Maximum City (82 page)

I
AM SICK OF MEETING MURDERERS
. For some years now, I have been actively seeking them out, in Varanasi, Punjab, Assam, and Bombay, to ask them this one question: “What does it feel like to take a human life?” This unbroken catalog of murder is beginning to wear on me. So when my uncle phones me one day and tells me about a family in the diamond market that is about to renounce the world—take diksha—I put aside everything else and go to meet them. They are the other extreme from Sunil, Salaskar, Satish, and their ilk; they are Jains. They are becoming monks in a religion which for 2,500 years has been built on the extreme abjuration of violence. They are preparing to enter an order that has a different conception of life and its value, where they will stay indoors all four months of the rainy season because if they inadvertently step into a puddle of water they will be taking life—not only killing minute water organisms but also killing the unity of the water. From men who sleep tranquilly after taking human life, I want to go to a family that thinks it sinful to end the life of a puddle of water.

I grew up with Jains. Many of my best friends in India and in America are Jains, and when the marriage broker came to my uncle with proposals for me, he brought them both from Gujarati Hindu and Jain families, since there is so little difference. My uncle is married to a Jain. In Sripal Nagar, in Bombay, we lived above a Jain temple; every day I saw monks sitting in the lobby of our building working on each other’s hair. I did not know what they were doing; it looked like they were picking lice. Later I learnt that it was how they kept their hair short, by pulling it out by the roots. Some days
they sang hymns about renunciation set to Hindi film tunes. On a particular day, the Jains paid the men with birdcages sitting outside the temple to release the birds; every soul they freed aided in the account book of their personal salvation. The small birds flew out and settled on the rooftops of the city, there to be devoured by crows, kites, and eagles. And the bird sellers went back to the forests and trapped more birds to bring next year to the city.

My family never thought of the Jains as members of a separate religion; we just regarded them as especially, sometimes nuttily, orthodox Hindus. In the diamond market, Hindus are in the minority; most of the merchants are Jains. In America, I found almost nobody who knew about Jainism. It is the least accessible religion. Nobody drops out of Berkeley to become a Jain monk. No Hollywood actors or rock stars make public declarations of their devotion to Jain gurus.

T
HE FAMILY’S
FLAT IS HIGH UP
in a good building near Haji Ali, with a Jain temple in the compound. When the door opens, I step into a space that could be a village hut or an Indian restaurant abroad straining for the native ambience. The space is lit only by oil lanterns encased in glass, suspended from the ceiling. The walls are hung with religious tapestries. On one wall is an exhortation, written in chalk:
Samsara
[worldly life]
is as worth leaving as Moksha
[salvation]
is worth reaching.
The floor of one room is lined in a mud-and-cowdung mixture, the same flooring I have seen in village houses all over India. A village abode has been re-created in this flat. I have seen this sort of design before in Bombay, in the flats of other rich people, but for different reasons. It was in style a few years ago, the “ethnic” look.

My escort, another diamond merchant, leads me to a divan at the far side of the room by the window—there is no fan—on which reposes a dark, slender man in his forties with a thin mustache, wearing a gold-braided silk kurta and diamonds on his ears and fingers. This is Sevantibhai Ladhani, the patriarch of the family that is going to give up everything. He is one of several brothers in an extended family that has done very well in the metal business and then expanded into diamonds. He looks like a minor princeling. My escort goes up to him and touches the much younger man’s feet; the figure on the divan blesses him.

In one month, this family of five—a father and mother in their early forties, their nineteen-year-old son, and seventeen-year-old twins, a son and a daughter—are going to leave this flat, this city, and everything they own. They will spend the rest of their lives wandering on the rural highways of the country, the men and the women separated, never to be a family again. Sevantibhai says, of his wife of twenty-two years—he refers to her as shravika, laywoman—and the three children she has given him, “Now we are only united by selfishness. Hundred percent.” In a month, they will go to a small town in the northernmost part of Gujarat, and there Sevantibhai will say good-bye to all of them. And they will say good-bye to each other. From then on, the sons are to travel with the father, and the daughter with her mother, but as their disciples, not as their children. His sons will stop calling him pappa and refer to him as gurudev; his daughter will call him gurubhagvan. But male and female members will be forever separated: The mother can never again meet her sons or her husband, unless they happen to be passing by on the road. Sevantibhai will never meet his daughter, except by accident, and then only in the presence of the guru maharaj of his order, lest his vow of celibacy get contaminated. The bonds of family, formed over a lifetime, will be voluntarily broken in one massive public ceremony.

They are doing this in order to sever all ties with samsara and attain moksha. In the simplest sense, moksha means not having to be born again. Sevantibhai is looking for moksha to end not just his life or his children’s lives, but his entire lineage. But before doing this, they will show everybody that they aren’t leaving the world because they have failed in it; they will go out in the full noonday light of worldly success. In one month, they will go to the Gujarat town and give away, physically throw away, everything they have earned up to this point: between $2 million and $3 million. It will be a dramatic rejection of Bombay, of the sole reason why anybody would want to live here. Once your desire to make money stops, you should leave by the next train.

Sevantibhai had originally been a most unobservant Jain. He didn’t even go to pray in the Jain temple below his own building. He lived like any well-off Bombayite, enjoying the city and its pleasures. One evening at 11 p.m., Sevantibhai was reading a book written by a Jain swami titled
I Should at Least Be Human.
In the book, Sevantibhai came across a sentence that electrified him. “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?” He
thought about it and then woke up his wife and told her he had decided to take diksha. He had decided to resign before he could be dismissed.

It was a momentous decision, but it was not sudden. Several years ago, he had chanced to hear a speech at Chowpatty by a Jain guru, Chandrashekhar Maharaj, which had set him thinking. For the last few years, Sevantibhai had been progressively renouncing modernity. He had already ceased using allopathic medicine eighteen years ago, well before his interest in his religion had been awakened. After the twins were born, they were in some pain. Sevantibhai went to an ayurvedic doctor in Khetwadi, who gave him the urine of a cow. He made the babies drink it twenty-one times a day, and they got better.

Next to go was diesel and petrol. He gave up using automobiles. Sevantibhai impresses upon me the great sins committed during the extraction of fossil fuels: the drilling through the layers of the earth, the killing of snakes and other subterranean life forms while doing so. It is bad for the country too: “You have to import the petrol from Saudi Arabia and send them things like laboratory mice and human blood in exchange.” The use of the automobile also takes life. “If you use a bullock cart, a man doesn’t die if he collides with it. And then the bullock is also employed.” For the actual diksha ceremony, he wanted to go from Bombay to Dhanera, the diksha site, in a convoy of bullock carts, a journey that would take several days. His extended family objected vehemently, so he has reluctantly agreed to take a train.

Then went electricity. For the last seven years, Sevantibhai has been living in his Bombay high-rise flat without electric lights or appliances. He enumerates the sins racked up in its production. In the case of electricity generated through a dam, he explains, the great force of the water falling onto the turbines kills so many fish and crocodiles that every half hour the dam builders have to clean out the turbines. The disaster at Chernobyl, he points out, was a direct result of the desire of people to have electricity. Even the oil lamps that burn in the apartment kill germs. Sevantibhai admits with some shame that for the last year and a half, because of a back problem, he has had to use the electric elevator in his building instead of the stairs. He asks me to think of all the electrical connections in the city of Bombay, the immense accumulation of sin in the bright lights of the city.

I ask Sevantibhai if it is all right to use my computer to write down
what he is saying. I assure him that it is battery-powered and won’t use the electricity in the flat. He looks doubtful but then assents, on the grounds that what I am writing may spread the Jain message in the wider world. This, as he puts it, is “using sin to combat sin.” So we continue the conversation, the light of the screen illuminating my face in the lamplit apartment as I write.

Sevantibhai began a course of study in Gujarat with Chandrashekhar Maharaj, the senior Jain guru he had heard speak at Chowpatty, and started taking his family along. The children had been studying in English elementary schools in Bombay—his older son at the Tinkerbell School—but Sevantibhai had pulled them out seven years ago to study the dharma, first at home and then with Chandrashekhar Maharaj. When the children were first taken out of school, there was no talk of diksha. Sevantibhai had simply felt that something was lacking in the education provided by their schools. Now the children have been studying the Jain scriptures in the languages they were written in, Sanskrit and Prakrit. They are more advanced in the study of these languages than Sevantibhai, because the children’s minds are younger, sharper. “They are reading the Tilakmanjari, the hardest book in Sanskrit,” he says with pride.

He followed the tenets of the religion as a layperson, from his comfortable flat in Bombay. Underlying the guru’s lectures was always this theme: The only way to reach moksha is to renounce the world, to take diksha. Sevantibhai says it was not he, but his older son and his wife, who first felt the strong urge to take diksha. The teacher had said that the family should start with his older son, Snehal. But Sevantibhai’s brothers objected; they said they would give their consent only if he, Sevantibhai, took diksha along with his son. Sevantibhai wasn’t quite ready, and the family stayed in Bombay.

In the summer of 1997, Sevantibhai heard about a group of seventy people who were going to take diksha together. He asked his teacher’s permission to join them with his family. The maharaj saheb asked Sevantibhai to get his brothers’ permission first; there should be no bad blood in the extended family. All five of them packed their clothes and asked the brothers to give their approval. But a sister was getting married, and his brothers asked him to wait for another year. If he still felt like it at that time, they would allow him to go. Sevantibhai postponed it for six months. The
extended family was hoping that Sevantibhai would come to his senses, and they were trying to delay his departure till he did. But his determination to go was stronger than their will to hold him back in the world. And now, finally, in a month’s time, all five of them will say good-bye: to samsara, to Bombay, to modernity.

Sevantibhai constantly refers to the India of the past and its fall in the present. “Before, in India, we used to have families of twenty-five or thirty people. If someone dropped by for dinner, there were twelve women to cook. Now we have families of three people, and if someone comes unexpectedly for a meal, our faces get all twisted up. Before, we used to know who was who in the whole village. Nowadays, we don’t even know who lives in the next flat.” The staple grain was millet, which grew side by side with grass that cattle could also eat. Now it is wheat, which does not flourish amid grass, and the cattle have to be kept out of the wheat fields. Money was never used; it all ran on barter. “Milk was never sold before; it was considered a sin.” And the line of authority was clear: “When the mahajan came out, nobody had the courage to look him in the face.” It was a functioning system, the India of the villages, the India of the old times. It had vyavastha, order. “All our vyavastha was there, and now it has been broken. We want to make that vyavastha again.”

There is a battle in the making between city and countryside. Political earthquakes have been set off by the insecurity of the city dweller who doesn’t grow his own food; when prices of onions shot up dramatically in 1998, the national government almost fell. The outrage is principally from the cities; the rural areas actually benefit from a rise in vegetable prices. The biggest battles between urban and rural India are being fought over water. Cities need dams, which destroy villages; they need them for water and for electricity. Sevantibhai intends to desert the city’s side and go over to the village.

But there are cities and there are cities. There is a big difference between Bombay and a city like Ahmadabad, he maintains. In the half-mile stretch below his building, he has seen all the fleshpots of the world. Nothing is forbidden: There is a bar, there are eateries serving nonvegetarian food, there is a shop selling whiskey. Bombay is “paap ni bhoomi”—a city of sin—a visitor sitting at Sevantibhai’s feet agrees.

New sadhus such as he will be cannot stay in Bombay, Sevantibhai
explains. When they go around the high-rise flats for their daily round of gathering food, the doors are usually shut. Sevantibhai never refers to food-gathering as begging—a man from a business community like the Jains is never a beggar—but as gocari, the grazing of a cow, which only takes some grass, never the whole clump. They have to walk around with a layperson to ring the bell (the use of electric appliances is forbidden). “If the door is opened, the television is usually on, and if the sadhu’s glance happens to fall on the TV just once, it is enough to send him straight to hell.” The layman has to make sure, after pressing the bell, that the TV is switched off before the monk walks straight into the kitchen to gather the food. “Dharma Labh,” says the monk, inviting the householder to gain religious merit, and inspects all the pots, and takes from each only enough so that the family does not have to cook again, in which case the sin of the second fire would accumulate to the monk. The monk will graze in several different houses, once a day, mixing everything he finds into one or two pots: vegetables, rice, dal, and chapatis from different kitchens, mixed together and eaten cold, strictly for sustenance. Here, too, Bombay makes a monk’s grazing difficult. In towns like Ahmadabad, a monk can tell in advance if the television is on in a particular house, because the doors are never closed during the day.