Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (6 page)

I saw myself through Campbell’s eyes—I think millions of other people did at the time. I was standing on the corner waiting for the light. Only no one had ever promised me that it would turn green. We were very close with the Rao family. Dr. Rajindra Rao had the first private X-ray machine in Jabalpur. His practice primarily screened people’s lungs for tuberculosis, which was rampant at the time. He also made a team with my father, confirming with an X-ray what my father’s acute diagnostic skills had detected in a patient. His wife, Mallika, was also a doctor and had become the leading gynecologist in Jabalpur. Their combined clinic made them quite prominent in the city. The Raos’ daughter, Shobha, was nicknamed Ammu, the homey term used in South India for a little girl. Ammu was two years younger than Sanjiv. We accepted her as our sister. On the festival of
Rakhi,
a sister ties a braided bracelet around her brother’s wrist, while her brother pledges to protect her. Growing up together, we
performed the ritual with Ammu—and still do, with the occasional lapse (Ammu has a real brother, too, named Prasan, two years older). Today she lives outside Boston, following in her father’s footsteps as a radiologist.

As the oldest, I was the leader of the pack, and I went so far as to assign each of us a military rank, with me as captain. (Looking back, I’m touched, with a twinge of guilt, at how trusting my troops were as they followed me, listening with rapt attention to my commands, which were more like iron whims.) We played every game together, and Ammu, a bit of a tomboy, even agreed to be part of the all-boy cricket team Sanjiv and I started in the neighborhood.

Ammu’s father owned a prized possession that awed everyone he passed: a maroon Chevy Impala. The car was originally owned by a man who had made a fortune manufacturing
bidis,
the cheap cigarettes wrapped in the leaf of the ebony tree and tied at one end with a string. The poorest workingmen could afford bidis, and they were a constant smell in the streets. (Bidis remain a horrible health hazard, but the divine must have a sense of humor. Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the most revered south Indian gurus, ran a bidi shop in Bombay, above which he gave sublime spiritual guidance.) Bidis had made the Impala’s previous owner a multimillionaire, rich enough to import an American highway cruiser, before he tired of it.

One day, with a wedding to attend far away from Jabalpur, our two families, the Chopras and the Raos, piled into the Impala in a state of great excitement. There were eight of us, but room was made to squeeze in the Raos’ jack-of-all-trades servant, who cooked for us at night and was presumed to be able to fix the car if it broke down en route. The trip from Jabalpur to Delhi was five hundred miles. We broke up the tedium by stopping off to tour the famous diamond mine in Panna. The mine is an open scar on the landscape, dug in stepwise fashion like an open-pit coal mine and filled with bright green waste water in the middle.

Dr. Rao had turned the driving over to my father. As we pulled out of town, a noisy black car spewing exhaust seemed to be following us. A turn onto the main road, and it stayed on our tail. Dacoits.
That’s what my father presumed they were: local bandits. The dacoits must have suspected that anyone leaving the diamond mine in a big American car must be carrying diamonds. This was still turbulent post-independence India. Some regions were riddled with racial and religious violence. The clash between Hindus and Muslims that began in 1947 with the overnight partition of India and Pakistan had led to a vast murderous purge that claimed even Mahatma Gandhi to an assassin’s bullet.

My father tried to lose the black sedan, but after a few minutes the tense situation had become a full-blown car chase. Our pursuers tried to run us into a ditch. My father gunned the engine to put some distance between us and them, but after a moment the black sedan caught up. It pulled alongside close enough that we could see three fierce men inside. But I don’t remember being frightened. In fact, Sanjiv and I were thrilled.

A word about bandits and their peculiar status in India. Any attempt to make daily life orderly seems to fail there. If you send your best dress shirt to the dry cleaner’s and there is a spot on one sleeve, they may helpfully cut both sleeves off (as happened to an outraged American friend a few years ago). Or they might use kerosene instead of dry-cleaning fluid, a smell that never quite goes away. You learn to put tape over the postage when you mail a letter, to discourage postal workers from stealing the stamps and discarding your letter. In a third-class hotel a family may tire of waiting for their dinner dishes to be taken away—presuming that a large family has been sleeping in one room in the same bed—so why not store the dirty crockery in a dresser drawer? The next guest may be a bit surprised to discover them there when he opens the drawer (this happened to another visiting friend), but not all that much. Behind the apparent chaos, every social distinction is known down to the finest detail.

The hidden order that rules India is a way to preserve everyday life. There are dividing lines everywhere. People are silently aware of caste, even now, decades after it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of caste. A person’s name instantly reveals where he was born and usually the dharma, or family occupation, he follows. By the time
you have heard a stranger’s name, caught his accent, and assessed his dialect and vocabulary, perhaps a minute has passed, but in that minute was revealed a condensed autobiography—and with it a tightly bound package of prejudices. Modernism threw people together who never wanted to breathe the same air. They had to sit together in tight railway coaches, and no country packs its populace onto railways like India. The strict old rules, such as the one requiring a Brahmin from the priest caste to go home and bathe if the shadow of an untouchable crossed his path, were no longer practical. Was it really viable, under British rule, for a person born into an upper caste to throw out all the food in the house and clean it from top to bottom after a foreigner came to call?

India’s messy dance between chaos and order is crystallized in the dacoit. Between the early Thirties and mid-Fifties, a notorious bandit named Man Singh far outdid any legendary American gangster like John Dillinger. In his whole career Dillinger was credited with robbing two dozen banks and four police stations, in the course of which he actually killed only one person, a policeman. Man Singh committed more than eleven hundred armed robberies and killed 185 people, not counting numerous kidnappings for ransom and shootouts with the law—he killed thirty-two policemen.

Singh was born in the Chambal Valley in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, in terrain crisscrossed with deep winding ravines and scrub forest—perfect hiding places. Singh occupied a secure social standing where he lived; he was never turned in despite the sizable reward on his head. He was a provider. His gang consisted of his extended family, more than a dozen brothers and nephews, and when he spoke in public, in brazen defiance of his outlaw status, Singh was humble and respectful. After he was gunned down in 1955 by Gurkha soldiers as he sat under a banyan tree with his son, a temple was erected in his honor. Dacoits worship at this shrine today, it is said, praying to be kept safe on their next robbery.

A complicated tale, as interwoven with contradictions as the whole society, or human nature. Outlaws in every culture are romanticized, but where else outside India do they have their own temple? Where
else could the most famous female dacoit, Phoolan Devi, surrender to police with ten thousand onlookers cheering as she placed her rifle down before a picture of Gandhi? (After serving her prison sentence, the “Bandit Queen of India” was elected to Parliament, only to be gunned down in front of her house in New Delhi before she turned forty. My good friend, the director Shekhar Kapur, rose to international fame with his 1994 film,
Bandit Queen.
It contained a graphic scene of sexual assault on the young Phoolan Devi that one outraged critic called “the Indian rape trick,” but this scene underscored why she became a kind of feminist martyr.)

We sigh about the shortcomings of human nature; we all make peace with our personal demons. In India the demons are celebrated as necessary. Creation is the play of light and dark, and both are divine—even Ravana, king of the demons, pleads for a way to become enlightened after he is defeated by Lord Rama. Lord Rama doesn’t cast Ravana down to hell; he grants him his wish. In scripture there is the tale of a temple thief who reaches final liberation, or moksha, immediately after stealing an oil lamp. Spiritually, to be a criminal is a form of suffering, so this was the last gesture of atonement needed before Shiva, lord of spiritual seekers, was satisfied that the thief deserved enlightenment. The saint today was a sinner yesterday, playing out thousands of lifetimes of karma. The secret to hidden order is to enforce the rules of right and wrong while secretly knowing that they merge into the same thing in the end, stepping stones to eternal grace.

Arriving in India, a visitor has no choice but either/or. Either chaos is your enemy or your friend. Escape is impossible. Going crazy is an immediate prospect.

Back in the maroon Impala the dacoits following us grew more serious. They pulled up alongside and tried to push us off the road. Did my father now ruefully recall the warnings not to drive after dark on ill-made two-lane roads? He probably wasn’t even rattled. He and Dr. Rao were both doctors: confident, educated men who were used to handling emergencies.

My mother and Mrs. Rao began praying for our safety. They knew that the worst of these rural bandits carried guns, which were highly unusual in India at that time. Sanjiv and I knew to keep our excitement to ourselves. Ammu took her cue from us. We raced down the road until we reached a turnoff to the next sizable town. At the last minute my father swerved sharply onto the dirt track that led off the main road. The dacoits were going too fast to make the turn. By the time they slowed down and backtracked, my father had found the local police station, and our pursuers took off. I have no idea how long the chase actually lasted; it exists in the continuous loop that memory makes out of our greatest thrills, worst traumas, and moments of unbearable suspense.

My brother and I shared a childhood that knitted us together while shaping two very different people. Our paths showed signs of diverging quite early on. I was always more interested in my studies than Sanjiv, while he excelled as an athlete. Perhaps because of that there was no sibling rivalry. Our personalities blended smoothly on the cricket team that we formed in Jabalpur.

At the height of empire there was immense stoic suffering among the British, who insisted in maintaining the customs from back home, most fatally in how they dressed. Thick wool uniforms on the parade ground made no sense in the Raj under a sun that made soldiers drop in their tracks. No adequate treatment for tropical diseases existed. Colonialists died of typhoid and typhus as frequently as the natives they looked down on as primitives and pagans. The only relief from hellish heat was to send the women and children up to the hill stations in the north, close to the foothills of the Himalayas. These cool oases were homesick duplicates of an English village: Victorian houses adorned with gingerbread trim for parrots and monkeys to perch on and screech through the night.

Such surreal anomalies persisted, as in the heavy flannels that Indian cricket players wore unself-consciously in the grueling sun. Sanjiv and I grew a passion for the game very early. After watching a match between a visiting team from the West Indies and our
state team from Madhya Pradesh, I decided that we should organize a neighborhood team. I appointed myself captain and made Sanjiv vice captain. We recruited the children of servants and orderlies. (Did they look on us as no different from the British who used to order their parents about? If so, love of the game silenced their resentment.) We dug up a mountain of red sand behind our house to create a cricket pitch and played against other kids’ teams in town.

Sports are living proof of paradise for boys that age, a taste of delightful freedom recollected in nostalgia, when sunshine was unending.

While I was the captain, our team depended on Sanjiv to win matches. In the game of cricket, a century (scoring one hundred runs in a single inning) is considered a significant achievement. Sanjiv once scored two hundred in an innings—a double century. He was held in awe by all of us.

I was a good athlete, too, just not on a par with my brother. But I was more reckless about taking risks to win. One incident in particular was my undoing. We were attending a private boys’ school run by Irish Christian Brothers. (In the hopes of converting their students to Christianity, the Christian Brothers had developed a prestigious school system across India that ranked among the best in the country.) One particular brother had ordered me not to spin the ball outside the leg stump when I pitched, a throw similar to a curve ball in baseball that is a difficult thing to do correctly. If you didn’t do it right, the cricketer at bat would hit it out of the park. Watching the match from a distance, my teacher shouted at me not to bowl outside the stump. But I was feeling cocky, and I refused to be intimidated. I knew that, if I did it right, I would get the batsman out.

The first two tries were a disaster: The cricketer hit it out of the park (which isn’t the equivalent of a home run since he stays at bat). The shouted orders from the sidelines, which were growing more furious, only made me more determined. It was foolhardy to experiment in the middle of a match, but fortune smiled on me. The third time, I got him out. I’d proven that I could do what I had believed I could. Unfortunately my teacher didn’t see it that way. During a
break he took me to the dorm, ordered me to lower my pants, and caned me for refusing to take orders. In India an important remnant of British rule was absolute respect for authority, with a humiliating dose of corporal punishment if you flouted that authority. The lesson? Adhering to the rules is more important than the result. It was what made the system work.