The Stranger in My Home

by The Stranger in My Home- Facets of a Life (retail) (epub)

  52

  THE GOLDEN ONE

  THE TRAP YOU WOULD RATHER FALL IN

  IT WAS MY BROTHER’S wedding reception, but I knew few of the guests. Lots of politicos and doctors, since the bride’s grandfather was a well-known doctor-politician, but no familiar face. Searching for one, I saw something notable. A woman in a golden outfit, so beautiful she looked like a model. She wore a sari but she didn’t look quite Indian. She looked resplendent.

  Luckily there was an empty seat next to her.

  ‘I am the groom’s brother. Are you in the bride’s party?’

  ‘I am the bride’s aunt.’

  ‘Then I ought to know you better.’

  ‘You may,’ she said with a decorous smile.

  She had indeed been a model in Paris and a broadcaster in Washington, but now on a long vacation in India. Her looks were easily explained: while her father was an Indian journalist with Reuters, her mother was Russian, now a Canadian citizen.

  After dinner, I commented that, like me, she didn’t seem to know many people in the party. ‘I don’t. I have been overseas much of my life. I don’t know many in this town. I am not close to my family either. They think me strange. By Indian standards, I suppose I am ornery.’

  ‘Help me understand. Give me an example.’

  ‘Here is one. I have had enough of this party. Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and talk?’

  ‘I can take you to a bar or a restaurant, but I doubt it will be quiet on a Saturday night. The other option is close by and convenient, but I hesitate to suggest: my home.’

  I had some good Cognac and made two Sidecars.

  She looked suspiciously at her glass and asked, ‘What is this concoction? Are you trying to get me drunk?’

  ‘I might, if you weren’t so pretty and interesting as you are. I am just trying to make you comfortable.’ I explained the cocktail.

  I said, ‘The reason I want you to be comfortable is I want to ask you something rather strange.’

  ‘Fifteen years ago,’ I continued, ‘I was a student and visited my aunt in central India. She had a large stack of old editions of a popular magazine, and I would sometimes leaf through them. One day I saw a photo of a famous dancer, who was also a famous beauty, in Trafalgar Square in London, feeding pigeons. She was a beauty, but what caught my attention was that standing right next to her was another woman who, I thought, was not only more beautiful, but captivating.’

  There was more. I added, ‘I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I didn’t know who she was; I didn’t even know her name, for the caption only mentioned the famous dancer. I tried to find out more but had no luck. It was perhaps a silly obsession, but I never forgot that face. Today, as I sat next to you in the wedding reception and kept looking at your face, that old photo came to mind.

  ‘So, tell me, have you ever fed pigeons at the Trafalgar Square?’

  She looked at me for a long time, then quietly said, ‘The dancer is my uncle’s wife. She stayed with me in London.’

  She was captivating in more ways than one. I have never met anyone in whom two cultures not only coexisted so visibly but conflicted so frequently and abrasively. She could wake up loving Kolkata, but by breakfast loathe it with passion. She missed the Washington ambience at lunch – ‘I like the endless choice of healthy, delicious salads’ – only to recall over dinner the churlish way she was once pawed there. She would speak nostalgically of her apartments in Paris and Washington, and at other times speak of the pain to keep them in trim without domestics to help.

  She spoke with an adroit melange of English, Bengali and Arabic that occasionally bemused me, but always amused. The writer, Syed Mujtaba Ali, who knew all the three idioms as well as her, once described her beauty as a golden trap, comparable to the dazzling deer that misled the heroine of Ramayana: you regretted if you succumbed, but you regretted even more if you did not and missed the rapture of a lifetime.

  We were together for three years, before she returned to Washington. When I arrived in Washington seven years later, I found she had changed her mind and returned to India to live there. For ever, she told me. It took me some effort not to express a doubt.

  53

  TEA AND ME

  A BEVERAGE THAT BINDS

  WEI, A CHINESE FARMER hated seeing a squalid temple on the daily walk to his field in the Fujian province. He had no money for paint or masonry. He just took a broom and cleaned it thoroughly. He did it every week and, before leaving, lit an incense stick. One night he was told in a dream that he would be rewarded for his good work: he would find a treasure in a cave behind the temple. He was to share it with his neighbours.

  He found nothing but a single tea shoot in the cave. He took it home, planted and nurtured it, and, when the bush grew, he gave cuttings to all he knew. He even made money by selling the cuttings in the market. Everybody agreed it was best tea they had ever tasted, a real treasure. The plant came to be known as Tieguanyin, the goddess of mercy. Now the goddess presides over her merciful potion in millions of home, a drink the world most consumes second only to water.

  Are you bored or tired? Drink some tea.

  Are you distressed and unhappy? Try a cup of tea.

  Are you happy? For Heaven’s sake, celebrate with a large pot of tea.

  These, at least, were the counsel nuggets of my dear father. He loved tea. He would never dream of letting his wife, let alone his undiscriminating son (me), buy tea; he went to a special store and had the storekeeper mix different black teas to his specification. The day he retired from work, he even took over the ritual of making the morning tea; Mother happily relinquished, for she continued to work. I gladly stayed away from their dawn debut. I did not care to leave my bed that early. In any case – now it may be revealed – I did not care for Father’s strong brew.

  My pedestrian palate took many years more to wake up to the charm of tea. I love even its short, simple name. The Chinese who have discovered all sorts of unpleasant things like diabetes to decimal fractions seem to have found tea as the ultimate solace. They called the stuff ‘te’ in Min Chinese and ‘cha’ in Mandarin Chinese. The Dutch took a leading role in tea trade and popularized the term ‘tea’, which entered French and Spanish with minor variation while the Portuguese traders settled in Macau adopted the Cantonese variation ‘cha’ and brought it into Persian, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.

  How did it all begin? The idea of pouring boiling water on the cured leaves of Camellia Sinensis and getting a beverage probably started as a medicinal exercise, until the Han dynasty in China made it into an elite drink at the start of the Common Era. The Tang dynasty, which started larger cultivation in mountains, helped the practice grow. In India’s Himalayan region too tea was extensively used as a drink with a medical value. Slowly tea became fashionable in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Catherine of Braganza brought her taste to the English court in the seventeenth century when she married Charles II and the British started the practice of mixing milk and sugar with tea. Black tea soon outpaced green tea in consumption and the tea trade multiplied swiftly.

  To break the Chinese monopoly, the British tried several times in the nineteenth century to bring plants from China secretly and plant those in their Indian colony, until they found native plants in Darjeeling and Assam and in Sri Lanka. They even offered free land to Europeans who agreed to cultivate tea.

  Good tea isn’t easy to cultivate. Tea plants require acidic soil, warm climate and at least fifty inches of rain. They take a long time to mature: three years to harvest and five to nine years to produce seeds. There are of course many strains, classified mainly by leaf size: the Chinese are small, the Assamese large and the Cambodian intermediate. The plants can grow large, but they are pruned to be accessible for harvesting every two weeks. Only two inches of leaves and buds, called flushes, are picked at a time. In tea cultivation quality is paramount.

  Tea processing is no easier. White tea is wilted (water-extracted) but unoxidized (pan-r
oasted); popular black tea, called red tea by the Chinese, is fully wilted and oxidized; oolong tea is wilted and partly oxidized; green and yellow tea are both unwilted and unoxidized. Tastes vary, and the industry seems eager to respond with a larger variety. All loose and bagged tea is blended, with varied tastes in mind. There is also tea to which a special flavour is added. For a change, I have had tea with bergamot, as in Earl Grey, or tea with orange flavour, as in Constant Comment. Tea with mint is very common.

  Tea for me is also memory.

  Tea is my parents sitting on the deck and sipping a morning cup before the world or children interrupted their peaceful hour. Tea is my college mates thrusting a stained cup at me in a smoke-filled cafeteria to celebrate an electoral victory. Tea is my favourite professor, Amlan Datta, telling me that tea is not just for taste but also for flavour and I should try jasmine tea. Tea is the Roys passing me a steaming cup after another on a breezy terrace in Jodhpur Park. Tea is the only pathetic item I could afford when I persuaded a pretty coed in the university to join me in a restaurant. Tea, glorious tea, is what we drank in abundance when I and fellow oarsmen won a minor event in a rowing regatta.

  Bitter tea is what I had agonizingly sipped at the café in a hospital where my daughter underwent surgery. I have had tea in tiny clay pots in Indian railways stations, in plastic cups in Colombian buses, in delicate china in Hong Kong’s legendary The Penisula Hotel, from Jane’s large Chinese teapot, from my Russian neighbour’s showy samovar, from shiny, nondescript machines in Virginia’s motels, from the tiny Vietnamese contraption a friend gave me. I remember drinking tea with shift workers in a factory where I was an intern, with actors during break in a play I was stage-managing, with guerillas in Kathmandu, refugees in Cuba, tourists in Venice and students on a boat from Germany to Switzerland.

  Through all these memories is the strongest one: Mother, then a sprightly young woman, offering me my first cup of Darjeeling tea in India.

  India has changed a lot since I lived there. One way it hasn’t is that people still offer a cup of tea the moment I step into a home.

  I never say no.

  Epiphanies

  What Had to be Found Out

  The Abbot and the Sceptic

  Confession of a City Man

  The Islander

  Flying Solo

  Another Aspect of Life

  A Magical Kingdom

  A Perfect Day

  The Indiscreet Charm of a Coffeehouse

  Water, a Friend

  Coming Home

  Believer

  Getting Home

  Discovering Mother

  Pain

  54

  THE ABBOTT AND THE SCEPTIC

  WISDOM SANS FAITH

  ‘A SUCKER IS BORN every minute,’ said Barnum, the nineteenth century showman. I saw enough of that when I lived in India and, on the recommendation of well-meaning friends, met revered gurus who quickly proved to be purveyors of snake oil. They would spout sacred verses in Sanskrit, which most Indians don’t know; but I had painstakingly learned the ancient language, in which most Hindu texts are written, and frequently found these blatantly misquoted or misinterpreted.

  When I came to the US, I found a parallel phenomenon with religious leaders. They would volubly cite Biblical verses, then interpret them to neatly fit their crass social or political views. A famous preacher in the south would massage them for a happy, upbeat creed, while a popular televangelist would use them for fiery anti-Arab diatribes. They cared little for the historical meaning of canonical texts.

  So you will understand my hesitation when a friend in Kathmandu suggested that I join him and visit a reputed Buddhist lama. The latter, I was told in a hushed tone, was both a Rinpoche (the word means jewel), a scholarly abbot, and a Tulku, a child prodigy who is the custodian of a Tibetan Buddhist lineage.

  I had barely sipped my first cup of coffee that Saturday morning when my earnest friend came to collect me. Seto Gumba, the white chapel, was a charming midtown monastery, neither small or cramped nor huge or overwhelming, and, with colourful little flags and bright curtains, almost unmonastic. We sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of a sun-drenched hall with sixty other visitors, and presently the Rinpoche arrived.

  A middle-aged man, with a young and sturdy look, he wore a loose brown-and-saffron garb and walked briskly across the hall to take his seat on a slightly elevated platform. The broad eyebrows and firm lips were a contrast to his sparkling eyes. When he spoke, his tone was of genial conversation, not weighty discourse. He gave pauses, seeming to invite questions, and when some came, he explained himself mildly, almost deferentially.

  His was the shortest spiritual talk I have ever heard. When he stopped, some of the foreigners present asked him about Buddhist practices and he responded readily, sometimes drolly, to everyone.

  Then suddenly the Rinpoche pointed at the last row, and I thought he wanted to talk to my friend. My friend whispered, ‘He wants to talk to you,’ and quickly wrapped a silken scarf around my neck. I walked up to the Rinpoche, and following the Tibetan custom unwrapped the scarf, bowed and placed it around his neck. He acknowledged the gift with a bow and then placed his own scarf – gently but more deftly – round my neck.

  As I sat awkwardly on the floor in front of him, he smiled and asked who I was. I gave the conventional reply that I was the American consul in Nepal. He said that I looked a little different from the other Americans in the room. I explained that I was born in India of Indian parents and had spent a large part of my life there. Why did I then move to the US? I had met and loved somebody in India, who was an American. When she returned to her country, she wanted me to join her, and I did. He smiled broadly and said I was right to do so.

  Then he asked me a question that stumped me. Was I happy? Did I like doing what I was doing in my life? I thought a little and said that there were parts of my work – parts where I felt I was helping other people – that I liked. There were also, I added, other parts that I did not like so much. In my private life too, I liked the affection of friends and family, but weren’t comfortable with some other elements. I paused and then hesitantly said that I was often troubled by the feeling that my life was far too focused on small things and on myself; I would have preferred ‘a larger role for larger things.’

  He looked at me for a long time in silence. His face was as placid as it was earlier, but now it had a tinge of concern and sadness.

  He asked me to tell him my full name. When I did so, he repeated it and asked me to help him pronounce it properly. I said it twice more and he repeated it. When I nodded to approve, he asked me, so softly that I had to bend to hear him, to take care of myself. ‘Good care,’ he emphasized.

  He was again quiet for a while. Then he said: ‘Do the small things well. As well as you can. And wait for the larger things to appear.’

  More than a decade has passed since that strange encounter. I cannot forget the astonishing tranquility the Rinpoche somehow conferred on me in those few minutes. Never have I talked with a total stranger and felt every syllable heard with supreme attention and, yes, acceptance. I had heard rumour that he was clairvoyant. He didn’t need to be, for he saw, I felt, right inside me. He didn’t just hear my words; he absorbed my thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes and concerns. Ludicrous as it sounds, I said to my friend, I felt like a little boy sitting in front of my mother, loved, cared for, fully understood.

  When I came out, the colourful little flags of Seto Gumba, fluttering in the midday breeze, seemed to be singing a silent anthem.

  55

  CONFESSION OF A CITY MAN

  HOW THINGS CHANGE – HOW YOU CHANGE

  I HAVE ALWAYS LIVED in large and noisy cities. When I moved to Washington, it was more of the same – much more. I loved it. The smell of the downtown thrilled me as much that of the Brooklyn sidewalk had pleased Woody Allen.

  Then I took an interesting job in the exurbs and, in short order, bought a house in Reston to avoid the painfu
l commute. The change was, literally, breathtaking. The first breath told me I was in a different place. There were trees and bushes all over; there was a lake next door with a spouting fountain; I could walk down a myriad trails without ever seeing a car. I did not know such a place existed except in some quaint European town.

  Before I could settle down, however, I changed work and returned to the big city orbit. Now in different countries. In Kathmandu I drove through cows and cattle to reach my office. In Abu Dhabi I drove through deserts to reach others’ offices. In Manila, I lived in a plush, gated community that fashionably called itself a ‘village’ but was located at the junction of two roaring highways. In Delhi, vendors hollered at passers-by to sell mangoes and curried peanuts. In Cairo, even the Coptic churches seemed all large, all noisy, and all seemed fun to me.

  Then again back to Reston, after fifteen years. In all these years, Reston had grown and changed. But it had somehow managed to retain its essential nature: an urban patch that tenaciously holds on to a pastoral charm, with swatches of green that surprise and please, a community of clusters that look after themselves and yet manage to have common interests and activities.

  As important perhaps, the world had changed. The city meant a lot to me. Particularly what it offered. The theatre has been a major force in my life from my childhood. I understand much less of music, but the variety of music, from classical to pop and jazz, thrills me. Libraries are an abiding source of joy; just to hold books, let alone browse or read them, gives me a delight I can’t explain. Above all, the clash of ideas excites me. I love to attend book launches where authors not only talk but also cross swords with bellicose listeners, think tank seminars where multiple speakers contradict one another or even simple lectures where speakers allow – or, thank heavens, even encourage – contrary views in the garb of questions. I loved big cities for these.