The Kodi Etram or Flag Raising Ceremony was held in all kovils on Sunday 2nd February this week to mark the start of a 10-day fasting (vegeterian diet) in view of Thaipusam Cavadee which will be held on 11 February instant. When I met with Vishal in his workshop on Sunday in Flacq, I learnt that preparations for the Cavadee festival were scaling up in sophistication year after year. More devotees have recourse to carpenters, ebenists, furniture manufacturers to make Cavadee frames on a scale that can be supported by the devotees. In this context, Vishal is more of an artist than a mere manufacturer. The Cavadee is a ‘burden’ in Tamil which consists of a semi-circular piece of wood or bamboo which is bent and attached to a cross structure in its simplest form. Devotees carrying the Cavadee from the kovil to the river for rituals and back to the kovil implore Lord Muruga for assistance, usually for a loved one who is need of help or healing or for oneself to enjoy good health, to succeed in one’s enterprise, education, work, ambition and goals.

As a child, I used to help in the preparation of my friend’s Cavadee, the frame of which was wooden and all the rest bamboo rods and flattened sliced pieces of the bamboo to be eventually covered by blue hortensia (hydrangea) mainly, abundant on the sugar estate. Ours was a family duty, the fathers and the boys busy with decoration from afternoon to early morning of Cavadee day. Vishal tells me the fervour keeps deepening, not only among the devotees who come back to his workshop but touches an ever-growing number of devotees embracing other faiths. They order the Cavadee frame they find best and the ritual of decoration would be done on the eve of Cavadee day in respect of a lore, sacred, untouched, enriched transmitted from eons.

Vishal, like many of our fellow citizens, has found his way in a manual job, cabinet making. His formal education ended in Form 3 at the Professor Basdeo Bissoondoyal College in Flacq. Vishal and his father had a dream: make the Vishal Art Furniture workshop along the main road a place of reference: create pieces of furniture from chairs to tables to beds and from shelves to cupboards. After completing a one-year course in technical studies, in a cabinet manufacture at the Piton Industrial Technical School, Vishal took over the workshop as an inheritance from his late father. People who call here say he is up to his father’s reputation in matters of quality and time delivery, unless a ‘force majeure’.

Since January, Cavadee devotees are calling in to place their orders, specify their models, size, height, and weight. He proposes that they try models on their shoulders, models that would weigh heavier with their flowery decorations, copper glasses filled with cow milk, peacock feathers and bells. Vishal, like an optician careful with details, tests one model after the other on a young boy’s shoulders and will take a firm order only when his potential customer has overcome all uncertainties. His wife Anusha is his full-time colleague who maneuvers the gun hammer, the electric polishing machine, pliers and the manual hammer. She fixes the pieces of such furniture as a table, chairs, cupboards and beds thus completing quite often arduous jobs but for their two daughters, the elder one, still a secondary school student being the ‘official’ designer of the workshop. Her designs have received acclaim given the number of Cavadee devotees coming from as far as Trou-d’Eau-Douce and Rose-Belle.

Vishal’s and Anusha’s devotion to their profession will undoubtedly continue to be praised in Flacq and far beyond. Not only as an impact of the quality of the Cavadee they manufacture but also for their availability, amiability and openness to proposals from different perspectives.