“The two
most important days in your life are the
day you are born and the day you find
out why.”
- Mark Twain
Dateline: Singapore - October 12, 2014, 9:45PM
It was
late...it has been a long day…we were tired.
We
hesitated, because of the lateness of the hour, but decided to go for dinner at
Boat Quay (pronounced ‘key’) on the Southwestern edges of Singapore River.
This area is lined with outdoor restaurants,
serving pretty much any style food one might desire, and since this is Asia,
all of it is tasty. We would need only
pick the style of food and settle in at a table along the riverbank to finish
the day, relax and enjoy the sights, sounds and smells of this wonderfully
exotic place.
We had
just gotten out of a taxi on Lor Telok Street, when we heard a roar that
sounded like an athletic event. It got a
little quiet and then up it went again.
“Let’s go
see what’s going on, “ Andry said.
So, we headed away from the Quay to North
Canal, turned right and walked the 400 feet or so to New Bridge Road, where
looking both right and left, there were people as far as the eye could
see. One half of the road was blocked
off with barriers, behind which there seemed to be hundreds, maybe thousands of
men. As we watched, the men moved from
our right to our left stopped…moved and stopped. It was a curious sight.
Ask and ye shall receive…
“Pardon me
sir,” I said to the man in the yellow reflective vest, looking like a parade Marshall.
“What is
going on here?”
Just then,
a similarly dressed man opened the gate to a very large rectangular shaped
corral holding more than 100, ‘ground sitting’ men in traditional loincloths…some
wearing tee shirts – others shirtless.
They instantly
jumped to their feet and with a shouting frenzy exploded out of the containment
area, running full tilt to the next containment area where they sat down on the
ground again. This sequence repeated
itself again and again like pulsing of blood through the circulatory
system…each beat moving the life giving liquid further and further down the
arterial tree.
“This is
the Thimithi festival done every year here in Singapore,” the man said.
Timing is everything…
Thimithi
is the annual Fire Walking festival attracting hundreds of thousands of Hindu
devotees in a number of countries. Fire
walking has been a tradition with Hindu faithful for over 1,000
years. It is done in rememberance of a woman
named Druapadi, whose honor was saved by Krishna, when she was about to be
shamed by a cousin in the famous Sanskrit philosophic Epic and story of the
Kurukshetra wars titled: Mahabharata (ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimithi).
In
Singapore, it happens in October…this year the 12th, our late
evening dinner night!
The processions begins begin around 10PM at Sri Srinivasa Perumal Temple on Serangoon Road
and ends at Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road, where the hot coal beds
await the focused minds and feet of the faithful!
If one
were to walk the route, it would take a little under an hour, but with nearly
10,000 Hindu faithful men preparing to ‘walk the fire’ at the Sri Mariamman
Temple, the event takes hours to complete and the primary travel routes are
shut to traffic from mid afternoon the day of, through 7AM the following
morning.
Not for the faint of heart…
These
worshippers were in a heightened state of excitement, and while they obediently
sat waiting for the gates to open to make their way toward their final
destination where they would ‘walk the fire,’ it seemed clear they were in a
‘different world.’ It is difficult to explain how fearfully impressive this
event was…literally controlled mayhem!
To the
outsider, and that would be me, there was the sense that if a crowd of 10,000
people began to move and take on a life of its own, whoever or whatever was in
the path would simply be overwhelmed and crushed. I have watched large crowd demonstrations on
television, but this…being there…feeling the throb…sensing both safety and
danger of the unknown…was a window into the exotic and an experience of a
lifetime.
We
followed on the sidewalk, beside this pulsating mass of men, for toward the Sri
Mariamman Temple, wanting to see them walk the hot coals. We were, however, not
the only ones interested. As we got
closer to the Temple the sidewalk became more and more congested, so that by
the time we got near the Temple doors we were literally stuck in a crushing mass
of people, packed so close together it was almost impossible to move.
Andry
and I both sensed we should probably not stay there, so pushing and shoving a little;
we made our away back against the press of people trying to get into the
event. Within minutes we were gratefully
free of the crushing mass of people.
Dinner on the Quay…
We made
our way back the eight blocks or so along South Bridge Road until we got to
South Canal and to a restaurant along at Boat Quay, where we shared a large
rectangular pan of spicy soup, Chinese noodles and a wonderfully cooked whole
fish.
As we sat
along the bank of the river and quietly chatted, looking across toward the
brightly lighted harbor, we were energized by the sense of wonder and a little
danger from the adventure.
The
tiredness we felt earlier in the evening had evaporated from an unexpected
event we had just witnessed, and we were both grateful we had not been to tired
to eat…the evening’s meal – food and unexpected undertaking – satisfying our
stomach’s and minds…
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