Upon their arrival in Mumbai, Martha and Vincent had taken a cab to the Taj Mahal Hotel. They were put up in the business-like Tower Wing of the hotel. They did not observe the young Japanese woman who checked into the adjoining luxurious Heritage Wing.
The Taj Mahal Hotel had something else that was more interesting than the themed suites. Besides the usual ‘house doctor’ for medical emergencies, it also boasted a ‘house astrologer’ for far more urgent counselling from the heavens. Vincent had decided to take an appointment. He had noticed the bit about the ‘house astrologer’ while leafing through the hotel’s extensive services directory. Even though he was sceptical about the occult, his last experience with the world beyond, in London, had opened up his mind to newer concepts.
He dropped in at the hotel’s reception to book an appointment with Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma, the world-renowned astrologer who practised his art and science from the hallowed portals of the Taj every alternate week. The receptionist was happy to give Vincent an appointment for 3 pm.
Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma turned out to be a wise old man of eighty-one, who spoke wonderful English, not the crazy, half-naked fakir that Vincent had imagined.
‘You see, Mr Sinclair, my childhood and growing-up years were spent in the picturesque fields of Hoshiarpur in Punjab. Surrounded by the splendour of nature, I became fascinated with the concept of destiny. This led me to the question: is everything preordained in life? It was this question that led me to the study of the occult, Hindu astrology and philosophy,’ explained Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma as he poured two cups of lemon tea, one for Vincent and one for himself.
Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma’s father had been a professor of science and mathematics but had remained perpetually absorbed in subjects such as astrology, palmistry, mysticism, and spiritualism. With twenty-four-hour access to his father’s texts and scrolls, Ramgopal had read, re-read, absorbed and understood each of them with a voracious appetite. He had become so curious about the metaphysical that he had begun to delve deeper and deeper into the subject. Very soon, there was a perpetual line of waiting visitors at his father’s house. People had begun to believe his uncannily accurate predictions. This had led to more enthusiasm and deeper research, eventually resulting in Ramgopal becoming one of the most sought-after astrologers in India and abroad.
‘Now, I take it that you do not have a janam-kundli, in which case I will need to make one for you.’
‘What is that?’ asked Vincent.
Pandit Ramgopal explained patiently. ‘A janam-kundli is a birth chart. It indicates the planetary positions when you were born. I will need your date, time and location of birth.’
Vincent supplied him with the relevant data: 1 July 1969; 7:15 am; New York City.
The pandit referred to a musty old tome from which he derived the latitude and longitude of New York City. Latitude 40°29’40’N to 45°0’42’N and longitude 71°47’25’W to 79°45’54’W.
Master craftsman that he was, he then started filling in the planetary positions in Vincent’s birth chart. Chart duly completed, he looked at it carefully as if he were admiring a work of art.
‘I will tell you a few things about your past. Please tell me whether I am right or wrong. This will ensure that the chart I have before me is indeed accurate.’
Vincent meekly nodded his assent.
‘You are an only child. No brothers or sisters.’
‘Yes.’
‘Your parents are dead. They died around the same time. Rather violently and suddenly. An accident?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are not married.’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though you are not married, you love children. You work with children in your career. A schoolteacher or paediatrician perhaps?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are deeply religious. In fact, your work is spiritual in nature.’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s fine then,’ said Pandit Ramgopal rather matter-of-factly as if all his accurate readings about Vincent’s past meant nothing.
He then became very serious. ‘The ascendant of your horo-scope is Pisces with the moon in Pisces,’ he said.
‘Huh?’ said Vincent.
Pandit Ramgopal carried on, ‘What it means is that in this life you are at the end of your multiple cycles of birth, death and rebirth. This is your final lifetime before you merge with the divine. This is a wonderful horoscope. I am honoured to read it.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Vincent.
Pandit Ramgopal replied, ‘It means that you have been through several lifetimes in which you have learned various things. In this final lifetime, your soul will have learned whatever there is left to learn. After this, you will not need rebirth. We Hindus call it moksha.’
‘What else can you tell me?’
‘There are three supreme forces in your life. You will need to recognise them before you can attain moksha.’
‘How?’
‘The first force has Saturn in the ascendant. But in this horoscope the ascendant is Libra, not Cancer. Saturn has its highest power in Libra, driving this person to the very top of wealth and power. Furthermore, the conjunction of Venus and the moon in the second house is a Raja Yog, the astral bounty that has kept this person in public prominence always.’
‘Who is this person?’ asked Vincent.
‘That I cannot tell you. But wait, hear me out. There is a second force which has what is called a Paap-Katri Yog or a Vish-Kanya Yog. The moon is afflicted and is surrounded by malevolent planets such as Saturn, Mars as well as Rahu-Ketu. This makes the person almost maniacal. This person will not hesitate to kill.’
‘What can I do?’ asked a visibly shaken Vincent.
‘Well. This second force has Rahu in the sixth house and Ketu in the twelfth house. This makes the person holy and very religious. Unfortunately, the person’s ascendant is a combination of Saturn and Mars. This makes him or her violent and bloody. Thus there is a spiritual side to this negative force.’
‘What do you mean by Rahu and Ketu?’ asked Vincent.
Pandit Ramgopal answered, ‘In Hindu mythology, Rahu is the snake that swallows the sun or the moon, thus causing an eclipse. From the astronomical point of view, Rahu and Ketu denote the point of intersection of the sun and the moon as they move. To that extent, they are the north and south lunar nodes, hence eclipses are bound to occur at these points.’
‘So how can I neutralise this negative force generated by Rahu and Ketu?’ asked Vincent.
‘Use the third force to neutralise the second. This third force has a Gajakesari Yog in the ninth house. Both Jupiter and the moon are without blemish here. There is no aspect of any planet on it, nor any conjunction. This is a person of wisdom and knowledge. Let them cancel each other out!’ he commanded as he thumped the table in front of him.
Martha and Vincent were sitting in the Sea Lounge of the Taj, one of the city’s favourite tearooms. They had just returned to the hotel after a hectic day of sightseeing and were enjoying the restaurant’s specialty, Viennoise coffee.
Vincent had been left rather shaken by the predictions of Pandit Ramgopal Prasad Sharma, and it had taken him a day to recover. In the morning, Martha had suggested that they spend the day seeing a little more of the city.
Vincent had told their guide—who turned out to be a mine of information even other than local—that he wanted to see St Thomas’s Cathedral first, and that’s exactly where they had headed. In the heart of the business district of Mumbai, St Thomas’s Cathedral stood like a quiet oasis in the midst of chaos. The cathedral had been built as the city’s first Anglican church in 1718 with a view to improving the ‘moral standards’ of the growing British settlement.
And then it struck Vincent. Wasn’t St Thomas one of the first apostles to come to India? He made up his mind quickly. He needed to go to the southern parts of India in order to understand the context of the Bom Jesus documents.
As t
hey were returning to their hotel they crossed the bustling shopping district of Colaba, filled with shops selling carpets and shawls. Most of the shops were owned by Kashmiri traders. Vincent noticed the names: Ahmad Joo, Bashir Joo, Muhammad Joo . . .
Vincent casually enquired of their guide, ‘Why is it that so many shopkeepers have the same last name?’ Pat came the reply, ‘Oh yes, an interesting question, sir. The word joo is added as an honorific by local Kashmiri Muslims to the names of elderly persons to show respect, as in, for instance, Muhammad Joo or Ahmad Joo. But the word “joo” is also believed to have been derived from the word “Jew”. The names of many tribes in Kashmir have Jewish associations. One of the tribes is called Asheriya, as in Asher; the tribe of Dand could be Dan; Gadha, Gad; Lavi, Levi, and so on.’ Vincent realised that the connections between the lost tribes of Israel and the present-day population of Kashmir were much more significant than had ever been discussed by Western scholars.
As they were nearing the hotel, they saw a petite Japanese woman sitting alone by a window table at a café. She was sipping camomile tea and staring out at the ocean. Vincent couldn’t help thinking, once again, what a delightful creature she was. Where had he seen her before? She looked familiar, but he shrugged off the feeling.
His aunt Martha didn’t.
Cochin, Kerala, India, 2012
Vincent had decided to opt for a package tour that would take him to all the relevant spots on the St Thomas circuit. He would proceed from Mumbai to Cochin on his own by air, while Martha would spend the next few days researching some documents at the David Sassoon Library.
Vincent’s tour guide was a young Keralite by the name of Kurien. Kurien did not wait for formalities before plunging into his prepared material. ‘St Thomas visited Kerala in A.D. 52. At that time, Kerala was famous in the ancient trade for spices, sandalwood, pepper, cardamom and cinnamon, and used to routinely trade with the Greeks, the Romans and the Arabs. The trade centres in Kerala were headed by Jews. Gold coins from Rome and Greece of the period 27 B.C. to A.D. 80 have been found in ancient port cities of Kerala.’123
Kurien continued, ‘The Acts of Judas Thomas, a Syrian manuscript about the voyage of St Thomas to India, and the travelogue of Thomas Canae from Syria, who established Syrian Christianity in A.D. 372 in Kerala, describe Malabar Christians living along the Kerala coastline. When the Portuguese arrived in India in 1498, they found 143 Christian churches already established in Kerala.’
Kurien pointed out that St Thomas had established six prayer centres in Kerala and that all of them were Jewish. Obviously, it had been much easier for St Thomas to preach to the Jews than to the gentiles.
By the time Vincent returned to Mumbai, he was convinced that St Thomas had indeed visited India. He now had many questions racing around inside his head. Was it possible that Jesus had also visited India along with St Thomas? If so, could a bloodline of Jesus still be surviving in India? Could Terry Acton’s Bom Jesus document lead them further in that direction? What about Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail—weren’t they supposed to have travelled to France? Could there be more than one bloodline?
Before proceeding any further, he needed to discuss these matters with Martha, who was still in Mumbai.
Mumbai, India, 2012
Martha was sitting inside the David Sassoon Library. Located in the city’s Kala Ghoda district, the library housed over 40,000 books, many of them extremely rare.
Martha’s research had led her to a rare Persian work entitled Negaris-Tan-i-Kashmir. Also in front of her was a book by Andreas Faber Kaiser entitled Jesus Died in Kashmir.124 In the latter, there was an interesting passage wherein the author related a conversation he had had with Mr Basharat Saleem, a man claiming to be a descendant of Jesus:
He [Bashrat Saleem] told me that to his knowledge the only written source on this subject of Jesus’s marriage was the Negaris-Tan-i-Kashmir, an old Persian book that had been translated into Urdu. That [book] relates that King Shalivahana [the same king who met and conversed with Jesus in the mountains] told Jesus that he needed a woman to take care of him and offered him a choice of fifty . . . Jesus had replied that he did not need anyone and that no one was obliged to work for him, but the king persisted until Jesus agreed . . . the woman’s name was Marjan, and the same book says that she bore Jesus children.
Martha recalled that Vincent’s regression sessions had seemed to indicate that Jesus survived the crucifixion. Martha remembered something else. In 1780, Karl Friedrich Bahrdt125 had suggested that Jesus had quite deliberately enacted his death on the cross, using drugs that were arranged by the physician Luke. He had done this in order to ensure that his followers would reject the possibility of his being a political messiah and instead would embrace the more desirable alternative of his being a spiritual messiah. According to Bahrdt, Jesus had been resuscitated by Joseph of Arimathea, one of his secret disciples, who was a member of the Essenes, just like Jesus!
Next, Martha pored over the photocopies that she had made of the research done by Karl Venturini.126 Venturini had suggested that Jesus’s fellow members of the secret society had heard groaning from inside the tomb where Jesus had been placed after his crucifixion. They had succeeded in scaring away the guards and eventually rescued Jesus. A scholarly paper by Heinrich Paulus seemed to show that Jesus had merely fallen into a temporary coma and was revived without any external help in the tomb.
A story seemed to be emerging. Martha was yet to read the Nathanamavali, a book on the Nath yogis of India.
In western India, there existed an extremely austere band of wandering ascetics in white robes. They were known as the Nath yogis. The Nath yogis hailed from a line of historical gurus. Among several others was one called Issa Nath. A book on the history of the Nath yogis, called Nathanamavali127stated the following:
Issa Nath came to India at the age of fourteen. After this he returned to his own country and began preaching. Soon after, his brutish and materialistic countrymen conspired against him and had him crucified. After crucifixion, or perhaps even before it, Issa Nath entered samadhi by means of yoga.
Samadhi, according to the proponents of yoga, was the final stage of the discipline. Samadhi literally means to ‘bring together’. It was the bringing together of the conscious mind and the divine, a union of one’s soul with Brahman.
Seeing him thus, the Jews presumed he was dead, and buried him in a tomb. When Issa Nath’s guru arrived, he took the body of Issa Nath from the tomb, woke him from his samadhi, and later led him to the sacred land of the Aryans. Issa Nath then established an ashram in the lower regions of the Himalayas.
Martha recalled Vincent’s words when he was under the trance of regression: ‘I am hiding behind some bushes. I don’t know why I am unable to tear myself away from here. Night has fallen. In the middle of the night, there was a visitor. He looked like an angel because of his white robes . . . I think he was an Essene monk. He rolled away the stone. The guards collapsed with terror. The Sabbath is over, and the two Marys have come here to roll away the stone to the tomb, but they are rather surprised to see it open. They are going inside. I’m following at a discreet distance. There are two men in white robes. They look like Essenes. They are saying that Jesus is alive, not dead!’
Were they Nath yogis? Could it also be that the great prophet ‘Nathan’ mentioned in the Old Testament had actually been a proponent of the ‘Nathanamavali’?
Not completely satisfied with the progress she had made with her research on behalf of Vincent, Martha decided to look up Holger Kersten, the leading authority on the subject of Jesus in India.
In 1983, the book Jesus Lived in India had created a mild storm when it had expanded the scope of Russian traveller Nicholas Notovich’s experiences in Ladakh. Kersten had set out on the path ten years previously when he had first come across the theory that Jesus had lived in India.
Kersten had found that the Persian scholar F. Mohammed’s historical work Jami-ut-tuwarik, which spoke of
Jesus’s visit to Nisibis, Turkey, by royal invitation, had been ignored by Western theology. Kersten discovered that in Turkey, as well as Persia, there were stories of a great saviour by the name of Yuz Asaf, ‘Leader of the Healed’, who shared several similarities with Jesus in terms of character, lessons and life incidents.
Kersten also drew from the Apocrypha, which were texts written by the Apostles but were not officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. The Apocryphal Acta Thomae, or The Acts of Judas Thomas, spoke of the several meetings that had taken place between Jesus and Thomas on several occasions after Christ’s crucifixion. The Acta further spoke of Christ specifically sending Thomas to preach in India.
Holger Kersten had found that stone inscriptions at Fatehpur Sikri, near the Taj Mahal, included ‘Agrapha’, or ‘sayings of Christ’, that were completely absent in the Bible. Their grammar resembled the Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas.
Kersten had cited this fact to drive home the point that texts deleted by the Church contained extremely important information about Jesus and his life and that this information, while having been ruthlessly obliterated by the Church, had not been erased from the Indian stone inscriptions.
Martha decided that she needed to trace the Tarikh-Issa-Massih that had been photocopied by Terry Acton and given to Vincent. In the published Tarikh-Issa-Massih that she found in the library, the final paragraph said:
Issa and Mary had a child by the name of Sara, who was born to them in India, but was later sent to Gaul with her mother. Issa remained in India, where he married a woman from the Sakya clan on the persistence of King Gopadatta, and had a son, Benissa. Benissa had a son, Yushua, who fathered Akkub. Akkub’s son was Jashub. Abihud was the son of Jashub. Jashub’s grandson was Elnaam. Elnaam sired Harsha, who sired Jabal, who sired Shalman. Shalman’s son Zabbud embraced Islam. Zabbud fathered Abdul, who sired Haaroon. His child was Hamza. Omar was Hamza’s son and he produced Rashid. Rashid’s offspring was Khaleel.
The Rozabal Line Page 17