Authors: Suketu Mehta
D
RIVING AWAY
from the house, my driver, a tough taciturn Rajput, wonders, “Why did all five of them take diksha? They’re billionaires.”
“They’re diamond merchants,” I say.
“The Dawood gang must have been after them,” he speculates.
We drive from Dhanera to Ahmadabad, from where I have to take a train back to Bombay. I have relatives in Ahmadabad and stop to see them. These are the poorest relatives I have, and when I go to their house most of the family members are walking around in clothes I recognize: They belonged, when new, to my father, my mother, my sisters, myself. There is a new baby in the house, but her father, my cousin, is absent. He is at work in a diamond factory, where he is a cutter. Most days he does not see his first child, who is only a couple of months old; he has to leave as soon as the sun is up and comes back home well into the night. He works most Sundays as well; even during Diwali, traditionally a holiday time for the industry, he may be asked to work if the demand is high. He gets paid per diamond he cuts, and for all that work, for all that sacrifice, he makes less than my driver in Bombay. All day he cuts stones, denying himself to his new daughter, so that the merchants of Sevantibhai’s class can throw into the air the profits he earns for them.
I catch up with Hasmukh in Bombay the following week, in his brother’s flat in Tardeo. Hasmukh is fairly religious himself. On his trips to Bombay, he always prays first at the Sankeshwar temple, and only then does he go to Opera House to buy his diamonds. In Los Angeles, he is a devotee of the Swaminarayan sect, which, though Hindu, he finds similar to Jainism. But he has married outside the religion; in fact, outside the Gujarati nation. His wife is a Mangalorean whose family owns sixteen restaurants in Bombay; it was a love marriage. A restaurant is a breeding ground of sin for Jains. And this fact, I sense, has put him at variance with the community into which he was born. They don’t shun him or his family, but there will always be the sense that he has crossed the threshold, and an awkwardness around his wife.
At this point a boy comes in, wearing a green T-shirt with the Nike swoosh on it. He is Hasmukh’s son and has just been to see a Hindi movie with Hasmukh’s brother, his uncle. The boy is disagreeing, in an American
accent, with his uncle about the message of the movie, a melodrama about an Indian taxidriver in New York torn between a westernized Indian woman and a traditional Indian woman. “All I’m saying,” says the boy, who is in the sixth grade in Diamond Bar, California, “is India has love but America also has love.”
The uncle disagrees. “America has less love than India.” He points to America’s high divorce rate as proof.
The boy responds, “They take divorce for a reason.” He tells me he was asked by Sevantibhai to come back to India to live. “I said I would like to but my everything is over there.”
It is in this flat that I learn there is an insurance policy for the Ladhanis in case the path to moksha gets too steep, as has happened with other renunciates. A trust has been set up with four family members as trustees, endowed with a sizable fund—in the crores. It will disburse money on Sevantibhai’s instructions. In his wanderings, when he meets needy people or deserving institutions, the trustees will send money to them. “In case the children want to come back, they don’t have to stretch out their hand to anybody. They can get a car, a house,” explains Hasmukh. For Sevantibhai, there is this security. If he changes his mind, all of samsara will not be lost to him. He has given away a good deal of his fortune, but there is enough left to provide him or his family with a reasonable standard of comfort in Bombay. It is a strange concept: a wandering monk able to fund a temple or change the fortunes of an entire village with one phone call. Is the life of a renunciate made easier or harder when he knows that if he returns to samsara, he can immediately have the goods of life back? Sevantibhai and his family will always have a choice. Each step of their wanderings will be taken out of free will. Whenever they are tired from walking in the hot sun, something at the back of their minds will always be telling them that they can afford to travel in a Rolls-Royce, even now. All they have to do is to admit defeat.
S
EVEN MONTHS
after the diksha ceremony, I go to see how Sevantibhai is doing in his life as a monk. He and the two boys are spending the monsoons in Patan, in northernmost Gujarat, where my grandfather studied as a boy. The Jain temple and its attendant institutions are in a quiet quarter of the town, with old painted wooden houses all around.
After Dhanera, Sevantibhai walked from town to town in Gujarat, to Tharad, then Deesa, Patan, Bhabhar, Ahmadabad, then Patan again, to a private house in the city. And now, seven months later to the day of his diksha (by the lunar calendar), I find Sevantibhai, or Raj Ratna Vijayji Maharajsaheb, sitting in an enormous room in Patan. He has been here for two months and will continue to stay a further two months, till the rains end. There is a large painting on the entrance to the hall, which is the temporary home for the entire order of twenty-one monks. It is entitled
A Compassionate View of Worldly Life
and depicts a man hanging on a tree above a well filled with snakes and crocodiles, with rats gnawing at the vine the man hangs on, and an elephant shaking the trunk of the tree.
As soon as I enter the hall I see him and he sees me. He makes an indication, touching his fingers to his head; it is a comment that my hair has grown. Sevantibhai, on the other hand, has just had his first lochan after becoming a monk: all the hair on his head, face, and lips had been pulled out, hair by hair, tuft by tuft, over a period of several hours, by his superior. His scalp was bleeding. “It is just a sample of the tortures of hell for my sins. The hair is pulled out by hand to make the body strong, and so that you can understand others’ suffering.” He got through the ordeal by remembering the tortures inflicted on the Jain gurus of old. When the enemies of their faith would pull off not just the hair but the very skin on their bodies, the response of the gurus was to ask their tormentors, “In what way would you like me to stand so that you are put to the least inconvenience while peeling off my skin?” The courage of those martyrs redoubled his own.
The retreat hall, the paushadhshala, is an enormous room open on two sides. It does not belong to the monks. They are guests of the sangha, the community, which has built it for the monks to rest in. The monks sit at a series of low tables, reading from ancient manuscripts and writing commentaries on them in their notebooks. Laypeople come to visit them and are instructed in the proper conduct of quotidian life; those with special promise are encouraged to take up diksha. There are a number of laypeople sitting in the hall getting a taste of the monastic life. They can choose to observe the life of a sadhu for one day or, for the merest sample, for exactly forty-eight minutes. During those forty-eight minutes, their thoughts and deeds should be pure of violence. There are no fans in the hall; as I sit cross-legged talking to Sevantibhai in the August afternoon, I sweat and
wave away the flies. If the ceiling were not so high it would be intolerable. At night, the monks sleep where they are sitting, but with a caveat: They can’t sleep in the path of the fresh breeze coming in, because that will kill the lives in that breeze. It would also mean that they desire the bodily pleasure of the cooling breeze. If a window is closed, they are forbidden to open it for the same reasons. Sevantibhai has to bleach his life of all comfort or pleasure. It is only then that moksha can be attractive. His life has to be so bereft of luxury, so continuously tormenting, that it will be easy to slip into the dark waters of nonexistence.
Sevantibhai has taken five vows. The first is that he can’t do violence to life, make someone else do violence, or approve of someone else doing violence. This means, for example, that he can never compliment a householder on the taste of the dal that he gives to Sevantibhai during gocari—to say “What a fine dish!” would mean that Sevantibhai approves of the multiple killing the householder had to perform in order to make it. The second vow is that he can’t tell a lie, tell others to tell a lie, or approve of a lie being uttered. The third is that he can’t steal, cause others to steal, or approve of stealing. For example, he says, if I were to drop my pen on the floor, and if he borrowed it for a minute without asking my permission, that would be considered stealing. The fourth is that he cannot be uncelibate, cause others to be uncelibate, or approve of uncelibacy. Thus, he can never praise a wedding ceremony or suggest that a particular girl might be a good match for a particular boy. The ascetics keep wandering to avoid breaking the vow of celibacy. They should not get to know any female during their travels. If a monk were to visit the house of a devout laywoman regularly during the process of gocari, and if she were to think, How noble is this monk! or if the monk were to think, How devout is this sister! it would be a sin, and he would be breaking his vow. A nomadic life prevents any possibility of intimacy between the sexes. The fifth is a vow of poverty. He can’t own anything, not even the single cotton sheet he wears on his body. It has to be gifted by a layman.
The head of the order, Chandrashekhar Maharaj, sits at the head of the hall, ever on the alert for any slippage into samsara among his monks. His entire family of six had taken diksha together when he was eleven. A mother with a boy in his lay clothes, who looks to be under ten years old, is sitting in front of Chandrashekhar Maharaj. The boy is sulking; his mother is smiling, tenderly persuading him about something. The boy keeps worrying
his foot. After a while the maharajsaheb takes over, again speaking to him in a low, gentle voice but not letting up, not fazed by the fact that the boy isn’t saying a single word to his mother or to the maharaj, isn’t looking at either of them. Sevantibhai enlightens me. The boy and his mother are from Bombay, and he has been staying here for three months studying with the maharaj in his preparation for taking diksha. But now the boy misses Bombay and misses his family and wants to go to the metropolis for four days with his mother. The maharaj instead advances his preferred alternative: The mother should stay with the boy for four days. If he were to go to Bombay now, he would fall much farther behind in his studies than four days. The boy, a bright child, has not been concentrating on his studies. He wants to play. He sees other children outside, children of visitors, and wants to watch television. The mother, her love for her child writ all over her face, is gently but insistently telling him to stay here—so that, in the fullness of time, all connections might be severed between them.
The boy comes over to where I am sitting with Sevantibhai. “I wish I had taken diksha thirty years ago,” Sevantibhai says to me. Then his body would have been better able to stand the demands he is putting on it. As it is, he sometimes feels weak and can’t stretch his body as much as he’d like to. “I wish I had taken diksha thirty years ago,” he says again, in the presence of the wavering boy.
His own sons, or ex-sons, have not become as single-minded as he has or as he would like them to be. “Out of the twenty-four hours, they still want to play for an hour with the other young monks,” he says. “It’s not desirable, but it’s understandable.” I ask him what kind of playing they do. He points to some colorful labels stuck on a couple of shelves. “They’ll stick these labels, they’ll draw, they’ll gather all the books and arrange them in a row, they’ll want to wash their clothes once a week instead of once a month as we do. They want to play, they’re still young. Not cricket, of course—the ball hitting the bat is himsa”—violence—“but this kind of playing, sticking labels, washing clothes.”
Before Sevantibhai sits down in the hall, he sweeps the ground with his duster to move away any lives. The sweeping of the hall is constant, and the tiled surface is very clean. I watch him sweep a large patch of the hall, gather up the dust in a small plastic dustpan, take the dust to a window of the hall, and scrupulously deposit it on the windowsill just outside, being careful not to drop it. Then he sifts the dust, spreading it out. If it is
dropped from a distance greater than the breadth of the palm it will kill the lives in the air. For this reason, he explains, the monks are forbidden to use a toilet to urinate or defecate. It is one of the stories non-Jains spread about the monks: that they are filthy and throw their shit on the roads. Sevantibhai now explains it for me. Their urine and feces have to dry within forty-eight minutes of coming out of their bodies. Otherwise, lives will be created in the liquid or the moist mass, lives that are invisible to us but which the Universal Soul can see. This is why, when Sevantibhai finds himself stopping in a place without a sandpit in the back (such as the one in Patan), he has to walk outside the city limits or to a stretch of railroad tracks, or the rocks by the sea, and carefully spread out his feces so that they dry fast; if they are just dropped in piles or mounds they won’t dry within the required forty-eight minutes. This is difficult in the rains. “That’s why we can’t go to America or Antwerp. It stays wet there all year.” The West is forbidden to Jain monks because of its lack of appropriate toilet facilities.
Sevantibhai does not miss anything about Bombay and has no wish to return. He will go only if his teacher, his acharya, commands him to. The city is filled with sin and temptation. “Bombay is only for those who are very firm. It will take me at least ten years, I think.” The problems of the city are a direct result of the impoverishment of the countryside. He gives me an example. “Everybody uses peanut oil now. But much better for you is sesame oil. At the diksha only sesame oil was used. The seeds would be pressed in a mill turned by bullocks, we would get the oil, and the bullocks would eat the crushed seed pulp. Forty years ago there were six lakh [600,000] bullock oil presses. Each employed two bullocks, so there were twelve lakh [1.2 million] bullocks in these presses. Now there are about sixty. Where did all those bullocks go? To the slaughterhouse. What happened to all those bullock drivers? What happened to their families? They went to the cities, in search of employment. Have you seen Dharavi [one of Bombay’s biggest slums]? It is full of people like those bullock drivers. But there, too, they don’t find work, leading to crime and corruption.” It is a remarkably accurate description of the causes of migration from the village to the city, brought down to the difference between a peanut and a sesame seed.