Only on the return was the
shortening of the Koc—Coach—noticed. Narrow gauge. The Ottomans had
done the same for the silver and other mines in Bosnia, the British throughout
India too no doubt. The women's compartments had been noticed going out and
also among the rest of the prohibitions displayed in pictorial form kissing was
disallowed. Evidently the shorter distance trains and monorail had lesser risk
of molestation and amorousness—none of this appeared there.
Tourists to Batu Caves would likely think to themselves, Oh! Full marks for urban planning bringing a major train line from the city centre directly onto the temple complex. Najib can’t be all bad.
On the return as the train slowly filled a young mid-teen Indian-Malay boy he looked left the seat where he had been earlier with his mother and came into the next compartment. At the previous stop a pair of girls a little older than himself had entered and looked for a seat. Nothing to their liking available; a lot of men dotted and no two seats together. Unbidden the lad had risen and passed into the adjoining carriage, leaving the lasses nice and snug with mum.
Fine grace-note young fellow. Bully for you; well done.
As expected the rock forms were beauties, marvelous shaping from untold ages of rain on stone. (Fortunately no prior photographs had been glimpsed, only those of the giant outdoor statues and the stairs.) Perfectly understandable how the place could be adopted by the weary toilers in the mines and on the lines and slowly consecrated as a holy site. The coolness within for one thing was a savior. Fresh running water. In other circumstances twenty and more millennia past finest paintings of tigers and songbirds from the forest would have been sketched by the sure hands of the hunters. In the tropics however the abundance of foods of all kinds gave rise instead to lepak—kick-back relaxation. Artistic focus here was directed toward the melodies flitting through the canopy overhead. (The Malays loved their karaoke.)
At the small Murugan temple at the top of the sequence of natural platforms a little four-year-old in a corner was fighting, seizing and swimming through the waves of smoke from the incense; encouraged by the clanging bell and drum, the monkeys scampering across the floor, how could the boy not? None of the adults was perturbed and the ceremony quite unaffected.
The bell-ringer tirelessly pulled his cord easy as you like one hand behind his back in a lazy jerk-off motion. Priests were housed near-by; low-level multi-storey housing stood on all sides in what was now the sprawl of KL. The old Sri Lankan Tamil caught at Mehran a few days before—not a fan of the Northern Modi—suggested for Thaipusam one million people gathered at the Batu Caves.
A Japanese or Chinaman from the Mainland had stopped on the 227 steep steps to ask a woman what she was carrying in a pail on her shoulder. Like in a comic opera, much tongue twisting and ear-bending.
—…. M-I-L-G? the fellow repeated her spelling.
A steep climb even with a small 2 - 3 litre pail and easy to slop; like other temples in the region, the depth of treads on the stairs was scaled to dwarf-size. Inevitably one thought of the civic-minded Singaporeans planting an escalator on the grassy side of a little hillock in the city for the convenience of elderly and infirm nature-lovers.
Some of the true devotees climbed barefoot and prostrated themselves full-length at the landings, arms out-stretched in front like divers and foreheads to the ground.
An identical pair of roosters, copper and lustrous ebony, circled up on the rocky ledge to the right of Muguran; monkeys screeched and darted beneath Muguran's skirts; various birds coming and going from the perfectly placed circular opening onto the sky above. Nothing whatsoever untoward, not by any means; all the various ingredients here added to the particular kind of solemnity created.
Some of the striking gestures among the statuary inside the caves was lost now to the living realm, retained only in ghostly form in the histrionics of the stage, the screen and places of worship in far distant corners of the globe. The hints of former warmth, compassion and the greeting of wonder were deeply touching. Fine acrobatic poise was shown by the gal against the wall at the back of Mug's entrance, one of his chosen consorts no doubt kicking her left leg out wide across her body and swanning bird-hands outward either side. (Bollywood musical intervals took their cues from Hindu statuary.)
We have a smaller, more modest cave out near Niksic in Montenegro where the miraculously preserved body of Saint Vasil remained after his soul’s departure. The small niches high in the rock there provide a dizzying prospect onto the settled valley below. In the 1930s Grandma Rose had walked two days barefoot from Boka in order to visit the shrine.
Closer by Village Uble within one of the peaks that to date has not been visited stood Boskova Pecina—Bosko's Cave. Young handsome Bosko had met a foul and violent death in the cave that took his name. A generation or two later the child shepherds scared each other in the shadows of the place with Bosko's terrifying hauntings.
Tourists to Batu Caves would likely think to themselves, Oh! Full marks for urban planning bringing a major train line from the city centre directly onto the temple complex. Najib can’t be all bad.
On the return as the train slowly filled a young mid-teen Indian-Malay boy he looked left the seat where he had been earlier with his mother and came into the next compartment. At the previous stop a pair of girls a little older than himself had entered and looked for a seat. Nothing to their liking available; a lot of men dotted and no two seats together. Unbidden the lad had risen and passed into the adjoining carriage, leaving the lasses nice and snug with mum.
Fine grace-note young fellow. Bully for you; well done.
As expected the rock forms were beauties, marvelous shaping from untold ages of rain on stone. (Fortunately no prior photographs had been glimpsed, only those of the giant outdoor statues and the stairs.) Perfectly understandable how the place could be adopted by the weary toilers in the mines and on the lines and slowly consecrated as a holy site. The coolness within for one thing was a savior. Fresh running water. In other circumstances twenty and more millennia past finest paintings of tigers and songbirds from the forest would have been sketched by the sure hands of the hunters. In the tropics however the abundance of foods of all kinds gave rise instead to lepak—kick-back relaxation. Artistic focus here was directed toward the melodies flitting through the canopy overhead. (The Malays loved their karaoke.)
At the small Murugan temple at the top of the sequence of natural platforms a little four-year-old in a corner was fighting, seizing and swimming through the waves of smoke from the incense; encouraged by the clanging bell and drum, the monkeys scampering across the floor, how could the boy not? None of the adults was perturbed and the ceremony quite unaffected.
The bell-ringer tirelessly pulled his cord easy as you like one hand behind his back in a lazy jerk-off motion. Priests were housed near-by; low-level multi-storey housing stood on all sides in what was now the sprawl of KL. The old Sri Lankan Tamil caught at Mehran a few days before—not a fan of the Northern Modi—suggested for Thaipusam one million people gathered at the Batu Caves.
A Japanese or Chinaman from the Mainland had stopped on the 227 steep steps to ask a woman what she was carrying in a pail on her shoulder. Like in a comic opera, much tongue twisting and ear-bending.
—…. M-I-L-G? the fellow repeated her spelling.
A steep climb even with a small 2 - 3 litre pail and easy to slop; like other temples in the region, the depth of treads on the stairs was scaled to dwarf-size. Inevitably one thought of the civic-minded Singaporeans planting an escalator on the grassy side of a little hillock in the city for the convenience of elderly and infirm nature-lovers.
Some of the true devotees climbed barefoot and prostrated themselves full-length at the landings, arms out-stretched in front like divers and foreheads to the ground.
An identical pair of roosters, copper and lustrous ebony, circled up on the rocky ledge to the right of Muguran; monkeys screeched and darted beneath Muguran's skirts; various birds coming and going from the perfectly placed circular opening onto the sky above. Nothing whatsoever untoward, not by any means; all the various ingredients here added to the particular kind of solemnity created.
Some of the striking gestures among the statuary inside the caves was lost now to the living realm, retained only in ghostly form in the histrionics of the stage, the screen and places of worship in far distant corners of the globe. The hints of former warmth, compassion and the greeting of wonder were deeply touching. Fine acrobatic poise was shown by the gal against the wall at the back of Mug's entrance, one of his chosen consorts no doubt kicking her left leg out wide across her body and swanning bird-hands outward either side. (Bollywood musical intervals took their cues from Hindu statuary.)
We have a smaller, more modest cave out near Niksic in Montenegro where the miraculously preserved body of Saint Vasil remained after his soul’s departure. The small niches high in the rock there provide a dizzying prospect onto the settled valley below. In the 1930s Grandma Rose had walked two days barefoot from Boka in order to visit the shrine.
Closer by Village Uble within one of the peaks that to date has not been visited stood Boskova Pecina—Bosko's Cave. Young handsome Bosko had met a foul and violent death in the cave that took his name. A generation or two later the child shepherds scared each other in the shadows of the place with Bosko's terrifying hauntings.
— Eto ga! Sad ce te!... There he is! Gotcha now!
The damnable jealous Vukovici had murdered the innocent. (Beauty was all on our side of the family.) That was the reason Granddad Rade was outraged when his famous cousin, glorious Elena Blagojeva from the house of his mother, choose to marry one of their clan. Pop Rade's nephew Stevo had been mad for Elena too. Once when the much-pressed maiden had been rattled Blagoje and Stevo found themselves waiting together at the same place for Elena's promised arrival. In umbrage the pair that day had pledged to throw the hussy over once and for all; nothing more to do with the girl.
Eventually half-mad Stevo went to consult the monks at Niksic, not far from Saint Vasil's cave, where he received the bad news on second cousin unions. Are there no other girls to take for marriage in your parts? the daft monk had turned on our young Stevo. (How the Arabs would scoff at such delicacy over consanguinity, and even for second cousins!)
Few selfie groups at 8 30am on a Saturday; majority visitors pilgrims from near and far in the Hindu world. The wise old monkeys were a constant reminder of something telling and salutary. (Even cats had no place in conventional churches—therefore the mice.) Limestone here on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur as opposed to our Balkan karst; not dissimilar friable rock in fact. Croatia further north was well-known among speleologists; as a young man Nikola Tesla had made his first discoveries in electric current within the karst hills of his native Lika.
The damnable jealous Vukovici had murdered the innocent. (Beauty was all on our side of the family.) That was the reason Granddad Rade was outraged when his famous cousin, glorious Elena Blagojeva from the house of his mother, choose to marry one of their clan. Pop Rade's nephew Stevo had been mad for Elena too. Once when the much-pressed maiden had been rattled Blagoje and Stevo found themselves waiting together at the same place for Elena's promised arrival. In umbrage the pair that day had pledged to throw the hussy over once and for all; nothing more to do with the girl.
Eventually half-mad Stevo went to consult the monks at Niksic, not far from Saint Vasil's cave, where he received the bad news on second cousin unions. Are there no other girls to take for marriage in your parts? the daft monk had turned on our young Stevo. (How the Arabs would scoff at such delicacy over consanguinity, and even for second cousins!)
Few selfie groups at 8 30am on a Saturday; majority visitors pilgrims from near and far in the Hindu world. The wise old monkeys were a constant reminder of something telling and salutary. (Even cats had no place in conventional churches—therefore the mice.) Limestone here on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur as opposed to our Balkan karst; not dissimilar friable rock in fact. Croatia further north was well-known among speleologists; as a young man Nikola Tesla had made his first discoveries in electric current within the karst hills of his native Lika.
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