All of a sudden, we saw a person coming towards us. I asked him, ‘Hey brother, where can we find some water around here?’
‘Nowhere near here. You’ll find some near the river over there.’
‘How far is it?’
‘About three miles.’
I thought of something, so I asked, ‘Where do you live?’
He pointed in one direction and said, ‘My house is pretty close—behind that thicket.’
‘So there must be water over there, right?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Huh? No water at home? How do you manage?’
He was silent.
I said again, ‘Come on, give us some water. We’re very thirsty.’
He was silent again.
I said, ‘It’s fine if you don’t want to come. We’ll go there and ask for it. Is there someone at home?’
He was silent again. After a little while he asked, ‘Sir, what caste do you belong to?’
‘We don’t care about caste, but if you are worried, we’re Brahmins. So your utensils won’t be polluted.’
‘No, that’s not it,’ he said and became quiet. Then he said, ‘You should go elsewhere and find water.’
We had been hopeful, but those hopes were now dashed. I asked, ‘But why won’t you offer us some water?’
Then out of helplessness he said, ‘Sir, we’re of a lower caste . . .’
I started laughing all of a sudden. ‘Is that all? We don’t care about caste; we’re equals.’
‘No, sir, it can’t be.’
‘All right, if you won’t offer us water, we’ll drink it ourselves. How do we get to your house?’
‘No, sir, this . . .’
My companion got upset—perhaps he was really thirsty. He asked, ‘What kind of man are you? You carry shit all day, and now you’re too proud to offer us water!’
I was about to stop him when that man suddenly stood upright and said, ‘Sir, you can think whatever you want about me, but please don’t insult my job. I earn an honest wage . . .’
I wondered at the combination of the humility of the wretched and his pride! And I thought that it was right . . .
We didn’t get any water. We kept going.
Wouldn’t it be something if this happened everywhere? I know that it doesn’t; there are many places where you can’t find this pride, this dignity. There you only find wretchedness, complete servitude. There, mothers and fathers teach their children not to be proud but to be obedient; they teach them to bow not out of dignity but servility. These souls have been so tightly bound that they can’t tell you how they were shackled and they don’t realize that they helped the chains grow stronger . . .
That prideful dignity is not the ultimate solution to the issue, but it is a solution, certainly, and natural, too . . .
*
One more lesson.
They didn’t have a cook at their house although they had been looking for one for many days. One day a man came and asked if there was a need for a cook.
After making a few inquiries, the man was hired.
Shekhar and his brothers went to the kitchen to see the new order of things. They saw that the kitchen and the stove had been freshly washed, and the cook was sitting near the stove and drawing a line with a fistful of lime. The pots that crossed the line had to be newly washed, and whenever the cook went out he washed his feet again before going back across it. He would hop across on one foot so that the pollution wouldn’t follow him. Every once in a while, the cook would say to the children, ‘Don’t come here. Don’t come here.’
The children saw their fill and left. When they went outside, they drew a line and began jumping over it on one foot, just as they had seen the cook do, and started laughing.
Well. When it came time to eat, a new problem arose. If the cook came to serve dinner, he would have to wash his feet ten times a minute. It took a minute to wash his feet at any rate, so who would roll out the bread? Who would butter it? Who would serve it? It was decided that the cook wouldn’t leave the kitchen, and that one of the brothers would serve the food. But the plates that left the kitchen couldn’t go back into the kitchen! When seven or eight plates had been polluted in this way, the child came up with a plan. He took his plate and placed it on the other side of the line.
‘Dear God! What have you done! You’ve polluted the entire kitchen!’ the cook said as he jumped to his feet. The child fell into a fit of laughter.
A complaint was made. It was decided that the cook would serve everyone and then cook for himself.
After everyone had been served, the kitchen was cleaned again. The cook then bathed and cooked his own meal.
The child went back to the kitchen. He put a pot outside the line and then pushed it across to the other side and said, ‘Cook, can you put a little salt and pepper in this?’
Another round of complaints. The child was questioned, so he responded, ‘I didn’t put the pot inside the kitchen. I put it down on the outside and pushed it in. How could this have spoiled the kitchen?’
The cook decided that his meal would have to be prepared for the third time. It was already 2 p.m. Mother had ordered that tea be served at 3. And with tea, snacks.
The cook sighed deeply.
In the evening, the cook made his own meal first. After he had eaten, he went to Father and said, ‘Sir, I won’t be able to work here.’
Everyone let out a deep sigh of relief. The cook departed.
*
Iron or gold, neither is forged with just one blow. They have to be beaten, blow upon blow, blow upon blow . . .
That’s how education works. It doesn’t make do with just a blow or two; there are countless blows. But they aren’t that different; they appear as repeated marks of a single blow . . .
Except sometimes, when the metal gets misshapen, it receives its blows in crooked ways. All construction, the entirety of education, is composed of merely two or three basic kinds of blows, and their limitless forms. And by examining those two or three kinds of blows, you can get a sense of the whole method . . .
There is a third lesson . . .
The Gomti was flooding—flooding badly . . .
Shekhar had gone out with his father. Out, meaning on a little boat, manoeuvring it here and there with bamboo poles because the water on the roads was more than a foot high, and the way was blocked. If it was traversable then only for boats.
The boat was on the major thoroughfares. The view was so lively that it was as if a little part of Venice was in India because vendors were going around in their boats selling all kinds of foodstuffs—grains, vegetables, cooked meats, fruits and the like. Some were making the rounds selling books and newspapers, others were selling pictures of the flood—yes, even toys were being sold. The boats were going up to the doors of houses as if they were docking on riverbanks and the vendors called out the names of their wares and their prices.
But that was on the bigger roads, which they had already passed. Now they were headed into the poor parts of the city—to observe. This part of the city was lower than the rest (like they always are), so there was much more water here, and the boat was moving at an exciting pace. Exciting! What fun! The streets here were completely deserted, and it stank, and a funereal shadow fell over most of the houses—and if there was anything which pierced its silence then it was the sound of some child wailing. He asks his father, ‘Why don’t the vendors come here?’
‘What would they do here? Nothing gets sold here.’
‘Why?’
‘These are poor people, they can’t afford it.’
Filled with a wave of compassion, the child thinks about those children whose parents are ‘poor people’ and can’t afford toys for them. Nor fruits.
The child asks, ‘Where do their children play?’
‘They don’t play.’
‘Why?’
‘. . .’
What could anyone say, that they didn’t even have the strength to play? These
are the ones who don’t play, who are themselves playthings, whom fate plays with.
Calling these memories ‘memories’ requires stretching the meaning of the word. After all, I don’t remember things exactly like this, or more precisely I don’t remember the facts. When I look to the past these things don’t appear like images before my eyes. I only remember the feelings that I experienced, that special state of mind I was in when I took part in a certain scene. These images that I sketch are the phantasmal impressions left on the screen erected by that state of mind. If these are memories then they are the free associative memories of the mind, not the kind of memories for which we use our eyes to fix the original impressions . . .
But what is education? Not a series of images. It’s a series of feelings—feelings whose gradual development we can observe; that grow wider and deeper, on top of which these images are suspended. These images are in one sense the funerary remains of those feelings, and life is a wide expanse of such memorials . . .
*
Stability and ability.
The source of these two qualities in his education is clear. But he believes that there is another virtue, a drive, an impulse, a powerful attraction—where did that come from?
He thinks that it is something. Like a bubble in the stream of progress, perfectly fragile but still a little independent, a little dynamic, a little catalytic, a little exalted, a little immortal. What?
It’s a strange fact that the ideas and events that determine a life’s direction, that turn it in one direction and show it the permanent course to its future destination, those same events and ideas are impenetrable and imperceptible, and no one can determine their root impulse, the source of their decision-making powers.
So when I ponder where I found this ceaseless, upward-looking impulse—what is it which always sets the course of my life, and kept elevating it, in the direction of some summit that can’t be seen, that can’t even be imagined, hidden somewhere beyond the highest clouds—I never arrive at a clear answer . . .
I can see several disconnected images . . .
The past several events had unsettled Shekhar, whatever firm convictions he had, his certainties, all were dashed.
Now everything seemed fraudulent. He couldn’t bring himself to get attached to anything for fear that it, too, might turn out to be a lie, and slip through his fingers. So he began more and more to be alone, to wander off on his own.
The most noteworthy thing about all of the images that he can recall from this period of his life is their tranquillity. It’s possible that he was in such a desperate quest to find peace in those days that wherever he found it, even if only for a moment, the spot became fixed in his memory. That’s why these memories are so pleasant . . .
The bank of the Gomti River. Evening. Shekhar is walking by himself, slowly, noticing the trees. Some of the trees are covered by lattice upon lattice of yellowed dodder, mounds and mounds of them—that’s what he was looking at, and he was thinking about why these were the only organisms given the ability not to need the soil, never have their feet touch the ground, remaining elevated always, and drawing their life juices from the earth by using others as their support. But he couldn’t think about this for too long; his mind would wander to the coppery light that trembled on the waves of the Gomti and stay there. He felt as if there were something in the light that was calling out to him, drawing him in, offering comfort, but he couldn’t name it. The word ‘beauty’ was not yet part of his mental landscape . . .
Shekhar was sitting by himself in the colonnade in Lucknow.
An extremely beautiful horse passes in front of him at a rapid speed. There was no effort to his motion, no hesitation, as if there were no command of will. The motion was self-complete, beautiful, like a wonderful song with its own unique rhythm.
Shekhar gets up all of a sudden. This was a new thing in his life—and it jolted his mind like electricity.
Rhythm7 . . . tempo . . .
He sat back down. Clear as the sky, as a mountain stream.
Perhaps, ever since then, his life has been spent searching everywhere for that. Perhaps he even found it; because many years later, even in the darkest days of his life, when he was troubled by the oppositions around him, a sudden ray of moonlight would pierce the darkness and those same oppositions and problems would be resolved and they would seem to be the diverse parts of a great unity . . .
One day, his father took him to the museum, left him in the room with the statues and went to work.
Shekhar looked around nervously. There were statues all around him, some intact, some broken, some bodiless heads, some headless bodies, some black, some white, some made of stone, some made of clay, some of sparkling metal and some eaten by rust.
His gaze fell on one statue and stopped.
Or rather, his gaze stopped at the statue’s feet, because the statue was quite large. And his line of sight only reached its feet.
He slowly looked up. His gaze reached the ceiling where the statue’s head was.
Shekhar looked at it again, from head to toe. All the way to the wooden platform underneath the feet where in big letters was written, ‘Mahavir Jain’.
A thought arose in Shekhar’s mind and said, ‘The statue is completely naked.’
It was naked. Shekhar didn’t understand how, while sketching its massive, terrifying, expansive nudity, the sculptor’s hands didn’t tremble, his mind didn’t shrink back. The truth of nudity, naked like truth, was not a part of his world, was never allowed to be a part of his world; for him, nudity was a lie, vulgar, loathsome and ugly. Still, or perhaps because, he kept looking at it with fixed and unwavering eyes, looked at it for a long time.
As if his mind had accepted that nudity, in his eyes it was not to be forsaken; it was natural and beautiful.
He went back home slowly. The sweet and cool breath of peace had spread a light perfume across his mind.
A few days later, when his father had taken him to Sarnath and they had stopped in Bodh Gaya, he sneaked out when he had the chance and made his way towards the museum in Sarnath, passing next to the edge of a large pond. Some people were gathering water chestnuts in the pond, and at the edge and in the mud several half-naked boys were causing a commotion; he didn’t even lift his eyes to look at them. The imaginative resources that he drew on while away (so many moments spent recalling delightful, forgotten scenes) no longer existed, because today he was going to the museum . . .
Very few people went to the museum in Sarnath. And when Shekhar got there, it was closing time.
He noticed that there was no peon at the door or at the gate. He quietly went under the gate and made his way inside.
The statues were on the right. Shekhar walked around for a while looking at them, and then sat down on a wide pedestal for a statue of the goddess Tara.
Suddenly it seemed to him as if a durable silence had descended there. So deep that he strained to hear if there was even the slightest sound, but there wasn’t. It was complete.
He quickly got up and went outside.
The door was locked; he was alone inside the museum. He slowly went back. Eventually he sat back down in the same place.
When we long for company, want sound, silence terrifies us; we listen to it and it appears to speak back to us. It speaks to us in words that in older times a writer who knew the human mind would have written, ‘It hissed.’ It didn’t seem to Shekhar that the silence was hissing at him, that it was coming to bite him. It didn’t occur to him to think, ‘I will be locked up all night, I won’t be able to eat or sleep, and Father will be looking for me.’ He was sitting there in a grand, beautiful, tranquil, thrillingly peaceful moment. He had forgotten knowledge. He sat there and kept sitting there . . .
Now when he thinks back at that episode, it makes him nervous. The peace was all-encompassing, and that silence! But at the time nothing seemed strange to him. What was strange was the word made by a door opening that dashed the silence . . . A word that he
couldn’t bring himself to believe—that’s how far gone he was! The call of his own name seemed foreign to him—‘Shekhar!’
He got up with a start, and quickly got away from the statue of the goddess Tara. He couldn’t bear the idea that people would discover where he had been, where he was for so long, what he had been doing; he thought that if people learned of the particular spot where he had been sitting, he would die of embarrassment . . .
Just like the spot where Buddha gained enlightenment, the spot was as pure to him as it was hidden to the world . . .
He was asked how he got there, what he’d been doing—why, where, when—the questions that always get asked, but whose answers hold no meaning, except for the fact that the questions are always just as mandatory as the replies are identical!
Shekhar’s embarrassed silence was his reply.
When he tells himself that it is a bit of the world’s peace, the world’s soul in him, is he lying, is he deluding himself?
He is surrounded by suffering, poverty; injury, disease, death, all of it is present. The architects of the religions of the world have made use of the inventive powers of their class and brought forth the worst and most terrifying anguishes of hell into the world, into his world, and he doesn’t accept them, wages an adversarial rebellion against them, fights them. But isn’t this because his soul can imagine or feel a place where none of this exists, because his soul has obtained a glimpse of some otherworldly peace? Despite living in this hell, he is connected not to the hell but to a global peace.
Delusion? Can a delusion give life to a complete biography, an entire society? Can delusion give you power? You can die for a delusion, but can you live for a mere delusion?
People say that a revolutionary is narrow-minded, that his mind is weak, his heart is off. People also say that his dreams are hollow, idealistic and impossible. They might be right. But he is able to look at the marginalized and the helpless with respect, his heart can lift the downfallen, his mind can run an entire nation. And for his dreams he can fight with truth and tenacity, and his dreams can come true.
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