There's a good reason to wear socks when visiting one of India's most famous temples.
Pilgrims at Karni Mata, photo Corbis
Don’t leave home without your rat socks. That’s a tip for anyone heading to India’s Karni Mata temple, where thousands of rats live the good life, roaming free and feeding on offerings of milk and grain. The temple is one of the most famous in India, and draws thousands of pilgrims a day to its isolated location in a small desert town called Deshnoke in Rajasthan in the country’s northwest.
I’d been meaning to travel to India for ages. I expected to be overwhelmed by the colour, the noise and the chaos, to do things I’d never done before, to see incredible poverty, and to spend far too much time sanitising my hands. But as I stood at the threshold of the Karni Mata temple and watched my companion flinch as the first visible rat ran up the gate by our heads, I began to wonder: what the hell was I thinking? Yes, I was born in the Year of the Rat. But this was a long way from a Chinese astrology coffee mug.
Most of India’s 1.2 billion people are Hindu. With 36 million Hindu deities, they have plenty of gods to go around. There are temples everywhere, ranging from huge elaborately carved marble cathedrals to roadside shrines where drivers stop to worship a motorcycle. As an over-involved aunty, I can relate to the story of Karni Mata. When her nephew died, she called on the god of death, Yama, to bring him back to life. Angered at his refusal, she vowed her people would no longer go to Yama when they died, but be reincarnated as rats.
After stopping at a nearby market to buy our ultra-cheap grey business socks, we arrived at the temple site in the heat of the day. Buses and cars were crammed into the parking area, and the men, women and children were in festive spirit, laughing and chatting, and buying snacks and chewing tobacco from the vendors’ stalls. Next to the shoe-deposit area, a man pressing sugar cane for drinks was doing a slow but steady trade.
Having left our shoes and donned our rat socks, we passed through the typically Indian security check: you walk through the metal detector, one for men and one for women. Regardless of whether it beeps, they wave you through without checking. We weren’t carrying much, anyway; in Hindu temples you can’t carry water or food or wear leather – although they make an exception for your wallet. As we entered the temple courtyard, men were removing their leather belts and hanging them on a rack.
At the edges of the courtyard area, you could see rats in groups of maybe 50, eating from piles of grain. In one corner a large bowl of milk sat on the ground, with 10 or 20 rats perched on its sides, drinking. I’m not much of an expert on the genetic diversity of rats, but these are more your small brown country-type rats, rather than the big grey thick-tailed ones you see in your compost heap. So, on the plus side, they are not huge. But, unfortunately, they do scamper. Most of the time they stay in their groups, feeding lazily, but occasionally one will raise itself off the ground and break into a dancing, jinking run. Seeing those brown blurs out of the corner of my eye was making me nervous. If I was going into the temple proper, I’d better hurry.
As we approached the door I felt my adrenaline level rise. I told myself, they’re just like pigeons, or chipmunks, which are everywhere in India. They are probably cleaner than I am. The inner temple area is about the size of a large open-plan living room. Made of marble, it is an open-roofed square space, with raised verandas on the sides and a small room at the front with an altar and a statue of Karni Mata. A man and his daughter, aged about two, were sitting close to me on the edge of the veranda; there must have been a niche in the marble beneath them, as rats were moving in and out from behind their legs. Women were sitting on the floor in their saris, hoping the rats would walk over their bare feet, as this is a sign of good luck.
Rats were scurrying back and forth, crossing through the queue, coming within inches of my feet in my flimsy rat socks. After a while I stopped looking down. Reaching the head of the queue I could see inside the altar area, where women were sitting in a virtual blanket of rats. More rats than floor: my cue to leave.
Waiting to reclaim my shoes, I looked around at the bustling string of stalls. There were no rat postcards on sale, no T-shirts with puns about the rat race. But there were highly embellished images of gods, holding their many symbols – peacock feathers, tiger skins, tridents, lotus flowers, swords and flutes; there’s a reason some of them have more than two arms. The gods are often shown in family groupings, with their consorts and little infant god offspring.
For many of us in the Western world, spending a lot of time with extended family can be trying, even when they aren’t incarnated in rodent form. And religion is something we practise on weekends, if at all. But in India, daily life revolves around faith and family, family and faith. And when you’ve got 36 million gods, and more than a billion compatriots, it’s hard to feel lonely.
I peeled off my rat socks, dropped them into one of India’s rare public rubbish bins and slipped my shoes back on. They call it hand sanitiser, but I’m willing to testify it works just as well on feet.