Hundreds of thousands of devotees participate every year in the nine-day Navaratri festival in honor of the Goddess at the Sri Mariamman temple in the heart of Bangkok, Thailand. The rush is so heavy that the adjacent Silom Road, a major thoroughfare, is closed to traffic for hours at peak times. This would all be quite typical for a Hindu temple in Delhi or Calcutta during any of our major festivals, but this is Thailand, and the Thai Buddhist devotees at this Navaratri festival outnumber Hindus ten to one. There are just 100,000 Hindus in Thailand, mostly relatively recent immigrants, with about eleven Hindu temples. But Hinduism, which first arrived here from South India over 2,000 years ago, permeates Thai religion and culture. Consider, for example, that the King has his own brahmin priest of Thai ancestry, or that the Thai script is based upon the South Indian Grantha script.