Deshnok

DESHNOK

Thirty kilometres south-east of Bikaner in the western Indian state of
Rajasthan lies the village of Deshnok. It has a temple.

Go to the temple. Walk over from the bus stop in the dusty square
where a few shops and stalls tend the needs of the village and its
trickle of visitors. Look closely at the temple's doors; they are solid
silver although the temple is otherwise modest in the context of a
country with thousands. Push those doors open then and walk through to
the small courtyard. And take off your shoes.

That is the test: removing your shoes.

Are you a tourist? Are you a traveller? Are you an old hand at
temples?

Try this one and say you have seen the rest. For this one is occupied,
lived in, indeed alive with ......rats.

They are black rats, shiny and alert and mangy and failing, hordes of
them running around as if they own the place, which, effectively, they
do.

They scurry - the word is particularly suited to the gait of a rat -
to greet visitors, sniffing to see if there is more food, defecating
even as they do so, their small, hard droppings covering the floor to
lodge under the toenails and press like grains of rice into the soft
flesh of western feet.

But the rats won't eat you. As a species, they are omnivorous but not
those in the temple at Deshnok. They are strictly vegetarian, feeding
well on piles of corn and bowls of milk and yoghurt set out by the
priests who protect them. For these are holy rats.

They are "kabas", the doing of Karni Mata, a woman mystic of the
"Charan" - or minstrel - caste, said to have lived in Deshnok for 151
years spanning the 15th century. She is the most famous Rajasthani
incarnation of the Mother Goddess, Devi Durga, who is the giver of
wisdom, wealth, victory and peace and the major deity for
Rajasthan.

The story goes that on one occasion, going about her mystic's
business, Karni Mata found herself unable to revive the only son of a
distraught Charan couple who had come to her for help. She was then
told by Yama, the God of Death, that the boy had already been reborn
elsewhere. Since that was not at all what she or the boy's parents had
intended, she decreed that thenceforth all dead Charans would be reborn
only as kabas in her temple. They could then escape Yama's clutches and
instead be reincarnated as humans at her command.

So here are departed souls in transit. Do not kick or lash out when
they touch you. Do not strike them in any way, even when the most
diseased and flea bitten of them sniff at your toes, poking their
snouts between to deposit who knows what infection into that touch of
tinea you were meaning to fix. Anyone harming a kaba in any way,
however innocently or accidentally, must present a gold or silver
replica of the injured party to the temple or suffer misfortune. Just
draw breath from that fetid air and watch your step.

Probably like most westerners, we moved slowly that day, hobbling on
corn grains and rat faeces, convincing ourselves of the claim that all
others had gone before without contracting bubonic plague or other
pestilence - which, if true, was itself a sufficiently miraculous
credential for Karni Mata.

The rats came to us, converging in brief and restless packs around our
ankles until, sensing no food, they scattered to previous
business.

They swarmed in side chambers. They scaled the railings which steer
visitors to the inner shrine and they nestled there in the ironwork to
scratch their various contagions. They ran in and out of holes in the
walls which may or may not have been there for the purpose but
suggested even greater fecundity within.

Inevitably perhaps where local history meets tourism, there is
folklore within the folklore. They say it is particularly auspicious to
see a white rat among all these black ones. After a few minutes, one of
the ten-year-olds who looked after the shoes sidled up to whisper the
equivalent of "Psst. Wanna see a white rat?" The white rat duly
appeared, shoved anonymously in through a door from an outer
area.

Not very many people seemed to make the trip out from Bikaner. There
was a bus every hour and taxis were not expensive. But the only other
westerners there that afternoon came in a self-drive hire car - still
rare enough in India - which disgorged among others a German lady in
tight white dress and sling-backs - even rarer. She and her party got
no further than the doors.