THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 9, 1994 TAG: 9410080101
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY PATRICIA HUANG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 183 lines
WHEN THE PROGRAM for the big festival at the Hindu Temple of Hampton Roads arrived in Bharti Desai's mailbox, she immediately began to create a mental menu of the dishes she wanted to cook for the celebration.
Her youngest son had been practicing dances for the Hindu holiday, called Navratri, for the past month. Her eldest son was coming home from college to join in on the festivities at the Hindu Temple of Hampton Roads.
``I kept thinking in my head all night, what new things to make for the festival,'' Desai recalled of the Thursday evening.
But in the predawn hours of the next day, a phone call brought shocking news to squelch the excitement.
The temple was on fire.
A blaze that had started early Friday morning, destroyed most of the 10,000-square-foot temple. Firefighters arrived at the single-story, cinder-block building off Chesapeake's Dominion Boulevard shortly after 4:30 a.m. on Sept. 30 but not in time to save it.
The cause of the fire is still unknown, but fire officials say they have ruled out arson.
The temple's priest - called a pujari - and his wife were living in a front apartment of the building. Firefighters said that the couple, who are in their early 70s, were asleep when the fire started. They seemed to be unaware of the fire even after firefighters arrived, but there were no injuries.
``I got the phone call at about 6:30 a.m.,'' remembers Dilip Desai, Bharti's husband. ``And that was the darkest night because we worked hard to build this.''
It was four years ago that Dilip Desai, a member of the temple's board of trustees, and others in the region's Indian community realized a long-time dream. They had raised enough money to see the first Hindu temple built in Hampton Roads.
The group hand-picked the 10-acre Great Bridge site after looking at a location in Hampton and another on Kempsville Road. The Chesapeake location's easy accessibility from the interstate won over the members who come from Hampton Roads, parts of North Carolina and as far north as Williamsburg.
``The day I heard (about the fire) I was lost. I was so broken,'' said Bharti Desai of Virginia Beach. ``I felt like there was a death in the family. That was the only place we Indians could get together.''
The temple's membership includes about 450 families, the region's only Hindu congregation. Ceremonies at the temple often attracted crowds of more than 1,000 people to the building, members said. The next nearest Hindu temple is located in Richmond.
``We call it a temple, but it is really a community center,'' said Dilip Desai, who immigrated from India to this area years ago, as did many other temple members who arrived in the United States in the 1970s and '80s. ``Most of the children are born here. They are American. So we try to take the best of American culture and the best of Indian culture and put them together.''
The temple fostered that. Indian parents enjoyed the company of other Indians, rejoiced in their commonalities and felt free to worship their religion. They celebrated their customs and passed Hindu culture on to their Americanized children.
``They always knew about Hindu religion,'' Bharti Desai said of her two teenage sons. ``But once we had a temple they were more into Indian culture. They liked to go, and they looked forward to going.''
The temple was home to everyone. ``Even 2-year-olds look forward to it, and they ask their parents, `Is there a program at the temple this weekend?' '' she said.
Most members came every weekend for picnics and cookouts and some said they even frequented the center three or four times a week to play badminton in the same hall where they celebrate birthday parties, baby showers and wedding ceremonies. They came during the week to worship, play basketball or socialize. Hindi language classes for the younger members were also being planned.
``The temple made everyone close,'' Desai said. ``Before it there was no place to meet and no place to get so close.''
She shook her head as she walked around the charred remains of the building four days after the fire. The temple's destruction, she explained, had come at the start of Hinduism's most celebrated season.
There was Diwali - the passing of the old year - and other celebrations to come through the fall and into the winter. The events would start off with Navratri, one of the most important of Hindu holidays.
In India, Navratri is celebrated for nine consecutive days and nights. The Navratri dance, called a Garba, ``becomes a ceremonial participation in which one and all, irrespective of caste, creed, age or social position, join in gay abandon. . . ,'' according to literature available at the temple.
Locally, the festival has been arranged every year at the temple to be held over three consecutive weekends.
``We dance from probably from 9 at night until about 2 or 3 in the morning,'' Bharti Desai said, explaining the tradition. ``Everybody enjoys it - adults and even little kids are dancing in front of the gods that we put in the center of the hall.''
But on this day, Desai was staring through mangled pieces of melted metal from the building's collapsed frame. She looked past the debris at two of the only still-standing marble statues of deities. Her husband had tried to salvage the statues, which had been specially ordered and imported from India and cost more than $10,000. But as he leaned over to pick one up, he found that it crumbled at his touch.
It had taken a year to bring the deities over from India, and they had arrived only a few months ago. Temple members were planning to build an addition to the $1.5 million temple this fall as a shrine for the statues.
Another casualty of the fire was a set of red-and-black velvet stage curtains valued at about $10,000. The curtains had recently been donated by a member in the name of her late father. The curtains would have been used for the first time at the Navratri shows.
Even before the fire, members said they were always chipping in donations of thousands of dollars at a time whenever something was needed.
Within days of the fire, temple members reported that they had already raised about $50,000 in donations to rebuild and have collected pledges for even more.
Dilip Desai and other members predict that the temple will be rebuilt by next summer.
``The community is all missing the center, and they are more committed to rebuilding now,'' said Dilip Desai. The members also see a chance to expand the facilities to suit their needs, he said. In the meantime, they will return to renting halls for their functions until they can have a place of their own again.
``We are united like a family,'' Bharti Desai added. ``We will do it again.'' MEMO: HINDUISM'S ROOTS ARE PREHISTORIC
IN EXPLAINING a little bit about her religion, Bharti Desai, a
long-time member of the Hindu Temple of Hampton Roads, said, ``In Hindu,
there are many gods, but there is only one God.''
Ponder that as you would Confucianist riddles such as, ``What is the
sound of one hand clapping?''
The World Book Encyclopedia provides some enlightenment.
Hindus worship many gods. During the period of early Hinduism,
believers worshiped gods that represented powers in nature, such as rain
and the sun. But gradually, some Hindus came to believe that, though
divinities appear in separate forms, these forms are part of one
universal spirit called Brahman.
The three most important gods that make up Brahman are Brahma, the
creator of the universe; Vishnu, its preserver; and Shiva, its
destroyer.
Shiva, the god of destruction, is often depicted in statues and
pictures with four arms. The third eye in Shiva's forehead symbolizes
the Hindu belief that he knows and sees everything.
Hinduism is the major religion of India and is one of the oldest
living religions in the world, dating back to prehistoric times. Unlike
such religions as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, Hinduism was not
founded on the teachings of a single man. It developed gradually over
thousands of years as many cultures, races and religions helped shape
it.
Hinduism has no single book, such as the Bible, that serves as the
source of its doctrines, but it does have many sacred writings. One of
the most important of these writings includes the Vedas, which are the
oldest Hindu scriptures. They are older than the sacred writings of any
other major religion. The teachings of the Vedas existed long before
they were written down. Other writings include stories of Hindu myths
and long epics.
Hinduism teaches that the soul never dies. When the body dies, the
soul is reborn in either an animal or in another human being.
The law of karma is closely related to reincarnation. It states that
every action of a person, no matter how small, influences how his or her
soul will be born in the next life. Hindus believe that a person's
reincarnation continues until he or she achieves spiritual perfection.
The soul then enters a new level of existence, called moksha, from which
it never returns.
- Patricia Huang
ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
REBUILDING THE TEMPLE
[Color Photo]
Staff photo by STEVE EARLEY
``We are united like a family. We will do it again,'' says Bharti
Desai about building a new temple.
Staff photos by STEVE EARLEY
Four years ago, the Indian community realized a long-time dream when
the temple was built.
ABOVE: Bharti Desai visits the site of the Hindu Temple of Hampton
Roads, which was destroyed in an early-morning blaze Sept. 30. The
cause of the fire is still unknown, but fire officials say they have
ruled out arson.
RIGHT: Only two statues are left of Hindu deities. Temple members
had worked for a year to bring the marble statues over from India,
and they had arrived only a few months ago.
by CNB