‘I can feel him coming. You know, like I am allergic to cats and I can tell you when there’s a cat in the house without even having to see it or even being in the house or even seeing any hair or anything. That is the way it is. You know he’s there. You feel this intense feeling. You know it is a very real feeling, it is not vague, you know. It is not a little tingly thing you have to look for, it is Whapp! It is immediately the most present thing in your mind.’
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This extract is from Godmen of India.
41.
Goodbye World
Suketu Mehta
Seven 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, Ahmedabad, 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 maharaj saheb, sitting in an enormous room in Patan. He has been here for two months and will continue to stay a further two months, until 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 have 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 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 non-existence.
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 gowkari—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 gowkari, 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 layperson.
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 maharaj saheb 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 further 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 TV. 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 is not desirable, but it is understandable.’ I ask him what kind of playing they do. He points to some colourful labels stuck on a couple of shelves. ‘They will stick these labels, they will draw, they will gather all the books and arrange them in a row, they will want to wash their clothes once a week instead of once a month as we do. They want to play, they are still young. Not cricket, of course—the ball hitting the bat is himsa—but this kind of playing, sticking labels, washing clothes.’ …
Through the day, I keep returning to the hall whenever the monks have time for me in between their meditation and their lectures. Sevantibhai keeps directing me to one of the senior acha
ryas, saying I should pose my questions to him. But the guru has the habit of launching into a discourse without being asked, and it is difficult to interrupt him. Sevantibhai is yet questionable, not practised. I ask him what was the hardest to give up: his family, his wealth, or his house and its comforts? After a long pause, he answers. ‘Family. The hardest thing to leave was family.’ His extended family or his wife and children? ‘Not the extended family. They are not religious. But my own family. We learned together.’ He hasn’t seen the woman who was his wife for four months now. For a month and a half after the diksha they travelled side by side—but not together, he is at pains to point out. He doesn’t know when he will see her or the girl who used to be his daughter again. Neither do the boys who used to be his sons. ‘If I say something that upsets them, there is no mother now to soothe them. But they have Chandrashekhar Maharaj,’ he adds quickly, pointing to the guru. ‘He is more than a mother.’
What was the hardest thing for Sevantibhai to get used to after taking diksha? He considers, then says, ‘There are twenty-one sadhus in this group. They come from different backgrounds, different homes, some rich, some poor. They have different ways of thinking, different tempers. That took getting used to. For a month and a half there was a tough time.’ He heard harsh words from them; he saw how their faces turned sour during gowkari when the food was not to their liking. He has had to deal with this: this strained fellowship. He attributes these personality conflicts within the group to the demise of the extended family. ‘I have known families of up to a hundred people, following one patriarch. They would grow up obeying him. Before, the sadhus used to come from these extended families, and they would all obey the acharya. But now they come from small families, and they are not used to living in big groups. If there are forty people, all of them think differently. Their capacity for work is different. It will take me a few years to adjust.’ All the sadhus give up their worldly possessions to enter this life, but Sevantibhai and his family gave up more of this world’s goods than most of the rest of this order put together. This knowledge, I get the feeling, persists with him past the diksha and into monkhood. Perhaps class has carried over into the classless society of the sadhus. It is like the army. The man who was a millionaire in civilian life finds himself taking orders from one who used to be a clerk.
Modernity has been hard on the sadhus. For instance, they can only drink boiled water, and few people boil water nowadays; most houses of Jain laypersons have water filters. In the old days, every house in the village would boil water for later use in boiling feed for the cattle, and the monks would come early enough in the day to get some. But householders also cannot be commanded to boil water for the exclusive use of the monks. The monks are willing to allow the layperson to sin by boiling water for general use, but it is their sin; if the water were to be boiled just for the monks, then the sin would accumulate to the monks. Roads are another problem. In their wanderings, the monks try to look for unpaved roads, which are getting rarer and rarer. Paved tar roads are hard on the feet and especially on the eyes; the heat glinting off the tarmac is very bad for their eyesight, which they need to keep sharp for prolonged study of ancient texts, as well as to scan the path ahead to avoid stepping on lives.
The most difficult time physically for Sevantibhai was a journey from Bhabhar to Ahmedabad, where he was to attend another diksha ceremony. Every day they walked thirty kilometres, five hours in the morning after sunrise and more in the evening. On one stretch, after walking ten kilometres, his feet started to hurt, so they rested in some fields. But by nightfall they had to reach a particular village where there was a Jain house. The last half-hour was excruciating. When he looked at his feet he saw that huge boils and blisters had developed on them. So he took a thorn and burst the blisters, which were filled with water and pus. Since he doesn’t believe in allopathic medicine, he doused the wounds with castor oil and turmeric, as an antiseptic. He shows me the soles of his feet. These are abused feet: cracked, callused, split and blackened, with layers of skin overlapping each other, cratered like the surface of the moon. But ‘we can’t hold it in our minds that our feet hurt’. There is greater peril in his travelling on paved roads than sore feet: ‘All the violence of road building accumulates on us.’ Many sadhus these days die in accidents on the highways, which have no space for pedestrian traffic …
Sevantibhai admits to still feeling the vestiges of fatherhood. He points to a boy monk sitting against a pillar. ‘I can’t scold him like I can my own sons. I still call them mine. They listen to me. If the guruji is asking everyone to come to eat, I can command them to come at once to eat. If they are not studying, I will scold them, as I won’t the other maharaj sahebs of their age. Why? Do I feel I have a right with those two and not with the others?’ When we are talking about them, he doesn’t use any names for them—perhaps not yet comfortable with calling his boys, so lately Vicky and Chiku, Raj Darshan Vijayji and Ratna Bodhi Vijayji.
The older boy is sitting in a specific type of meditation, with everything he owns touching him: his eight pieces of cloth, his staff and his bowls for gowkari. Around him the other swamis are eating, and there is a stench of sweat, urine and food. The monks have bad breath—they are forbidden to brush their teeth, as the very purpose of brushing is to kill bacteria—and it is an effort to talk to them at close quarters. All day for a month Vicky has to sit like this. His hair has been freshly pulled. He feels peace and joy in his new life, he says, ‘not running around like before’. He wakes up at four every morning and spends the day in studying and prayer. At nine-thirty he stretches out in the same hall and goes to sleep. ‘Four or five times a day I wonder when will moksha come. When will I be free?’
The younger boy is still studying while the others are eating. There is something tender about him, and I have the impression that he is keeping up a brave front. Sevantibhai tells me, ‘He was always more attached to his mother.’ So when he is scolded by the father, he writes complaints about Sevantibhai to the nun who used to be his mother. And she writes back. There is a weekly exchange of letters between the two of them. Chandrashekhar Maharaj doesn’t object. When I ask the son about this, he will not admit it, in the manner of a teenager pretending to be indifferent to a girl he’s heartsick about. ‘If she writes to me, I reply.’
Neither of the boys refers to her as Mummy. Instead, they call her Divya Ruchita Sreeji, her post-diksha name. They don’t talk about their sister. As twins, Utkarsh and Karishma had a bond that went far beyond normal sibling ties. Not once does he mention his renunciate sister. The older boy points out that if they were to meet the women, they couldn’t sit close to each other. ‘Far,’ he says, indicating with one arm the necessary distance between them, now no longer mother and son, or brother and sister, but only male and female, susceptible to temptation if not restrained by monastic rules. They can come together to discuss points of doctrine, if permitted by both their gurus, but neither of them should look directly at each other, and they have to be holding a cloth over their mouths. The mother can never, ever, again touch the boy who came out of her womb. ‘Where I sit a lady can’t sit for 144 minutes, and where a lady sits I can’t sit for forty-eight minutes, because the aura of the body lingers on.’
Sevantibhai and the two boys used to eat only once a day. But then the younger boy developed jaundice and now he is allowed to eat twice a day. The rules about eating can be waived during illness, since the body, the vehicle of sadhana, needs to be kept alive. But not comfortable. While the boy was stricken with jaundice, the guru maharaj decided he had to have his lochan. His hair had grown too long. So, yellowed and weakened by jaundice, he sat down before the guru, the guru smeared coal ash on his head, gathered fistfuls of hair one at a time and yanked it all out by the roots. It was the most difficult time for him in the last few months, the boy tells me.
The younger boy doesn’t remember much about his past, about Bombay. I ask him about his future. ‘I’ll do as the guru maharaj saheb says.’
I ask him why he took diksha. And then the boy, sitting in front of his notebook in which he is revising his Sanskrit lessons, says to me—admits to me—‘They say if you take diksha, you’ll get moksha. Right now I have no knowledge of that.’ He trusted his father. What choice did he have?
Sevantibhai had defined moksha for me: ‘In the bliss of moksha there is no desire.’ It is a simple straightforward definition: Salvation is absence of desire …
Wandering through the villages of Gujarat, Sevantibhai is thinking about the great questions, about the purpose and order of the universe, about the stupidity of nationalism, about the atomic nature of reality. More than anybody else I know, he lives with a daily and nagging realization of the amount of violence our species perpetrates, each hour, each minute, not only on our fellow humans but on all life and on creation itself. The diamond merchants I have met throughout my life are not, by and large, given to this kind of questioning. Their trade has done well. These questions tend to occur more frequently to people in financial hardship. The Jain diamond merchants of Bombay are pretty happy with their lavish homes and offices, their occasional trips to Antwerp for business, to Disneyworld with their children and to the hill resort of Lonavla on weekends. They are almost to a man BJP supporters, and they think the proposed Narmada dam will be a blessing for Gujarat.
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