The Journey Home

© Sundaram Ramaswamy, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

At the center of a temple, a dark room. The blinds are half open, and dust floats in the slats of light. The room is a library in name—glass-doored bookcases line the walls—but it is mostly a closet in function. In here are the objects belonging to a life forever in transit: two metal lockers, a doctor’s scale used to weigh luggage, and stacks of not-yet-unpacked cardboard boxes, old and soft, the weathered flaps not sealed with tape but tucked into each other for easy access. Among these objects, on gray folding tables, occupying most of the room, stand row upon row of statues of the Hindu god Ganesha. Some are nearly a foot tall; others, no larger than a thumb. Hundreds of crescent-crowned elephant heads with sleepy trunks resting on swollen boy bellies, hundreds of painted eyes looking forward, hundreds of right palms up, asking you to stop for a second. To be still.

I stood among those statues, or murtis, on a late afternoon in September 2012, trying to photograph the feeling of being in that room: the eerie company of all those copies of a single deity, each one believed to actually be the god himself. Each had been brought to life by a pran pratishtha, a ceremony whose name literally translates to “enlivening the resting.” In four days, these statues would no longer exist—at least, not in this state. I was here, with the heavy, semiprofessional Cannon DSLR that I’d borrowed from a generous uncle, to document their end, when the statues’ owners would drop them over a ship’s railing and into the San Francisco Bay. In the bay, their clay bodies would dissolve, releasing the god from his earthly shackles.

Ganesha is a benign god; he is a hopeful god. He is known for being an exemplary son, the god of beginnings, the god of the arts. The stories of Ganesha—of how he won a race around the world by sitting on his mouse and circling his parents, his universe; how, when he was tasked with transcribing the Mahabarata, he broke off the tip of his tusk so that he could finish—are symbolized by the mouse at his feet and his jagged half-tusk. These stories are what make him the most beloved of all the Hindu gods.

But the best-known story, the one that brought me to the temple in California, is of how his father, Lord Shiva, the destroyer, decapitated him in a rage and then brought him back to life with an elephant head. This is the story of Ganesha’s birth, of his rebirth, and of his rebirthday, which his followers celebrate every year. They invite the god, temporarily embodied as a statue, to their homes, where, for ten days, they treat him like an out-of-town guest. They hold dinner parties in his honor. They offer him sweets on a silver platter at the end of each meal. When the celebration, the Ganesha Chaturthi, ends, his devotees return him to his home on Mount Kailasha, in Tibet—the path to which is the water. But because Ganesha is the god of good luck, the god of auspicious beginnings, this ceremony of immersion, or visarjan, also serves as a cleansing for his devotees. Into the ocean he goes, carrying with him all of his worshippers’ misfortunes.

The photos I’d seen of visarjans were surreal. A Ganesha murti three stories tall, photographed from up high and so far away that the thousands of bodies carrying him down the streets of Mumbai turn into one body, a thick river of people carrying the statue down to the sea. The enormous murti being escorted into the water on the shoulders of men, each individual now clearly visible—some capped, all fully clothed and soaked. Now you see their faces, pained and joyous, and all the people behind them, watching from the beach against the backdrop of lush trees and South Mumbai’s...