ashore, looking for Jayapaul, who appeared to my confusion to be waving me off.
''Three times,'' he shouted. ''For the Samudra snanam,'' or holy sea bath, ''you must go under three times.''
I returned to the water and repeated the performance. Then Jayapaul and I made for the entrance and bargained with one of the guides who lead pilgrims through the baths. ''Doing everything on own is a little painful process,'' said the instructions I'd downloaded. Without my guide, a whippet-thin North Indian, I might still be wandering the temple's halls.
''Temple has 22 wells that are supposed to contain water from different holy places,'' read the online instructions. ''You need to sequentially take bath at each place. Attendant would pull the water from each well.''
We went briskly from one well to another, following a route through the vast structure that seemed anything but sequential. By the fourth well, I had given up trying to guess the location of the next or where we were headed or even what I thought I was doing there. Spiritual cleansing was anything but the image most prominent in my thoughts, which strayed continually to a vision of blood sheeting down my forehead as inevitably I slipped on the mossy pavers and cracked my skull. It didn't happen.
''it never happens,'' reads a needlepoint pillow in the house of a friend. And somehow this high-WASP rendition of the all-is-illusion tenets of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy popped into my mind as I went from the 19th to the 20th bath. Thus the terror of germs, of grunge, of mold and eternal confusion and the conviction that I was either an idiot or a madman fell away by the 22nd dousing. It is true that I skipped the offerings that often conclude the tour and also bypassed the added-tariff V.I.P. viewing of the idol and subsequent recitation of prayers by a priest. It is also true that I could sense some change, a tilt in consciousness.
Jayapaul brought me my dry clothes. I dressed damp and exited into the metallic glare of midday. As we headed back to where we came from, a weird feeling overtook me. While nothing exactly had happened, I was not altogether the same person I had been some hours before. My head was so light that I began to wonder whether a stealthy and fast-acting microbe hadn't managed to slip past my squinched-up lips and eyelids. Was I already suffering from cholera or encephalitis? Was I merely waterlogged?
The sensation did not lift on the ride home or that afternoon or evening. For a surprisingly long time, I felt afloat. Perhaps this was an effect, my friend Susanna would later suggest, of lustration, a term I associated with the abruptly disappeared dictators from Communist-era countries.
The usage Susanna had in mind was older, however, than Nicolae Ceausescu -- probably Greek or Roman. It denoted purification by holy water and the obliteration of sin. I did not for one second believe this, and yet I felt as though before my visit to Rameswaram I had been walking around with a land anchor over my shoulder and now was much lighter. And while I could not by any rational means account for this, I concluded that the gods had released me for a time from what can sometimes seem like my karmic task: explaining.
Feeling it would have to suffice.
ESSENTIALS, TAMIL NADU, INDIA
Hotels: Bangala The rooms at this former gentlemen's club are spacious and antique-filled. Meals are prepared by the family cook and included in the nightly rate. Devakottai Road, Senjai, Karaikudi; thebangala.com; 011-91-44-2493-4851; doubles from about $125. Chettinadu Mansion Only 12 of the 126 rooms are available to visitors, but the rates are reasonable and the meals are home-cooked. S.A.R.M. House, 11, A.R. Street (behind Raja's Palace), Kanadukathan; 011-91-98-4634-4305; chettinadumansion.com; doubles from $130. Visalam Small and secluded luxury hotel with 15 enormous rooms, terrazzo verandas, a lush garden and a pool as well as an excellent chef. 7/1-143 Local Fund Road, Kanadukathan; 011-91-484-301-1711; cghearth.com; doubles from $240.
Temples: The region is studded with some of the greatest temples in India. Some, like the Unesco-inscribed Brihadishvara temple in Tanjore, are too mobbed to merit further mention. Others, like the 11th-century temple of Avudayarkoil, are seldom visited; it is an hour by car from Karaikudi. Two other alluring sites are even closer: the Pillayarpatti temple, famed for a rock-cut idol of Ganesh, and Thirumayam Fort, with two cave temples dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu. Sri Ramanathaswamy is on the island of Rameswaram; the Meenakshi Temple is in the holy city of Madurai.
PHOTOS: Tower of power Inside the Meenakshi Temple in the holy city of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, India. Opposite: the exterior of the temple, which is dedicated to Lord Shiva. (M2 108-M2 109); Sacred space Saffron-robed holy men inside the 11th-century Avudayarkoil Temple. (M2 110-M2 111); Field report Above, from left: rice farmers working near Karaikudi, the central town of the Chettiar region; an entrance room at the private home of Meenakshi Meyyappan, a 19th-century Chennair-style mansion; terra-cotta images of guardian deities common to Ayyanar shrines in the south.(M2 112-M2 113) (PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLAF OTTO BECKER)
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