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Everything about the festival is seen in the worst light. When she and Kanan receive free food,
Judith suggests the benefactor is being generous ‘As a penance for being so greedy the rest of
the year’(TB, 148).
Judith is intent on seeing the kavadis, the central part of the festival which involves acts
of endurement of great pain. She insists when Kanan questions her strength, but is shocked at
the first, relatively harmless sight of ‘a man with a naked chest as hard as a gymnast’s and grey
snakes of hair to his waist. He glared at them and jumped up and down on the grass, rattling
his ankle bells’ (TB, 149). Judith senses a ‘mindless, concentrated malevolence’ emanating
from him. Kanan tries to explain how the man is taking on the role of Shiva, the god who
‘destroys the universe by dancing it down to atoms’, but to Judith it is just part of ‘this orgy.
This abomination’(TB, 149). Judith later describes the far more gruesome part of the festival,
the kavadis, acts of voluntary submission to torture where ‘dozens of silver fish-hooks were
run through the flesh of backs and chests to act as anchors for the towers of tinsel, peacock
feathers, plastic dolls and other glittery rubbish that made up the big kavadis’ (TB, 151).
Indian ascetics who regularly submit to tests of pain endurance are so well known that their
images have become banal, but d’Alpuget describes a scene which not only Judith would find
unbearable:
There was a little girl of about five. She looked starving, her arms were like
sticks, and her eyes were too big for her face. They screamed ‘Vel! Vel!’ in
her ears, held the incense under her nose, and she closed her eyes and began
rolling her head. They just grabbed her, her mother held her still, and they
speared her tongue. Everyone looked as calm as if they were threading meat
on to a skewer for shish-kebab. (TB, 149)
The description seems meant to shock her readers with the unbounded barbarity of the
festival, and Judith’s desire is understandably to either vomit or rush in and stop them, yet
d’Alpuget juxtaposes Judith’s horror with the inane reaction of a stereotypical Australian
tourist. This hippie girl is more impressed with other aspects of the festival, notably the
Chinese man who goes into ‘a monkey trance’: ‘He turned into a monkey before my eyes. He
ate bananas with the skins on, and ripped a coconut husk off with his teeth, and they beat him
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