by Suketu Mehta
The head of the order, Chandrashekhar Maharaj, sits at the head of the hall, ever on the alert for any slippage into samsara among his monks. His entire family of six had taken diksha together when he was eleven. A mother with a boy in his lay clothes, who looks to be under ten years old, is sitting in front of Chandrashekhar Maharaj. The boy is sulking; his mother is smiling, tenderly persuading him about something. The boy keeps worrying his foot. After a while the maharajsaheb takes over, again speaking to him in a low, gentle voice but not letting up, not fazed by the fact that the boy isn’t saying a single word to his mother or to the maharaj, isn’t looking at either of them. Sevantibhai enlightens me. The boy and his mother are from Bombay, and he has been staying here for three months studying with the maharaj in his preparation for taking diksha. But now the boy misses Bombay and misses his family and wants to go to the metropolis for four days with his mother. The maharaj instead advances his preferred alternative: The mother should stay with the boy for four days. If he were to go to Bombay now, he would fall much farther behind in his studies than four days. The boy, a bright child, has not been concentrating on his studies. He wants to play. He sees other children outside, children of visitors, and wants to watch television. The mother, her love for her child writ all over her face, is gently but insistently telling him to stay here—so that, in the fullness of time, all connections might be severed between them.
The boy comes over to where I am sitting with Sevantibhai. “I wish I had taken diksha thirty years ago,” Sevantibhai says to me. Then his body would have been better able to stand the demands he is putting on it. As it is, he sometimes feels weak and can’t stretch his body as much as he’d like to. “I wish I had taken diksha thirty years ago,” he says again, in the presence of the wavering boy.
His own sons, or ex-sons, have not become as single-minded as he has or as he would like them to be. “Out of the twenty-four hours, they still want to play for an hour with the other young monks,” he says. “It’s not desirable, but it’s understandable.” I ask him what kind of playing they do. He points to some colorful labels stuck on a couple of shelves. “They’ll stick these labels, they’ll draw, they’ll gather all the books and arrange them in a row, they’ll want to wash their clothes once a week instead of once a month as we do. They want to play, they’re still young. Not cricket, of course—the ball hitting the bat is himsa”—violence—“but this kind of playing, sticking labels, washing clothes.”
Before Sevantibhai sits down in the hall, he sweeps the ground with his duster to move away any lives. The sweeping of the hall is constant, and the tiled surface is very clean. I watch him sweep a large patch of the hall, gather up the dust in a small plastic dustpan, take the dust to a window of the hall, and scrupulously deposit it on the windowsill just outside, being careful not to drop it. Then he sifts the dust, spreading it out. If it is dropped from a distance greater than the breadth of the palm it will kill the lives in the air. For this reason, he explains, the monks are forbidden to use a toilet to urinate or defecate. It is one of the stories non-Jains spread about the monks: that they are filthy and throw their shit on the roads. Sevantibhai now explains it for me. Their urine and feces have to dry within forty-eight minutes of coming out of their bodies. Otherwise, lives will be created in the liquid or the moist mass, lives that are invisible to us but which the Universal Soul can see. This is why, when Sevantibhai finds himself stopping in a place without a sandpit in the back (such as the one in Patan), he has to walk outside the city limits or to a stretch of railroad tracks, or the rocks by the sea, and carefully spread out his feces so that they dry fast; if they are just dropped in piles or mounds they won’t dry within the required forty-eight minutes. This is difficult in the rains. “That’s why we can’t go to America or Antwerp. It stays wet there all year.” The West is forbidden to Jain monks because of its lack of appropriate toilet facilities.
Sevantibhai does not miss anything about Bombay and has no wish to return. He will go only if his teacher, his acharya, commands him to. The city is filled with sin and temptation. “Bombay is only for those who are very firm. It will take me at least ten years, I think.” The problems of the city are a direct result of the impoverishment of the countryside. He gives me an example. “Everybody uses peanut oil now. But much better for you is sesame oil. At the diksha only sesame oil was used. The seeds would be pressed in a mill turned by bullocks, we would get the oil, and the bullocks would eat the crushed seed pulp. Forty years ago there were six lakh [600,000] bullock oil presses. Each employed two bullocks, so there were twelve lakh [1.2 million] bullocks in these presses. Now there are about sixty. Where did all those bullocks go? To the slaughterhouse. What happened to all those bullock drivers? What happened to their families? They went to the cities, in search of employment. Have you seen Dharavi [one of Bombay’s biggest slums]? It is full of people like those bullock drivers. But there, too, they don’t find work, leading to crime and corruption.” It is a remarkably accurate description of the causes of migration from the village to the city, brought down to the difference between a peanut and a sesame seed.
There was no competition in the village, he says. A potter would make only enough pots and cups as could be bought by the villagers, and he would barter them with the farmers for food. There would only need to be one potter, and he would work on a hand-powered wheel. But now, with electricity powering up his wheel, he can make many more pots than the village needs. “What is he to do with all these pots? He has to go elsewhere to try to sell them, and that creates competition.” It is the same with diamonds. Electric cutting machines have made possible the cutting of diamonds on a mass scale. “A diamond doesn’t degrade, it doesn’t get old with use. So with more and more diamonds being cut, people have to use more and more of them. What do you do after you have rings on all ten of your fingers?” Technology leads to surplus production, which leads to competition, to the death of the village and its barter economy, and to consumption for its own sake. It is a Jain version of Marxism.
Throughout the day, I keep returning to the hall whenever the monks have time for me in between their meditation and their lectures. Sevantibhai keeps directing me to one of the senior acharyas, saying I should pose my questions to him. But the guru has the habit of launching into a discourse without being asked, and it is difficult to interrupt him. Sevantibhai is yet questionable, not practiced. I ask him what was the hardest to give up: his family, his wealth, or his house and its comforts? After a long pause, he answers. “Family. The hardest thing to leave was family.” His extended family or his wife and children? “Not the extended family. They are not religious. But my own family. We learnt together.” He hasn’t seen the woman who was his wife for four months now. For a month and a half after the diksha they traveled side by side—but not together, he is at pains to point out. He doesn’t know when he will see her or the girl who used to be his daughter again. Neither do the boys who used to be his sons. “If I say something that upsets them, there is no mother now to soothe them. But they have Chandrashekhar Maharaj,” he adds quickly, pointing to the guru. “He is more than a mother.”
What was the hardest thing for Sevantibhai to get used to after taking diksha? He considers, then says, “There are twenty-one sadhus in this group. They come from different backgrounds, different homes, some rich, some poor. They have different ways of thinking, different tempers. That took getting used to. For a month and a half there was a tough time.” He heard harsh words from them; he saw how their faces turned sour during gocari when the food was not to their liking. He has had to deal with this: this strained fellowship. He attributes these personality conflicts within the group to the demise of the extended family. “I have known families of up to a hundred people, following one patriarch. They would grow up obeying him. Before, the sadhus used to come from these extended families, and they would all obey the acharya. But now they come from small families, and they are not used to living in big groups. If there are forty people
, all of them think differently. Their capacity for work is different. It will take me a few years to adjust.” All the sadhus give up their worldly possessions to enter this life, but Sevantibhai and his family gave up more of this world’s goods than most of the rest of this order put together. This knowledge, I get the feeling, persists with him past the diksha and into monkhood. Perhaps class has carried over into the classless society of the sadhus. It is like the army: The man who was a millionaire in civilian life finds himself taking orders from one who used to be a clerk.
Modernity has been hard on the sadhus. For instance, they can drink only boiled water, and few people boil water nowadays; most houses of Jain laymen have water filters. In the old days, every house in the village would boil water for later use in boiling feed for the cattle, and the monks would come early enough in the day to get some. But householders also cannot be commanded to boil water for the exclusive use of the monks. The monks are willing to allow the laymen to sin by boiling water for general use, but it is their sin; if the water were to be boiled just for the monks, then the sin would accrue to the monks. Roads are another problem. In their wanderings, the monks try to look for unpaved roads, which are getting rarer and rarer. Paved tar roads are hard on the feet and especially on the eyes; the heat glinting off the tarmac is very bad for their eyesight, which they need to keep sharp for prolonged study of ancient texts, as well as to scan the path ahead to avoid stepping on lives.
The most difficult time physically for Sevantibhai was a journey from Bhabhar to Ahmadabad, where he was to attend another diksha ceremony. Every day they walked eighteen miles, five hours in the morning after sunrise and more in the evening. On one stretch, after walking six miles, his feet started to hurt, so they rested in some fields. But by nightfall they had to reach a particular village where there was a Jain house. The last half hour was excruciating. When he looked at his feet he saw that huge boils and blisters had developed on them. So he took a thorn and burst the blisters, which were filled with water and pus. Since he doesn’t believe in allopathic medicine, he doused the wounds with castor oil and turmeric, as an antiseptic. He shows me the soles of his feet. These are abused feet: cracked, callused, split, and blackened, with layers of skin overlapping each other, cratered like the surface of the moon. But “we can’t hold it in our minds that our feet hurt.” There is greater peril in his traveling on paved roads than sore feet: “All the violence of road building accumulates on us.” Many sadhus these days die in accidents on the highway, which have no space for pedestrian traffic.
But the present state of the world is almost rosy compared to what is to come. Time for the Jains is divided into a continuously repeating cycle of six eras, the first being the most ideal. In this, the fifth era of Jain cosmology, men live to a maximum of 130 years. In the sixth era, the bottom of the cycle, men will be able to live only for 20 years. There will be no vegetable life, no religions—not even the non-Jain ones—and men will have to live in caves in the bottom of rivers, to avoid the fierce heat all around. The height of human beings at the start of the era will be no more than twice the distance between the elbow and the palm and will gradually decline to no more than that span. Therefore, in the Jain worldview, this is the gloomiest historical time to live in, not the next one. For at least in the sixth era, people will have the hope that things will get better in the time after that (the cycle starts again; it goes back up to the fifth). In our time, we don’t even have that comfort. Bad as this time is, it’s only going to get worse.
Sevantibhai is sure he will not reach moksha from this birth. All he can do is to take a dramatic step forward on the path, by concentrating on moksha wholeheartedly. But he will still incur negative karma, merely by living on the planet in its present state. Then why doesn’t Sevantibhai end his life? There are other orders of Jain monks, such as the Sthanakvasis, who make a voluntary exit from the sinful world. They simply stop eating and invite laypeople to their retreat hall to watch them slowly starve to death. But Sevantibhai’s order is more rigorous. “We don’t have the freedom of suicide. There are no shortcuts to the next birth.” There is one exception, however. If Sevantibhai were to find the pull of samsara too great, if he were unable to follow the rules of the order, suicide is preferable to going back to the world.
Permission is sought from Chandrashekhar Maharajsaheb for me to talk to the two younger maharajsahebs. Sevantibhai explains that I have come back to India after twenty-one years abroad. “You have made an excellent decision,” the guruji says, nodding his head at me.
Sevantibhai admits to still feeling the vestiges of fatherhood. He points to a boy monk sitting against a pillar. “I can’t scold him like I can my own sons. I still call them mine. They listen to me. If the guruji is asking everyone to come eat, I can command them to come at once to eat. If they are not studying, I will scold them, as I won’t the other maharajsahebs of their age. Why? Do I feel I have a right with those two and not with the others?” When we are talking about them, he doesn’t use any names for them—perhaps not yet comfortable with calling his boys, so lately Vicky and Chiku, Raj Darshan Vijayji and Ratna Bodhi Vijayji.
The older boy is sitting in a specific type of mediation, with everything he owns touching him: his eight pieces of cloth, his staff, and his bowls for gocari. Around him the other swamis are eating, and there is a stench of sweat, urine, and food. The monks have bad breath—they are forbidden to brush their teeth, as the very purpose of brushing is to kill bacteria—and it is an effort to talk to them at close quarters. All day for a month Vicky has to sit like this. His hair has been freshly pulled. He feels peace and joy in his new life, he says, “not running around like before.” He wakes up at four every morning and spends the day in studying and prayer. At nine-thirty he stretches out in the same hall and goes to sleep. “Four or five times a day I think, when will moksha come? When will I be free?”
The younger boy is still studying while the others are eating. There is something tender about him, and I have the impression that he is keeping up a brave front. Sevantibhai tells me, “He was always more attached to his mother.” So when he is scolded by the father, he writes complaints about Sevantibhai to the nun who used to be his mother. And she writes back. There is a weekly exchange of letters between the two of them. Chandrashekhar Maharaj doesn’t object. When I ask the son about this, he will not admit it, in the manner of a teenager pretending to be indifferent to a girl he’s heartsick about. “If she writes to me, I reply.”
Neither of the boys refers to her as Mummy. Instead, they call her Divya Ruchita Sreeji, her post-diksha name. They don’t talk about their sister. As twins, Utkarsh and Karishma had a bond that went far beyond normal sibling ties. Not once does he mention his renounced sister. The older boy points out that if they were to meet the women, they couldn’t sit close to each other. “Far,” he says, indicating with one arm the necessary distance between them, now no longer mother and son, or brother and sister, but only male and female, susceptible to temptation if not restrained by monastic rules. They can come together to discuss points of doctrine, if permitted by both their gurus, but neither of them should look directly at the other, and they have to be holding a cloth over their mouths. The mother can never, ever, again touch the boy who came out of her womb. “Where I sit a lady can’t sit for one hundred forty-four minutes, and where a lady sits I can’t sit for forty-eight minutes, because the aura of the body lingers on.”
Sevantibhai and the two boys used to eat only once a day. But then the younger boy developed jaundice and now is allowed to eat twice a day. The rules about eating can be waived during illness, since the body, the vehicle of sadhana, needs to be kept alive. But not comfortable. While the boy was stricken with jaundice, the gurumaharaj decided he had to have his lochan. His hair had grown too long. So, yellowed and weakened by jaundice, he sat down before the guru, the guru smeared coal ash on his head, gathered fistfuls of hair one at a time, and yanked it all out by the roots. It was the most difficu
lt time for him in the last few months, the boy tells me.
The younger boy doesn’t remember much about his past, about Bombay. I ask him about his future. “I’ll do as the guru maharajsaheb says.” I ask him why he took diksha. And then the boy, sitting in front of his notebook in which he is revising his Sanskrit lessons, says to me—admits to me—“They say if you take diksha, you’ll get moksha. Right now I have no knowledge of that.” He trusted his father. What choice did he have?
Sevantibhai had defined moksha for me: “In the bliss of moksha there is no desire.” It is a simple straightforward definition: salvation is absence of desire.
On the way back from Patan, I decide to stop in at the great eleventh-century Sun Temple at Modhera. My driver says the temple is well worth seeing, and he drives into the little village and parks outside a spanking new temple, all pastel walls and large-print lettering of the various donors associated with its construction. I tell him there is an older one also.
The Sun Temple is exquisite. The central idol was stationed in such a way that the first rays of the equinox illuminated it directly. There is no idol anymore, but as I walk around the walls of the ancient stone structure, I see that they are filled with lovemakers. A woman is bent over, taking one man in her mouth while her rear is serviced by another. In another figure, a man is kissing a woman with tender passion, holding up her left leg to his waist; under her, another woman is kneeling, fellating the man. They are surrounded by stone plants, stone elephants, and attendants, in full view of God; there is nothing secret or shameful about this. Sex in a Hindu temple is intended for glorious public display. Tourists come in, groups of villagers and tribals and middle-class families from the towns, and children scamper amid the lovers. The figures throb with eroticism; the faces have been hacked off or have been erased by time or the acids in the droppings of the hundreds of pigeons that roost in the crevices of the temple, but their very postures reveal the delight they are taking in the body and its possibilities. This also is holy. This too is sacred.
