A HOLY DELUGE

This week we went to a Hindu Festival in which the six hour long "Parade of the Gods" preceded a three hour firework show. Indians really know how to throw a party for their gods! The parade included floats with paper mache statues: Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva and all their homies painted in bright colors. We were surprised to learn that every year the rain gods show up to the festival for real, bathing the streets in demonstration of their approval.

Sure enough, it happened. As soon as the parade started the skies darkened, lightning darted about, and thunder cracked. It rained so hard we couldn't hold our eyelids open to see under the pressure of the falling water. We resorted to wearing our sunglasses at dusk, in effort to protect our eyes from the vertical buckets. It was the most voracious rain either of us have ever seen. "The Gods are happy", one man explained.

Suddenly the power went out and the whole scene went black. We ran to take refuge under a random tin-roofed hut as people lit candles all over the dark streets. First there was the sound of distant symbols clashing, growing louder and louder in the darkness. Then five of the largest land mammals approached, right in front of us. It was so dark we could only see the candle-lit silhouettes of the Holy Elephants. Until lightning struck and the flash illuminated a giant creature staring down at us. The procession of the Holy Elephants commenced in this way. Crack! Strobes lit up the street to reveal a gargantuan elephant decorated in holy regalia, heaving by like a dinosaur. Riding on top of the creature was a man dressed like a maharajah. Lightning eerily flashing in the sky above his head. Think "Aladdin" meets "Jurassic Park". Then it all went black. Crack! Crack! Another elephant passed and we'd gasp. Black again. And it went on like this until the elephants approached the Hindu Temple, after which the storm abruptly stopped and the weather returned to it's normal equatorial smolder. Every single summer it mysteriously rains on this most auspicious festival day.

But this is not the only time the rain gods show up. India is full of auspicious spectacles.

Where else can you see villagers make a wedding ceremony for two frogs, spending loads of money just like for a human marriage? With the whole village in attendance, a holy man gives the vows, and two frogs dressed like royalty in gold frills are wed... all this as a ritual to bring on the rains when the crops are thirsty. Only after the bride and groom have been sent to a nearby pond for their honeymoon does the precipitation arrive. It rains hard. Every single time they do this.

Where else can you see that?

Where else can you see a shoeless man herding his sheep and talking on his cell phone?

Where else can you see three major oceans converge on one beach, where the sun rises and sets in the same horizon and thousands of pilgrims come to pray... and yet be surrounded with homeless children carrying homeless babies on their hips and sleeping in garbage piles on the sidewalk?

Where else can you visit the site of the tsunami and meet people who's entire families were lost in one wave, and then watch them cavort in the surf like its the first time they've seen salt water?

Where else can you see dark skinned natives in designer jeans, wearing skin-lightening makeup, walking down the street next to white Americans wearing bindis, working on their tans, and searching for God in a foreign deity? India is is full of paradoxes.

It's impossible to reason anything out here. You'd be amazed at the lack of logic in the lifestyle and the utter craziness of it all. It has reduced this writer to teary cries of empathic pain followed by cathartic belly laughs at how sturdy God has made us humans.