Last night, there was a Hindu religious festival on nearby Mandrem beach. Due to my poor grasp of Hindi, I can't tell you the name or the significance of the event. Even my Hindu friends seemed vague on the details.
It was close to 11 p.m. when my friends decided to check it out. This seemed a bit late for church to me, but they assured me it would go on all night and reminded me to bring extra money "for gambling."
"Gambling?" I said, fearing I'd misunderstood the invitation. "Where are we going? A casino party?"
"No, no, religious festival. You know, Hindu."
"With gambling?" I asked again.
"Of course," they said, shrugging.
I was sure I'd lost something in translation, but I packed a few extra rupees and we headed out across the sand.
Soon, a giant tent appeared on the horizon, its pyramid peek flashing white lights against the night sky. Shrieks and cacophonous drum rolls rushed towards us in the dark. When we reached the tent, an epic drama was taking place inside. A shirtless actor in a feathered headdress, his chest smeared with paint and his eyes bulging from his fiery face, yelled to the heavens in Hindi. A sleepy two-man band - one organ player and one drummer - occasionally roused themselves to punctuate his assertions with startling musical interludes. An equally drowsy crowd of about 50 men and women sat on the floor, watching through heavy-lidded eyes.
My friends paid polite attention to this production for about 15 seconds before pushing me out the back of the tent to a nearby field. There, I was surprised to find a crowd about four times the size of the one in the tent. Everyone crouched in small circles around lanterns placed at intervals on the ground. When we got closer, I saw they were all playing card games on blankets.
We gathered around a blanket which had 10 playing cards sewn to its surface. My friends dropped 50-rupee notes on their favorites - Queen of Hearts, eight of diamonds - and then waited anxiously as a grizzled dealer split his deck of cards one by one into two piles. If the card my friends bet on landed in the left pile, they won money. If it landed in the right pile, they lost. They urged me to play, but being the only non-Indian and the only woman in the field, I felt too shy.
Nehi, nehi, mai achi lardki hei, I told them in my fledgling Hindi. "No, no, I'm a good girl."
They laughed and kept on until they ran out of money. (Just like in America, the house always wins, even when "the house" is just a blanket in a field.)
The next day, I tried again to understand the marriage of gambling and religion.
"Is there always gambling at Hindu religious festivals?" I asked.
"Oh, always," my friends assured me.
"But isn't that weird?" I pressed. "Isn't gambling considered a vice in most cultures?"
"Sure," they agreed, "but if they didn't have gambling at the religious festivals, no one would go."
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