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Babies & Walking Dead. Last week, when the day of the Jagannath Festival dawned, the city of Puri (pop. 60,000) was packed with 150,000 pilgrims from all over India. Some had come crammed into special trains from Calcutta, 265 miles to the north; wide-eyed peasants had come on foot, herded by professional guides. There were women with babies, young students of Yoga, families of dark, half-naked tribesmen from the jungles. Medical officers manned every road, armed with hypodermic needles to head off the cholera which used to sweep through Puri after the festival. Holy men, their naked | bodies smeared with ashes, and the "walking dead" (lepers and the congenitally deformed) begged their way through the crowds. Along the route the gods would travel peddlers hawked souvenirs. And through the shrill mass moved boys with water buckets and bicycle pumps to spray the sea of heads in the searing heat.
At midmorning, behind dancing drummers and holy men waving fans and yak tails, the priests began bringing out the gods. The crowd cheered and surged against police lines at the sight of each deity swathed in colored gauze, profusely garlanded and shaded by an umbrella. In a shimmering uproar of crashing gongs they were loaded aboard their high carts. The 29-year-old Raja of Puri, hereditary superintendent of the Jagannath Temple, swept each cart with a golden broom to show that in the eyes of the god all men are lowly.
Beatitude & Absorption. Suddenly a wail came from the crowd, as hundreds of hands seized the great ropes of Balabhadra's chariot and began to pull. With a screech of stretched leather and a grinding of wood on wood, the towering structure swayed into motion and started down the sandy avenue, flanked by policemen to keep people back from the huge wheels (though it has been decades since anyone committed the traditional holy suicide beneath the carts, accidents have been common).
Twenty minutes later, Subhadra's cart shuddered on its way. At last, in a din of gongs and cymbals and a blaze of flags came the Lord of the Universe himself. The sound of praying paced the god's slow journey to his garden house, and before his passage people fell back in heaps.
Watching from the Raja's balcony, the librarian of the Jagannath Temple turned to a Western visitor: "To witness the Lord of Lords on the Holy Car," he said, "guarantees the beholder eternal beatitude and absorption in the Supreme Being."