Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian

Mass. ‘You know, Xavier once wrote to Rome that the residents of Veerapandiyapattinam were practitioners of sorcery,’ Kattar said with a smile. Nearly everybody in the village is a Catholic now, and the focus of the town is the Gothic-styled Church of St. Thomas, dating back to 1886. The church is a long building with a bright white, vaulted ceiling and an inexplicable, cement-coloured finish, as if it were forever young, forever on the verge of being completed.
    In the hour before Mass began, Kattar went to visit his mother, and Fernando took me to Father Stephen Gomez, a loose-limbed, thoughtful, middle-aged priest who is the director of the Valampurinatham Institute for Research in Society and Religion, located barely a kilometre from the Church of St. Thomas. Gomez listened politely to Fernando’s introduction (which included the statutory mention of Joe D’Cruz) and to my expressed interest in the religious history of the Parava community. ‘Yes, it’s an interesting subject,’ he said finally. Gomez was the only person to articulate what I’d found so fascinating about the Paravas: ‘The community has, in a way, fossilised in the state that it was four hundred years ago.’ He waved an arm vaguely to his right. ‘That church is the centre of their daily lives,’he said. ‘Their houses are built around it, and their lives revolve around it.’
    The glowing twilight slowly dwindled into a pensive dusk, and the front steps of the Church of St. Thomas came alive with harsh tube lights and the hubbub of its parishioners’ conversation. I stood for a while just outside the church, with a group of men that had arrived too late for seats within. Later, I went up to the balcony where, in front of a circular mural of Christ and his disciples, I watched the choir, led by a short organist with jasmine flowers in her hair, her electronic keyboard rattling off many of the same disco classics I heard at Our Lady of the Snows. Looking down from that balcony, I could see the entire length of the church, the multicoloured saris and shirts of the congregation looking like the individual panels of a very big work of stained glass.
    The service was first led by a woman, and half an hour into the proceedings, when she issued an instruction, many of the men in her audience stood up and slipped on shoulder vestments, either in red or blue. (They also had circular headbands, which to a man they delayed putting on until the last possible minute, keeping them tucked under their arms.) ‘These are the two sabhas,’ Fernando told me. Then, searching for the right English word, he said: ‘They are the groups of acolytes.’ And this proved to be the case: At some point, they took up a cross and banners and candles and moved in a procession into the verandah of the church, where we were already standing. Near us, an orchestra of pipes and drums burst into song.
    The ceremony on the verandah was brief and completely unintelligible. Kattar, Gomez and a third priest took their seats, and for fifteen minutes, various speeches were delivered into microphones, only to rebound immediately from the massive speakers placed around us, the words rushing to fuse with their predecessors like mad little droplets of mercury. It didn’t seemto disturb my peers in the audience, who listened with rapt attention. ‘You should really be here tomorrow,’ my neighbour informed me. ‘All the children in the village attend, dressed in white and holding candles. It’s a beautiful scene.’
    After the ceremony, it remained only for Kattar to deliver his Tamil sermon, which he did with his trademark, swerving style. He lectured on truth, seemingly extempore, for several minutes, leaping athletically from quote to quote; in one three-minute sequence alone, I recognized verbatim references from Mahatma Gandhi, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad,
and there were probably more that I missed. When I met him immediately afterwards, at a