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Silence With The Storm
(Chapter 1)
by
Rattan Mann
DEDICATION
To Ravindra, who is still too young and innocent to
understand fully the hypocrisy
of those wise teachers and great lovers of peace,
non-violence, and yoga who murder
the soul to preserve a worthless body, and to mamma
and Bimla who understand them
too well, more than is necessary.
CHAPTER 1
Like every man I was born of woman, and like every
child I cried the moment I came
into the world. Indian philosophers say that this
is man's first outcry of sorrow
and protest against the world's cruelties and
injustices, but whatever the
philosophical explanation of the birth-trauma, my
cries must have been a great
relief to my mother.
"It is a boy," my grand-mother is supposed to have
said, and my mother was
overjoyed because those were times and places where
boys were more important
than girls, men more important than women,
positions more important than men,
and connections more important than positions, or
at least more useful - those
were times of slavery, those were places of
poverty.
Thousands of years before I existed, the course of
my life was already
predetermined, not by the predictable motions of
the heavenly bodies, the stars
and the planets, but by the unpredictable caprices
of the human mind. The Alphas
of the Universe, the Brahmins of India, have taken
upon their shoulders the
irresponsible responsibility of determining, from
birth to death, the fate of
every individual upon this earth. From zero to
twenty-five years, I was to
remain chaste, avoid women, wine, and meat, and
devote my life - or waste my time,
depending on the point of view taken - to learning
by rote, without understanding,
it goes without saying, the mantras and the slokas
of the Vedas and the Upanishads,
until even the universal truths contained in those
holy scriptures was crushed
beneath the heavy schedule of the ever busy lips.
At twenty-five a woman was
suddenly to be produced before me by the magic of
my parents, and till fifty I was
to dedicate my energies, both physical and
psychological, though in reality mostly
sexual, to dragging into this sorrowful world a few
more of my kith and kin, the
Betas of the Universe, the Kshatriyas, the
warriors, the professional killers of
their fellow-men. From fifty to seventy-five years
I was to remain a figure-head
of my family, at the end of which term I must
renounce, voluntarily of course,
the earthly pleasures and vices and call myself a
hermit and saint, because to call
myself a homeless beggar, thrown out by thoughtless sons and greedy and quarrelsome
daughters-in-laws, no longer willing to burden
themselves with the care of an old
and worthless man, would be too crude and unaesthetic a description of reality.
In the jungle, I the hermit was allowed but one
occupation, for the lack of any
other choice of course, though would-be saints,
fixed to the coming world, are not
duty-bound to agree, and that was prayer and
penance to pave my path to Nirvana,
which would finally be achieved at the ripe old age
of one hundred, and last
forever and ever, unless some megalomaniac God,
scared of human will, chose to
throw me back, with heavenly justification of
course, to repeat the sorrowful cycle
of human existence once more.
Something else was also predetermined for me: I
must hate, on purely logical a priori
grounds, without ever asking why, the Deltas of
Mankind, the Sudras of India. Loathe
them, detest them, despise them, shun them, scorn
them, trample them, turn my back
when I saw them, and close my ears when I heard
them coming. I was also forbidden to
ask one question: How a man feels when he lives in
the gutter and dies in the gutter,
sleeps in the gutter and wakes up in the gutter,
weeps in the gutter and laughs in
the gutter. This was not a human problem, but only
a problem of the Deltas, who with
God's help, could take care of it themselves, and a
privileged Beta like me was
highly discouraged to ponder over such useless
issues.
So was I taught, so did I believe. Under oath, and
upon my honour I declare that no
electric shocks were given to me, nor was I
tortured into this belief. I believed it
on my own free will, and quite proudly and happily
upon that, because everybody
around me believed it and so many wise and
honourable people could not be wrong.
I said my caste is Beta. I am actually
Beta-minus-minus, a subcaste of the Kshatriyas
called the Jats. "As stupid as a Jat," and "For a Jat two times two is always
eight," are just two of the many sayings in
northern India, the others being hard
to translate because the joke - or the truth,
according to those seekers of truth
who can relish it only at others' expense - lies in
the rhyme. Beta-minus-minus are
warriors and farmers: Both my grandfathers, my
uncle, my father - who rose from
the ranks to become a major, promotions often
coinciding with the birth of one of
us, the children - and my brother, all had been or
are in the army. And those of my
relatives who are not yet in the army dream of
being in it some day. It is the irony
of human existence that the profession of killing
another has a higher social status
than the profession of nourishing another, even
among believers of peace and non-violence, and throughout Indian history the tillers
of Mother Earth have always
dreamed of becoming the killers of men some day.
With so much of my fate and future already sealed, I came into this world in the
summer of 1945 as the second child, after Bimla,
to pilfer from Destiny what still
remained of a mutilated and distorted freedom and
life.
From the dusty layers of a misty memory creeps out
a fatty throwing pebbles into
puddles to watch tiny dots of water growing into
full circles and rushing towards
their annihilation at the edges. The next moment
the fatty is gaping with horror
at Munshi Ram, the village school-teacher, beating
a Delta with a rod and then
stuffing warm ash into his gaping wounds to stop
the bleeding. Fatty knew such a
thing would never happen to him because he was the
son of an army captain, but
still he hated to go to school after that day.
Every morning as he trudged towards
school he felt, in his own way and without knowing
the feelings of horses or any
other creatures, like a horse taken to a
slaughterhouse. And the irony of it was
that he never complained or cried or told mamma
that he disliked school. Perhaps
in his own child-like ways he knew there was no
way out and therefore no point in
complaining.
Then there was that chilly winter evening when he
stood helpless, embarrassed,
almost ashamed, a distant spectator, and mamma lay
on the ground in a pool of
blood, as uncle Pratap Singh tried to split her
skull into two with a wooden
plank. This was the inevitable climax of a
joint-family feud which had been
raging he did not know since when. Mamma wanted to
break free from the shackles
of the joint-family system, leave the village, move
with papa to the city where
he was posted, and give the children - even girls -
a proper education. For
Grandma and Uncle Pratap money spent on education,
especially of girls, was money
wasted, and so they won't allow it under any
circumstances, even if it meant
killing mamma before she went too far with her
crazy ideas. Who had ever heard
of girls being educated? Girls are the garbage of
another house; the sooner they
are disposed of in marriage, the better it is. So every evening there were
horrible quarrels, one against two, mamma against
grandma and Pratap.
Grandma: You think yourself to be too modern. Your feet have grown wings. But I will clip them to the roots. From now on you will not go out even for a walk with your sister Satto.
Mamma: I will go out whenever and wherever I want.
Grandma: If Satto steps inside this house I will chop off her legs.
Mamma: You dare touch even a hair of hers...
Grandma: You will not talk to Satto's husband. Is he your husband that you have to talk to him?
Mamma: I will talk to anyone I please. You can't stop me.
Grandma: You are a whore.
Mamma: I am not a whore, you lame bitch.
Grandma: Prostitute, you are a witch. You bewitched Raja and then ate him. (Raja was Pratap's nine year old son who had died sometime back from a liver sickness.)
Mamma: You killed him yourself. To save money you did not even take him to the hospital. If you had listened to me he would have been alive today.
Grandma: Man-eating witch, eat Rattan.
And on and on it would go 'til late in the nights.
One late night when everybody
was asleep and there was no one to hear a cry for
help, thrice did Pratap rush
towards mamma to choke her to death and thrice did
she grab an iron rod and
warned him in no unclear terms, "Come, you
one-eyed bastard, touch me and I will
tear you to pieces."
Of course, she was shivering inside because she
knew she was not strong enough
to fight a man, but the bluff worked and it was all
she had ever hoped for. How
she wished papa was at home or the children were a
little bigger and stronger
to be able to come to mamma's rescue at such times.
She cannot be finished like this, reasoned Uncle Pratap, and so he wrote to
grandfather asking for his gun. Both my father and
grandfather had guns. But my father never brought
his gun home just to prevent such tragedies. My grandfather
had a farmhouse in a sparsely populated area three
hundred kilometers from Delhi so for him a gun was a necessity but he too never
brought it home when he visited
us in Delhi.
"Don't be a fool. Don't do it," Grandfather
replied in a short, cryptic letter.
"If she wants to separate from the rest of the
family, let her go her own way.
And if Katar (papa) is the lice on her sari, as you
say, well, it is not
a crime to listen to one's own wife." And
grandfather did not send his gun.
Gun or no gun, Uncle Pratap decided to go ahead
with his plans.
So came that evening when mamma sat in the yard,
sifting wheat for the evening
porridge, and fatty played near her with his wooden
rabbit. Nobody was expecting
any trouble because the day had gone by peacefully.
Mamma felt safer than usual
because papa was at home on annual leave from his
unit. Suddenly, without warning,
Pratap came from behind with a wooden plank and
dealt two blows on mamma's head
and one on the back before she knew what was
happening. Pratap had assumed that
he would be able to finish the job before papa had
time to interfere, and later
ask for forgiveness and get away with everything.
But papa was warned in time
by a neighbour and could come to mamma's rescue
before it was too late. And
instead of bashing a helpless woman to death Pratap
found himself confronting
a well-trained soldier and that was a totally
different story than he had
expected. Papa wanted to go to the police and have
Pratap jailed. But mamma
was more forgiving. She and the neighbours talked
papa out of it - a brother should not destroy a
brother for "such things."
Fatty stopped his game and stared at the strange
sequence of events rushing
before his eyes. It all looked so distant and
unreal. It produced no anger
or fear or tears - only embarrassment. He was not
part of anything and nobody
took the least notice of him. He just stood there
totally empty and irrelevant until uncle Summer Singh took him gently by the
hand and whispered, "Come son,
let us go out. This is not for children."
That kid of six was not me. It would be a mistake
to think so. Whatever he felt
he felt, without knowing they were feelings. It was
all mist and haze with no
definite shape. He did not know that actions should
produce reactions. He should
have gone to grandma and told her, "My mother is
not a prostitute and whore with
fifty husbands in each village as you say, you lame
bitch," because I would have
gone and told her exactly that. But he did not. He
was a blank canvas with no
reference points to tell him what he should do. I
am a canvas painted all over
with references to my past and pointers to my
future actions. He could compare
himself with nothing. I can compare myself with my
past, my future, and my
surroundings. He thought without knowing it was
thinking. I think. I know that I think. And I know
that I think and therefore I am. And therefore he is he and
I am I and never the twain shall meet.
From every drop of human blood shed upon this
barren earth sprout not mushrooms
and vegetables to fatten laboratory rabbits and
guinea-pigs with, from those
drops sprout human endeavours, human dreams and
aspirations, however shattered
and unfulfilled in the end but noble human efforts
nevertheless. Out of the
blood of my mother that spilled upon the ground
that evening and sank into the
mute and downtrodden dust sprang our education,
Bimla's crazy ideas about
emancipation, my so-called ideals and love for
mathematics, philosophy, and
theoretical physics, and everything else that was
noble in the family, because
at last mamma won and had her own way. Papa agreed
to take us all with him to
the town where his unit was posted and give the
children proper education in
the best of schools. Sacrifices there were in
plenty. When there were not enough
beds, Bimla slept on chairs with a horse-blanket
as her bed-sheet. For seven
years there was no visit to any cinema-hall. And
fatty ate his first chocolate
when he was twenty-one and no longer so fat. But
for education in expensive
private American schools there was, and there had
to be, enough money all the
time.
The day they left for town, grandma wept for hours,
but suddenly and strangely
papa had acquired a heart of stone and he did not
say good bye to her. As they
left, grandma limped to the roof crying bitterly
and hoping that somebody would
look back. Nobody did. But there was no joy in
anybody's heart. Fatty didn't
feel like he was going to a new exciting place. He
never spoke to grandma again.
His real education began when papa took him to St.
Xavier High School Jaipur and
said, "Son, tell your name to father Wilzbacher."
In his confusion he forgot
how to say his name in English.
In kindergarten he wouldn't show others what he
brought for lunch. He mumbled his
daily prayers without understanding a word of
what he said. 'Hallowed be thy
name' was 'Hello pe kei name.' 'May I be excused'
was 'May I go excuse' because
he thought excuse was pee. He tried to figure out
for himself what a lot of
English words meant but was too afraid to ask the
lady-teacher. One day she
caught him mumbling, 'May I go excuse' and asked
him to repeat the words clearly
and slowly. It was so embarrassing. Excuse is not
pee - was his first
acquaintance with higher English.
One day he told a boy that he was only four when he
was in fact nine, and ran
away in shame when the latter shouted, "Come boys! Look, Fatty is saying he
is only four years old."
In the first standard, to which he was
double-promoted, he wrote "Simon" behind
the door, and sat innocently as miss Francis took
Simon to task and humiliated
him before the whole class. The poor boy protested
all the while but Miss
Francis did not believe him and forced him to
wipe the door clean. Fatty meant
no ill to Simon but he was too clever to write his
own name and too cowardly
to admit later what he had done.
In the third standard to which he was again
double-promoted, boys would gather
around him to watch him eating chalks and Father
Extross nick-named him "the chalk-eater."
For the first time in his life he rebelled against
injustice and later regretted
it. In the boarding school, two boys and only two
boys got milk during lunch.
"Why not me?" he asked himself. It was unfair.
Every evening before going to
bed he would make a firm resolve to himself, "Tomorrow I will ask for milk."
And every afternoon the next day he would
chicken out in panic. But after fifteen
days of inner struggle he finally made it. "I want
milk," he told the bearer
and expected the latter to pour some into his glass
instantly. The bearer did
nothing of the sort. Instead he went to Father Willmes and Father Willmes came
to him and whispered something in English which
he did not understand. Then Father
Willmes whispered something to the bearer, and
after ten minutes a glass of
milk finally appeared. But those ten minutes seemed
like an eternity of
embarrassment because every boy on the table was staring at him all the time.
Without knowing it then, he felt like Oliver Twist
asking for more. He never
asked for milk again. Gradually he learned that the
two boys got milk for
medical reasons.
Despite Freud, India believes in the innocence of
childhood. But the childhood
he knew wasn't that innocent after all. The third
standard was buzzing with
sinister rumours. Boys of ten whispered in subdued
voices that something was
going on between a Jesuit Father and a married
lady-teacher. They were often
single-by-double was the exact term used. What it
meant was that the Father
often had sex with the lady-teacher. Once a
class-mate hissed to him between
pressed teeth and muffled giggles that somebody
had just told him that somebody
from fourth standard, he did not know who, had
actually seen these two teachers
coming out together from an empty room. In plain
words, somebody had actually
seen them immediately after a sexual intercourse.
He never invented such wild
stories himself, but enjoyed hearing them. For
months he kept a watchful eye on
the infamous couple, hoping to catch them
red-handed someday, but he never saw
them going into or coming out of empty rooms.
He was again double-promoted to the fifth standard,
but papa wanted him to
proceed more slowly by going through the fourth.
And there she was, the new
class-teacher, the pretty woman with an ugly
reputation in the underworld of
childhood fantasy.
So for long hours in class his eyes wandered from
the blackboard to her
sensual pretty face and drank the distant,
unreachable charm of her inviting
lips and heaving breasts. Then the eyeballs rolled
down her breasts in
great hurry to her legs and crawled up slowly
into her skirt to catch a glimpse
of her underwear. On the other side of the white
linen was the abode of eternal
happiness and romance that wouldn't leave him in peace
even at home. Lost inside the
darkness beneath her skirt he metamorphosed into a
grown-up man rivaling her
age if not her beauty. Then the two lovers, he now
a handsome Jesuit priest and
she as always the fountain of life, were alone
under a lonely tree or the shade
of a burning rock, deep in the deserts of
Rajasthan, unseen, undisturbed, and
unmolested except by eternity, looking into each
other's presence, and hoping
against hope that eternity would stop
metamorphosing itself into time. The next
moment they were united together, lips against
lips, breasts against breasts,
and thighs against thighs and not even time, their
eternal foe, could tear
them apart. Then with her moist lips she would
spray into the shifting sands
of time the H of their first Happiness and beside her bold, dreamy H fluttered
a clumsy, timid L of his first Love. Once and for
all Eternity was imprinted with
his Existence and his Dreams.
The toddling lover did not yet know that love and
sex are the enemies par
excellence of the deepest philosophical assumptions
of Indian society, nor
did the following thought experiment occur to him:
Consider a society based
on the cast-system in which suddenly men and women
are permitted to intermingle,
understand and love each other. Love and
understanding know no caste-barriers,
and within a few generations there would be no
caste left. But in India caste
has survived generations after generations, from
which it follows that understanding, love, and sex have been destroyed
generations after generations. QED.
This is the origin of the arranged-marriages
tradition of India.
Besides love and sex, he experimented with alcohol,
though this time the experiment was a real one
rather than a dream-experiment. As an army officer,
papa always kept a few bottles of rum and whiskey
at home. When nobody was
around he would rush and grab a bottle and pour
some whiskey on his folded
palm and gulp it down in a hurry before he was
caught. He tried it a couple
of times till time overtook him and changed him
into a more philosophical
and saintly person. Thank God, two things never
happened - he was never
caught and he never broke a bottle.
If something fascinated him, though the child did
not yet know that it could
be called a fascination, it was the two dogs, one
Alsatian and the other a
Dachshund, and a dozen white pigeons he was allowed
to keep. And he hoped that
some day those dozen pigeons would become two
dozen, three dozen because they
were his best friends and he was never tired of
watching them as they flew
overhead for hours. But somehow their number never
rose beyond thirteen.
"Do your homework and don't sit there watching pigeons the whole day. I will
give them away and you will never see them again
unless you do your homework
first, you lazy brat." Mamma's angry screams always
hung like a sword over
the head and spoiled some of the beauty of that
otherwise perfect paradise
of innocent happiness where there was no boredom.
Boredom was not yet his terror
as it was to become later when he had to plunge
into a new universe of books
to escape this deadly enemy.
Then came the latency period, not only in the
narrow sense of psycho-analysis,
but also in a wider sense when the soul literally
enters the dark caves for
a long winter-sleep, and nothing leaves an
everlasting impression on the
slumbering mind. Unless the still lingering memory
of a bored boy, lying alone
in bed in the hot summer afternoons, searching the
dictionary for sexy words,
or arranging secret marriages between himself and Bollywood actresses or
lady-teachers, could be called everlasting
impressions.
And then suddenly it exploded - almost overnight,
it seemed. The mind woke up from the long slumber of puberty and adolescence,
from the nothingness,
meaninglessness, and hollowness of past existence,
and burst into a frenzied
spring-time activity which struck ruthlessly at the
very foundations of his
Being and ushered the first philosophical crisis of
his life. A headlong fall
from papa's cavalry horse at the age of sixteen
which left him unconscious
for a night, the first separation from parents and
home to join the boarding-school when papa was transferred to South India
just a few months after the
fall, or the first unjust failure in exam two years
later, may each have
contributed to the change. But he felt only the
change - sudden, clear, manifest -
not the obscure, underlying causes of the change.
If goaded into defining
his existence, he might have cried out, "I feel, therefore I am!" had he heard
of Descartes. But he had not. The universe, both internal and external, was
suddenly surcharged with a new meaning, a fresh
summer-like intensity, holding
a surprise round every corner, and he plunged into this new terra incognita
headlong like an explorer bent on conquering new territories.
The external world did not prove to be very
stimulating, however, and his curiosity for it cooled down very quickly. For
example, when he tried to visit
a new radio station about two kilometers from home,
and a textile factory
in the city, he was insulted and denied entrance.
In those days of Indo-Pakistan tension, people thought he was a Pakistani
spy. After asking some
very technical questions about machines, the
textile factory manager told him
angrily how he could ever think of visiting a
factory without knowing the ABC
of it. Stunned by these unexpected insults and
humiliations, he suspended his
explorations of this side of terra incognita.
Then he wanted to gaze at the heavens, but could
find nothing better than an old binocular to serve
as his telescope. Even the
moon did not look big enough
to excite him further. For months he tried to find
out if there was a telescope
somewhere in Jaipur, but nobody could tell. So his
interests shifted from
astronomy to chemistry and he got very excited
about opening his own private
laboratory at home. So he searched for a
chemistry-box all over town. But none
of the shop-keepers he asked had even heard of the
name.
The first attempt to explore the mysteries of the
mountains was equally futile.
Explorers don't visit hill-stations. They are for
tourists. So on his first
trip to the Himalayas he landed in Chakrata Hills
near Dehradun. And was
arrested immediately. Chakrata Hills is a military
area. And he looked like a
perfect spy - alone, bearded, wearing a grey army
overcoat, roaming in places
where tourists don't venture. The police first
searched his body and luggage, and then took him to
the army HQ for interrogation. It took a lot of effort
to convince the army captain that he was just a
harmless lover of mountains,
not a spy. The captain let him go provided he took
the next bus back to
Dehradun. There he could roam as much as he wanted
and nobody would bother
him. But the well-meaning idiot never seemed to
learn. Later, once again he
ventured into another forbidden territory in
Kashmir. Again he was told to turn
back immediately unless he wanted to be beaten into confessing the
alleged
espionage. It looked as if both times he was lucky
enough to meet interrogators
who were decent enough and intelligent enough to
distinguish an innocent man
from a spy. With more impatient interrogators
things could have been much
different.
But there was something which nobody could deny
him, he thought, though later
he was to learn the hard way, both in India and
Germany, that it too can be
denied: Man's birthright to read books from the
library.
Guided only by the tiny black marks upon paper, he
took the first long journey
into the unknown, and went to the far-away,
snow-clad Antarctica where a tiny,
innocent piece of his credulous soul froze to death
and was forever buried
under the snow with Scott, while the rest escaped
to the stars and distant
galaxies to witness, through the same strange books
that lay before him, the
birth and death of the universe itself. For the
first time in life he came
across names like Einstein, Leonardo daVinci,
Michelangelo and they became
his best living friends.
What sort of life should he choose for himself?
Writer? NeverGreat writers
always wrote in their mother-tongue, while his
tongue was tied to a foreign
language and so would never be utterly free. He did
not want to write in
English and he could not write in Hindi because
English was his de facto
mother-tongue, a step-mother whom he could never
love like a mother.
A philosopher? Yes! This is what he thought he
really was. Once, when he was
hardly seventeen or eighteen, he said to himself, "I would write a book on
human nature, because nobody has ever written such
a great book." And he was
embarrassed and disappointed when he came across
Hume's "A Treatise On
Human Nature" just a few weeks later. Thank God
he hadn't told anybody
about his plans and so there was no loss of face.
And when he read Hume he believed in Hume, and when
he read Bishop Bradley
he believed in Bishop Bradley, and when he read
Kant he believed in neither.
And long after he left the study-room, he wondered
if the chair upon which
he sat was a chair only as long as he sat upon it,
and is a chair no more
now that he was out and playing hide and seek with
Usha and Ravindra. At
least Bishop Bradley thought so.
Then he received a healthy dose of realism from
Russel, and having convinced
himself that Truth is to be found in mathematics
and physics, he left the
chair in peace, believing that it exists all right
and will not disappear in thin air when nobody was looking at it.
Scientist then? Is philosophy and science the same?
Or had he to choose
between the two? The final push over the barrier of
doubt and hesitation
was given by Father Pinto, his class-teacher in the
final two years at high
school. Father Pinto taught mathematics, was a
philosopher, and had a beard.
He took all three verbatim. The future course of
his mentality, if not his
life, was determined once and for all.
What Father Pinto would have said to this he never
knew. In India, elders and
teachers are gods before whom one must silently bow
one's head in reverence,
and not friends before whom one may also bare one's
heart. Russel was a better
friend of his than anybody around him. So
mathematics became his new meta-physics, and only after ten years, when he had
examined every nook and corner
of mathematics in search of a hidden metaphysics,
did he learn that mathematics
is not metaphysics after all. Russel had already
said long back that
metaphysics is nonsense. But it takes very long to
reach one's own conclusions.
Out of these self-studies in philosophy,
mathematics, and physics grew a new
bond of friendship and understanding between him
and Bimla. He was in high
school and she was in college. His school library
was for kids and her college
library was for thinkers. And now he looked upon
himself as a "thinker." So the
burden of keeping the younger brother well-supplied
with advanced books fell
upon the elder sister. But there was a problem. Bimla studied history and so
could not borrow books on philosophy and
mathematics. After a lot of looking
around she found a philosophy student who was
willing to help. But often
she came empty-handed because something or other
always went wrong.
Once he waited for days for Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason. And then he saw
Bimla coming with a smile on her face and a thick
book under her arm. But as he took the book from her his own joy vanished
instantly. It was volume two.
He knew what trouble she was going through for him.
So he said nothing. It
was not her fault. She had not heard of Kant.
Nobody could understand why
a history student was interested in philosophy
books. And so she was glad
to get anything without knowing what it was.
Ironically, the budding "thinker"
never got into the mood to try to read The Critique
again. Whether he would
have understood it or not is totally another
matter.
Then somewhere in the white, polar deserts, or the
golden glow of exploding
galaxies, or the thick, dusty systems of tottering
philosophies, God laid
down his head and died. If he could have, he would
have gone to the most
distant and desolate corner of earth or heaven to
lay a tablet of memory
there: Somewhere here I lost my best, last, and
only friend, God. For months
he walked in stunned delirium, mourning the death
of a beloved one and asking again and again: What now?
What next?
As to so many of his age on the other side of the
globe, God was not to him
a commodity to be gladly bartered for a Ford car, a
Suzuki motor-cycle, a
pretty girlfriend, or even to be tucked away in
memory as the relic of a
bygone superstition. Like so many of his kind on
this side of the globe who
must cling to something in order to live, God was
his belief, his hope, his
life and existence. And when God died, the solid
rock of youthful paradise
was washed away by the stormy waters of doubt and loneliness. He could speak
to no one about the loss. So he spoke to no one at
all. Who could have
understood him? Mom? She was an illiterate woman
with a serene face. She
could have asked, "What is this science which has
taken God away from my
dear son?" But she could not answer anything he
wanted to ask so badly.
Dad? He was a soldier, not a philosopher or
scientist. His only answer
could have been more questions, "Who are Russel and
Einstein? Why are you
interested in them? And what do they have to do with
God anyway?" What answer
did he have to these counter questions? During the
quiet evening walks
the sad and puzzled faces of Mom and Dad looking at
him curiously would
haunt him. And he decided to leave them out of all
this.
A man is born alone, he dies alone, and in life he
suffers alone, so say the
wise men of India. And gradually he was learning
how right they were. He
plunged more deeply into science and philosophy
because they had taken
away his Friend and they and they alone could offer
something in return.
At times he took the path of asceticism and
self-mortification with fasting,
getting up hungry from meals, and even torturing
the body with needles. He
wanted to see light, a vision which would take away
the pain and expel all
doubts, but even the angels kept away. He saw
nothing except his own mind
in turmoil.
In this state the years at school slowly drew to a
close and he moved from
Jaipur to Delhi to study mathematics at the
university.
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