by Suketu Mehta
An elderly merchant is brought to the stage, one of the leaders of the industry, a former diamond smuggler from Antwerp who knew my grandfather well. He does not speak, and with great difficulty gets up to bless Sevantibhai. His family owns a mansion on Malabar Hill and a Manhattan apartment above a Rolls-Royce showroom. Another merchant, Arunbhai, dressed simply in a white half-sleeved shirt but a billionaire in any currency, tells us that a few years ago his mother had also wanted to take diksha. He convinced her against it. But he speaks of the monk’s life with yearning, as something he will have to do sooner or later.
One speaker is frank about Sevantibhai’s past: “There is no sin which he has left undone. One of his friends told me, ‘Whenever he was on the plane with me, he was always tight.’” There are dark hints of other sins, of a life enjoyed to the full before he turned to the religious way. A merchant tells me that Sevantibhai’s first engagement was broken when the girl’s family found out about his reputation. A broker in my uncle’s office had said he was once with Sevantibhai for three days running in the police station; he had been accused of stealing goods. The police recognized him; they salaamed him. The broker speculated that there must have been something huge, some fraud or financial disaster, that made the diamond merchant decide suddenly to take diksha. All around, Sevantibhai’s reputation is of one who has committed more than his fair share of sin.
But now, Sevantibhai Chimanlal Ladhani, the dark little man with the easy smile, is not just a moderately successful diamond merchant. He has become a figure of power, a leader on the path that even the billionaire Arunbhai will have to tread sooner or later. At one bound, he has surpassed people far more successful in business than he. He is now, in this hall, in this afternoon, the subject of their admiration, even of their envy.
The diksharthis are now felicitated by the leading merchants, with plaque, tilak, shawl, and garland. The wives of the merchants felicitate the women; it is the first time they are really noticed. The girl, Karishma, has barely been mentioned in the speeches. There is little glory in this for her; almost all the speeches mention only the father’s sacrifice. This is a Bombay girl who now will never go to a movie, put on makeup, go on a date, or go to college. She will never return to the city she grew up in.
The woman on the balcony opposite reappears, this time with a kite. She flies it out into the little bit of sky visible between the buildings, and she is grinning.
THE MODERN METROPOLIS is a collection of transients, on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. New York is a collection of migrants from other cities; Bombay is a collection of people from villages, who come into the city and seek to re-create the village. The anxiety of the city dweller is the anxiety of transience; he does not know where he will be next year or where his children will be. He cannot form lasting friendships, because sooner or later his friends will be scattered. In the village, his grandfather knew where he was going to die, the funeral ground he would be burnt on, and the river his ashes would be scattered into; he knew that the friends and cousins he grew up with would be a short walk away till he died. The city dweller has no such trust in the permanency of relationships. Satish could not go about his deadly missions in a village, where there is no protective anonymity. Monalisa would not be needed in a village; her sympathetic ear, her status as an object of public consumption, is relevant only in a city. The human spirit has not caught up to the speed at which things change in cities. We began as a village species; we have not readjusted to city life. That is why Sevantibhai seeks to escape the city; he is renouncing the city as much as he is renouncing anything else, wealth or family.
SEVANTIBHAI SMILES as soon as he sees me through the throng in his ancestral home in Dhanera. We have all gathered here to see the Ladhanis off. “Have you eaten?” is the first question he asks me. Outside, one of his brothers is chanting, “My dear brother has taken diksha!” to be met by the answering chorus, “Wah bhai wah!” A woman shouts out the first line, and the whole extended family roars the chorus, the force of their voices perhaps convincing them that this is an occasion for celebration. There is to be a grand parade around Dhanera on this, the last day that the Ladhanis will spend in samsara.
As Sevantibhai is carried out of his home on the shoulders of his family, the din is enormous. All the traditional musicians for miles around the small town have been called for this procession. I take a place atop the terrace of a house overlooking the route of the procession and settle down to watch. There are a lot of people on this terrace, all leaning over the brick parapet. The owner warns us, “Don’t press against the parapet! It might break!” Below us, all the wonders of rural Gujarat are passing by. White-clad Jain sadhus glide by seated on dolis, little platforms slung on the shoulders of their followers, heralding the coming of the procession. First come the drummers of the small dhol, cymbalists, men playing elongated trumpets, and a man on the hump of a camel playing two enormous turmeric-smeared drums. Then come the dancing horses, decorated with rich embroidery. Two little turbaned boys ride two snow-white dray horses. A bevy of village girls comes by, each holding a brass pot on her head, each brass pot topped by a coconut. Then the members of the extended Ladhani family ride past on floats pulled by camels—each one a little straw-covered village hut. Now the actual diksharthis arrive, preceded by men in tribal costume playing, of all things, bagpipes. The three Ladhani children are seated in the middle of enormous sculpted birds: one a peacock, another a swan. Each bird sits on a cart pulled by an elephant. Behind them are Sevantibhai and Rakshaben, seated high on twin thrones, on another elephant-pulled cart. A man holding two swords follows them, as does an enormous mob, for Sevantibhai and Rakshaben are literally throwing money away. They fling out their arms, scattering rice mixed with gold and silver coins and currency notes. In front of them are baskets full of this lucrative mixture. By this stage of the procession, their movements have become practiced, automatic: They dip, gather up an armful of their wealth, and straighten out, throwing out their arms as they do so, the glistening white rice and the gold and silver traveling outward from their bodies in a wide arc to the frenzied mob below. On the street, I am kept at a distance by the throng jostling to grab their discarded wealth, but even from afar I can make out the couple’s exhilaration. Rakshaben’s white teeth gleam in her dark face. They are unburdened. I am reminded of the customers unburdening themselves in Sapphire, the beer bar, blowing their money over the heads of the dancing girls. It’s the same flinging out of your wealth, with both hands, getting rid of it as fast as possible.
Following the diksharthis, two human horses (men walking with life-sized cloth horses attached to their bodies) do a dance; others blow conch shells; a man beats a metal plate; a monk continuously pours water on the ground through the spout of a jug. The last float features an idol of the prophet Mahavir himself, a golden cobra hooding him as he sits in meditation. It is a surprisingly tiny image. The floats are followed by a cart heaped with cardboard boxes, out of which men are distributing clumps of dates and cylinders of jaggery to the poor. The throng is intense around this cart too. As the men give out the gifts they are also swinging sticks at the crowd to keep them back.
All the tribals of Dhanera and the surrounding villages are dressed up for this event, men and women both, in extravagantly colorful cottons and silks. The procession passes by under the statue of Ambedkar. The diksharthis fling out extra amounts to the mostly Dalit mob, who surround them like pigeons flocking around someone scattering grain in a park. The great liberator of the Dalits has an arm out, holding his finger up in censure or prohibition.
As the diksharthis approach the eating ground, a carnival has sprung up outside the tent of giving, where peasants have been lined up for hours, to get gifts of grain and cloth from Sevantibhai’s fortune. I can see a man walking on a tightrope above the crowd. Sevantibhai and Rakshaben come down the road on their float, a king and queen on their thrones. Men shout from a cart preceding them, urging the crowd, “Abandon the wor
ld!” Something catches Sevantibhai’s eye, and he gestures to the woman whom he will call his wife only for the next twenty-four hours: Look. And she looks. The tightrope walker is balanced on the end of a very tall pole, high, high above the crowd, silhouetted against the clear January sky. The couple salute him with folded hands, but he is the only one in the crowd who doesn’t notice. He is facing away from them and is now suspended upside down on his tightrope. Sevantibhai and Rakshaben behold the carnival performer, and there is delight on their faces.
Sevantibhai’s guests have been fed for seven days. Today, on the eighth and final day, every single person in the fifty-seven villages of the district of Dhanera has been invited for a grand feast. Thirty-five thousand people sit side by side for the meal—men and women in separate tents—which has been bought from those same villages. The village leaders have been instructed to prepare the ingredients using the old ways: the water is from wells, not taps; the oil is pressed by bullocks; the vessels are handmade brass; the ghee is from the local cows, not buffaloes; the sugar and the jaggery are organic; the grain and vegetables have all been grown locally. The flour is hand-ground, not mill-ground, which would be inevitably contaminated with dead insects. It is all as Sevantibhai has specified. On the eve of the twenty-first century, it is still possible to prepare a strictly Jain meal, grown and cooked locally, and feed thirty-five thousand people with minimum harm to the planet. It is good, wholesome Gujarati food: two sweets, two farsaan savories, puri, two vegetables, two dals, pappadams, rice, a stuffed chili, chutney. There are no onions, garlic, or potatoes in the food; nothing that the earth has to be dug up for to harvest. But the water, when it is poured into my glass, is muddy with sand.
Back where I am staying, with old friends of my grandfather, the doctor who owns the house sits down on the veranda to educate me about Jainism. He only came out once to glance at the procession when it passed by his hospital. He is of the opinion that what the Ladhanis are doing is a travesty. He is from the Sthanakvasi fold of the Svetambara Jain sect, which doesn’t worship idols—“like in Islam”—and considers a temple only a hall of prayer. Sevantibhai belongs to the Deravasi sect, or, as the doctor calls it, the murtipujak—idol-worshiping—sect. There are eighty-four Jain sects now, he says, and only 10 percent of the sadhus are authentic. The rest steal money meant for the poor; the diksharthis keep money saved up in case they decide to go back to samsara, and while they might themselves walk from place to place, they make sure their followers and relatives accompany them in cars, catering to their every need, bringing modern medicines, arranging the itineraries of their travels in advance. Each leader of a sect is preoccupied with how many diksharthis he can attract to his order. The Ladhani children are just doing it because their father told them to. Everybody knows this, but he can’t say these things in public, the doctor says, because there would be fisticuffs.
Dhanera is a town of thirty thousand people, from which most of the Jain population has emigrated; only about a hundred families remain. Even so, fifty Jains from families originating in Dhanera have taken diksha in the last ten years, a point of considerable local pride. But Sevantibhai’s ceremony is unique. “Nothing like this has been seen in Dhanera,” the doctor says. About Sevantibhai’s reasons for taking diksha, the doctor opines: “Blind faith.” I ask him about the rituals of the renunciation. He gives me a parable. A long time ago, a man was conducting a wedding. A cat was running around the marriage hall, disturbing things. So he tied it to a pillar. Afterward, generations of the man’s family, whenever they had a wedding, found a cat and tied it to one pillar of the hall, believing it to be a required wedding custom. The goings-on around this diksha, the doctor says, are like that cat tied to the pillar: The original meaning has been lost, and people are just doing it because that is how it has always been done. The leaving of institutions has become institutionalized.
When I get back to Sevantibhai’s house in the evening, I am introduced to the extended Ladhani family, milling about in the courtyard, as one of the fold. “One hundred years in the business,” a merchant who grew up with my grandfather says about my family. Most of the people around here know my grandfather, my uncle, my father. I am introduced to a large dark man wearing glasses, speaking English with a Gujarati-American accent, an enforced drawl. Hasmukh lives in Los Angeles and is a diamond merchant and nephew of Sevantibhai, though he is only a year and a half younger. He is also the renunciate’s best friend. He is eager to tell me how close they are. He has known his uncle since he was five years old. People refer to them as a pair of bullocks yoked together, inseparable. When Sevantibhai and Rakshaben went on their honeymoon to Srinagar, he went along. They set up the diamond business together. Every Sunday they used to go with their wives to the Copper Chimney restaurant and eat and drink. “We’ve done everything. We used to drink every Saturday and Sunday; we needed to drink whiskey. We would be watching the other’s glass, say, There’s more in yours, and fill ours higher. After prayers, we would go and eat pav bhaji [which is chockful of the forbidden onions and potatoes and garlic]. After prayers, we needed to eat pav bhaji. We’ve done everything: drinking, drama, movies . . . everything.” Sevanti is a sensualist, Hasmukh informs me. He loves getting massages; at home there were always two people massaging him. In Dhanera, Hasmukh has been fighting with his best friend, swearing at him. “I told him last night, bhenchod, chutiya, don’t do this. What is this chodu thing you’re doing? I am totally frank. He said if I were to take diksha with him, I would reach moksha first.”
After Sevantibhai started walking on the religious path, their friendship was put under some strain. On his regular trips back to India, Hasmukh began to avoid meeting him. Not because he felt uncomfortable with his friend’s penances, but because he was afraid he was retarding his friend on his path toward moksha. When Hasmukh came, Sevanti would temporarily stop his daily prayers, and then he would have to fast the whole of the next day to atone for the sin. Their conversations took on an increasingly didactic tone. One day, Sevanti talked to Hasmukh for four hours on the nature of a drop of water, of the lives in it, of the cosmic significance of that one drop. On that day too, Hasmukh found out that the whole family would be leaving the world.
Suddenly, in the midst of the jubilation, we hear a loud wail. Laxmichand, Sevantibhai’s eldest brother and King of Metal Business, is crying. He wails, and everybody rushes to console him: the women of the household (who have also been wailing), the men, and, not to be outdone, the Jain swamis standing around. (Later, Laxmichand comments acidly about the senior gurus who keep harassing him with instructions about the ceremony. “Have they no other business?”) Suddenly, the atmosphere in the Ladhani household changes from one of a wedding to that of a funeral. An older man is remonstrating with him that this is a joyous occasion. Hasmukh, weeping, says, “Look at that. That man is Raksha’s father; he is losing his own daughter, and he is consoling Laxmichand! That takes guts!” Even now, says Hasmukh, Laxmichand would rather that his brother stop the whole show and stay in samsara. There have been fierce fights among the brothers—some of the merchants say to stop the diksharthis from leaving their fold, others say over distribution of their property.
Utkarsh, the younger boy, is sitting outside. Here, in the midst of the huge clan, I learn the family’s nicknames for them: Utkarsh is called Chiku, his older brother, Vicky. “Tomorrow I’ll have to say maharajsaheb to you and fold my hands in front of you, but today you’re still Chiku to me,” Hasmukh says, and laughs with the boy. During the last meal, the entire extended family—a hundred strong—feed them, one last time, with their hands. One of the children asks for bhelpuri. After today there can be no pleasure permissible in food, and that will rule out bhelpuri forever for the kids from Bombay. The meal ends, the women begin singing, and a man comes to the courtyard with a flame at the end of a long wick and begins lighting hundreds of oil lamps. Then someone reads out a document that has the tone of a will. Sevantibhai is disposing of the remains of his w
ealth among his relatives. All of them will get something, from a few lakhs to 2,100 rupees. Then Sevantibhai folds his hands and says to his relatives, “I have made many mistakes. Forgive me if I’ve hurt anyone.”
Later, Hasmukh takes me inside the room where Sevantibhai is being massaged by his relatives. The diksharthi confesses to me that he is in some turmoil. “I’ve been trying to think, but I keep getting disturbed. I’m thinking, What will I do after tomorrow? Where will I be? I’ve been sick, I have a temperature, and right now I have all the facilities, they’re pressing my arms and my legs, but I think, How will I tolerate this sickness after tomorrow?” Of all his family, he is the only one that admits publicly to some doubt or uncertainty. Perhaps he is the only one allowed to. I ask him what he intends to do now. “I want to study Sanskrit for ten years. Only after ten years of study will I speak.”
I ask him how he will bear the separation from his family, if he is thinking about not seeing his wife and his daughter again. He replies that he feels confident at the moment. “But I will only know the real test the day after tomorrow, or the day after that, when I’m really separated from them.” Would he come back to Bombay? “The desire to return to Bombay is less, both mine and my guru’s.” Hundreds of people are waiting to see him, so I give him my salutations and leave the dark room.
I speak to the rest of the diksharthis, first to Rakshaben. “I only feel ulhas,” says the woman from Ulhasnagar. So much happiness, she says, that she won’t miss her husband or her sons. Snehal, too, says he is giving up samsara “for real happiness.” Moksha is real happiness, and you can get moksha only after you take diksha. It is a circular definition: happiness is moksha, and moksha is happiness. Then Karishma is summoned for an “interview” with me, by Laxmichand, who is sitting stubbornly under a fluorescent light. Someone is kidding her about her power to demand, on the next day, the day of the diksha, any boon from her family. Will she ask Laxmichand to give up smoking? “I can’t give such a rule,” the girl says. “He’ll only give it up if it comes from within.” When her uncle was weeping, the others asked her to go and comfort her Laxmi Kaka. “Why is he crying, on such a happy occasion?” she demanded to know. In Bombay, when she left, she didn’t look back once at the building she grew up in. Of all the diksharthis, the youngest is the one who has the least doubt, the least hesitation in her answers. Perhaps she has never asked the questions.
