Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (35 page)

About six months later I was in my office and his new book,
Golf for Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life,
with an introduction by professional golfer Jesper Parnevik, arrived on my desk. Deepak had thrown himself into the game of golf, trying to understand it on an intellectual as well as a physical level. The book was more about the mental approach to the game of golf rather than nuts-and-bolts golf instruction. It was indeed a very good book. However, I could be biased; in the book’s dedication he wrote, “To my father, Krishan, who inspired me to play the game of life, and to my brother, Sanjiv, who taught me that the game of golf mirrors the game of life.”

A writer for a golf magazine wanted to do a story about Deepak taking up the game and writing a book about it, and suggested that
they play a round together. Deepak was quite nervous when he discovered this writer was an excellent golfer. In preparation for their match, Deepak played every single day and took lessons from a gifted instructor. His shot-making improved. The two of them played a round and Deepak acquitted himself well. That was the height of his passion with golf, as after that he pursued many other passions.

TM and Ayurveda proved to be very different, of course. TM very quickly had become an important aspect of all of our lives. Amita and I went to Fairfield, Iowa, to learn advanced meditation techniques, including what is known as yogic-flying, and sometime later we also got to spend time with Maharishi. The first time I met him I was introduced as a doctor who had written a book entitled
Disorders of the Liver.

“Dr. Chopra,” he asked me, “in that book, did you include a chapter on how Western medicine can cause liver disease?”

“Maharishi, I have written a chapter on drug-induced liver toxicity and there are many drugs that can even cause fatal liver disease. So, yes, of course there is a chapter on it.”

He was pleased, I think.

Then he said, “You should abandon Western medicine. It is a sinking ship, and you should embrace Ayurveda.”

As much as I respected him, I knew that was not the path I intended to follow. But to be polite, I told him, “I will think about it.” My path in life is to be a teacher; that was my passion. At the same time he also invited Amita to give up the practice of modern medicine and join his movement. Amita was probably more intrigued by the possibility than I was, but as she explained, “My home and my heart and my path lies with Sanjiv and my children,” so she chose to continue with her career in Boston.

But having grown up in India it was impossible not to know about Ayurveda; it just wasn’t an important part of our lives. My father practiced Western medicine and both Deepak and I followed him. While occasionally we would use natural remedies to heal minor cuts and bruises, for any serious medical problems we relied on science. But after Deepak became so deeply involved in mind-body medicine,
both my father and I investigated it further. It certainly was impossible to dismiss it, as some modern physicians insisted on doing. And, in fact, I did see things that couldn’t be explained by the medicine I practiced. For example, one morning when we were vacationing in Delhi, a TM teacher named Farroukh, who was a friend of my father’s, told me, “Sanjiv, I’m going to see this amazing Ayurvedic physician to get some herbs for a friend of mine. Come along, you will find it an amazing experience.”

Off we went in his car. Farroukh told me several amazing stories about the man we were going to see. His name was Dr. Brihaspati Dev Triguna and he was quite well-known for being able to diagnose people by feeling their wrist pulse. He said he had accurately diagnosed a colleague, saying to him, “Years ago you had a hyperactive thyroid, and when you were young you had surgery for kyphoscoliosis.” All of this by taking his pulse for a few seconds. This colleague’s wife also went to see Dr. Triguna. He took her pulse and then he asked her, “Do you have problems having an issue?”

She had no idea what he meant. “Issue?”

Dr. Triguna’s assistant then explained: “He’s asking if you have any problems conceiving and having children.”

They were flabbergasted. They had been trying to have children for years without success. Then Dr. Triguna told her, “You have a very large but benign tumor of your uterus. That’s why you’re having difficulty getting pregnant.” Sure enough, back in Boston they did a uterine ultrasound and the doctors discovered a large uterine fibroid. I listened with rapt attention, though, truthfully, stories like this were not all that uncommon for Deepak and me when we were growing up in India. But I had never encountered somebody who had firsthand experience with such an amazing skill. So I was indeed quite curious to meet this learned Ayurvedic doctor.

About three hundred people were waiting quietly in the courtyard to see him. From the way they were dressed it was obvious they came from all social classes, very rich and very poor. There were even several Westerners there. I was even more curious, but equally skeptical.

Farroukh took me right away to the front of the line and I sat down. Dr. Triguna was sitting cross-legged on a divan. We were propped down directly in front of him. He quickly dispensed the herbs to Farroukh, then said to me in Hindi, “So what is the matter?”

I replied in a polite, but admittedly somewhat confrontational voice, “I’m fine. You’re supposed to be this amazing and gifted Ayurvedic physician. So please tell me what’s wrong with me.”

“Okay,” he agreed, “put your wrist out.”

Using three fingers he felt my pulse on both my left and right wrists, holding his hand there only for a few seconds. Then he said, “There are three things wrong with you. The first one is you get serious heartburn.”

I was astounded because I did take medicine on a regular basis to counteract my heartburn. But heartburn is quite common, so it could have applied to almost any Westerner whose pulse he was reading.

“Okay,” I said, “what else?”

“You have difficulty breathing through your nose.”

That, too, was true. I have a markedly deviated nasal septum. I thought, maybe when I sat down and looked up at him, being an astute clinician, he had noticed it.

Finally he said, “Okay, done. Next.”

“Wait,” I said. “There were three things, you said. What is the third thing?”

He shrugged. “The third thing is
Mamuli,
” meaning totally trivial, really inconsequential.

“No, no, please.” I was incredibly fascinated. “Tell me what it is.”

“Every time you take a shower your eyes turn fire-engine red.”

I was absolutely blown away. That’s exactly what happens. In fact, when Amita and I were first married she thought I was drinking in the shower. It’s some type of reflex. But it was astonishing that he was able to diagnose that simply by holding my pulse for a few seconds.

“Could you teach me how to do this?” I asked him. “Specifically can you teach me to take a patient’s pulse and accurately diagnose their liver condition?”

“I can,” he said. “It will be a two-year apprenticeship. When would you like to start?” There was no way for me to take a two-year sabbatical and make a foray into unchartered territory.

In some ways he reminded me of the diagnostic skills displayed by Dr. Elihu Schimmel, who was able to determine a patient’s medical history by looking at his X-ray. What I did learn from Dr. Triguna was that there is so much more to the practice of medicine than we already know. He and Deepak eventually became friends and Deepak brought him to America, where he demonstrated his remarkable ability to diagnose patients with a variety of medical disorders simply by taking their pulse for a few seconds. I think from that point forward I began to pay at least a little bit more attention, and perhaps even gained a modicum of respect, for the ancient and current practice of Ayurveda.

What also pleasantly surprised me, at least mildly, was that our father at a later stage of his life was able to embrace aspects of the mind-body connection. My father was always open to new experiences. He and my mother had started meditating. He met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi many times and they would have long conversations late into the night. As our father began probing the power of the mind to control the body he recalled experiences from his own life that couldn’t be explained by Western medicine. His mother—my grandmother—had sustained a serious head injury in an accident and had fallen into a coma. He and my mother had rushed to the hospital. When they arrived his mother was in critical condition, both of her arms were paralyzed and physicians could not feel a pulse or detect any blood pressure.

“It appeared,” he wrote years later, “that she was waiting for me. I went to her bed and leaned over her face. Immediately her breathing became noticeable and quicker. She opened her eyes, whispered my name, and lifting her paralyzed arm around my neck, pulled my face toward hers and kissed me on the cheek. Then she fell back and stopped breathing… Her will, so dynamic and strong, must have been operating from outside her individual consciousness, from
what I could think of as only a cosmic level, directing the paralyzed limb of the pulseless body to lift and embrace me. I kissed her face over and over again.”

Although he never embraced Ayurveda completely, our father did integrate important aspects of it into his own cardiology practice. When treating Maharishi, for example, he relied on Western medicine when he felt it was necessary. When Maharishi suffered his heart attack, it was the techniques of modern medicine that kept him alive and allowed his body the time to recover. But at the same time he also stressed the importance of stress reduction, diet, and the other elements of Ayurveda in his work.

Toward the end of my father’s life he published two books, including
Your Life Is in Your Hands.
In that book he summed up what he had learned, writing, “I believe that you can heal yourself more effectively by changing your lifestyle, and by engaging in activities and relationships that raise waves of love, happiness, compassion, and other positive thoughts and emotions.” Of course that’s sensible advice from any doctor. But in that book he also headed a section, “Our Thoughts Can Even Influence Whether We Live or Die.” There he told a story of one of Deepak’s patients when Deepak was an intern. The patient was an elderly man who decided it was time to die, but Deepak, who was preparing to leave the hospital for a month, told him, “You can’t die until I come back to see you again.” That man waited an entire month until Deepak returned—and then he died peacefully.

But what was more telling was my father’s own life, and his death. Dr. Krishan Lal Chopra was a man of science; he had an insatiable appetite for knowledge. For twenty-five years he was the head of the Department of Medicine and Cardiology at the prestigious Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital, where fact-based medicine was practiced. He was eighty-three when my daughter Kanika got married. The wedding was held in India because her husband, Sarat, wanted the blessing of both sets of grandparents. So about one hundred and fifty people traveled from the United States to India. Indian weddings are large celebrations and as many as six hundred people attended
the five functions we had there. At the wedding my father sang and danced and blessed every guest. It was a time of great celebration and joy for him. In addition to this wedding, his second book,
The Mystery and Magic of Love,
was completed and about to be published.

About two weeks later, at midnight, he said to my mother: “Pushpa, I am departing. I love you.” And after he had this premonition, he passed away. He had lived his life as a saint, and he died that way.

We all returned to India, this time for a parting. After the cremation we asked my mother to come back with us to live in America.

“You can stay with us,” Amita said, “or you can stay with Deepak and Rita. Your children are in America. Your grandchildren are in America. Come and be with us.”

She refused.

“I’m going to die in India,” she said. “I don’t want to die in America.”

It was frustrating to all of us who loved her.

“What is India? America? It’s all one world,” I said. But she was adamant. India was her home and she would not leave. And then Deepak and Rita, Amita and I decided that one of us, including our kids, would go to India every month and spend at least a week there with her. Maybe we had become Americans in so many ways, but when it came to family we were still Indians. There were some members of our family in India who were totally skeptical that Deepak and I would follow through with this plan, but every month for almost six years Deepak, Rita, Amita, our children, or I was there so she would know that next month, every month, somebody was coming to be with her.

Each of us knew that every time we left, for the entire six years, it was possible this would be the last time we were seeing our mother, or our grandmother alive. There is no way to describe that feeling, except that it heightened every greeting and every departure, and made us appreciate the importance of family.

Like my father I have certainly looked into the potential benefits of all forms of alternative medicine. I have always had an open mind and I understand that not all forms of medicine can be judged solely by science. For example, surprisingly there is very little scientific evidence
that acupuncture has any real benefit at all. There is no single accepted form of acupuncture; different practitioners probe different points on a patient’s body with their needles to achieve results, which makes it impossible to test by the traditional scientific method. But several years ago I had an operation on my right knee for two torn menisci and afterward on occasion it would swell up quite painfully. When that happened it became difficult for me to walk. In the past I had seen an acupuncturist for back problems and found substantial relief, but at the same time I was also losing weight, doing abdominal core exercises, and incorporating other treatments, so it wasn’t possible to be certain that the marked improvement was directly a result of the acupuncture treatment. I decided to see this practitioner about my knee.