The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  As time went on, Anand said, “a mountain of poverty” descended upon his family. The Jhas were forced to sell their land as others, less highborn, moved in. The family jewels were stolen in a robbery. Before long, this Brahmin family, which had once owned land and horses, was reduced to penury. “Things became so bad,” Anand said, referring to a time before his birth, “that for three and four days at a time there would be no food cooked in our house. It was a terrible burden on my grandfather.”

  Anand’s father, who had dropped out of school after tenth grade, was unmarried. The atmosphere at home was tense. Anand’s grandfather locked Anand’s father in the house with the intention of pressuring him into marrying against his will. Anand’s father escaped and ran away. He thought he could make good on his own.

  The old caste-based society of India was changing. Brahmins could do certain forms of work, such as government jobs, teaching, joining the civil service, that were almost like modern iterations of their old vocation. But work in India is never just work; marriage never just marriage; every element of how you live, down to what and with whom you eat, is informed by the imperative of caste.

  Tradition could allow for incremental change, but it could never have permitted the debasing work that Anand’s father in his despair ended up doing: he went to Bhimnagar, on the Koshi River, and washed buses for a Muslim proprietor. “And,” Anand said pointedly, “he lived with him in his house.”

  “Despite being a Brahmin?” I said.

  “Yes, yes,” Anand said, grateful that I had understood the implication.

  Anand’s father earned one rupee a day. Of that money, he spent twenty-five paise on a bag of roasted gram flour, which was all he ate; the remaining seventy-five paise he sent home, and there would be food in Anand’s house.

  I had just been in Patna, the capital of Bihar, and under its overpasses, which cast long shadows over the low-lying sprawl, I had seen vendors selling the conical tubes of newspaper containing the roasted gram flour that Anand described. It was meager sustenance. Patna had presented a frightening vision of urban decay. The streets were strewn with dust and bits of paper; open gutters ran alongside them, choked with blackish liquid and plastic bags in blues and pinks and whites. The one image that redeemed the city was the soaring spectacle of silk-cotton trees in flower: their fleshy coral blossoms as large as fruit lay in blankets on the street, rotting in the spring sun. I looked again at Anand’s physique: the delicate bones of his face, the skin stretched taut like parchment, the knotty joints, the thin arms and wrists. A history of real physical hunger lay behind Anand’s hunger now, his hunger for the world.

  Anand brought his story out of the darkness of a parable into the hard bright light of Indian poverty, garish and detailed. Nothing made his descriptions more real than his uncanny ability to remember monetary values, every penny earned and spent by either him or his father.

  Anand’s father didn’t come home for fourteen years. “He learnt drivery,” Anand said. “He was employed after much struggle as a bus driver by the Bihar government. He drove on a contractual basis, and for every kilometer he drove, he received thirty paise.” A stamp, a piece of fruit: that was what thirty paise bought you.

  Anand’s father went back and forth from Patna to a town seventy kilometers away, earning between forty and fifty rupees for the two-hour journey. Eventually he earned enough money to marry. His dream was to land a government job, and the woman who became his wife—Anand’s mother—chided him for this fixation, which, though it offered security, must have seemed more trouble than it was worth. “I have waited so long,” he told her, “I have borne so much; sooner or later, I’m sure the government will reward me.”

  And so it did: he received a three-year contract with a regular monthly income. He was made “fix,” Anand said, using the English word to mean that his father, after years of uncertainty, had found some modicum of stability.

  The story until now—about Anand’s father, his grandfather, the distant but illustrious ancestors—had been a prelude to his own. He wanted me to see the loss of prestige against the background of what had been. Without that, it would not be possible to understand what it meant to fall; nor indeed what it was to pick yourself up again. And it was only about now—fifteen or twenty minutes into our conversation—that I made a quick note:

  At first I could not tell what his story was about. But soon it became clear it was a story about dharma lost and regained, all embodied in a journey from a roguish and poor past to Banaras Hindu University here, at this ancient seat of learning.

  Anand was born on April 1, 1994, but he gave even this recent date a mythical cast, so that it seemed it could hardly have been the year of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, or of the release of Pulp Fiction.

  “I was born in the same month as Lord Ram, and as I grew up, it became clear to my parents that this tongue of mine, with which I’m speaking to you now, and speaking frank”—Anand used the English word—“would not descend. My parents grew worried. The doctor said, ‘This boy may never speak.’ So, I had to have an operation, and only after that was I able to speak. My first school was a convent in the village, a private school. I will tell you all that I remember,” he said, embarrassed suddenly by the breadth of detail he had supplied. “I have forgotten a great deal too.”

  The words he used for forgetting and remembering—asmarana and smarana—are beautiful. They share a root with the English word “memory.” Anand’s language, in general, was refined. He spoke a Sanskritized Hindi, which from a less deft speaker might have seemed cumbersome and haughty, but with him was fluid and natural. My language, in comparison, was inferior. Here, in India, the modern had yet to surpass the classical. If the cities of the West nurtured sophistication and education, the pockets of urban anglophone life in India had nothing to compare with the cultural richness of the old country.

  With the full resources of his language at his fingertips, Anand used a Sanskrit word of great charm to describe himself as a child. He said he was a “chanchal-type” person; it meant “unsteady, inconstant, movable.” I had seen this instability in him, and it had perturbed me. Now, by identifying it himself, he seemed in some way to neutralize it.

  His fierce intelligence, raw, prehensile, equipped with a photographic memory, was visible even in boyhood. In speaking of his astonishing recall, he said, “I would see something, and it would go straight into my…” He tapped his forehead. “In the third grade, I came first out of seven schools. I was publicly honored by the elected head of the village. I still have the certificate,” he said with a trace of sadness.

  A self-destructiveness was evident in Anand even at an early age. His chanchal quality grew into something more sinister. What began as the normal antics of a naughty child—pushing his chair back in class, stealing the lunch of another child—had by the fifth grade already acquired something of the air of criminality that was prevalent in Bihar at the time. A few years before Anand was born, the state had elected a thuggish peasant as its chief minister. By 2004, around the time Anand was ten, The Economist reported that “Bihar [had] become a byword for the worst of India: of widespread and inescapable poverty; of corrupt politicians indistinguishable from the mafia dons they patronise; of a caste-ridden social order that has retained the worst feudal cruelties.”

  Anand and his best friend, Rahul, must have imbibed something of this atmosphere. They were both denied a TC—a transfer certificate required for them to go from primary school to secondary school. The denial was not for academic reasons; they were both, as Anand put it, “toppers.”

  “Then why were you denied it?”

  “We beat someone up,” Anand said, sheepish still after all these years. Referring to his lady teacher, Anand said, “Madam would not give us our TCs. She said, ‘You have to call your guardian, or your parents, first.’ Naturally we did not want to do that, so this Rahul, who was a pretty rough guy and used to carry a knife around with him, pulled it on Madam. He planted it squarely in
to her desk and just left it there. ‘If you don’t give us our TCs,’ he told her, ‘I’m going to kill you. Understand?’ Madam got frightened. She said, ‘Obviously you won’t listen to reason. So I had better just do what you want.’

  “She gave it”—Anand smirked—“and we took it!”

  It was the first of many such moments when Anand had fallen prey to his environment. He even came to look fondly on the legacy of his bandit great-uncle.

  “At least he made a name! I feel I’ve got to do something with this life of mine. I’ve got to become something.”

  The stories that most enchanted Anand were tales of affluence. He told me of one uncle who had fallen into bad ways. The son of the most esteemed Jha brother, the Railway Police officer, got himself thrown out of the house and ran away to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. But there he did not fail. He made a love marriage with a woman who was a Ph.D. from a university in Faizabad. They bought a large house and a car. “And that same man who could not do without guns, booze, and meat,” Anand said, referring to a triune of sins that exists only in India, “is now totally reformed.”

  I suspected Anand wanted something similar to happen to him. He would have liked nothing better than to make good somewhere, by whatever means, and to thumb his nose at the pious fools in his village who were convinced that the bad blood of his uncle and great-uncle was reasserting itself in Anand.

  The village was rife with malicious rumors that Anand was on the path to ruin. His father, trying to save Anand from himself, sought his father-in-law’s advice. The boy was sent to a Sanskrit school forty or fifty kilometers from the village. It recreated the ancient pastoral of Brahmin boys learning the scriptures by the banks of a river, and here Anand would be reformed.

  “It was a beautiful place,” Anand said, pointing outside, where the palpitating dusk had given the Ganges a granite hue.

  There was a river; the living conditions were excellent; their temple housed a statue of Ram ornamented with a crown of solid gold. In the morning, the boys were fed a porridge of yogurt and sugar, which was known as “the children’s breakfast.” In the afternoon, there was “a royal repast.” In the evenings, they took a ritual bath and cooked their own food. No one could eat until Lord Ram had been fed first.

  Little Brahmin boys, cooking and cleaning for themselves, serving Lord Ram, devoting themselves to the study of Sanskrit and the scriptures—it was an idyll. But even here, Anand soon began to play what he called a “leadership” role.

  “It took me six months to get the measure of the place.” He meant it took him that long to sniff out the malefactors. He studied for six months with all his heart. His father had convinced him that there was something special about him, and he worked hard to live up to his potential. But then the chief priest of the school, who had a connection to Anand’s village, showed up with the guns.

  “Guns?” I said.

  “Yes.” Anand grinned. “He had a little trade in guns on the side and wanted me to perform a ceremony to bless them.”

  “How old were you?” I asked, astonished by this development.

  “I must have been—what?—ten or eleven.”

  The chief priest kept his munitions in a cave, where he was also harboring a fugitive from justice. A “sooter,” Anand said, and for a moment I didn’t know what he meant.

  “He was an excellent shot. He had amazing aim. People would hire him to kill other people.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, there I was: I had been sent to this place to be reformed, to learn Sanskrit, but I was soon living like a criminal.”

  The shooter, like many men of criminal backgrounds in Bihar, had political ambitions. By the summer, he was campaigning to be the chief elected official in Anand’s village.

  “We had holidays. There was a nice election mood heating up.”

  Anand’s father was horrified to see his eleven-year-old son as a mascot in the shooter’s campaign, riding about in an open jeep with a turban tied on his head. “How do you know this man?” Anand’s father asked gravely. Anand had no reply, and his father saw that his worst fears had been confirmed: Anand had fallen into bad ways.

  He was pulled out of the Sanskrit school and brought back to the village, but by then it was too late. Anand had developed a taste for the unsavory side of life. As he put it, “Whatever mold you cast the clay in, that is the pot you’ll get.” He became a “big boss” at school; he was elected monitor, he said, giving the English word a deep tilde, so that it sounded like “manyetor.” He began once again to adopt a “leadership role.” Teachers grew afraid of him. He cut class with impunity. He sat all day in a village shop, watching Bollywood films.

  “And you know what kind of films I would watch?” he said with sudden urgency. “Those films in which the hero becomes a millionaire, films with strife and struggle in them. I would love all the adversity the hero had to endure before he became a big man. One film in particular was my favorite: Muqaddar ka Sikandar.” The Conqueror of Destiny.

  I knew the film. Bollywood was perhaps the only shared cultural point of reference left to us both, all the proof Anand and I had that we even lived in the same country, and that was now in jeopardy too: a new generation of Indians, educated abroad, found the films too operatic. The industry was increasingly run by native English-speakers. I had met many actors, producers, and directors from this world over the years, and the impression they gave me were of people guessing at the tastes and desires of a vast Hindi-speaking audience they were no longer culturally in touch with. Many, I suspected, would have preferred to make films that were more subtle and urban, less melodramatic, but those films did not speak to young men such as Anand. And it was interesting that the actors Anand described as his heroes, in that little shop in rural Bihar, had been my heroes, too, despite our fourteen-year age gap. Even this film Anand admired so much—The Conqueror of Destiny—had been made in 1978.

  In the three years Anand spent in the village, he became a man of fashion. He adopted what he called an “espice” cut.

  “What is a spice cut?”

  “Hair forward”—he ran his fingers through his brilliantined hair—“and short at the back. That’s the fashion I would keep. I wore colorful English-style T-shirts and torn jeans. My living style became Western. My own culture—our culture—began to change. And do you know how I paid for all this?”

  “How?”

  “I would perform religious ceremonies for people here and there. I’d studied Sanskrit for two years, and so I could get by, and I’d earn some two or three hundred rupees a pop.”

  I laughed out loud. “You would use your earnings as a Brahmin to pay for your Western fashions?”

  “Yes.” He grinned broadly.

  An idea of the West, even if only as a source of technology and fashion, had reached Anand in his little village in Bihar. The priestly work of his ancestors became less an exalted duty and more a way for a young man to fund his growing taste for a Western lifestyle. Anand’s predicament—which was the predicament of so many young men—crystallized in a very real way in his life: a choice.

  He’d done badly in his tenth-grade examinations. He’d earned a third division: “I didn’t study at all.” The only subject he’d done passably well in was mathematics, in which he got 66 percent. He wanted to study commerce. He had a natural head for business and thought it was a field in which he might amount to something. He was desperate to make a name for himself. He filled out the application form, paid his fees, and secured a place to study business administration in one of the top government colleges in Muzaffarpur.

  His name was already on the list of students when something put Anand on an altogether different course. At a wedding at the house of one of his maternal uncles, a guru, versed in the scriptures and in astrology, came to perform the rites. As the guru recited various mantras during the marriage ceremony, Anand began reciting alongside him in the background. The guru heard Anand and was impressed. He said to his father, with the s
pecial authority of a clairvoyant, “Give this boy an education in Sanskrit. It will be good for him. His future is very bright.”

  As I heard this, I felt something of the dread we feel in certain books and films when we desperately want a character to go one way, and they go inexorably another. Commerce was an excellent choice for Anand. It represented a kind of shorthand in his mind for modernity, and his desire for material wealth ought to have been given a proper outlet. Anand was intelligent, but did not strike me as an intellectual. I felt he was especially unsuited to the pieties of a traditional education in Sanskrit. He would surely revolt and feel guilty. It was a pattern that had already done him considerable harm. The idea of dharma had calcified over time: it could no longer serve as a guide for self-realization. Commerce was much nearer Anand’s real dharma. He had tremendous energy, which, unharnessed, would fester and become the cause of a greater disturbance.

  But Anand’s father—the man who had waited a lifetime for a contract to drive buses for the Bihar government—found it difficult to refuse the revered elder figure of the astrologer-priest. Mr. Jha, though poorly educated, was in the end a Brahmin. A man far grander than himself had seen promise in his son and was telling him to initiate the boy in the ancient rites of their caste. How could Mr. Jha refuse him? Anand had his heart set on commerce, but he could not, in turn, refuse his father. Anand said, “If it’s something you want me to do, then it must be good, and I’ll do it.” His father replied, “It’s you who has to study. Not me.”

  Father and son—under the sway of the prophetic visitor—together arrived at a place of perfect misunderstanding. The dream of commerce was abandoned, and Anand was sent to yet another Sanskrit school. He tried again to correct course, tried once more to alter his nature to fit the pieties of his vocation. Once again, his intelligence and charm earned him the affection of people around him—most notably a Brahmin Sanskrit teacher called Madam Veena—and yet his chanchal disposition landed him in trouble.