Years before his father left home, Pundit Trivedi had been groomed for his role as patriarch. His marriage had been arranged with a woman born in the family’s ancestral village in eastern Bihar, and within a few years of their wedding, she gave birth to a son and two daughters. In deference to the times, all three children were sent to an English-medium school. A modern education was important if the girls were to marry well. For the boy, though, learning English was something of a formality, as it had been for Pundit Trivedi, since as the only son he would of course remain at home to take over for his father, to assume his place in the long succession of brahman scholars who had walked this same path. Pundit Trivedi tutored his boy from an early age, as he himself had been tutored by his father. The two of them sat together in the garden, every morning, reciting declensions and conjugations, reading the folk tales of the Hitopadesha and the abstruse verses of the Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi, an introduction to Panini’s sublime vision of Sanskrit grammar.
Who could have predicted what would follow? Who would have thought that so much could be lost so quickly? But we live in the Kali Yuga, the fourth, final, and degenerate epoch, a time when even the most ancient, revered traditions are slipping away.
When the girls reached an appropriate age, they were married and sent off to live with their respective families, just as they were expected to do. It became clear, however, that the boy was not interested in pursuing his studies in Sanskrit. Instead he attended a technical college, where he trained to become an electrical engineer. How this decision was made—how such a thing was permitted to happen, with what amount of conflict and heartache—I can hardly imagine. By the time I met Pundit Trivedi, all of this was history. The prodigal son and I were never introduced, and I saw him only once, as I was leaving from a lesson; he was a distinguished man with graying hair.
With his son in New Delhi, Pundit Trivedi did not renounce the world to take up the life of a sannyasi. Had he gone away, who would have watched over Mata-ji and the complex domestic affairs? It may be that he too had fallen under the spell of the decadent Kali Yuga, for in 1945 he did something else altogether without precedent: he accepted a non-brahman as his student—an Englishman, a magistrate at the high court of Banaras—and began tutoring him in Sanskrit in the same quiet garden where he had passed so many hours with his young son. Since that time he had taught only a handful of Westerners, all of whom were attracted to Banaras because of its reputation as a center of traditional learning.
His most recent student before me had been a prominent German philologist who studied in Banaras during the sixties. The professor had arranged for Pundit Trivedi to receive a post at Humboldt University as a lecturer in Sanskrit. For Pundit-ji to accept this offer would have entailed the final break with his orthodox roots. Of the many difficulties involved, perhaps the greatest was that traveling to Germany would open the unimaginable possibility of death outside the precincts of Shiva’s city, the triangle of land bordered on the east by the Ganges and on the north and south by the Varana and Assi rivers. Kashyam maranam muktihi. So says the Kashikandika: “Death in Banaras is liberation.” Death in Banaras is death that brings an end to death. And so it was that the invitation to teach in Germany was respectfully declined. Pundit Trivedi elected to remain in the holy city, supervising the family property and discussing politics and philosophy with old friends.
I arrived for our lesson one cool December morning and found my teacher reclining, as usual, on a stone bench in the garden, absorbed in his newspaper. Nearby a cow stood under a canopy of palm leaves, studiously working her way through a mixture of water, oats, and hay. Pundit-ji leaned against a large cylindrical bolster—his “wisdom pillow.” “Without my wisdom pillow I could not remember even one shloka!” This was his standard claim, and it was generally accompanied by a solid slap to the white cloth and a sly smile. He was wearing heavy wool socks, a bulky sweater, and an incandescent orange stocking cap pulled tightly down over his head. A pair of wooden sandals rested on the ground at his side, each one with a single peg made to fit between the first and second toes, each peg rubbed to a soft luster from years of service.
As I stepped from the shadows into the sunlight, Pundit Trivedi looked up from his paper. I saluted him by bowing slightly and raising my hands, palms joined.
“Oh ho! The great Buddhist scholar has arrived! Please, come. Sit down, sit down.” His eyes glittered and he smiled enthusiastically, directing me over to the bench in characteristic north Indian fashion, his right arm outstretched, palm downward, cupped fingers moving rapidly back and forth as though digging a small, invisible hole in the air. He sat leaning slightly forward, back straight, arms at his sides, the way a musician sits with his sitar—his right knee bent sharply over the fulcrum of the left thigh. I went to him and touched my fingers to his feet and then to my own head, after which I settled into my spot on the bench. For a moment we simply sat there silently beaming at each other as though this were the happiest occasion of our lives, the culmination of all our hopes and plans.
“Mata-ji! Chai laao!” Through the backdoor of the house I could see the broad silhouette of his wife as she moved toward the kitchen to prepare tea. “You will have some chai, no?”
“Yes, please. How’s the new calf doing?” We both turned to examine a miniature white cow that hovered near its mother, wobbling on four bony stilts. She blinked her long lashes uncomprehendingly, as if this new world had been made just a bit too bright for her taste. The servant, Madhav, rubbed her body vigorously with a large towel, causing her head to bob up and down.
Pundit Trivedi studied the young cow, giving my question serious consideration. “These cold nights are too much for a newborn. She needs to be watched over carefully or we will lose her.” He called out instructions to move the calf away from its mother and into the sun. Madhav acknowledged his words with a nod and began to pull the tottering animal out from under the shelter. This resulted in a loud exchange of plaintive cries between mother and daughter, both of whom were clearly uncomfortable with the new arrangements.
When Pundit Trivedi’s father became a sannyasi, he left behind much more than the single great stone house. The house and surrounding property marked the center of a modest feudal estate. Madhav’s family had served Pundit Trivedi’s family for generations, bound to them by loyalty, tradition, and expediency. According to a long-standing agreement, the land where Madhav and his relatives lived was entirely at their disposal in return for services rendered. So far as I know only one of Pundit-ji’s several household servants, a deaf mute who slept in a shed with the cows, did not come from Madhav’s extended family. I was told that she had been an orphan child begging near Kashi Viswanath temple. One day, for reasons of her own, Mata-ji singled out this particular girl from among all the other wretched beggar children and brought her back to the house. Here she had lived for over twenty years, earning her keep by washing clothes and cleaning up after the cows. I never heard her called anything other than Goongi-ji—from the Hindi for “deaf and dumb.”
Engaged in her various duties, Goongi-ji skulked around the house and garden in a clumsily wrapped, soiled cotton sari, her hair a tangled nest. She communicated with the rest of us through a frenzied jerking of her arms, hands, and fingers, accompanied by spasmodic facial contortions, grunts, and squeals, which her interlocutor was obliged to imitate by way of response. It was more than a bit disconcerting to see her and Pundit Trivedi squared off in conversation, flailing their arms at each other, faces twisted, eyes bulging crazily. Under the mass of snarled hair someone was keenly alert, forever watching and thinking. At the moment she squatted in a corner of the garden making a great fuss over her lunch—dal and chapati that she bolted down with the aid of both hands, smacking and chomping—all the while keeping one eye on Madhav and the rest of us.
I opened my book and arranged my notes on the table between us. We were reading the Buddhacharita, an elegant narrative poem of the Buddha’s life composed in the third century
. Ashvagosha, the author, was a master stylist, and I had selected this text hoping that my teacher would appreciate the language in spite of its Buddhist subject matter. I presumptuously imagined that reading a beautifully written Buddhist text might expand his intellectual horizons. He repaid me adequately for my conceit. We hadn’t finished the first chapter before he began teasing me by punning, in Hindi, on the Buddha’s name, referring to him as Bhagavan Buddhu—Lord Blockhead. This wasn’t just about Buddhism, though; regardless of the context, Pundit-ji derived enormous pleasure from puns like this, concocted from an imaginative blending of Sanskrit, Hindi, and English. There was always some danger that our work would be sidetracked at any moment with an obscure linguistic joke or an amusing anecdote only vaguely related to the reading. These interruptions were relatively brief, though, compared to the ever-present possibility of unannounced guests; at such times I had no choice but to sit back and wait, and perhaps to discover, as I did on this particular morning, that there are many ways to learn.
With the calf now basking happily in the warm sun, Pundit-ji appeared suddenly to remember our purpose together. He opened the text that lay before him and leafed through the pages, carefully moving one long index finger down the margins until he located the place where we had left off the previous morning, and began to read. Pundit Trivedi did not speak Sanskrit; the language spoke through him, just as it had spoken through his father and grandfather and all the others. To hear him read aloud was to grasp, in an immediate, visceral way, that I was hearing the ancient language of the Aryas, warriors who inhabited the Indian subcontinent over three thousand years ago with their horses and chariots and their elaborate sacrificial rituals. The very name Sanskrit means “polished,” “cultured,” “refined,” and above all else, it is the sound of Sanskrit—its most sacred treasure—that has been closely guarded over the centuries with uncompromising devotion. The power of the mantra, the capacity of Sanskrit to heal and transform, is entirely dependent on its correct enunciation. These sounds emerged from the crucible of visions, shaped through poetry and metaphor into words that echo the primordial vibrations of the cosmos. Sanskrit is a bridge between conceptual thinking and the elemental forces of nature, a gateway opening backward out of the mind into the divine realm of fire and earth, thunder, wind, and rain.
Pundit Trivedi taught in the old way, first reciting the sounds himself, then listening closely as I repeated what he said, mimicking, as best I could, his pronunciation. After reading each verse, he analyzed its syntactic structure, split compounds, and deciphered particularly rare or thorny grammatical forms, if necessary rehearsing the appropriate conjugation or declension. Finally, almost as an afterthought, we discussed the meaning of the words. In this fashion the two of us plodded along at the majestic pace of water buffalo, with great deliberation—no more slowly as we labored under the plow, no more quickly as we headed for the river to bathe. Reading Sanskrit with Pandit Trivedi was in essence a ritual act, a sort of linguistic darshan, in itself sufficient to insure a more favorable birth next time around.
We were already deep into our reading when Mata-ji arrived with chai; one glass for Pundit-ji and the special “foreigner’s cup” for me—a flowered ceramic mug that could be easily identified so as never to accidentally enter the ritually pure kitchen. This business of the foreigner’s cup was something that took a bit of getting used to, and during our first week together I committed a crude faux pas that succeeded in embarrassing everyone present. I had reached out to take Pundit Trivedi’s glass from Mata-ji to hand it to him. Fortunately, an instant before my fingers made contact with the untainted glass, she deftly pulled it out of reach.
This morning Mata-ji was accompanied by a Hindu gentleman who stood politely to one side while she served us our chai. He was perhaps forty, dressed in carefully pressed slacks and a Western-style shirt, his hair and moustache neatly trimmed. He had the appearance of an office worker or a government bureaucrat. The muscles in his toes flexed uneasily in the dirt as he watched us receive our glasses. I had seen him before, several times in the early evening, performing puja at a small Vishnu temple near the shop where I went for black-market kerosene. Once the chai was served he stepped forward and knelt, palms joined. He brought his fingers to Pundit Trivedi’s feet, then raised these same fingers to his head.
“Namaskar, Guru-ji.”
Pundit Trivedi accepted these formalities with the easy grace of a man accustomed from childhood to the life of an aristocrat. “Namaskar, Chotilal.” Madhav fetched a dilapidated cane chair, placing it at a discrete distance from the bench where we sat. Meanwhile I leaned back on my cushion and prepared to be kept waiting indefinitely. “Baiteeyay,” Pundit-ji said, motioning for him to be seated. “Tell me, how is your wife?”
Chotilal shook his head gloomily. “Not well, Pundit-ji. Her digestion is worse. The medicine prescribed at the clinic does not seem to have helped her at all. She has taken up an Ayurvedic treatment now, but so far there is no improvement in her condition.” He averted his eyes for just a moment, then turned back to Pundit-ji. “She has a good deal of pain.”
Pundit Trivedi frowned, which had the effect of pulling his nose down over his upper lip. “I’m very sorry to hear that. Please tell her so. And your daughters?”
“They are fine, Pundit-ji. The eldest will be fourteen this month. I have completed arrangements for her marriage to a boy from a very good family.” He hesitated. “The dowry they are requesting is more than we can afford. But they will not agree to anything less. Kyaa kiyaa jaayay? What is to be done?”
“And the others?”
“Sita and Anju are in school. But soon enough they too will require husbands. We . . .” His voice dropped away into an embarrassed silence. “I did not come here to complain to you about these mundane problems.”
“What is it, then?”
Chotilal stared at the wooden chappal resting on the ground near his feet. After a few seconds he glanced in my direction and seemed to look right through me, then turned to Pundit Trivedi.
“Guru-ji, I have been reading and studying the Bhagavadgita, attempting to go deeper into the meaning of Shri Krishna’s words. For this purpose I turned to the explanations given by Shankaracharya in his commentary.”
I perked up on hearing the name of my former dissertation subject but tried not to appear nosy.
“I see,” said Pundit Trivedi. “No doubt Shankara’s philosophy of nondualism is most profound, but his views are subtle. Do you find the commentary worthwhile?”
Chotilal sat forward, causing the chair to creak. I noticed that through the repeated clenching of his toes, he had dug two small trenches in the packed earth. “It is difficult. In the beginning—before reading Shankara—I felt I understood what Krishna tells Arjuna, that he must fight.” He recited, from memory, the Hindi translation he had been reading:
Better to die fulfilling one’s own dharma;
to take up the dharma of another is filled with peril.
I watched Pundit Trivedi as he reflected on the significance of this verse, one that must have figured prominently, years ago, in discussion with his son. “The meaning is clear, is it not?”
Chotilal nodded. “Arjuna cannot escape his duty as a warrior. This much I understand. But the explanations of Shankara . . .” He sighed. “The more I study, the more confused I become. I no longer know what to think.”
Both he and Pundit-ji seemed to have forgotten all about me as I sat quietly, pretending to be absorbed in the text we had been reading. It may be that Chotilal assumed I could not understand Hindi; although he really did not seem to care. Nor was he the first to converse with Pundit Trivedi in this way, as if the foreigner sitting nearby had no ears. In Banaras, the most intimate details of one’s life become the shared property of family and neighbors; maybe under such circumstances people don’t need, or expect, privacy. Pundit-ji now looked at Chotilal with obvious concern. Before he could respond his guest continued in the same bookish, formal Hin
di.
“Shankara writes about Brahman, a state beyond all distinctions—beyond all the worry and pain of this illusory world. Beyond even the need to fulfill one’s dharma.”
Pundit-ji’s brows arched almost imperceptibly. “Indeed, this is one interpretation of Shankara.”
“But how can it be, Guru-ji? Is this world really nothing more than maya?” He appeared genuinely exasperated. “Is all that we do for nothing?”
“Hari Ram!” Pundit-ji exclaimed. “You are becoming a philosopher, Chotilal. What is the point in worrying about such abstruse matters?”
But Chotilal was clearly in no mood to back down. “Is this,” he threw out his hand in a nervous arc that took in the garden, the cows, even Goongiji, who had finished eating and was now following our every move with great curiosity, “all of it . . . not real? I want to understand, Guru-ji. I need to understand Shankara’s meaning.”
“And what if it were?” Pundit-ji responded pointedly. “What if all of it—the whole world—were nothing but a dream? Kyaa fark hai? Would knowing this change anything?” He seemed to have suddenly become aware of his neighbor’s heartfelt distress.
Chotilal let both hands drop to his lap in a dramatic gesture of resignation. “Bardhaa fark, Guru-ji. If this life is no more than a dream, then why should I worry to pay my daughter’s dowry? And my wife’s pain—if it is not real, then why should I care? Why should I care about anything?”
“Is that what you would prefer?” Pundit-ji’s voice was flat, betraying no emotion. “Not to care about your daughter’s marriage? Not to care about the suffering of your wife?”
Chotilal did not immediately respond. He bent forward in the chair, his elbows resting on his knees, and began to massage his forehead with both hands. “It would be easier, Guru-ji . . .” He looked up, his face framed between two open palms. “Would it not?”
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