by Suketu Mehta
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.
Sevantibhai’s older son, Snehal, is sprawled sleeping across the divan, in a sweater, the windows closed against the January chill. Utkarsh, the younger son, enters, along with his mother, Rakshaben. They too wear gold and diamond ornaments. All the family is bedecked with jewelry; it is their way of showing how much of the world they are leaving behind, how rich they are, the extent of their contempt for the attractions of samsara. They all are also resplendent in silk clothes. At my wedding, which was in the South Indian style, I was not allowed to wear silk, because for the Brahmin community I was marrying into, the destruction of silkworms to make silk was a sin. But the Jains believe that silk is less sinful than mill cloth, since the production of silk destroys only two-sensed beings, whereas the occupational hazards of making fabric in a mill destroy five-sensed beings, in addition to incurring the sin of using electricity. In every activity of life—eating, drinking, wearing clothes, traveling—there is a conscious balancing of harm, a series of decisions constantly being made so as to incur the least amount of karmic matter possible.
When I ask the mother questions, the younger son speaks in a low, irritated voice; he is berating her for inaccuracies in her responses. She has a lovely smile. He is a bit peremptory with her.
“We will live a life completely without sin,” Rakshaben tell me, her face shining. “We leave in happiness.”
Utkarsh explains further. They will be walking constantly, observing the five vows: no violence, no untruth, no stealing, no sex, no attachments. They will be wearing two white unstitched pieces of cloth, nothing else; every six months, their hair will be pulled; and they will have no shoes, no vehicles, no telephone, no electricity. On the day they take diksha, they will bathe; it will be the last bath they take in their lives. They will not put their foot into a puddle; they will stay in the same place during the months of the rainy season; they will not bathe in ponds or rivers or seas; and they will stay indoors while it’s raining. Occasionally, if they feel very hot, a light wipe of the skin with a wet cloth is allowed. They can wash their clothes only once a month, and rinse out their gocari bowl after eating. “I, my father, and my brother will live together,” Utkarsh explains. “Mummy and Sister will stay with their sadhvin. If we happen to be in the same village we can meet; otherwise we can’t.” He seems almost eager about the coming separation.
I ask the mother why she isn’t allowed to see any relatives after she takes diksha.
“Because we want to break the attachment, the affection. Only then will we get moksha.” Rakshaben is not from one of the more orthodox Jain families; she was raised in Ulhasnagar and educated in a Catholic convent school. “My husband felt we should all take diksha together,” she explains. Women who aren’t getting along with their husbands sometimes take diksha instead of divorce. For a traditional Gujarati woman, society understands diksha, but divorce will mark her. But Rakshaben is taking diksha for the opposite reason: to keep the weird unity of the family. I get the sense that she loves and follows her husband and that this love will lead her to follow him even into permanent separation.
After they become nuns, Rakshaben and her daughter will be free to wander anywhere they choose—except Bombay. The sadhvin of the order they are to join has decreed that the territory south of Virar, where the local trains terminate, is forbidden to them forever. “The environment is not good. The thinking is good in the villages, not in the city.” But the prohibition doesn’t apply to all cities. “Only Bombay. Delhi, Calcutta, and other cities are okay,” explains Rakshaben. Bombay is the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Jain religion, “Paap ni bhoomi.”
The phone rings and the daughter, Karishma, comes to answer it. It is the only powered appliance in the whole place, and it feels odd to see her so comfortable using it. She is a slight dark girl who seems the least articulate of the five. She sits shyly behi
nd her twin brother and her mother.
Downstairs, as I get into a taxi, I look around the street landscape of the paap ni bhoomi at night. On the ground floor of their building is a Fiat showroom; opposite is a bank, urging its loan money upon the public; and next to it is a bar, the Gold Coins. The murderers I have been meeting recently live only a short walk away.
I come home from Sevantibhai’s house to find my friend Jaiman waiting for me, the half-Marwari, half-American man who has just been made editor of the Russian edition of Playboy. We go to a party in the Casbah Room at the top of the Khyber restaurant; three rooms of people drinking, dancing, flirting, feasting. Women stroll by in abbreviated skirts. Jaiman is immediately pounced upon by Bombayites wanting to know what it is like being editor of Playboy, whether he selects the models himself. Beautiful women come to his office every day, he says, and he asks them to take off their clothes to shoot a couple of test rolls and they unbutton their shirts, unzip their skirts. He has just been on a family trip to Bhilwara, in Rajasthan, where he couldn’t quite tell his Marwari relatives what he did in Moscow. They are fantastically orthodox, very much like the Jains. A tall, big-boned Punjabi woman hugs and kisses the men in the room. “I can’t wear this dress because my mother says I’m popping out all over,” she says, pointing to her breasts. She sits down on a man’s lap, their arms around each other, one long leg emerging from a slit in the skirt. Rivers of liquor flow from the bar; there is no closing hour here. When someone puts a cigarette in his mouth, passing waiters stoop and light it. Large tables are stacked with Punjabi and Italian food: racks of meat, hundreds of birds and animals and fishes, dressed and cooked and adorned so they look nothing like the living beings they once were. A steady electronic pulse comes out of a darkened room, where people are writhing on the dance floor. Jaiman has his eye out for someone he can take to bed during his three nights in Bombay. He is like a pointer dog when he sees a pretty girl. His hair bristles, and his whole body turns reflexively in her direction. Until he possesses the girl, or at least makes a pass at her, he is in a state of acute unease, a profound anxiety. He has come to India prepared; from his bag, he pulls out a small white pill: Viagra. The magazine’s head office in Chicago has sounded out Jaiman about launching an Indian edition of Playboy. They think it would do very well here.
WHEN I GET to the Diamond Merchants’ Association Hall a few days later, there is a large banner on the wall: HEARTY WELCOME TO THE MOKSHA-STRIVING JEWELS. The renunciates—diksharthis—are to be felicitated by the wealthy community of diamond merchants. Tikkas are applied to our foreheads, with glitter instead of the traditional rice. We are all given little plastic packets of dry fruits—almonds, cashews, raisins, pistachios—that must be worth, at a minimum, 50 rupees each. The Hindu chairman of the industry association, who is one of the felicitators, takes me into a corner and asks me what I think of the whole thing. He is more than a little disapproving. The children are so young; he wonders if they have received enough of an education to be able to make an informed choice. Seventeen is too early, he says. He comes from a family of BJP leaders. “You and me are getting associated with these rituals.” This is a premodern religion, not the kind the Hindu nationalists would like to be associated with. “What a religion,” the chairman observes of Jainism, “which can have both”: the billionaires on the dais, with their extreme love of money, and the diksharthis, with their extreme abnegation of it.
The program begins. A religious singer produces the sounds of traditional Indian instruments—the oboelike shehnai, the tabla—from a Casio synthesizer and sings bhajans, all set to the tune of Hindi film songs. The crowd swells. It is the middle of the trading day, but by now hundreds of men and a few women are here, the men dressed in simple light-colored cotton-blend shirts and dark pants. You would not know the wealth of these men from their clothes. I see friends of my uncle, people I have known since childhood in Calcutta, merchants from Dariya Mahal, and many other faces I recognize but can’t put a name to. The talk as we wait for the Ladhanis is of sizes and weights, of the glittery stones they trade in. “I need some half-caraters, natts, browns. . . .” I have grown up amid such conversations; it has been a constant in my shifting life, and it soothes me like a song I have been listening to since birth.
The family comes into the hall. Sevantibhai is dressed in silk robes and turban like a peshwa, Rakshaben in a green gold-braided sari, everyone laden down with fabulous diamond jewelry all over their visible bodies: fingers, ears, noses. Jewelry is ultimately useless ornament, and their casting away of these baubles is going to make no difference in their lives, as it made little difference while they were wearing them. They sit on the white mattress and bolsters on the dais, the men and the women very separate. Not once during the ceremony does Sevantibhai cast so much as a glance toward his wife and daughter, but he occasionally smiles and converses with his sons.
As the compere, a bearded man dressed in a khadi kurta, acquaints us with the bare facts of the family’s renunciation, a merchant seated next to me starts sobbing uncontrollably. I see he keeps his eyes open as his face shakes, so as not to miss anything happening onstage.
The speeches begin. The diamond merchants talk about wanting to do this; every year a few of them renounce the world. “We have gathered here to get the idea,” one says. “We need the idea before we do the deed. We all will have to do this sooner or later, if not in this life then in the third or fifth birth from now on.” And another: “His understanding is two steps ahead of ours.” The steps are, first, be born in India. “If we were born in America this wouldn’t even be possible.” Then, observe the regimen of a Jain layperson, which the Ladhani family has been doing for the past several years. A giant pilgrimage was recently undertaken, on which my aunt and uncle went. They walked from temple to temple in Gujarat for ten days, doing without electricity, following the Jain dharma more or less strictly for the duration. Thousands of diamond merchants had participated. The final step is to take diksha. In a subsequent birth, if your karma has been erased, your soul may be reborn as the prophet Mahavir, and only at the end of that life will you reach moksha. It is comfortably in the future.
The compere talks about the time three of them from a Jain organization went to a place where dogs and other stray animals were slaughtered. They had tape recorders and small video cameras, and they asked the manager of the establishment what they did with the carcasses. They melted down the animal fat, the manager said, and sold it as tallow, 16 rupees a kilo for the lower quality, 22 rupees for the better quality. Who would buy such a product? the Jains asked. “His answer was such that even now when I think about it I break out into a sweat,” the compere recalls. The manager told him he had advance orders from the leading snack-food merchants of the city. The fried snacks that Gujaratis are especially fond of were cooked in dog fat. With such sin within us, the compere thunders, how can we even hope to improve ourselves? It is the same with ice cream, he continues. Do we know what happens with the bones, the hooves, and the horns of old cows? He had asked the owner of an ice-cream factory how come the ice cream didn’t melt. It was because those bovine byproducts were melted down and put into the product, as gelatin. This brings murmurs and expressions of disgust from the crowd. “Let us vow from this moment on not to eat ice cream!” the compere shouts.
The speeches very rarely mention God. They also don’t talk about helping the poor. The principal thing you can do for others, they suggest, is to lead them away from samsara. There is no mention of heaven or the delights of moksha. It is a phenomenally pessimistic ideology. The compere describes the present state of the community. There are 10 million Jains. Of them, only about 20,000 are monks. “The Jain community is like a man who has swallowed poison, has poison in his belly, and is being attacked by a man with a knife. As he steps back from the attacker, he is one step away from the edge of the open terrace, beyond which is the abyss.”
We are sitting on the floor. All around the vast hall, very close to the b
uilding we are in, are the windows and balconies of other buildings in the densely packed quarter. A woman comes out on the balcony just outside the window in front of me. She leans over the parapet and meditatively throws up, controlled release of a thin stream of white mucus, somewhere between spitting and puking. Perhaps she is pregnant; she isn’t retching. A merchant in front of me nurses his chapped lips with a tube of Vicks lip balm.
Then the most riveting speaker of the afternoon comes up to the mike. He is the brother of Atulbhai, an extremely rich merchant who had taken diksha in Ahmadabad; farewell processions for him were taken out not just all over India but also in Antwerp and New York. Sevantibhai took advice from Atulbhai about his decision.
The brother asks us to consider what we are doing with our lives. He paints a picture of the Ladhanis after the thirtieth, wandering from village to village in the blazing heat of Kutch, not knowing if they will get food in the next village, mixing five different types of vegetables and six different types of dal in the same pot and swallowing it. “We have to think about what we listen to now, and what we will do this evening in our offices. We get distressed even if the air conditioner doesn’t work for a little while. We complain if the air-conditioning in the first-class compartment of the Ahmadabad train fails. And think of this family, in the extreme Celsius heat of Kutch! This little Karishmaben!” He asks us to consider how impatient we have become with time, how we complain if we can’t get a train reservation, and how time will stop having meaning for this family, and how much they will have to walk. “This has now become our culture: Have more! Have more!” In rapid, vigorous Gujarati he describes the crazed world that the diamond merchants live in, a world of mobile phones, of global plans made for office expansion in Bangkok, New York, Antwerp, of billions of rupees’ worth of dealings every day, of waiting lists for airplane tickets, of constant accumulation—“Have more! Have more!”—and contrasts this with the lifestyle this family is about to adopt, which is one of “de-attachment.” The crowd is overflowing past the entrance now, there are hundreds of people in this vast room, and it is hot with breath and sweat even on a winter afternoon.
