Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (4 page)

One Saturday afternoon I fell asleep while reading a book. I woke up less than an hour later to discover I was blind. I opened my eyes and the world was completely black. I blinked again and again, but still I could see nothing. I was twelve years old and utterly blind.

Deepak was nearby, reading a book. I nudged him.

“Deepak, I can’t see.”

He waved his hand in front of my eyes, and when I didn’t respond, he started to cry. I remember him calling out to our aunt and uncle.

“I have only one brother and he’s blind!”

My uncle Rattan Chacha rushed me to the military hospital. Senior physicians, among them a respected ophthalmologist, examined me and were unable to determine the cause of my blindness. They suspected I was suffering from hysterical blindness, but that made no sense to me or my brother. Why would I suddenly, out of the blue, be
experiencing hysteria? I was a good student, a talented athlete, and a happy kid.

The physicians were able to locate my father, who was on a military field trip visiting a rural hospital. My father listened calmly and then started taking a detailed history. “Please tell me what has happened to Sanjiv in the last month. Has he been well? Has he had any illnesses? Has he incurred any injuries?”

The doctors relayed these questions to me and my brother. I replied, “Just a small puncture wound to my thigh when I nicked it with the sharp end of a cricket wicket.”

“What treatment did he receive?” my father asked. “Did he get stitches? Antibiotics? Did he get a tetanus shot?” They looked at my records and told him that I had indeed gotten stitches, an antibiotic, and a tetanus shot.

“Was it tetanus toxoid or serum?” The serum, he was told. After a pause, my father said, “Sanjiv is having a rare, idiosyncratic reaction to the tetanus serum: retrobulbar neuritis. It’s affecting the nerve in the orbit of each eye. Start an intravenous at once and give him massive doses of corticosteroids.”

The doctors followed these directions and within several hours my vision had returned. It was an incredibly scary experience. Had my father not correctly diagnosed this condition, I might well have remained blind for the rest of my life.

Even as a young person, I was amazed at my father’s diagnostic skills. All the other doctors, even the specialists, had been stumped, while he, a cardiologist, had almost immediately zeroed in on a rare reaction and ordered the correct course of treatment. It was a moving and unforgettable experience. Prior to this incident, I had vaguely considered following my father’s footsteps into medicine, but that experience left an indelible mark. From then on there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind: I would become a physician. I wanted to help people. Although I made that decision when I was very young, I have never regretted it for a moment.

Because my father was a well-respected physician, my family
led a privileged existence in many ways. Every three years we moved around the country as my father’s military hospital assignments changed, but we were affluent and always lived in nice houses with plenty of servants, and Deepak and I always attended the best schools. We lived in Bombay, Jabalpur, Shillong, and Delhi. We traveled extensively throughout India on pilgrimages or sightseeing trips. The India in which I grew up was a vibrant, complex society finding its own identity as a newly independent nation in the post–World War II world. It was a place where cows roamed freely in the streets, sometimes valued more highly than people, while behind the high walls of opulent estates the wealthy lived charmed lives. What I remember most from my childhood were the sounds, the smells, the colorful chaos, and the daily contradictions.

We grew up surrounded by the cacophony of endless traffic: buses and trucks and cars, bicycles, scooters, carts, and rickshaws, and somewhere in the distance, the railroad. One thing we did not often experience was silence; wherever we lived, the world was always rushing by directly outside my window. I remember being awakened very early many mornings by loud speakers blaring from the mosques reciting the Muslim prayers, or by the street merchants hawking their goods as they walked along:
Alu lelo, kela lelo!
Buy potatoes, buy bananas! The songs of the street vendors were the background music of our lives. And oddly, against that constant chatter, I also clearly remember the beautiful sounds of the birds singing during the day and the crickets chirping at night.

By now I’ve traveled extensively throughout the world and, as a consequence of the world growing smaller, the easily identifiable smells of a society have become much less distinctive. There really does seem to be a McDonald’s on every corner, even in India, where they sell veggie burgers. But once, it was possible to know exactly where you were by smell alone. The spicy, pungent aromas of India are still very much alive in my memory. The fresh smell of rain soaking into dry parched earth is, to me, the scent of life itself. When we traveled by train, hawkers at each stop would come aboard selling
Pakoras, Samosas,
and fudge-like sweet
Barfi.
The aromas would fill the train compartment. Certainly one of the most memorable smells of my childhood was hot tea served in clay pots. One whiff and I’m back in India.

Admittedly not all the smells were pleasant. There is a smell to poverty, and we knew that odor, too.

The poverty around us was so much a part of our lives it was taken for granted. We barely even noticed it. When I asked my parents how it was possible that people could live and die in the streets, survive by begging and have nothing but rags to wear, they explained the concept of karma to me. Karma is an important aspect of the Indian culture, a part of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy; in a sense, karma is your path in life, and it is determined by your actions in previous lives. Hindus believe that a spirit has many lives and that after each death it is reincarnated in another form. Your actions in one life determine your status in the next. If I’m a good person in this life, then I’ll be rewarded in this or my next life; if I’m wicked, I’ll pay for it in this or my next life. This belief in karma is one of the reasons that the poor in India don’t seem to have much resentment against the wealthy; they accepted their poverty as their fate, in the sincere belief that they were paying for their past sins. But my parents also told me that your karma did not have to be your fate, that by working hard you can change your destiny.

The belief in reincarnation has always been very common among most Indians. We had an amazing story of reincarnation in our own family, in fact. My mother had a brother named Shukra, who was four years older than she was; before he could even read or write, he could recite long passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures. When my mother was born, her parents named her Suchinta. Her brother objected to this decision. He told them that the name Suchinta incorporated the word “
chinta,
” which means worry in Hindi and therefore had a negative connotation.

“What should we call her then?” they asked him.

“Pushpa,” he answered, Pushpa means beautiful flower. And so my mother was known by this name throughout her life.

When my uncle was four and a half, he admonished his father for shooting a pigeon with a BB gun. “What harm did that innocent bird ever cause you?” he asked. “The harm you did will now return to you.” This from a child.

The stories about this young boy have been passed down in our family. According to my mother’s oldest sister, Bare Bahenji, he would be eating a meal in the kitchen, pause suddenly, and dash outside to the front gate just in time to greet a wandering monk he had somehow sensed. Then he would invite the monk into the house and have a servant prepare him lunch.

Before he reached his fifth birthday, my uncle went to Bare Bahenji and asked for sixteen rupees, then the equivalent of about two dollars.

“Why do you need so much money?” she asked him.

He needed it, he explained, to repay a debt to Daulat, a family servant whose name, ironically, means wealth. My uncle explained that he had incurred this debt in a previous life. He continued to pester Bare Bahenji until she relented. Daulat refused to accept the rupees until my grandparents insisted. A few days later Shukra told Bare Bahenji he would prefer to sleep on the floor. In India this is a common request made by adults who believe they are going to die and want to be connected to the earth. Bare Bahenji was dismayed and disturbed and refused to make his bed on the floor. Instead, she made his regular bed, carefully tucked him in, and sang him a lullaby.

The next morning the family found Shukra’s lifeless body on the floor. My uncle had accurately predicted his own death and wanted to repay the debt from a previous life to Daulat the servant before he passed away. For me it’s hard not to believe in reincarnation when all this occurred in my own family.

Stories like this one are not unusual in India. The founder and chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, was a very learned man. He devoted his entire life to the university. On his deathbed he said, “Take me to the outskirts of Banaras.”

They were puzzled. “Pandit Ji, you have given your whole life to Banaras. You’re now going to pass away and go to heaven. Why would you want us to take you outside Banaras?”

Among Hindus, there is a widely held belief that if you die in Banaras you achieve
Moksha,
an end to the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.

“My work on earth is not complete,” Pandit Ji said. “I do not want to achieve moksha. I must come back and finish my work.”

India has always been a country where people—no matter how educated, sophisticated, or wealthy—accepted some element of mysticism, understood that some events in life couldn’t be easily explained. For example, there was a story several years ago that statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who dispels all obstacles, were drinking milk. People were pouring milk over the statues and into a bowl at their bases as offerings late in the evening. By the morning the milk would be gone. I thought it was nonsensical, but there were many educated people who believed it. It actually turned out to have some scientific basis; the statues were made of a material that absorbed liquids and did soak up some of the milk.

Unfortunately many people were taking milk their children needed and leaving it for the statue. I asked my mother if she believed the statues were drinking milk. My mother, an intelligent, sophisticated woman, said she did. Then I asked some of our other relatives, and several of them told me it was happening in their own temples. They had seen it!

That was the tradition in which we grew up. There was more to life than what we could see in front of us.

In the India of my childhood, we were exposed to a variety of religions and philosophies and taught to respect all of them. While we were Hindu, we had friends who were Muslim or Parsi and we went to school with Christians and Jews. For me the best part was that we had days off on all of the holidays. We were off for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali; Easter; the Muslim holiday Eid. When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, we were living in Jabalpur attending St. Aloysius, a school that had classes from kindergarten through grade twelve.
Our school was closed for three days. I was nine years of age and a six-year-old friend of ours stayed with us during those days off. We spent that time running around, playing cricket and games. It was a wonderful short vacation and we really didn’t want to go back to school. The night before classes resumed, we were lying in the dark when this young friend spoke up.

“Sanjiv, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“What are the chances the new pope will die tomorrow?”

We were raised as Hindus, which is as much a culture and a way of life as it is a religion. Unlike the major Western religions, there is no formal structure to our worship; we don’t have to go somewhere at a specific time to take part in a specific ceremony. We go to the temple when we want to. There isn’t even any accepted definition of what a Hindu is or any agreement on whether Hinduism is a religion, a culture, a philosophy, or a way of life. The chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court once said, “Unlike other religions in the world the Hindu religion does not claim any one prophet; it does not worship any one god; it does not subscribe to any one dogma; it does not believe in any one philosophic concept; it does not follow any one set of religious rites or performances; in fact, it does not appear to satisfy the narrow traditional features of any religion or creed. It may broadly be described as a way of life and nothing more.”

We were raised in a rich tradition, a mythology filled with hundreds of gods and warriors and moral tales, taught to us from a very young age. During summer vacations our mother would read and sing verses from the two major scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, sometimes while playing a small, hand-pumped organ called the harmonium. Many of these stories were thrillers at heart, and as she read them or sung them we could visualize the wars, the chariots, the gods and demigods, the beautiful heroines and the courageous heroes. Usually she would stop reading at a cliff-hanger: Sita has been abducted by the Great Demon and an army is being assembled to rescue her. Deepak and I would ask her to explain the story she’d read and tell us how it applied to our lives. And, of course,
like almost all educated young Indians, we read the comic books that retold these stories of gods and epic battles, monsters, myths, and legends. Our mythology was also our popular entertainment. There were hundreds of these comics, and every kid read them. We read about Buddha, Ravana the Demon King, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and Krishna. We read the Bhagavad Gita. We read the Mahabharata, the epic tale of India and Ganesha, the god who is the remover of all obstacles. Together with all this, we read everything from
Superman
and
Archie
to the writings of Gandhi and the works of Tolstoy.

India is a nation in which the reality of daily life and the influence of mystical forces are commonly accepted as equally true. In addition to karma, many Indians also believe in the concept of
Dharma.
In Hinduism and Buddhism, dharma has various connotations, but generally it means cheerfully fulfilling your moral and ethical duty. Doing the right thing.