I am the concentrated essence of my innumerable past lives. Beginning with the dead comet that produced life on this planet, and created a multitude of basic life forms, and from those developed countless different species of vegetation, reptiles, insects and mammals, I bear the imprint of this legacy on me. I am also in the many characterizations of the best paragon of a humanity that has ceaselessly evolved for tens of millions of years. From this perspective, whatever I am, I am not my own, nor am I anything new. I am a new edition of an incredibly old volume, an expanded and corrected and annotated edition whose original author is unknown.
And I am new, and rare. Not a single moment of my life has happened before. I am a new thing, a new promise that the future will keep, a lesson that will remain for posterity.
Permanence belongs to moments, but moments are desperately fragile. I, too, am, and whatever novelty exists in me, I want to finish speaking of it in a moment because it belongs to the future. I can’t stop without speaking it and there is no time to think—what is the life of a moment?
Let me speak my inner story, let me shed my inner anguish, let me scatter my inner light, let me allow my private experiences to be looted, let me give away my long-collected lessons of inner strength, the ecstasy of my inner being.
So that I may go. I am exhausted, so that I may sleep. But first, let me reveal my one secret, which is the race of man’s legacy to me and my legacy to the race of man—the story of my will to revolution . . .
What sorts of memories occur to me in my silence.
You are made anxious today, O Poet!
By the jangling of earth’s ornaments
The aimless, unceasing movements of unseen feet
Pulsating, throbbing the sound of your wandering footsteps
From your heart arises a clamour.
Who knows why your blood
Dances like the waves of the ocean
Today the impatient forest quivers
I am reminded of that tale
Proceeding through ages
Drunkenly, unsteadily
Silently, quietly
From form to form
From soul to soul
In the morning, at night
Whatever I have acquired
I have merely passed on
From song to song.18
I’ll speak.
As I consider the story of my life, as I consider its importance in the life of a revolutionary by evaluating and weighing and measuring each individual argument, I begin to hold it in higher esteem. There is something in this life. An energy, a celestial glow, which if it isn’t the will to revolution, it is definitely the capacity to worship the will to revolution.
I just remembered something from a long time ago, some ten or eleven years back. I was about fourteen years old then, maybe fifteen. This revolutionary sentiment was smouldering within me and I had wandered to many places before coming back home. I had tried very hard to lead a revolt against my own home and each time I would end up grinding my teeth in helplessness and insignificance.
One day, I don’t know why, I left home. I don’t remember how I came to this decision, or what compelled me, but I still remember today the feeling I had when I left. It is still boiling within me as if it will break through the external pressure and explode. I’m thinking with a wounded pride that there is no place for me in this enormous world, and I keep looking back towards my home as if to destroy it.
Beaming with pride and full of hope, I left my home. What were my worldly possessions? In addition to a small package of biscuits, one loaf of bread and the clothes on my back, an old overcoat into whose pockets I put both of these things.
I have left home to wander, and I’m standing on a hill thinking, where should I go? ‘Where to go’ doesn’t yet produce a clear feeling in me because it hasn’t occurred to me that sometimes you have no place to go. I didn’t feel compelled to go to any particular place; I am voluntarily choosing between many attractive directions . . .
My feet set off in one direction—I kept moving in the direction they propelled me. For the first seven or eight miles I had no idea where I was going; I never even thought about it as my mind was still fixed on vexing thoughts of home. But after about ten miles, my home became too remote for my thoughts. Then I looked at the road, and the part of the road that went off into the distance made me aware that they were taking me towards a waterfall that I had seen many times on a map and in my dreams.
I had decided to leave home for the rest of my life when I set out, but I hadn’t considered how I would survive for the rest of my life on a package of biscuits and a loaf of bread. And the sun was beating down hard, and I was very hungry . . .
I took my clothes off on the banks of the first stream that I came to and lay down. When my body had cooled off a bit I turned over on my stomach and dipped the biscuits in the water and started eating, and that’s how I polished off half of my life savings. Afterwards, I started to dream about a time when no one would have to suffer humiliation, whether in the home or in the world.
I got out of the water and put my clothes on and lay down with my loaf as a pillow so I could rest for a while.
When I woke up it was dark; the stars were shining. I looked around. I was walking through a coffee plantation, but there was no sign of the waterfall that I was walking towards . . .
I walked another mile. I was still in the plantation. When I came to a small brook, I decided to stop there for the night and at the same time remembered that I had a loaf of bread.
All of my savings were gone. I spread my overcoat on the ground and tried to sleep, using the protruding root of a coffee tree as a pillow, listening to the din of the cicadas.
I don’t know if the din ended first or if I fell asleep before it did. But I awoke in the middle of the night. I was shivering. I picked up the coat and wrapped myself in it, and tried to go back to sleep. The cicadas were silent. I listened. From a distance came a deep, oceanic sound. It was the sound of a waterfall.
Wrapping myself up in the coat made me feel even colder. So I put half of it on the ground and wrapped myself up in the rest and, in my endless attempts to keep this arrangement balanced, it somehow turned into morning.
When I could see the waterfall from afar, I sat down on the road and watched it for a long while. I thought that life should be like this, resplendent, limpid, filled with music, free, always alert and endlessly progressive, free from the chains of households and always rebellious . . . I got up slowly and walked towards it.
I don’t know how much of the waterfall’s frothy water I drank that day because water doesn’t alleviate hunger, and whenever I got hungry, I drank.
I passed the night under that waterfall. I found a clean and flat ledge that had been baking all day in the sun to sleep on, and at night when the ledge deceived me and turned cold, I fought with that geezer of an overcoat, trying to make it longer until night turned to daylight. Even after daybreak I didn’t wake up. I remained curled up until the sun came and spread its loving warmth across my cramped form.
My anger had subsided by then; the prior tumult inside me had calmed. I was sitting thoughtfully and observing the waterfall, noticing emptiness in its life . . . I thought that I could feel a stubborn monotony in its volatility, a subservience in its unrestricted freedom, a hunger . . . and I was drinking the water over and over again in order to hide from myself!
By the afternoon, that thoughtfulness had abandoned me. I was depressed and irritated. The feeling that I had was not unlike the feeling I had when I was leaving home. But now it was leading me back home.
It was a feeling of frustration and defeat and I couldn’t keep it from myself—my hunger wouldn’t let me ignore it. I got up and turned back! I passed the night on the road, and by morning I was back home. I had even forgotten my frustration and defeat and had a new respect for life, one that had become hardened and recast through pain and experience.
There had been a wide search conducted fo
r me—but no one had thought to go near that waterfall. Father didn’t say anything to me, nor did he ask me where I went.
He quietly accepted my return. He possessed a generosity which allowed him to endure not only his own but the defeat of others—it took me a long time to recognize this in him . . .
I will tell my story with the newly acquired respect I discovered that day. That feeling of respect, which contains the equanimity of experience, the purity of pain and, perhaps, a little bit of the rage of defeat . . . because although my life has found a kind of realization, it is not quite complete. It’s almost like the feeling when someone has eaten and extinguished his hunger but hasn’t had anything to drink and is still thirsty. It is this story of the agony of completion and incompleteness that I will tell.
Oh light, oh flames! Endow that feeling of respect, that purity and that rage with durability so that I can centre my energies completely on that message which I have retrieved from the dark past of evolution, which I will leave behind for the bright future . . .
Sometimes I think, what can I leave aside from that terrible curse—because my life has been a curse.
Cursed be the social wants that sin against
The strengths of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us
From the living truth!19
*
How should I write it?
Shall I compose my story by pouring all of the will power of my personality in it, using all of the analytical powers of subjectivity, and shout out a challenge full of pain and fire, or
Shall I step outside of my ego and examine my actions and the drives that inspired them from an external, objective vantage point, and speak a calm, dispassionate and intellectual message, or
Shall I think of it as a loan from some natural force, and then like a debtor paying off his entire debt when he returns it, make redress for some wrong committed and offer up a detailed, contrite confession?
Shall I think of my personality as ‘me’, ‘he’ or ‘you’?
I’ve come from a feeling of duty; there is a responsibility on my shoulders. So it is only right that I am like a criminal standing before a judge taking responsibility for his actions, one who hears the unbiased evaluation of his weighed and measured character in the form of a charge sheet from the judge’s mouth, and that’s why I think it’s best if I put myself in the form of ‘you’ and conduct an evaluation of it. Or in order to leave behind a memorial of myself, to leave behind the stamp of my personality and my prowess, I will call myself ‘me’ and express myself.
But I don’t want to do either of these things. I have accepted my responsibility, and so if I am ‘you’ then only for myself. Besides I have no selfhood, and the stamp that I want to leave—I am merely the art of the flow of life which will be reabsorbed in the flow—I am myself a stamp!
I have brought a message, which is not my own, but which I have received from the evolution of my race, which I say under pressure from an external compulsion. All of my actions are the result of a compulsion which is external to me, separate from me. I want to gesture to the future of that compulsion—consider it a force separate from my personality, something supernatural.
Therefore the story in which the message inheres will belong to ‘him’. His name is Shekhar. He is currently awaiting death. In this waiting he is revealing his selfhood to himself, and after reading the truth of his life, drawing out its essence and transcribing it, I will also be leaving.
I am leaving. Where? The same place he is going—where we are both strangers. Because we are indivisible, ultimately one. And our unity is awaiting its death . . .
*
I will say everything with an excited, all-consuming faith. I will say it all. Even if his life is destroyed in the process of making his brilliance manifest, even if it runs into nothingness and is lost, even if he reaches no one.
Destructibility!
When the thorns will be ravished by cruel storms of wind
Who will hear the words of the blossoms, trapped therein
When my selfhood will be mute in its final repose
The silence within me how will anyone disclose
Who, destructibility!
VOLUME 1
DEVELOPMENT
Part 1
Dawn and Divinity
Life’s most profound occurrences always happen in unacknowledged moments.
It’s hard to pin down the exact moment when pain sets in; the feeling is obvious enough, but it’s almost impossible to know when, where and how the infection took hold because we were not paying heed to it then.
His birth happened, too, in one such unacknowledged moment. He was born in a tent, pitched next to scattered ruins in a desolate land, far beyond inhabited country. His father wasn’t present at the time; his mother was unconscious, too, at the time.
There was a midwife present. But there is always someone, somewhere, who witnesses the beginning of every pain, one person or other who understands the secret to the turbulent motion of development, but since we don’t know that ‘someone’, since we can’t perceive the received information, we claim that the ‘someone’ doesn’t exist . . .
No one really knows whether this newborn perceived his own birth. No one could tell you whether he was alert or not because there is no definitive account of his first moments. We have hearsay evidence, of course, that tells us that it was approximately twilight. The birds had finished chirping and had retreated to their nests, where in some meditative contemplation, some inert curiosity, they fell silent, and the watchman who made his rounds through the ruins began his circuit, walking back and forth, singing some off-key tune . . .
But just as ways to heal can only be prescribed after a distinct stab of pain, similarly, as soon as his mother woke up exhausted and said, ‘Hai!’ there was a commotion all around. The newborn was washed and cleaned and made to look like a proper Brahmin boy; the four or five occupants of the tent began running around, here and there and back again, pointlessly, purposelessly . . .
In the meantime, his father returned. After he made sure his son was all right, the anxious tension in his body dissipated, and the wrinkles on his forehead, furrowed out of some hope of preventing misfortune, relaxed and disappeared, and he stood there quietly with his thoughts, half-happy, half-satisfied. Then the local pundit arrived, and a Buddhist mendicant, too, and all present turned to forging a new link for the newborn in the chains of their personal life philosophies in order to bind the infant to a fixed spot in their own worlds . . .
The ruins he was born in were the ruins of a Buddhist temple. On that very day, a casket containing the remains of Gautama Buddha had been brought out for viewing, and the mendicant had come to the child’s father as his guest in order to worship it. When he saw that an infant had been born on the same day, he said to his father, ‘This child is an incarnation of the Buddha. Make sure that he is initiated into a Buddhist order.’
Father said, ‘Yes.’
The Brahmin priest who was in attendance said, ‘This child has been born into a line of Brahmins and his upbringing should be in accordance with that lineage, and because of the influence of the Buddha on his birth, he will be a devotee of non-violence and will bring glory to Brahminism.’
Mother said, ‘That’s good.’
Father thought for a moment and said, ‘We should call him “Buddhadev”.’
Mother thought to herself, ‘No matter what, I’m going to call him “Tau”.’ And then out loud, she said, ‘I vow on his behalf that he will be a vegetarian for his entire life.’
Father had decided to himself, ‘I’m going to make him an engineer so that he can build new cities.’
Mother thought to herself, ‘My Tau will be a barrister and will help the downtrodden.’
And so, before he was even aware, the child’s life had been shackled by custom and many palpable but powerful bonds cast a shadow over his life; he had been sold off.
They say that a human
being makes his own bonds, but then who is responsible for the shackles that are on his feet from the moment he is born, shackles that take an entire lifetime to cut away?
Ask the priests and the mendicants, because no one has been able to determine what bonds they, too, had fixed in their own minds.
*
A voice asks, how did you come to learn all of this?
We seldom notice the moment that a complete, human consciousness begins to dawn in a newborn; so certainly no one would have noticed the moment when an order of experience less developed than human consciousness—which merely makes marks, but neither understands writing nor desires—was born.
But perhaps as soon as a child becomes a formless lump of flesh, he bears an indelible stamp, which belongs not only to the contemporary forces that produced him but also to those innumerable events that preceded his birth and the countless transformations that will succeed it. The stamp is placed and remains affixed there; it never becomes clearly manifest, never enters our consciousness—until it overwhelms us like the echo from an incomprehensible shock at the blow of an unexpected revelation.
These matters about the moment of his birth are most likely not scripted by his own brain. And he can’t tell you where he experienced any of this, how he experienced it and whether or not he even really experienced it. Because these recollections are probably aggregates of the mental images generated by collecting and hearing various, disconnected narratives on countless different occasions, observing half-finished gestures and perceiving half-formed, invisible thoughts through some synthesizing internal force.
But there are also some things that don’t come to light this way—that no one ever speaks out loud, that no one ever considers. How did these things enter his brain? How did these images appear on the screen of his memory?
Shekhar Page 5
