by Suketu Mehta
That night, which is his last in the world before his diksha, Sevantibhai goes to bed at 3:15 a.m. “He couldn’t sleep till then,” Hasmukh tells me afterward. “I saw that he was really thinking, How will I begin my life tomorrow?” Forty-five minues later, he rises, goes to the temple, and prays to the god, does his puja. It will be the last time. After becoming a monk of his sect, he will never be able to do a puja. The senior maharajsahebs are forbidden from even folding their hands and bowing to the gods in the temple; Jainism is, at its purest, an atheistic religion. Not the least of the worldly comforts Sevantibhai will be renouncing is faith in God.
THE LADHANIS’ FINAL MORNING in samsara is so cold that my diesel car won’t start. When I leave the doctor’s house at six, the sky over the arid country is crowded with stars. There are very few people on the roads, and all of them are going toward the Ladhani household. Inside the house, there are even more people than the night before. This is, after all, the moment the five diksharthis will be saying good-bye to their families. The women lament and celebrate:
“What kind of day is it?”
[Chorus:] “It’s more valuable than gold.”
“What’s more valuable than gold?”
“Self-restraint, Self-restraint.”
“One more heave!
Samsara you leave.”
The Ladhanis are praying in the storehouse, and then a cordon is formed outside it. Big steel plates are put down in a line outside their room, filled with rice, coins, precious stones, and the keys to their various houses. I am standing near the first plate. Sevantibhai emerges at great speed, clad in his most extravagant costume, and kicks aside the plate full of his wealth. Then his wife and children do the same thing, all in a line; by the time Karishma comes out of the storehouse there is hardly any money left on the trays to kick aside. Outside, there are men with crossed swords blocking their path; the renunciates push aside the swords and march on. As they leave their ancestral house, it is very important that they never turn back, even for a second, to look at what they are leaving behind.
All along the route from the house to the diksha site, which is lined with more plates heaped with the Ladhani fortune, village children with their sharp eyes scan the ground for the money the Ladhanis have kicked away. The entrance to the diksha-mandap is flanked by five elephants. Inside is a vast tented enclosure and thousands of people seated in separate groups on the floor. I take my place in the diamond merchant section. The audience is handed out packets of a pearl-and-rice mixture and invited to shower the diksharthis with the fabulous confetti. On the stage above us, first the parting, like the bidai at a wedding (when the bride’s family says good-bye to her), is done in full public view, by the blood relatives and the business partners. Another will is read out. Over two crores has been given away to charitable institutions, including money to animal shelters, and another crore to religious bodies. The compere, the same one from the diamond merchant meeting, reads out a good omen: The previous day, the Bombay Municipal Corporation lost a Supreme Court appeal against a lower-court verdict that forbade the killing of stray dogs. A Jain family’s petition will now save the lives of fifty thousand stray dogs a year. There is a resounding cheer from the audience.
The moment has come. In front of thirty-five thousand people, Sevantibhai seeks permission to take diksha from his guru. A flare of trumpets announces the guru’s assent, and the diksharthi dances madly around the stage, clutching a large white duster. The rest of the family follows, and then they leave to get their heads shaved, except for seven hairs, which will be plucked out by the maharajsaheb. Meanwhile, the charitable auction starts, for the right to buy the vestments that are to be presented to the diksharthis for their monastic life. The first item, a cloth for Sevantibhai, is sold for 151,000 rupees. A string of white prayer beads for Snehal goes for 68,000. All around me, there is a tremendous din of figures, as the auctioneers shout out the competing bids, standing amid the seated audience and egging them on to invest in spiritual gain, like a hot stock tip. “This kind of opportunity for labh won’t come again! Only thirty-one thousand, you lucky people!” There is wealth on the stage, and wealth in this audience, as the assembled millionaires and billionaires compete for public demonstration of their piety.
Then the name auction commences. First, the name-page is opened. The gurumaharaj has given each of the men the names they will be called henceforth; and the head sadhvin has done the same for the women. Now the entire audience waits to hear the new names of the diksharthis. The bidding begins for the right to reveal Sevantibhai’s name; a layman will announce it to the audience. That right is purchased for 361,000 rupees, and the winner turns to the crowd and pronounces it: “Raj Ratna Vijayji!” The huge space rings out with applause. Then the right to say Snehal’s—Vicky’s—new name is bought: “Raj Darshan Vijayji!” Then Utkarsh, or Chiku’s: “Ratna Bodhi Vijayji!” Then Rakshaben’s: “Divya Ruchita Sreeji!” Finally, when the bidding starts over Karishma’s name, the three sisters of her father, who had the right to name her when she was born and had given her a name that most Indians associate with a sexy movie heroine, outbid all others to give her this new name and pay 150,000 rupees—one and a half lakhs—to face the audience and shout out, through their sadness, the three words: “Darshan Ruchita Sreeji!”
When the Ladhanis come back onto the stage, the change is startling. They have replaced their uniform cream-colored silk robes and saris with uniform white sheets; almost all of their hair is gone. After Rakshaben comes out with her head shorn, Hasmukh tells me later, “I marked that Sevanti didn’t look at Raksha. Raksha didn’t look at Sevanti. The children looked, but the couple didn’t look at anybody.” It was Hasmukh’s wife who wept when she saw what had been done to Raksha. “When her head was being shaved, Raksha put her face in her hands and didn’t look for one second at anybody as her hair, the mark of beauty for an Indian woman, was taken off.”
Hasmukh also tells me that during the hair-cutting ceremony, all the family members had to pour water—in the January morning, this meant freezing water—on the diksharthis as their final bath. They poured the frigid water on the feverish Sevantibhai, and they poured it on the other four. After this, Rakshaben and Karishma started running temperatures as well. “They had to first bathe with cold water. I don’t understand why,” says Hasmukh, shaking his head, like a child trying to understand an adult custom or rule that he is told has some sense behind it but the logic of which he is unable to grasp. Then Hasmukh said farewell to his best friend and uncle. “When I come back to India, I will visit you.” But his friend didn’t answer him. “He had his stick in his hand, he had his belongings around his neck. He didn’t look in my eyes, he just shook his head.” When Hasmukh said good-bye to the other four, they didn’t respond either.
Sevanti and Raksha have been married for twenty-two years. The last time they touch each other is when Raksha puts the tilak on Sevanti’s face, as she did the first time she touched him—when she married him. The little woman reaches up with her thumb, anointing his fevered brow with the saffron paste, and they smile at each other and laugh. His hot forehead feels the cooling impress of that last touch from his wife.
Finally, the five diksharthis sit on the front of the stage, and all the extended family honors them. The maharajsaheb says to Laxmichand, “Look, Laxmichand bhai, they were yours, and they are yours, but now they belong to all of us.” Laxmichand keeps weeping; the maharaj has ever so gently reminded him that the five of them have now gone beyond the Ladhanis’ orbit, beyond the extended family and out into the world. They have left behind everything from their former world; all traces of Sevantibhai the diamond merchant, Rakshaben the housewife, and their Bombay-bred teenagers, Vicky and Chiku and Karishma. At long last, they have abandoned all their possessions. Except their spectacles. The two boys keep their spectacles. They will need them to see the path ahead.
They sleep the night in the upasara, or rest house. At four-thirty the next morning, the
first day of their lives as renunciates, they will set out to gather their first meal—they have fasted all the previous day—and the first house they will go to is the Ladhanis’. It is a fitting metaphor for renunciation: The first house you beg in should be the one you’ve left as its owner. Then, with the two adults and Karishma still in the grip of fever, they will set out on the road away from Dhanera. They will not be able to come back to their ancestral town for at least five years. After Bombay, it is the next forbidden place.
DRIVING AWAY from the house, my driver, a tough taciturn Rajput, wonders, “Why did all five of them take diksha? They’re billionaires.”
“They’re diamond merchants,” I say.
“The Dawood gang must have been after them,” he speculates.
We drive from Dhanera to Ahmadabad, from where I have to take a train back to Bombay. I have relatives in Ahmadabad and stop to see them. These are the poorest relatives I have, and when I go to their house most of the family members are walking around in clothes I recognize: They belonged, when new, to my father, my mother, my sisters, myself. There is a new baby in the house, but her father, my cousin, is absent. He is at work in a diamond factory, where he is a cutter. Most days he does not see his first child, who is only a couple of months old; he has to leave as soon as the sun is up and comes back home well into the night. He works most Sundays as well; even during Diwali, traditionally a holiday time for the industry, he may be asked to work if the demand is high. He gets paid per diamond he cuts, and for all that work, for all that sacrifice, he makes less than my driver in Bombay. All day he cuts stones, denying himself to his new daughter, so that the merchants of Sevantibhai’s class can throw into the air the profits he earns for them.
I catch up with Hasmukh in Bombay the following week, in his brother’s flat in Tardeo. Hasmukh is fairly religious himself. On his trips to Bombay, he always prays first at the Sankeshwar temple, and only then does he go to Opera House to buy his diamonds. In Los Angeles, he is a devotee of the Swaminarayan sect, which, though Hindu, he finds similar to Jainism. But he has married outside the religion; in fact, outside the Gujarati nation. His wife is a Mangalorean whose family owns sixteen restaurants in Bombay; it was a love marriage. A restaurant is a breeding ground of sin for Jains. And this fact, I sense, has put him at variance with the community into which he was born. They don’t shun him or his family, but there will always be the sense that he has crossed the threshold, and an awkwardness around his wife.
At this point a boy comes in, wearing a green T-shirt with the Nike swoosh on it. He is Hasmukh’s son and has just been to see a Hindi movie with Hasmukh’s brother, his uncle. The boy is disagreeing, in an American accent, with his uncle about the message of the movie, a melodrama about an Indian taxidriver in New York torn between a westernized Indian woman and a traditional Indian woman. “All I’m saying,” says the boy, who is in the sixth grade in Diamond Bar, California, “is India has love but America also has love.”
The uncle disagrees. “America has less love than India.” He points to America’s high divorce rate as proof.
The boy responds, “They take divorce for a reason.” He tells me he was asked by Sevantibhai to come back to India to live. “I said I would like to but my everything is over there.”
It is in this flat that I learn there is an insurance policy for the Ladhanis in case the path to moksha gets too steep, as has happened with other renunciates. A trust has been set up with four family members as trustees, endowed with a sizable fund—in the crores. It will disburse money on Sevantibhai’s instructions. In his wanderings, when he meets needy people or deserving institutions, the trustees will send money to them. “In case the children want to come back, they don’t have to stretch out their hand to anybody. They can get a car, a house,” explains Hasmukh. For Sevantibhai, there is this security. If he changes his mind, all of samsara will not be lost to him. He has given away a good deal of his fortune, but there is enough left to provide him or his family with a reasonable standard of comfort in Bombay. It is a strange concept: a wandering monk able to fund a temple or change the fortunes of an entire village with one phone call. Is the life of a renunciate made easier or harder when he knows that if he returns to samsara, he can immediately have the goods of life back? Sevantibhai and his family will always have a choice. Each step of their wanderings will be taken out of free will. Whenever they are tired from walking in the hot sun, something at the back of their minds will always be telling them that they can afford to travel in a Rolls-Royce, even now. All they have to do is to admit defeat.
SEVEN MONTHS after the diksha ceremony, I go to see how Sevantibhai is doing in his life as a monk. He and the two boys are spending the monsoons in Patan, in northernmost Gujarat, where my grandfather studied as a boy. The Jain temple and its attendant institutions are in a quiet quarter of the town, with old painted wooden houses all around.
After Dhanera, Sevantibhai walked from town to town in Gujarat, to Tharad, then Deesa, Patan, Bhabhar, Ahmadabad, then Patan again, to a private house in the city. And now, seven months later to the day of his diksha (by the lunar calendar), I find Sevantibhai, or Raj Ratna Vijayji Maharajsaheb, sitting in an enormous room in Patan. He has been here for two months and will continue to stay a further two months, till the rains end. There is a large painting on the entrance to the hall, which is the temporary home for the entire order of twenty-one monks. It is entitled A Compassionate View of Worldly Life and depicts a man hanging on a tree above a well filled with snakes and crocodiles, with rats gnawing at the vine the man hangs on, and an elephant shaking the trunk of the tree.
As soon as I enter the hall I see him and he sees me. He makes an indication, touching his fingers to his head; it is a comment that my hair has grown. Sevantibhai, on the other hand, has just had his first lochan after becoming a monk: all the hair on his head, face, and lips had been pulled out, hair by hair, tuft by tuft, over a period of several hours, by his superior. His scalp was bleeding. “It is just a sample of the tortures of hell for my sins. The hair is pulled out by hand to make the body strong, and so that you can understand others’ suffering.” He got through the ordeal by remembering the tortures inflicted on the Jain gurus of old. When the enemies of their faith would pull off not just the hair but the very skin on their bodies, the response of the gurus was to ask their tormentors, “In what way would you like me to stand so that you are put to the least inconvenience while peeling off my skin?” The courage of those martyrs redoubled his own.
The retreat hall, the paushadhshala, is an enormous room open on two sides. It does not belong to the monks. They are guests of the sangha, the community, which has built it for the monks to rest in. The monks sit at a series of low tables, reading from ancient manuscripts and writing commentaries on them in their notebooks. Laypeople come to visit them and are instructed in the proper conduct of quotidian life; those with special promise are encouraged to take up diksha. There are a number of laypeople sitting in the hall getting a taste of the monastic life. They can choose to observe the life of a sadhu for one day or, for the merest sample, for exactly forty-eight minutes. During those forty-eight minutes, their thoughts and deeds should be pure of violence. There are no fans in the hall; as I sit cross-legged talking to Sevantibhai in the August afternoon, I sweat and wave away the flies. If the ceiling were not so high it would be intolerable. At night, the monks sleep where they are sitting, but with a caveat: They can’t sleep in the path of the fresh breeze coming in, because that will kill the lives in that breeze. It would also mean that they desire the bodily pleasure of the cooling breeze. If a window is closed, they are forbidden to open it for the same reasons. Sevantibhai has to bleach his life of all comfort or pleasure. It is only then that moksha can be attractive. His life has to be so bereft of luxury, so continuously tormenting, that it will be easy to slip into the dark waters of nonexistence.
Sevantibhai has taken five vows. The first is that he can’t do violence to life, make someo
ne else do violence, or approve of someone else doing violence. This means, for example, that he can never compliment a householder on the taste of the dal that he gives to Sevantibhai during gocari—to say “What a fine dish!” would mean that Sevantibhai approves of the multiple killing the householder had to perform in order to make it. The second vow is that he can’t tell a lie, tell others to tell a lie, or approve of a lie being uttered. The third is that he can’t steal, cause others to steal, or approve of stealing. For example, he says, if I were to drop my pen on the floor, and if he borrowed it for a minute without asking my permission, that would be considered stealing. The fourth is that he cannot be uncelibate, cause others to be uncelibate, or approve of uncelibacy. Thus, he can never praise a wedding ceremony or suggest that a particular girl might be a good match for a particular boy. The ascetics keep wandering to avoid breaking the vow of celibacy. They should not get to know any female during their travels. If a monk were to visit the house of a devout laywoman regularly during the process of gocari, and if she were to think, How noble is this monk! or if the monk were to think, How devout is this sister! it would be a sin, and he would be breaking his vow. A nomadic life prevents any possibility of intimacy between the sexes. The fifth is a vow of poverty. He can’t own anything, not even the single cotton sheet he wears on his body. It has to be gifted by a layman.
