Articles of Faith

Under a sweltering sun, I learn about faith.

The Batu Caves are home to Kuala Lumpur's (KL) celebration of Thaipusam, a three-day Hindu festival in honour of Lord Muruga. It occurs in January or February each year and I am there for this year's event.

I arrive on the last day, a Sunday, and the festivities are in full swing. Though the caves, in the distance and up a long flight of stairs, are where devotees make offerings to their lord, people also bear their burdens along the street below.

They are burdens to be certain. This is a festival of doing penance, of washing away sins, of being blessed. The burdens are the penance.

Some Hindus support kavadis, large platforms built with a metal framework that is attached to head, shoulders and waist. They are ornately decorated with different colours, feathers and religious figures. They bob in the heat, lifting then falling into themselves.

Other Hindus are pierced. To say that they are pierced doesn't exactly hit the point if only because the piercing, in most cases, occurs in an all-over-body sort of way. It's not permanent, either. People don't walk around the everyday streets looking as they do; I have the distinct impression that their adornments have been done very recently and will be removed at the end, which makes the effort even more impression.

Many of the pierced have hooks running through the skin of their backs, up and down in rows. Some hooks hold apples; others are attached to ropes held by other Hindus who hold back their charges when they strains too much. The skin pulls and stretches.

The piercings also include metal rods, spears and tridents running through cheeks and horizontally through the upper lip. There is no blood. All the pierced Hindus have the dazed and holy look of the penitent, but there is no blood.

Those who don't carry burdens of penance, carry burdens of a beat. Thaipusam is a celebration and drummers make music so the devoted can dance. To the crack and thunder of a drum, they dance. They dance and they dance and they dance.

One woman twirls and stumbles in the middle of a circle of people. She sticks out her tongue, eyes wide and wild and seemingly senseless to the world around her. She stops, takes a breath and keeps going. The sun beats down.

Away from the crowd - I am wilting in the heat - a Hindu man asks me what I think of all this. He is the one who explains about penance and washing away sins.

"For me, coming from the West, I have no context for this," I say. "It's madness."

The west coast of Canada is not an overtly religious place. There are probably pockets of faith to be seen, spaces for belief. But they're not very obvious and one would have to go looking. Largely, these places stay out of the light and the public spaces.

But in KL, articles of the people's faith are there to be seen: on heads, in backs and cheeks. Faith, here, is not Paul Simon's "island in the setting sun."

Faith, here, is to be celebrated and worn on the body, a badge of belief with no blood.