Walking Wisdom

by Gotham Chopra

  I retreated back to my apartment with the full intention of collapsing onto the couch, where I planned to spend the whole night feeling sorry for myself. Alas, I had forgotten about Cleo, who’d by then been cooped up in the apartment, going on about ten hours. Even as I ached to take a load off and wallow in self-pity, Cleo made herself clear, lurching from side to side, pawing at my pants legs, and snarling. She needed to go out.

  I changed from my suit into sweats and rummaged through the closet to find a pair of sneakers. Seeing this transformation, Cleo’s snarls changed to excited yaps, and she pranced around the room, knowing this ritual ended with us going for a walk. No matter what frayed emotions I was struggling with, at that moment Cleo’s focus and attention was singular: She needed to go out and it was up to me to make it happen.

  As was our usual routine, I’d planned to take her for a quick loop around the block and quickly hustle back upstairs, where I could get back to my solitary pity party. But as we came to the third turn that would start the procession home, Cleo dug her heels in. Literally. She yanked her neck, and gestured as if she wanted to keep going.

  “Come on, Cleo,” I urged her. “Let’s go home.” I dashed a little enthusiasm into my voice as if suggesting that perhaps a treat awaited us back at the ranch.

  No dice. Cleo jerked harder, pulling her leash toward downtown. Yeah right, I’m sure she was thinking to herself, let’s go back to your messy bachelor pad so I can watch you cry yourself to sleep. No thanks. I’m not that much of a sucker for a Greenie.

  This time she barked and pulled even harder.

  Fine, I relented, letting her pull me westward. I could hold out another block.

  As we walked, we came upon the corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Broadway. Cleo stopped to sniff something on the sidewalk and I waited. I looked up to find myself facing a wall of large maroon posters for the show Miss Saigon. Staring at them, I smiled, remembering the last time I stood in that exact spot.

  Miss Saigon had been one of the first Broadway shows Candice and I had ever seen together. A simpleton when it came to theater, I’d of course enjoyed it, chiefly because the star was a sexy Asian girl and the story hit all the formulaic dramatic beats with considerable pomp and pageantry. Candice, on the other hand, found it, well, formulaic, not to mention saturated with all of the Orientalist stereotypes that canonized Western masculinity while dispiriting the East.

  I shrugged, unconvinced. “John [the ex-soldier turned executive] tried to do her right . . .”

  Candice turned to me, irritated. “Oh, is that what you’re doing with me? Doing me right?”

  I laughed out loud at the recollection. Cleo jerked her leash again, this time pulling me downtown. Maybe she knew what she was doing, I thought to myself, and followed her lead.

  Indeed, over the course of the next few hours, I let Cleo lead the way, guiding me from midtown Manhattan all the way to lower Manhattan and the Wall Street area. It was a tour through Candice’s and my history together. Fiftieth and Broadway, the pommes frites booth where we shared a last supper (a bucket of frites with tartar sauce) the night before I moved to California. The TKTS discount ticket booth in Times Square where we had spent many an hour waiting in long lines to purchase tickets so Candice could educate me on good Broadway shows. Madison Square Garden, where I took Candice to her first NBA game (Celtics-Knicks circa 1996) and I defended her honor when an Asian punk wearing a John Starks jersey made a lewd comment toward her. Thirty-third and Seventh, Koreatown, to this day our favorite spot for a great meal. Chinatown, where through the years she’d flaunted her Mandarin and earned us special dishes not on the menu. And finally Ground Zero, the former World Trade Center site, a monument to a moment, that like every other American vaguely associated with it, bound us together in our shared panic, disbelief, and subsequent grief.

  By the end of our long walk, Cleo had not only sobered me up, but had reminded me why I was in fact ready for my wedding day. Sure, a part of me was scared by the thought of marriage. Candice was the first and last serious commitment I’d ever made to anyone, the only adult relationship I’d ever really been in. While I often told people that she and I had essentially grown up together, part of me wondered if we had grown up at all. Still, something deep inside me, some strong sense of self convinced me I was on the right path. Looking down at my weary loyal dog, I knew I had a companion on that journey in Cleo. I picked her up, kissed her dusty nose, and flagged down a cab. It was time to go home.

  Cleo’s love and loyalty was affectionate without being patronizing. Empathetic without being untrue. Regenerative, nurturing, and intense without being fleeting. I realized then and I realize now writing this that all of these observations were my own projections. In reality, Cleo’s behavior patterns were simple and predictable and for the most part reliant on a single discernable, though eminently powerful, characteristic: She gives love.

  BACK ON THE GOLF course, Papa made it a point to single this out. “When we talk about the power of love, its therapeutic and regenerative effects, we’re almost always referring to what it’s like to be the object or recipient of someone’s love.

  “But it’s even more powerful when you are the one doing the loving. There’s a purity to that love, the way a child loves its parent early on and vice versa. It’s unfiltered, naked, stripped of the burdens of time, context, and conditions. It’s everything you’ve described about Cleo.”

  Over the course of the last few weeks, Papa had spent more time with Cleo than he ever had before. He was observing and studying things in her he’d never even noticed.

  “Do you think Cleo truly understands the concept of love?” I posed to Papa, thinking maybe we were going a little overboard here.

  “No, and that’s what makes it so powerful.

  “There’s a playfulness and grace to the way in which Cleo reacts to those she loves. She trusts us with a sense of transcendence. There are no gradients to that, no measure to how or how much she loves. She’s unobtrusive with her attention. It’s not dependent on your behavior. With those she loves, she does so simply because they are.”

  “I FOUND IT,” I told Papa a week later when he was again in LA, staying with us. We were sitting in the living room late at night. Krishu was asleep in his room, while Candice was reading manga comics online, her favorite pastime.

  “Found what?”

  “The story. On love—unconditional love.” I nodded. “It’s from the Mahabharata about the Pandava brothers.”

  Papa looked at me, intrigued. “Tell it to me.”

  Growing up, the stories of the Mahabharata, one of India’s epic and most seminal narratives (akin to the Iliad or the Odyssey in the West), had been my favorite. The whole saga is a sprawling narrative that chronicles the feud between the five righteous Pandava brothers and their nefarious rival cousins, the one hundred Kaurava brothers. At the heart of the story is an eighteen-day battle waged between the two sides, pitting a single—albeit expansive—family against one another. Brothers, fathers, sons, uncles, mentors, protégés, gods, and demigods all engaged in a single mythic and gruesome war, the outcome of which will determine the fate of the cosmos.

  In the end, of course, the noble Pandava brothers triumph, having slaughtered all their rivals as well as having suffered massive casualties on their own side. As a consequence, though, in the aftermath of so much violence and loss, they question what they have really earned in victory. Faced with this existential dilemma that they cannot really resolve, the brothers relinquish the hard-fought kingdom they’ve gained to their last living heir—a single nephew who has survived the war—and set off for the mythic realm of Kailash (the threshold to the heavens) in search of God’s blessings.

  The five brothers, led by the eldest, Yudishtra, and their consort, Draupadi, set forth for the arduous ascent upward. Early on, in one of the poor villages at the base of the mountains, a mangy dog straggles behind the group, following them on their pilgrimage.

  But as they a
scend the mountainside and the climb gets more challenging, bad things happen. The youngest brother, Nakula, slips on some ice and falls over the ledge, plunging to his death. After mourning the loss of their brother, the brothers continue upward in pursuit of their literal lofty goal.

  Now the shit really hits the fan, because as the group and mangy dog continue their ascent, like in some B-list horror flick, one by one the brothers and even Draupadi slip and fall to their deaths. Only Yudishtra and the dog survive and reach the mountain’s apex.

  It’s here that Yudishtra encounters Indra, king of the gods and the heavens. He congratulates Yudishtra on successfully completing the climb and says he’s earned himself a spot in the kingdom of heaven. He opens the door to his divine chariot and invites Yudishtra in for the short ride toward eternal bliss. Yudishtra thanks him and makes his move for the chariot, gesturing to the mangy dog to follow him.

  But wait!

  Indra blocks the dog and informs Yudishtra that dogs—certainly dirty village ones—are not welcome in heaven. Yudishtra halts and says that the loyal dog has stayed by his side the entire ascent and he has no intention of abandoning his loyal companion at this point.

  Indra appears flummoxed and irritated. Yudishtra is willing to abandon his own brothers and Draupadi during the ascent but not this dirty dog, even now that he is being granted entrance into heaven?

  Yudishtra shakes his head solemnly. He explains that he did not leave his brothers nor Draupadi. They were taken from him, and he presumes it was so because of some divine plan that he’s not privy to. He insists that he has faith that he will be reunited with his loved ones when the time is right. With that, he reiterates his unwillingness to proceed if the dog is not by his side.

  Lord Indra breaks into a wide smile at last. Suddenly the dog itself begins to transform and is revealed as the god Dharma, which is none other than an incarnation of Indra himself. Welcome to the Matrix! He explains that the whole episode from the journey up the hill, to the death of Yudishtra’s loved ones, to the offer to escort Yudishtra to the heavens sans the dog was all a test. And Yudishtra has passed with flying colors. Now, together Yudishtra, Lord Indra, and Lord Dharma enter the heavens, where eventually Yudishtra will be reunited with his brothers and Draupadi.

  After relaying the story to Papa, I sat back on the couch, pleased with myself. He nodded, seemingly equally delighted.

  “It’s a good story,” he noted.

  “I know. It’s a great story.”

  “What do you think it means?” he asked.

  “Well, a lot of things.” I gestured with my hands. “Where to start, really?”

  “With the ending,” Papa replied. “The dog is Dharma and Dharma is the self. The idea of loving one’s self in the West has a bad connotation. It’s the difference between the god Dharma in the East and Narcissus in the West.”

  Sure enough in Greek mythology, Narcissus is a hero renowned for his exceeding beauty. But he’s cruel and spurns all who love him. As such, he’s eventually cursed by the other gods, forced to fall in love with his own beauty and, like all those suitors whom he despised, he now hates his own self.

  “Right.” Papa nodded. “But in the Eastern traditions, the self is everything. It is behind your thoughts, the very same force that is responsible for all the intelligent activity of the universe including the dog.”

  “It is consciousness,” I interjected.

  “Yes.” Papa laughed. “Not bad.”

  “So can we say that there are now five people in the world who understand consciousness?” I asked Papa, grinning.

  “Maybe,” he conceded.

  “So what you are saying is that the dog is a metaphor for the self, which is just another expression for consciousness?”

  Both Papa and I looked at Cleo, who lay outside Krishu’s door in a light sleep. She underplayed her role as cosmic seer remarkably well.

  “I don’t think it’s any coincidence.” Papa shook his head.

  “The great seers of India who wrote these stories must have known—dogs are spiritual beings.”

  Chapter Seven

  Papa, I’m wondering why bad things happen to good people.

  Bad things happen to everyone.

  ON JANUARY 20, 2001, MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER—WE called him Daddy—sat in his bedroom in New Delhi watching the inauguration of George W. Bush on CNN. Daddy was a student of history and he enjoyed playing witness to moments like these. More than fifty years ago he had had a front row seat to India’s dramatic transition. From the grip of British colonialism, to the euphoria of independence, to the agony of partition between India and the newly created Pakistan, he was eyewitness to it all. Daddy was the personal physician to Lord Mountbatten—the last Viceroy of India—so he had an intimacy with and insight into the highest levels of the British Raj and its rule over his country. Growing up I would sit with rapt attention as he told stories of his years of service in the Indian army—stories about the siege of Burma, when he became the only surviving member of his military unit by playing dead and eluding his Japanese would-be captors; historic journeys alongside Lord Mountbatten; proud tales about the time when India’s iconic hero and first prime minister post-independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, stopped amidst a sea of admirers to hand our grandmother a red rose.

  Daddy sat in his bedroom that night amidst a tangled testament to all of that history. Portraits of my grandmother Ma were proudly displayed alongside Daddy’s regal days with British colleagues during his posts all around India, not to mention London, where he had done much of his medical training. There were more recent pictures too, updated photographs of Daddy and Ma beaming with their five grandchildren. Only three weeks earlier, we’d all celebrated the marriage of my younger cousin, Kanika. It had been a classic Indian extravaganza, packed with decadent parties, religious rituals, and endless family affairs. Hundreds of pictures captured those wondrous days, but had yet to find their way into any frames. Instead they lay in stacks, tucked into envelopes, piled on the wooden chest that stood just beyond Ma and Daddy’s bed.

  After watching President Bush take his oath on that rainy day in Washington, DC, and officially accept the duty and responsibility of the presidency—qualities that Daddy held in the highest esteem—he settled into bed beside Ma, who was already fast asleep. Rarely in their fifty-four years of marriage had they slept apart. Shortly after midnight, Daddy rang the bell beside the bed to call Shanti, the family servant for more than twenty-five years. When Shanti showed up a few minutes later, Daddy said he felt cold and needed a blanket for the night. Daddy returned to sleep. Not long afterward, he awoke again. This time Daddy sat up and felt his chest. He was one of India’s most well-respected cardiologists and was still practicing well into his seventies. He knew what was happening. Daddy reached for Ma and rustled her from her sleep. She too sat up and asked him what was wrong. Daddy informed her that he was dying. Ma panicked and reached for the phone to dial my uncle, a physician who lived not too far away. Daddy, still clutching his chest, told Ma to put the phone down. There wasn’t much time left, he explained.

  “Just hold my hand,” he instructed her. And she listened. Ma and Daddy held hands as he took his last breaths. “I love you,” he told her softly, “and I am leaving.”

  Daddy closed his eyes a final time, embracing the mystery of death. “I am leaving.”

  THE LOGISTICS OF DEATH came fast and furious. Family arrangements, overseas travel, death certificates, and Hindu rituals overwhelmed. By morning, Hindu priests were summoned to the house to perform chants, bless Daddy’s body, his home, and Ma to ensure a smooth transition to the next phase of his soul’s evolution. By religious mandate, Daddy’s cremation ceremony had to take place within thirty hours of death. My father and his brother, Chota Papa, made it just in time. The two of them bathed Daddy’s body with milk, anointed it with sandal oil, and carried it on their shoulders for the last hundred yards to the cremation site. Papa, the older son, placed a torch beneath the funer
al pyre, igniting it so Daddy’s body could return to the elements from where it came.

  Later when I spoke to my father, he’d describe to me the emotional odyssey he’d been on the last two days.

  “You know, someday you too will burn my body,” he said over the crackly long-distance line. “It’ll be your responsibility as my son. And someday far in the future, your unborn son will do the same to you.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. The thought was creepy, solemn, sci-fi, and spiritual all at the same time.

  “They say it’s one generation allowing another to pass to the next phase,” Papa said.

  “It must have been difficult,” I said softly. I knew that Papa admired his father like no one else in his life. I’d never in my life heard him speak critically about Daddy.

  “It was.” Papa paused. “But I’m glad I did it. It’s a privilege.”

  Papa described the hymns the Vedic priests chanted during the ceremony, about the tangled web of agni (fire), vayu (wind), paani (water), dharti (Earth), and their inevitable return to the imperishable akash (space).

  “It’s all we are, really,” Papa surmised, “a cluster of the elements, ignited by some energy and a deeper mystery. And we’re all destined to fade back into an even greater mystery at the end.”

  Papa even laughed as he narrated how as the priests chanted those hymns, a few hundred yards away young boys played cricket, and farther along, still younger boys flew their kites using the draft of the fire to lift their kites high into the sky. Nearby, Scottish bagpipes mingled with gaudy blaring Hindi film music, indicating that a wedding was going on in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the priests continued to chant, speaking of the immortality of the human soul. “Water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it, fire cannot burn it, weapons cannot shatter it. It is unborn, beyond space and time, and does not die.”

  The full impact of Daddy’s death would not hit home for Papa until weeks later, when he had returned to his home—to us—in America. It was in those days as the residue of death lingered that our memories of Daddy started to organize themselves in the archives of our minds.