Avani Avittam in America

I was jolted out of my bed this morning by my roomie who was arrayed in white ceremonial robes and whose forehead was smeared with ashes. "It is Avani Avittam (day of the thread-changing ceremony of Brahmins) today," he religiously intoned in my ear. I mumbled, still half asleep, that I had just changed my thread a couple of days back since my earlier thread had snapped while using it to scratch my back. But he wouldn't lend me a ear; he would brook no excuse. The thread had to be changed at the prescribed auspicious hour and that was it.

That was how all of us sat down at 11:30 AM, makeshift veshtis hurriedly draped over jeans and porcelain cups supplanting the traditional vessels. The ad hoc arrangement served fine until two chaps each took out a pamphlet -- one authored in Kannada and the other in Tamil. The next half hour was spent arguing over the authenticity and the relevance of each of them to the Iyer and Iyengar factions. I unreservedly expressed my satisfaction about the way the discussion proceeded. I knew to read neither languages.

We waded through many sesquipedalian tongue-twisting litanies and sprinkled half a litre of water to the carpets before one of them was indignant in his realisation of the fact that the chant was for a different occasion. None of us felt like tolerating his indignation. Several tirades past, we chose to amicably settle, for the moment, that the shloka was indeed for a different purpose: removing the sacred thread! One of them suddenly beamed a beam that speaks of a newly-reacquired wisdom. He said he felt sure that it was not such a Herculean ordeal after all. He had felt sure all along. And now he was able to remember the reason for his cocksureness. He then crooned a couplet and asserted that that was the only mantra that was to be repeated 108 times. Instantly he was bathed in water that flew out of the porcelain cups. Nobody, atheist or otherwise, likes to be instructed the Gayathri Mantra like he's forgotten it.

It was at this point that one of my friends proceeded to do what he thought was the least offensive to the Gods. He instantly slung the new poonal (the sacred thread) over his body, removed the old thread, flung it into the dustbin and walked out proclaiming that his thread-changing was complete. I followed suit.

- posted by Dileepan @ 1:32:00 pm

Lampoons:
Post a Comment