Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (12 page)

One strong force, however, tugged against everything that was making us pious and proper—my uncle Rattan Chacha, who took Sanjiv and me in when we attended St. Columba’s. Rattan Chacha had risen to become an important journalist with a national reputation, and once he branched out into movie reviewing, his life became unspeakably glamorous in my eyes. I’d never seen anyone hold forth with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other.

Rattan Chacha was well informed about world affairs and had the
strongest rebellious streak in the Chopra clan. It was a trait he traded profitably in. He was widely known as a socialist and an unbeliever. As he put it, “I have left-wing opinions and right-wing tastes.” It was the perfect combination for someone who burned his candle at both ends. (Heart disease scared Rattan Chacha in later years, so he gave up the cigarettes, though never the Scotch.)

Sending shock waves was his game. Rattan Chacha talked incessantly, which suited me very well. I wanted to be him. (When I asked my wife, Rita, about the first impression I made on her, she thought for a moment and replied, “I’d never met anyone who talked so much.”) Entertaining and handsome, Rattan Chacha dominated any room he walked into, but he had the saving grace of wanting to hear my opinions. Brilliant talkers cannot live without an audience, and they learn soon enough to throw their listeners a scrap; they let someone else talk for half a minute now and then. But when I debated my uncle on a burning topic, he actually paid attention, and so it was sometimes more than a scrap.

Rattan Chacha and his wife, Karna—we called her Karna Auntie—occupied a second-floor apartment in New Delhi with two and a half bedrooms. Sanjiv and I shared a bed in the half bedroom, which was essentially a cramped cell with a window looking down on to a grubby courtyard where the neighbors made a clamor and hung their washing out to dry. We loved being there.

At the time, my father was posted to Kashmir, during the armed conflict with Pakistan. He treated the injured troops who were carried back from the front lines. My mother traveled back and forth to be with him and us. When she was absent, we inherited Lakshman Singh, the faithful servant who had come with her dowry.

I was fascinated by my uncle’s worldliness. One time he went with us on a trip to one of the hill stations. It was Dalhousie, and even though the setting was beautiful, this wasn’t one of the prestigious hill stations like Simla.

“I see how it got its name,” Rattan Chacha quipped. “It’s dull and lousy.”

He took us boys to the movies once and saw an empty seat with a
sweater thrown over it. Tossing the sweater onto another seat, Rattan Chacha sat us down. A moment later an irate man approached us.

“I left my sweater to mark this seat as mine,” he complained. Rattan Chacha shrugged.

“If you threw your sweater over the Taj Mahal, would that make it yours, too?”

His mentor in brazenness was his boss, Feroze Gandhi, a prominent publisher of several newspapers in Lucknow who had also taken up politics. In person Feroze Gandhi was even more domineering and provocative than my uncle. It reputedly shocked Nehru, not yet prime minister, when his daughter Indira declared that she wanted to marry Feroze Gandhi after meeting him on a trip to London. He was a Parsi, member of the sect founded by the Persian prophet Zoroaster. The Nehrus were Brahmins from Kashmir. (If you move in conservative Kashmiri Brahmin circles, they still cluck in distress over the match, seventy years later.)

Over any objections the wedding went forward in 1942. The groom’s reckless lifestyle eventually caught up with him, and Feroze Gandhi died of a heart attack just a few days before his forty-eighth birthday. As a widow Indira came into her own and rose to be prime minister, which was all but inevitable in India, where a few elite families connected to the independence movement were considered sacred; they controlled national politics for decades. (Only in the West is Indira’s married name confused with Mahatma Gandhi’s. Feroze wasn’t related to him. Gandhi is well-known to be a common Parsi family name.)

Rattan Chacha had a cultivated side. He tried to teach me Urdu, a language he loved for its poetry. I should have been a natural, since Urdu, spoken all over northern India, shares a common basis with Hindi. It has all the utility of a lingua franca, a pidgin language that traders carry around wherever they go. Swahili serves the same purpose in Africa. I wasn’t adept enough, though, and what stays with me is mostly the lore and romance that my uncle loved to dispense.

Urdu came to India with the drift of Islam as it moved eastward from its birthplace in Arabia. Like burrs and seeds that become attached
to a camel’s flanks, words stuck to Urdu from Turkey, Persia, and other lands where Muslim caravans unfolded their wares. The Mughal invasion of India in the sixteenth century rooted Urdu in Delhi, but to be clear, saying that India was conquered by the Mughals is like saying a feather pillow was conquered by a punch. You can’t defeat someone who doesn’t resist, especially an ancient people who have absorbed many empires. In school I memorized Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” which begins with the image of a mighty ruler brought low: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies…” India doesn’t chop emperors off at the knees. There’s more subtlety in pretending to be conquered, offering a smiling shrug to the iron fist, and then waiting until the day when the conqueror looks in the mirror and sees an Indian staring back. The notorious passivity that Westerners see is actually a subtle art of war.

Rattan Chacha did manage to teach me how to recite some verses in Urdu, which don’t really have their full effect in English. My favorite comes from a poet who also happened to be an emperor, born with a parade banner of a name: Abu Zafar Sirajuddin Muhammad Bahadur Shah Zafar. He was the last Mughal ruler of India, dying in 1862, and in school we learned about him as Bahadur Shah Zafar, the descendant of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal. The British made a mockery of the Mughal royal line by the end. The East India Company maintained the charade that they were not the rulers of India but had merely signed commercial agreements with all the princes, rajas, maharajas, and shahs, who in reality were their puppets. To preserve their dignity, the royal families could act as though they still held power. Their greed made them ready to cede anything in return for a lifestyle so luxurious that it became ghastly—one sees faded photos of diamond-bedecked rajas posed with big-game rifles astride their Rolls-Royces, bragging about the two dead tigers draped over the fenders.

The decadence of the last Mughals barely called for a military presence to hold their territory in check. What a few garrisons of redcoats couldn’t manage was handled by native soldiers, the sepoys. If Zafar
stood on the highest turret of the Red Fort in Delhi, built by his illustrious ancestors, he could see the limits of his actual rule; everything beyond the city of Delhi had eroded away. As Bahadur Shah, he was a poignant and pathetic ruler who left affairs of state to others while collecting the pension the British had granted him and finding refuge in his real love: poetry.

I wish I still had in memory the verses by Zafar that Rattan Chacha loved so much. Most were melancholy and romantic, as suited Zafar’s fate. He made the mistake of entertaining, only for a day, the fantasy of regaining power. In 1857 the sepoys mounted an armed rebellion against the British army, inflamed, it was said, by a rumor that pig fat was used to grease the paper that their bullets were wrapped in. Since the bullets were unwrapped by mouth, this was defilement to the sepoys, many of whom were Muslim. A sepoy regiment marched on Delhi and lured Bahadur Shah into an audience. He was dismayed by their insolence, but he gave in to temptation when the rebels swore to restore him to power. He aligned himself with them, and they killed fifty-two British prisoners, mostly terrified civilians found in hiding, by executing them under a pipal tree outside the palace. This act was meant to ensure that Bahadur Shah wouldn’t back down.

The sepoy regiments had plenty of genuine grievances against the East India Company, but the British looked upon the rebellion as being caused by religious frenzy. The poor old emperor, nearly seventy, made his son military commander and tried to bring civil order to Delhi, the only place he could hope to control. The result was chaos. The sepoy regiments were totally disorganized and couldn’t agree on one commander—it certainly wouldn’t be the inept, inexperienced royal prince. After the rebellion was violently quashed and the British had mowed down many members of his family, Bahadur Shah surrendered in exchange for his life and was put on trial. One can see photographs of him reclining on a divan awaiting his fate, a bald man with a neat, pointed white beard. His wide eyes are mournful, but you can still see the spark of a Sufi, a mystic, in them. As a young man Zafar had wanted to be a holy man and dressed in the coarse woolen robes of a wandering Sufi before he assumed the throne.

Zafar’s punishment was banishment to Rangoon, Burma, where he survived several more years. He thought he was lost in a dream. In his poetry, he describes himself as a ruined garden that was once luxurious. The saddest of his verses speaks about his downfall from ruler of an empire to a beggar who can’t find two yards of earth for his grave. I can find only fragments of his poetry translated into English, but one couplet sounds like something Shakespeare could have put in Hamlet’s mouth:

What is man, who is made of clay?

I see only a bubble on the water.

After he died, the last Mughal emperor was recognized as a major poet in Urdu. Some articles began to refer to him as a true Sufi, and a few as a saint. I am more ambivalent. When I learned Indian history in school, my sympathies went to the British, but when I heard the music of Bahadur Shah’s verses, I was on the side of the poets.

This inability to choose one over the other seeped into my character. I was turning into a highly competitive person, someone who saw Indian history from the British perspective because they had been the winners for three hundred years. But the pathos of my own people couldn’t be dismissed. The poets spoke for a silent witness inside me. It watched without interference. It made no demands for me to change. I wouldn’t have paid attention if it had. I was running the course with victory in mind every time I rounded the next curve.

The silent witness was patient. Time never runs out when you have an infinite supply.

8

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First on the Waiting List

Sanjiv

Sanjiv brings his classmate and future wife, Amita, on a trip to Pune during a school break with his mother, Pushpa, and brother, Deepak, 1967.

I
N THE VILLAGE OF CHERRAPUNJI
they thought we were gods. Cherrapunji is on the Indian border with Bangladesh. It is one of the rainiest places on earth; according to Guinness World Records, it holds records for the most rain in a year and the most in a single month. It is an extraordinary place with breathtakingly beautiful waterfalls. When I was twelve, my parents decided to take Deepak and me there on an excursion. We drove up the side of a mountain in our little Hillman car through what felt like an unending series of snakelike turns, up and up and up. Throughout our journey the rain never slowed. But just as we arrived at the village, the clouds parted and the sun came out. There were little children there who had rarely seen the sun in their lives, so when it came out just as we drove into the village, they assumed we were gods to have made that happen. Even some of the shopkeepers thought there might be some kind of divine connection. They smiled, invited us into their shops for tea and samosas, and refused to accept any payment.

I had that same feeling when I was a young boy, sitting on a train at the Jabalpur station and looking out of the window to see hundreds of people paying their respects to my father, many of them crying. Even though I didn’t understand at that age what it meant to be a doctor, it was obviously something very special. It was at that moment that I thought perhaps I too would become a doctor. Many years later my wife, Amita, and I went on a pilgrimage to Gomukh to see with my own eyes the origin of the holy Ganges. While I was there one of the people I had traveled with, a renowned Indian physician named Dr. H. K. Chuttani, asked me a question.

“Sanjiv,” he said, “if you had your life to live all over again, what profession would you choose? And where would you live?” I looked up at the mountain, at the sky, and then responded.

“Dr. Chuttani, it’s very simple,” I said. “I would be practicing hepatology
in Boston, teaching, writing books, and being a good doctor. Exactly what I’m already doing.” He considered that for a moment.

“The air is thin at this altitude,” he replied. “I’ll ask you again at sea level.”

We met a week later at a cocktail party in Delhi. My answer hadn’t changed. I am very fortunate to be able to do what I love to do. The practice of medicine was our family business. I watched my father deeply enjoy healing and caring for people. He seemed genuinely happy when he went to work every day, and even at a young age I understood that was something very important. For my father there was nothing more exciting or fulfilling than to solve the mysteries of the human body. To him everything began with the correct diagnosis. In the evenings at dinner he would often talk about his new patients and describe their symptoms and the course he intended to follow. For me it was a bit like a soap opera, and night after night I would carefully follow the progress of patients I would never actually meet. Although I knew absolutely nothing about them personally, they would take shape in my mind and I would begin to care about them.