The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  9

  THE ISLE OF

  ROUGH MAGIC

  WE ENTERED THE DARKEST WEEK of the year. The skies were ashen. A thin mantle of foul air prevented the rays of the sun from reaching the city; its disk hung over the river, wan and sickly at midday, no more a source of heat than the moon. The temperature was mild—no icy winds, no polar vortex, no bright blue frigid days—but this mealy-mouthed cold neither set in nor left you alone. There was no way to insulate against it. I found myself on many mornings fully dressed to go out, rattling about the house in search of a warm nook. But there was none. The only solution was to get back into bed, and I found myself doing this: spending long mornings, fully dressed under a heavy blanket of bloated cotton, mattress lumpy underneath, reading like an invalid until the town woke up, people were done with their prayers and ablutions, and it was warm enough to go outside.

  I had been here too long, and it was beginning to affect me adversely. Many aspects of my New York self had quietly come under assault in Benares. My sense of time was only the first and most obvious thing to go. I arrived with New York time, which I retained for a while, grafting it onto Benares. I was busy, officious. I went from person to place, gathering my material with surgical precision, ready to go home and write it up. I ignored the smiles of the people I was moving among. For a while the trick worked. The days went by swiftly. New York’s speed and industry stayed with me. But all the while a deep undertow of Benares time—languid, sluggish, miring—rose up from below. And one day, as if air brakes had been applied to me, my dizzying pace in the city came to a halt. I felt dangerously out of step with the place. Like a planet retrograding, my days grew larger and emptier; the hours dragged. New York time crumbled, and no matter what I did, I was not able to seize it again. It was like a tune that had gone out of my head. The emphasis in Benares on the timeless fact of death, a preparation for facing eternity, abolished the modern sense of time. It made daily life seem inconsequential; and in doing so, it created the conditions for an ahistorical society.

  “My notions of time are confused,” wrote Alice in 1934. “What happened yesterday, the day before, or today? Or this morning? Perhaps it has already happened? I’m now beginning to understand why no historical chronology is possible in this country. Time is suspended and the change from day to night has nothing to do with it. A calendar is a nonsensical thing here.”

  Outside, the calendar year was out. A stage was being prepared on the ghat for the New Year festivities. Music, choreographed dancing, a live band, patriotic songs. “Hello, hello. Check, check. Hello, checking,” the sound engineer’s voice boomed out over the river. A large sign in the colors of the Indian tricolor said INDIAN, LET THAT BE YOUR RELIGION.

  That religion, Benares had shown me, was composed of more than its fair share of actual religion; what it meant to be Hindu and what it meant to be Indian unavoidably overlapped. The knowledge of caste was just one tenet in this welding of belief and nationality. But as time went on, I was made aware of a whole substratum of belief composed of magic and superstition that formed a part of the daily life of Benares. They were the vestiges of what must have constituted belief in all classical societies. This was still in many respects a world similar to the one Gibbon describes in his history of Rome, where it was “the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity,” and where “the alterations of nature” were “connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind.”

  It was a world in which karmic law was still in force and the actions of the present were seen to exert an unearthly influence over the future. People looked to soothsayers and divines, palmists, witch doctors, astrologers, and exorcists. Many in Benares would sooner go to an astrologer than a doctor. Nobody would dream of performing an important ceremony or rite without first consulting one. Calendar time mattered only in that it was laced with a knowledge of the beneficence and malfeasance of the celestial world. It was unthinkable that any two people would marry without first matching their astrological charts, and if they did not match—or if one was deemed to be born under a dodgy star—the girl or boy would do better to marry an astrologically compatible stranger, rather than a life partner who might be compatible in every other way but this one supreme regard.

  Magic, like death, was ever present in Benares. There was a whole climate of subtle influence, now darkened by the malice of a family member, now brightened by the beneficence of the stars. People confronted these influences directly. They were as real as weather in the West.

  One morning, Pinku and I passed a witch doctor, brushing clean a toddler of the evil eye. This old man with white stubble sat on the dusty pavement in front of a green door. He wore a little Union Jack beanie and kept his spells in a yellow plastic bag. He pressed a pink-handled kitchen knife gently against the jugular of the toddler, muttering all the time. Then, banishing the evil eye with a swipe of the knife to both sides of the boy, he blew on him, brushed him with a whisk, and tied a black thread around his neck. A line of people stood waiting. One woman, in a blue sari covered in large green flowers and little red sequins, carried a small child in a zebra-striped sweater. The child had a black mark on his temple to ward off the evil eye. He was getting sick, and his mother feared that someone, in praising him, had secretly wished him harm. She had brought him to see the witch doctor to clear him of the special ill will that came in the guise of a compliment.

  “These are our little consultants,” Pinku said, and laughed. “They stand in for the psychologist and the doctor.” Then he confessed that he sometimes brought his little nephew to have him brushed clean of the evil eye.

  “Do you believe in all this?” I said, with perhaps some alarm in my voice.

  “No, but my family does.”

  It was not just his family who believed; everyone did. The great majority of India operated out of a kind of double consciousness in which the laws of reason and the laws of magic, like Roman and common law in Britain, reached an easy harmony. Each person came to his or her own special composite; but few—no matter how urban or westernized—lived their lives without factoring in the pressures of the supernatural.

  Golu, Mapu’s guru’s grandson, and the last in a long line of priests, was a master manipulator of these beliefs. He was as enterprising as a medieval friar and knew exactly how to prey on the fears of rich businessmen and industrialists. He came to see me one afternoon and regaled me with tales of his lucrative trade in banishing the malfeasance of the stars.

  He was tall by Indian standards, dressed elegantly in brown corduroy trousers, a dark yellow kurta, and a gray waistcoat. His forehead was emblazoned with broad yellow streaks pierced with red. He was vain, acquisitive, and, I thought, a trifle irritated at having to conceal his materialism in a garb of religiosity. God and Mammon found a happy balance in Golu. The ringtone on his smartphone was a famous verse from the Gita: “Whenever and wherever, O son of Bharata, there is a fall in dharma, and the rise of adharma—I will create Myself [anew].” When Golu folded his hands in greeting, I noticed a large ring of hessonite for protection from the ill will of Rahu, the eclipser.

  We went up to the roof, where Golu brought me up to date with his priestly work. He blessed private planes and helicopters; he procured astronomically priced corals to stave off the wrath of Mars. The stars and planets were his bread and butter, and only he and his team of Brahmins knew how to manage their adverse influences.

  Consider the case of the chewing-tobacco magnate from Rajasthan. The tobacco magnate had only just heard the bad news that the Supreme Court would outlaw his chewing tobacco, which was known to cause oral cancer. “It would have ruined him,” Golu said with feeling for the rich man’s plight. Golu immediately ordered a sacrifice worth seventy lakhs, or roughly one hundred thousand dollars.

  The ceremony began at 9:00 a.m., and almost as soon as it was over—“even before it was over,” Golu emphasized—two important bits of news c
ame through. The first was that the magnate’s son, who had been trying to get out of his marriage, had been granted a divorce. The woman came around and gave it to him. (That divorce was not part of the Hindu scheme, but a borrowed concept out of the West, did not trouble Golu.) Secondly, the Supreme Court issued a stay on the tobacco ban.

  “Can you imagine?” said Golu. “Right then and there—this is Rajasthan in May—it began to rain. Rain, as you have never seen before. A downpour!

  “So, you see, it is very important to keep this relationship”—here he used the English phrase—“of give-and-take going. The Ganges takes from us, but she also gives, doesn’t she?

  “There is a secret character to this city. You need to understand that.” Before leaving, he invited me back to the temple, promising to perform a number of expensive prayers and ceremonies to ensure my well-being.

  It felt almost like a threat.

  At the Pishach Mochan temple and tank, on the western limits of the city, the spirits of the dead were liberated and exorcisms were performed. A gnarled old tree overlooked a large tank of green water. Pinku pointed to the nails that had been hammered into the tree: “They are basically guesthouses for the lost spirits of the dead.”

  Those who had more money made little cement mounds. Yellowish-white lines were drawn on the ground in a hopscotch pattern, with marigolds, cloves, and little smoking stumps of incense placed in the different squares and circles. The wandering spirit, Pinku told me, was caught in one of the circles, then forced into a clove, and the possessed person was freed.

  The tank, with its greenish water, was meant to have special powers. Trash lapped up against its stone steps, where children were playing. A small boy defecated in the long grass behind me. “They’re making fools of people,” Pinku said. “Most of the so-called possessed people really just have psychological problems.”

  Pinku’s commitment to science felt like a form of resistance in a place where even the most educated people retained a magical cast of mind.

  At a multiday reading of a religious text, held in honor of BHU’s centenary, the presiding Brahmin, who had taught at Harvard, interspersed his songs about the deeds of Krishna with sermons on modern society.

  He lamented that while many Indians worked in the software industry, far fewer could be credited with inventing new software. I imagined we were in for a lecture on the damage Indian education, with its overemphasis on mathematics and science, had done to creativity; but, no, the Brahmin took a different line. “Our young girls and boys are serving the West,” he said with anguish. “When will the day come that their boys and girls will serve us?

  “We once had these technologies too. But over the course of a thousand years of slavery, we forgot them. Or, rather, we were made to forget them.” Then, as if speaking of magical powers, he said, “We must awaken these practices among us again.”

  The Brahmin was not alone in his conflation of magic and science. Modi himself believed something similar. “We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata,” he told a gathering of doctors and professionals at a hospital in Bombay in 2014. “If we think a little more, we realise that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time.

  “We worship Lord Ganesh. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”

  The achievements of the scientific West rankled in India like nothing else. India could do without Western literature, art, civics, philosophy, and religion, but the fruits of technology, science, and medicine, India wanted. This was the West’s “weapon of demoralizing superiority.” Yet, as much as India coveted the feats of science, little acknowledgment was made of the mindset behind them, nor of the centuries it took for Europe to shrug off its own belief in magic and superstition. In this climate of material results admired and methods disdained, or treated with ambivalence at best, even the coveted achievements of Western science could be regarded as the product of an especially potent brand of magic.

  IN HIS QUEST TO LEAD me deeper into the world of belief in Benares, Pinku took me to see a boy ascetic. His ashram was a vast concrete shed with rough squarish pillars. A midmorning gloom pervaded this hall of giants, which was dotted with greasy generators and motorbikes. Deep inside, on a little wooden perch, sat Balak Das. He was from bandit country in Madhya Pradesh, and no longer a boy. His features were dark and tribal, his face thin, his hair ragged and long. He was dressed in saffron robes; two mobile phones lay on a satin bolster next to him; he talked down to us from his eminence, wiggling his toes as he spoke. He was sometimes giddy and playful, sometimes solemn and self-regarding. He had left his home in the Chambal valley, he told me, when he was but a boy of six. He had performed severe austerities, tapasya. He sat for days with fires burning around him, unmoving, lost in meditation, gazing upon the peace of the abyss.

  “Completely still,” he said, evoking the image from the Gita of the ascetic “abiding alone in a secret place, without craving and without possessions … senses held in check … body, head, and neck maintained in perfect equipoise,” still as a lamp in a windless place. He gained special tantric powers. He was versed in the black arts. He could, for instance, if he wanted, reduce me to ash with the fire of his inner concentration. Then suddenly a wave of hilarity came over Balak Das, and giggling, he said, “The only thing that ever defeated me was Pepsi.” He recalled the scalding sensation of the fizz going down his throat—no one had told him to drink it slowly—and he thought he was going to die. He spat it out immediately. It had to be alcohol. Balak Das’s guru, enjoying himself immensely at Balak Das’s expense, told him that the drink cost five hundred rupees, and he would now have to compensate him for the waste. “Five hundred rupees!” Balak Das guffawed. “Five hundred rupees was all the money I had in the whole world.”

  Balak Das had risen; he had become a mahant, a head priest; he now had political ambitions. He said brazenly, “I have a desire—I’ve always had it—to be worshipped and honored.”

  Balak Das was a child of magic. No social or moral idea he could express would earn him more esteem in the eyes of his followers—one now sat on the floor at his feet, looking like an overgrown adolescent—than his ability to perform miracles: to tell the future, to incinerate his opponents, to accrue wealth and honor through those who flocked to him because of the magical power he had gained through his austerities. In his view, the power of the West could also be attributed to magic. But of rather an inferior sort. He spoke of missile technology with equal measures of wonder and disdain: “The weaponry in our scriptures is superior, you see. When we fired our great weapons, they came back into the hands of our warriors. Yours do not come back. They are single-use only.”

  We picked our way out through the darkness of that immense warehouse of an ashram. Outside, the boy ascetic’s two SUVs were freshly washed and gleaming in the morning sunshine.

  ONE AFTERNOON, AT A LECTURE on a sixteenth-century poet-saint called Surdas, Pinku pointed out Urmila Sharma.

  She was stout, in her early seventies, dressed in a beautiful silk sari and sweater. A long thin streak of black on her forehead gave her otherwise grandmotherly aspect a touch of severity. Pinku said she was the sister of a famous musicologist, and very knowledgeable herself. So, as the lecture concluded, I approached. No sooner had I introduced myself than Urmila asked me if I was Indian.

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, I would prefer we continue our conversation in an Indian language.” Any would do. She had mastered half a dozen. But not English. “I made a vow as a young girl to only ever speak to an Indian in an Indian language.”

  I went to see her one rainy day in December. She lived in a charmless residential neighborhood on the edge of BHU’s vast campus. A forest of weeds grew out of the deep drains; heaps of uncollected trash were on the street corners; eroded islands of tarmac streamed with water. Ur
mila met me at the door of a drab yellow bungalow, which was in total darkness. In one room, I could just about discern the spectral shape of a sitar on a platform. The house was freezing. We came out into the open briefly and climbed a concrete staircase. A garden was visible through the diamond-shaped openings in a plaster screen.

  Urmila led me up to a pantry of sorts, illuminated by tube light. The walls were green and badly scuffed in places; yellowing books and dented plastic bottles were everywhere. The furniture and electronics were under dustcovers. The room had a heavy air of decay, and I found myself looking longingly through the begrimed gauze of a mesh screen at a grove of rain-drenched mango trees.

  As I was taking in the room, Urmila asked that I wash my feet. The house was filthy, but that did not matter. The washing of a guest’s feet was an ancient Indian act of welcome, documented in Sanskrit poetry and epics. It must once have existed alongside a wider concern for the cleanliness of one’s surroundings, but now it occurred in a vacuum, with no thought to the sordid state of the house or the neighborhood beyond. I offered to remove my shoes, but as if to emphasize the purely ritual nature of the act, Urmila insisted I keep them on. Then she poured the water as I washed the soles of my sneakers, and from then on, the empty ritual was repeated every time I came to the house.

  Urmila, who was born into a Brahmin family from Punjab in 1944, was an exception in the Hindu society of that time. Women traditionally did not receive a classical education. They were forbidden, no less than those of low-caste birth, from studying or chanting the Veda. Urmila had lived the Brahmin’s vocation to the fullest; she was initiated into the life of the mind, a twice-born woman.

  “I decided at a very young age,” she said, “never to have any worldly relations.”

  “Worldly relations?”

  “Never to marry. I wanted to remain free to live the life of the mind.”