SYMBOL OF RELIGION In her childhood she had heard the tolling of temple bells. Those bells weren't ringing at a temple, though. Her mother had set up a shrine right next to the kitchen, a small version of a temple. The daily routines her mother performed before getting down to housework also involved daily worship. And so she would awaken to the tan-tan, tan-tan tolling of the bell, the bell that her mother rang just like the alarm clock she now keeps in her room.
Once there had even been a pact between her and her younger brother: they must hide their mother's bell that disturbed their sleep every morning.
One day, towards afternoon time, when her brother tried to hide the bell somewhere, their mother heard it ring at a most inopportune time, and she scolded her brother- "You're not supposed to ring the bell at off-times, it's only rung to invoke the gods, in the morning and evening. You think a bell is a toy?"
As her age increased, she came to understand, too, that a bell is not a toy.
In the passage of time, she turned from a girl into a young woman.
She remembers-the day of her first menstruation, when she had to stay locked up in a dark room, a stream of tears had poured out of her guilt-ridden eyes. She thought she had committed a sin. In the days that she remained in that dark room she discovered much about herself. She conceived a sense of what was sin, what was merit in a young woman's form. The customs that her mother taught her, taking menstruation as a symbol of religion, seemed sometimes like religion, sometimes like sin, sometimes like an accusation, and at other times like a gift she'd been granted, and this is how it seemed to her for years.
On the twelfth day after her menstruation, after she had taken her morning bath, put on a yellow blouse and sari, and sat down on a special mat to pray, according to tradition, she hung her head in embarrassment, unable to even look at the pundit who was teaching her how to make a water offering from cupped palms with a banana placed on top. Those cupped palms, the symbol of a woman's vulva, and the banana lying on top of it made her quiver. Her hands trembled as she offered the water. She herself was surprised by the strange comparison. Every year during the Teej Panchami festivals, when the women of the house were rapt in worship pouring water on top of a banana placed in cupped palms, a corner of her mind would centre on male and female sexual symbols, and she couldn't lose herself in worship as the others did. She never probed the mystery of that symbol, it's been years she's kept this sin safeguarded in religion, the mystery of the cupped palms and banana-this symbol of religion.
She couldn't become like her mother. Yielding to the pressures of time she became a housewife as well as a modern woman working outside the house. Her daily routine was extremely hectic. Some days, as she reached home in the worn out, exhausted, darkening evening, she could hear, mixed in with the sound of bells in the neighborhood, the voice of her absent mother asking, Why so late? The evening bell's already rung, and you've come back tired, haven't you? Before she could come up with any response, the long sigh of exhaustion inside her, finding no reflection outside, chose to stay inside. Outside the bell kept on ringing, and inside the house her voice stayed suppressed.
In the passage of time she turned from a young woman into a mother.
It was a winter's morning. She had taken off her year-old son's clothes so that she could oil him in the sun, and then had fallen into a quandary. As she slathered oil on him, her hands stopped suddenly. Her infant son's small-shaped penis was like that small instrument-like dong that hung, tolling, from the bell in her mother's hand. Forgetting all about sin and merit, she stooped over and kissed her son's small, soundless musical instrument. He chuckled as though he'd been tickled, and she too smiled in maternal love.
In the second half of life, she too stands in crowds, in lines, at the gates of temples in a sinless state of mind, fully liberated from sexual longing, in the hope of receiving the blessings of the gods, or in delusion. When someone rings the bell in front of the temple, sin and merit suddenly smile at that bell, that symbol of religion, that upside down vulva-shaped bell and the hanging musical instrument of a penis that it tries to cover, but cannot fully hide. Tolls and echoes emanate from the penis-shaped instrument as it knocks and thunders against the crevices of the vulva-shaped bell, the tolls outdoing even the hullabaloo of the crowds. She listens, enchanted, to that tolling.
Today she finds that bell symbol as mysterious as she once found the cupped palms and banana. That bell symbol, that instrument which, without the touch of a woman's vulva, cannot make a sound but just hangs there uselessly. She feels a kind of pride at the woman's sexual organ, which, upside-down, subdues the machismo of men. When she widens her nostrils to take in the fragrance of the incense at the temple grounds, she feels that her entire being is being perfumed.
She's already forgotten many of the pleasurable entrapments of sex; but the symbol of the bell hangs straight in front of her eyes, bringing back memories. A faint but unforgettable image appears before her like a picture. The bell reminds her of an image of male/female coupling. To remove this sinful thought that arises even in a temple courtyard, she lurches forward, grabs the instrument hanging on the bell, and starts tolling: ta-na-na-na, ta-na-na-na, ta-na-na-na..
