Thaipusam is an annual Hindu festival which draws the largest gathering in multi-racial Malaysia. Thousands devotees spear their cheeks with long, shiny steel rods - often a metre long - and pierce their chests and backs with small, hook-like needles in penance. Tourists watch in awe as metal pierces the skin with hardly any bleeding and, apparently, no pain as the devotee stands in a trance in the dawn light after weeks of rigorous abstinence. Thaipusam falls on a full moon day in the auspicious 10th Tamil monyh of Thai when the constellation of Pusam, the star of well-being, rises over the eastern horizon. In Kuala Lumpur, the festival is celebrated on a mammoth scale at the Batu Caves temple on the outskirts of the city. It began in 1892, started by early Tamils who migrated to colonial Malaya.