Funny. I don't remember the temple looking this grand, and this despite the fact that I distinctly remember gawking when I first glimpsed its ornately crowned white walls rising over the inordinately ordinary Midwestern suburb of Aurora, Illinois. There, in the middle of a verdant field of green, behind the gravel driveways and plastic tricycles and gas grills of another perfect Sunday in Middle America, the Hindu Temple rose like Atlantis out of the manicured and preternaturally green lawns: Another culture preserved and honored, given shelter.
I have to admit I kind of love the USA for this. We not only tolerate other religions than our own; we tolerate religious extremists. Not even our closest pals in democracy come close to us here. France is presently obsessed with finding a respectable rationale for banning Muslim women from wearing the birka or the niqab in public. While the French debate, Belgium passed a ban. Both countries seem to be relying on feminist support to make clothing criminal. Nuns throughout the Western world have been, not surprisingly, quite silent. I sort of think that if we're going to talk about how clothing manifests the oppression of females, we might want to also take a look at how Western culture sexualizes our female children. This, to me, is a lot more disturbing than a grown woman deciding to hide herself from the eyes of strangers on the street: the overly hormonal American adolescent girl wearing a shirt three sizes too small and breasts four sizes too large.
I think it's the meat we eat, frankly. All those damned hormones, the BGH, we ingest with our beef. How could it not have an impact on us? We are neighbors on the food chain, after all, what the cattle eat, we get. We know this deep inside, and for those of us who don't, there's Michael Pollan. But good Hindus don't eat beef, and given the scrawniness of the cows nonchalantly roaming the streets of the subcontinent Hindu cows don't eat anything remotely tainted with growth hormones! It was not altogether surprising, given this, that the children--amazingly well-behaved children--who followed their families around the stations of the temple on the day we visited were to a person pleasantly proportioned and singularly non-obese.
One cannot say the same for the Hindu deities however, many of whom were decidedly on the plump side of statuary physique. I suspect this is more a consequence of the inordinate amount of time these fellows sit than their diet. Deitic diet seems to consist of two food groups: Flowers and fruits. This makes for one of the more visually palatable arrays of food, and the worshippers at the temple devote a lot of time to enhancing this, arranging and rearranging mounds of fruit and flowers on large platters seemingly without end.
When we visited, these platters of fruit and flowers were being presented to enshrined golden deities in a variety of sizes and forms, some human, none of them breathing and, to the best of my knowledge and observances, none of them eating. None of the worshippers seemed in the least bit bothered by either deficiency and since no one, understandably, wanted to pause in their worship to tell the two obvious (pale skinned, light haired, blue eyed) Westerners what the presentation of these comely comestibles might mean to statues of stone or plaster, we just tiptoed around the shrines timidly before heading for the souvenir shop downstairs, aka the "Buy a Home Deity or Sari" Shoppe. Some weeks later, though, still sorting through the rituals and sights of that day in Aurora, Illinois, I found myself seated next to a lovely and very conversant Indian woman on a long plane trip. She was reading Danielle Steele; I was reading Midnight's Children. I asked her if she'd ever been to this temple once I knew she was a practicing Hindu who lived in the Midwest. She had. For the next two hours I plied her with questions.
"We want to show our devotion to the deity when we come to worship at the temple," she explained, with none of the hubris she might have claimed as a member of a culture approximately 5,000 years older than my own. "So we bring the best fruit and the prettiest flowers. It's called 'puja.'" I refrained from pointing out the obvious: that these deities were made of stone or clay or plaster and shellacked with some kind of probably toxic gold veneer. "So what is done with all the offering at the end of the day?" I asked instead.
"Oh, probably someone takes it home. Or it's given away," she shrugged. I wondered to myself if poorer worshippers stayed later in order to gain the leftover puja. There really ought to be some sort of pay-off for piety. It has always struck me as incredible that African Americans as a group are so religious; doesn't poverty ever seem evidence that God or the gods are pretty nasty as far as life constructs and concepts go? "It's good to take it home after the gods have received it," my patient seatmate was continuing my education. "It's 'prasada,'" she finished. "I'll have a Coke," she told the attendant. "Yes, Pepsi's fine."
All this emphasis on fruit and flowers is apparently not doing much good in the real world, though, where Indian men have the highest rate of cardiovascular disease of any identifiable population today. By the end of this year, it's expected that India will have fully sixty percent of all the world's heart disease cases. Perhaps someone should be talking to the deities about this, along with nuclear disarmament and the unsurprising fact that India's former untouchables are now converting to Islam in overwhelming numbers, finally finding a home that welcomes them as Hindus could never quite bring themselves to do.
But maybe the deities aren't doing too well. The temple, grand as it looked when we first spotted it astride the mowed green prairie, was worn and frayed up close. The white walls were in need of paint and replastering. The Rubbermaid garbage cans were full of uncollected offerings and sending up redolent reminders to the heavens right outside the temple's grand portal. Everything inside seemed sort of like it came from WalMart. But perhaps, if the worshippers are able to believe that the gold-lacquered gods can eat coconuts when no one's looking, perhaps a card table chair can be a throne.
The illusions of Hinduism at least seem pleasant and non-violent enough, so how could I really object?
