The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  But whatever differences there might have been between the three men, they were much nearer to one another in belief, in language, in their feeling for the land, than I was to any of them. Listening to them talking among themselves, exchanging stories of pilgrimage, and mapping out the entire country—which was a third of the size of the continental United States—through its holy places, each famous for a particular miracle (“proof” was the word Shivam used), I realized the extent to which English-speaking India was a caste unto itself, more isolated and unassimilable than any of Hindu India.

  The land around us grew more beautiful. A thin mist hung over the fields. Occasionally there were islands of elephant grass, towering lines of violet-tinted eucalyptus, and growths of small purple wild flowers along the edges of the expanses of green. A tunnel of small bowed trees, with gnarled trunks, enclosed the road, which became more rural by the mile. We saw women working in the fields and the occasional whitewashed grave of a Muslim saint, all framed against acres of pale Indian winter sky.

  Land to me was merely land. The knowledge of crossing a state border, or the nearness of a certain town, might give it some shape, but for the people I was traveling with, the land was marked by myth and history. It was incredible to watch Shivam and Rohit—with Mukesh making noisy interjections—graft episodes from the two Indian epics, and the lives of the gods, onto the moving terrain. Here was the place from the Mahabharata where the five heroes, the Pandavas, rested during their time in the forest. Or: “We are very near the place where Ram and Sita spent eleven and a half of their fourteen years in exile.” It hardly mattered whether these events were part of a genuine recorded history, or whether they occurred in the places where the two Brahmins said they occurred; what mattered was the Indian genius for imbuing the land with meaning. To see the country transformed into a holy land, the length and breadth of which the two Brahmins carried in their heads, was to feel that no patriotism was deeper than Indian patriotism. The country was already an article of faith. The sixteenth-century Indian scholar Narayana Bhatta had written of the “dharma of place,” and of how worship could still occur at a site that had been destroyed because its inner sanctity remained. I now saw that idea of the dharma of place extended to the country at large, and no wonder this natural worship of the land could be converted into a political ideology.

  We stopped by the side of the road at a sweet shop that Mukesh explained “was famous on account of its purity.” The shop overlooked a thin stretch of road that shook with the occasional thunder of buses and trucks. The mustard fields beyond were a pointillist yellow sprawl under a pallid sky. Woodsmoke rose from the thatch of a small hut and was slatted in the sunlight. The sweets were brownish-red blobs that lay flat against the convex surface of a blackened iron vessel. The owner of the shop peered out past a pyramid of clay cups at us. Soon we had sweets on dried-leaf plates, and hot tea in thimble-sized clay cups.

  Mukesh was blabbing on about the erotic content of the Khajuraho temples. “Sex,” he said, using the English word, “has been shown in all its shapes and forms.” The Hindu time cycle is divided into four great epochs, each hundreds of thousands of years long, beginning with an age of truth and ending with one of vice, Kali Yuga. We were in the last of the four ages at present, and Mukesh said, “The energy of Kali Yuga is female. It is women who create illusion.”

  The two Brahmins were dismayed at the oversimplification. Shivam said, “In order for one to go before God, one must free oneself of the things of the world. If you go in a state of sexual excitation, then you will get no reward. You have to quench those thirsts beforehand. It is only then that you can enter into a state of true self-wardness.” The temples, he explained, were a metaphor for the change we had to undergo to get spiritual reward. “But,” he said, gesturing to Mukesh’s ignorance, “the great majority of people go to Khajuraho in search of what is on the inside, but get stuck on what is on the outside.”

  “Yes!” Mukesh chimed in, excited by the bawdy suggestiveness of the remark. “They go for honeymoon.”

  “If there is no feeling, there can be no reward,” Shivam said. “I know an old man who sits in Kashi and has seen it change over the years. I said to him: ‘Are you happy, baba?’ He said, ‘Happy to see all the facilities, but sad to see the harm that has come to our culture, our beliefs, our way of life. Since the electric light has come, men have gone blind.’”

  This simple image was important. In old India, the gift of true sight was an aspect of inner realization. It was never enough to see what the electric light could illuminate.

  We drove on. Near the Madhya Pradesh border the earth grew redder, the land hilly and shrub-covered. We were near one of the seams of the earth where the landscape of the north—pale, flat, and melancholy, with its dark soil and long sunsets and mantle of haze—gave way to the glossy-leaved plants and the ferric red of the tropical south. Madhya Pradesh—madhya means “middle”—is a vast landlocked state, full of dark forests, silver rivers, and a large aboriginal population. No state feels older, none more primordial. It is the navel of India, the point where the country seems to draw into herself. It has neither the sea air of the maritime south, with its old trading routes that had stretched from Java to the east coast of Africa, nor the girdle of mountains through whose passes welcome and unwelcome visitors alike, from Alexander to Tamerlane, had always entered India.

  No country is more dependent on visitors for historical information about itself than India. One forms an idea of India by balancing what India knows about herself with what outsiders, from Megasthenes and Fa-Hien to Al-Biruni and Niccolò de’ Conti, have written about her. It makes the country ripe for being defined from the outside. “The West’s India became our India,” Mukhopadhyay had said, and I sometimes felt as if all India’s troubles could be boiled down to the simple fact that its past was truly a foreign country. What India knew about herself was too speculative and abstract, too mystical, for outsiders to apprehend, and what visitors said about India could make Indians feel the visitors were talking about a country Indians did not recognize. The violence of being seen differently from how one saw oneself had been a constant theme in this journey, and it now resurfaced in Satna, a cement town of self-wounding ugliness.

  The streets were treeless and bleak and choked with traffic. The town was shapeless, but for an overpass and a railway junction. The tracks ran over patches of pale burnt grass, hummocked in places, where a few blue and brown dusty carriages stood. We came in along a market street that overlooked a deep arterial drain, chortling with grayish-brown water. Customers stepped daintily on rusted metal stairs to reach the little shops that sold plasma screens and Samsung washing machines. At a major intersection, battered billboards loomed over a stunted cityscape. Satna represented a dystopian vision of urbanity, but it could not be ignored: more and more, every Indian town looked like this. The towns’ ugliness was especially painful to contemplate when seen against the background of Hindu culture, with its highly developed aesthetic sense, and its feeling for the earth and the elements. It felt almost like a failure of translation, in which old India was unable to project the germ of its genius into the modern present. It was the utter degradation of this urban landscape—among the most polluted in the world—that made the idyll of village life so enticing.

  It was late afternoon when we reached the Hotel Bharhut, a Sovietic behemoth that hulked around an octagonal courtyard of thick overgrown grass. The restaurant was overrun by policemen, who sat at long tables in their dark green uniforms. Shivam had changed into a kurta and jeans, and we sat off to one side, near a glass door, overlooking a shaded lobby that stank of phenol disinfectant.

  Shivam was telling me of the violent nature of student politics at BHU, where he was part of the main Hindu nationalist group. Earlier he had described what it had been like to be shot in the leg. The students were demanding an elected union, which the university had been unprepared to grant. The students had occupied one of its buildings and
held it until armed men were sent in to expel them. As Shivam was running out, an acting administrator opened fire. “I felt a kick-like sensation,” Shivam said, “and my foot was thrown forward. It didn’t hurt at first. There was just this stinging. I thought nothing had happened, that I’d just grazed my foot. Then suddenly it began to burn, and when I looked down, I saw that my shoe was sopping with blood. I fainted then and there.” When he came to, he was in the hospital.

  The incident earned Shivam a certain notoriety. His name appeared in the paper; the leaders of various political parties came to see him in the hospital; and I sensed he regarded it as a turning point in his life, one of those moments when the universe seems to single us out for bigger things.

  We had finished our vegetarian lunch. I was rolling a cigarette; tobacco was one of the few vices Shivam and I had in common. The policemen were still eating. I handed Shivam the cigarette and said I would meet him outside on the porch of the hotel after using the bathroom. I went off, the slow coma of an Indian lunch creeping over me. I was thinking of a remark Shivam had made while we ate. He had, out of curiosity, attended a seminar organized by a left-wing student group, though he was a firm adherent of the Hindu right. There, he met young women who greeted him with a hug and a kiss, and this, much more than anything about their politics, had shocked him. He said, “I felt I was among people who did not respect the relationship of a mother or a sister. I felt I was being asked to behave with them as one might behave with one’s wife. They were kissing and hugging me. This”—the panic in his voice was still high—“is not a question of politics; this is a question of my culture.”

  I was turning over what he’d said in my mind, considering the depth of the misunderstanding it revealed—the Western greeting seeming to suggest to him a whole world of lapsed morals, in which all boundaries had broken down—when I came out onto the porch of the hotel and found no sign of Shivam. I began asking the hotel staff where he had gone. They seemed at first not to know whom I was talking about, and only when my inquiries grew more urgent did one say, “Oh, that boy who was with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The police hauled him over for questioning.”

  “What?”

  I went out and saw that Shivam had been taken off to one corner of the hotel’s driveway, where the police were indeed questioning him. A couple of youngish officers seemed to be dressing him down, with that bored cruelty that is the hallmark of officialdom in postcolonial countries.

  I went up to them and demanded an explanation in English.

  “Oh, he’s with you.” They grinned. “Then no problem, sir. You please enjoy!”

  Shivam walked up to me shaking with indignity and anger. “Do you see what we are put through? If you hadn’t been there, he would have given me two or three slaps and taken five hundred rupees off me.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “They said, ‘The SP is eating inside, and you dare to stand outside and smoke a cigarette.’ I said, ‘So what? I was also eating inside with the SP.’ They said, ‘Is that right? We’ll show you, boy.’”

  The SP was the superintendent of police. The police officer had been offended on behalf of his superior by Shivam’s audacity—what if the SP came out from his lunch and saw a man such as this casually smoking a cigarette?—and thought it fit to show him his place. The incident revealed the workings of yet another power structure, the colonial state, which India had inherited from the British, and which had been designed to treat ordinary citizens like a subject people. Indians had added their own injustices, along the lines of caste and religion; but they had not made the state their own. The caste system may have been grossly unjust, but it was India’s, and when the time came to redress its wrongs, men such as the Dalit leader, B. R. Ambedkar, knew how. The modern state was inorganic, an overlay. It contained all the evils of Indian society, but translated into an opaque foreign grammar of civil service, bureaucracy, police, and military. It perpetuated the inequalities of the society while concealing its inner workings. The levers of power, when pulled, did all the wrong things, and rather than serve the people, the apparatus of governance became an instrument of cruelty, a means by which Indians preyed on one another.

  I don’t know why, but I found myself apologizing to Shivam, and that moment we both recognized that I was inadvertently linked (and yet not subject) to the power at whose hands he suffered daily injuries. There was a BJP government in Madhya Pradesh, and now at the center too, but these injustices did not change with a change in government. Yet it was surely this system that the boatman in Benares had been thinking of when eighteen months before he said, “When Modi comes, we will send this government of the English packing.”

  But Modi had come, and the attitudes remained.

  Shivam’s Brahmin sense of self was affronted, but as I went deeper with him into a world governed by the laws of caste, I came to feel less sorry for him. I saw him casually assume the role of perpetrator in a system that is hardwired to degrade other human beings. The world may have known systems of inequality crueler and more unjust than caste, but never, in the history of the world, has one provided a deeper, more metaphysical basis—one sanctified by religion—for why each man must accept his place, and consequently why those who have the audacity to dream of another must be punished.

  The unpleasantness from the afternoon carried over into the evening. Everyone seemed to need a little time alone. Mukesh was resting after the long drive from Benares. We were to leave at dawn the next day for Khajuraho. I went to the bar of the hotel, which was in a seedy annex, a dimly lit place of black faux-leather sofas and solitary drinkers. The waiters, who outnumbered the clients two to one, wore uniforms that had been laundered out of shape, but still bore yellow turmeric stains. The sacred precincts of Benares are dry, and the Scotch and soda I drank that night was my first drink in a while. It had a nice salacious quality in the atmosphere of that small-town bar. The sound of traffic filtered in through an evening hush, as if the quiet of the surrounding fields had neutralized the roar of Satna. Now and then, I could make out that most romantic of Indian sounds: the horn of a train carrying mournfully through the night air.

  It was a joy to be alone. One is never alone in India, and for those who are accustomed to solitude, those who need it, this is a daily, unorganized form of torture. The barman hovered, wanting to “repeat” my drink with the relish of a bootlegger, and seemed genuinely hurt when I said no.

  I returned to my room and found Shivam praying. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. When he eventually became aware of my presence, he came to, as if out of a trance. Then he went about his nighttime ablutions, ritually cleaning himself with mineral water, his sacred thread wrapped around his ear.

  When he began to speak about his life, I saw that his situation was far more precarious than I had at first realized. He had a young wife and a small child, he now told me. He shuttled aimlessly back and forth between Benares and his village. He was worried about his ability to provide for his family and had considered taking up some basic priestly work in a small temple. His classical education had ill prepared him for modern India. He had no English, no real skills, no knowledge of how the world worked. He was trying to build a political constituency in his area by helping people in the environs—a low-caste man in a neighboring village who needed money to build a house from a government scheme; young Brahmin boys whom Shivam helped into an education similar to the one he himself had received. He was only too aware of how undesirable such an education was: “Today a Brahmin is in no hurry to have his child learn Sanskrit. He would prefer he learn practically anything else, French, Russian, whatever. So, you see, the language of this land, the language that is the mother of all languages, is slowly being run into the ground.”

  In the middle of telling me this, Shivam’s wife called. She, along with their small son, was staying with his in-laws. When Shivam got off the phone, he asked if I was married.

  “No,” I lie
d without a thought.

  No sooner had I answered than I wondered if someone else, someone such as my husband, say, someone with more distance from India, would have answered differently. I had fought so hard for my life, yet I was so easily willing to deny it. Why? Was it the lurking fear of inauthenticity that plagues the westernized classes in colonized countries? Why was I not more willing to defend what I had become, even as Shivam was so easily willing to defend what he still was?

  Shivam said, “Well, when you do get married, you must marry an Indian girl. I tell you, if you make them even a little bit happy, they will reward you a hundred times over, with a lifetime of happiness.”

  We turned off the light. In the darkness, I returned to New York. I saw the island city, with lines of traffic, gold and ruby red, eddying around it. I saw the yellow rectangle of my apartment on West 86th Street: my husband, our dog, the IKEA shelves, and the takeout dinner. I thought of the towers with their flashing red lights, the dark sea, and the countries in between. Then I came back to Satna, which the map on my phone showed me was a throbbing blue dot on a beige landscape, daubed with fractal lakes and pale splashes of greenery. To know where you are is also to know who you are: we have never known better where we are, yet how little it helps us to make sense of the cultural and historical distances that have arisen between people so physically near to us. This young Brahmin dropping off to sleep next to me, talking of good Indian women who reward the little happiness we gave them a hundredfold, was so far away from anything I could relate to. It was as if the space- and time-bending force that had brought the world so near had an undertow of equal force that tore apart what the old unity of a shared geography—and, as an extension, a shared culture—had once made whole.

  By morning, a lot had passed unsaid between Shivam and me. The intimacy of the first day and night Shivam and I spent together, like the early days of friendship, affected us both. We developed an understanding that would have been hard to achieve even over several conversations. I feared it dulled my critical faculty. Human beings are never more human than in the mundane details of their lives: the late-night phone call from the wife; the prayers; the nocturnal rituals; the little meaningless conversations that occur on the margins of more serious ones. I thought of travelers I admired—Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Octavio Paz, Arthur Koestler, V. S. Naipaul … Would they have insisted on more distance? The distance might have come naturally to the Europeans; Naipaul, I know, would have actively preserved it. I found it hard to hold India at arm’s length. It was encroaching and overfamiliar; but it was also big-hearted and gracious. I found myself susceptible to its embrace. After Amherst, I had planned to come back to India forever, but I was unable to fit back in. My return to the West was an expression of internal exile in India. It didn’t feel like immigration; it felt more like a desire to be done with the demands of belonging, and to wait out my time in a neutral place. Perhaps one day a cohesive person would arise from the different societies I had known. But until then, I felt my experience of other places not as some embarrassment of riches, in which I felt at home everywhere, but rather as a betrayal of my own place. I lived with a constant feeling of lack, and my thoughts more often than not returned to what I had left behind.