Excerpt from American Canyon

01:39:37:15

The pujari is young, and has no beard. His name is Chandra. He tells me to sit on a straw mat along the blue wall of the room. The moogu is abstract, unlike the ones made of leaves and flowers around Podilli, and is composed of lines, circles, and crescents. He places a different colored piece of fabric on each vessel, and covers them with flowers. To my left is a rock the shape of a cobra’s hood that I have seen before propped up against the trunk of a tree in town, or along a road, or in a temple courtyard. Carved on its surface are two entwined cobras stained yellow with pusupu that resemble the caduceus of Hermes, the symbol of medicine for western hospitals and pharmacies. To the ancient Greeks this was a symbol of the occult, of alchemy. The pujaris had told me that this ceremony is performed for women who can’t have children. That is what the pratistha can heal; the barren womb. What effect will it or can it have on me? As I sit here, the document, the video, is creating itself. Like an orchid’s stalk growing out of red bark, every hour a new segment arrives, and at the end, when it becomes still, is a green bud.