OFFTRACK: GURUVAYUR, KERALA

The world waits on J. Jayalalitha. Puratchi Thalaivi, great leader, waits for none. Ignoring appeals made for security reasons by Kerala Chief Minister A.K. Antony and the Tamil Nadu director-general of police to postpone her trip to the Guruvayurappan temple in Kerala, she set off from Chennai. Her tryst was with the Lord: she had promised Him a baby elephant after her election victory. She need not have hurried. The temple authorities told Jayalalitha she would have to wait for 38 years. The problem was not about finding an auspicious date; it is about finding a date. All the slots for the Udayasthamana puja she wants to perform are booked till 2039. Jayalalitha's personal astrologer P. Unnikrishna Panikkar says, "She knew she would have to wait but never imagined it would be this long."

The puja, which last from sunrise to sunset, is performed at the temple on 125 days every year. And though it costs Rs 35,000, such is the belief of devotees in the ritual's magical powers that a 10-year wait is common. "No one, VIPs included, can be squeezed in the list as it is published in advance. Devotees can take us to court if someone is given a chance out of turn," says K.N. Satish, administrator of the Guruvayur Devaswom Board that runs the temple.

But Jayalalitha should consider herself lucky when compared to Sudakshnina Menon, an advertisement executive from Mumbai. When she wanted to perform the Poo Moodal puja (literally, "covering with flowers") at the tiny Kadampuzha Devi temple, 45 km from Guruvayur, she was told her turn would come in 2046. This relatively unknown temple does not even have an idol. Its symbol for a short-cut to divinity is a hole in a rock. For millions of devotees, including Muslims, the hole is the source of the cosmic energy personified in Goddess Parvati. At Rs 500, the ritual of covering the hole with a litter of kattu thechi (wild chrysanthemum) flowers is affordable, explaining the decades-long queue.

The authorities at the temple, an autonomous institution under the state government, were in for a surprise when they opened bookings for the puja last year after exhausting the 1991 list. "In one day, we made bookings for the next 13 years," says M. Komaleswaran, executive officer. Normally, bookings are never made for more than a decade. But in two weeks, devotees, specially those who have bought vehicles and want them blessed at the temple, had reserved time for the puja 45 years into the future.

Further south in Thiruvananthapuram, at the Attukal Devi temple, there is a 23-year waiting period for the Muzhukappu puja (Goddess' "make-up"). The temple's famed Ponkala festival attracts the largest congregation of women, about 25 lakh, in the state. They stand in a queue-last year's was 15-km long-and cook payasam in earthen pots to please the Goddess. Men are barred entry into the temple during the festival. "The deity here is considered a feminist, believed to protect her women devotees from persecution by males, including husbands," says G. Madhavan Nair, temple trust president. The congregation has even attracted the attention of the Guinness Book of Records, whose representatives are trying to ascertain whether it is indeed the largest religious gathering of women.

Many other temples have similar time frames for ceremonies. Racketeers are capitalising on this to mint fortunes. The Guruvayur Devaswom Board recently found out that several websites were offering to perform pujas here for a fee. The board has since launched its own website (www.guruvayurdevaswom.com) that accepts online booking for pujas. A corporate war is also on. The Reliance Group started it in Guruvayur by spending Rs 50 lakh to plate a door of the sanctum sanctorum with gold. Vijay Mallya of the UB Group then spent Rs 1.25 crore in gilding the front door and walls of the sanctum. Both Reliance and the UB Group are now vying for the privilege of covering with gold the Ayyappa temple in the Guruvayur complex. Of course, such corporate magnanimity is reserved only for a few temples to the envy of 2,000 other struggling places of worship. Perhaps there is a class distinction among gods too.