The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  On the 24th we drove to Satna in order to pick up Alfred Würfel and then proceed to Khajuraho … I almost forgot to mention the second evening. I went with Montu and Alfred to the temples in moonlight. Captivated and overwhelmed, we could hardly tear ourselves away from the spot. Montu too shared the enthusiasm of us Europeans, though in a more measured and less enduring way. Finally he slipped away from us and went up a temple. Indeed, from a distance his appearance was in such harmony with the surrounding, a rock of these rocks, a life of these spirits, all this is his, belongs to him, and is not anything alien or mysterious, as for us: this moon, the landscape, these forms, these colours are in his blood, are part of his self; why, then, should the delight extricate him from himself?

  —ALICE BONER DIARIES, APRIL 2, 1937

  WE REACHED KHAJURAHO WITH THE broadening of day. A tourist town of internet cafés and multicuisine restaurants had sprung up around the temple complex. There was a great big airport of steel and blue glass. When Alice was here in 1937, the temples, reclaimed from the jungle a hundred years before, still retained a wildness. Alice described them as “weather-beaten” and “completely black.” She had been able to visit them in moonlight. The temples marked the passage of time, but as I was beginning to see, in places where the past is not dead—where no line has been drawn between the classical world and this one—men do not enjoy contemplating their distance from it. They want instead to eradicate the distance. The Archaeological Survey of India, which had given the temple complex what the writer Neel Mukherjee called a “municipal soul,” was frantically erasing the effect of time on the temples. Framed against the wan winter sky, they had been turned into ornaments in a manicured garden with little cemented pathways and flower beds full of dahlias. Some were even being rebuilt.

  Shivam had little interest in the historicity of the temples, and yet there was something wonderful in seeing him move among them. He greeted the deities with loud salutations; he touched everything; he sang; he dozed in the sanctum. In one temple, he reached past the iron grille to anoint his forehead with some ash from an incense stick.

  The temples were not works of art for him, nor objects of historical importance; they were the articulation of living philosophical truths. “The purpose of the imager,” Coomaraswamy writes of the sculptor in traditional India, “was neither self-expression nor the realisation of beauty … To him the theme was all in all, and if there is beauty in his work, this did not arise from aesthetic intention, but from a state of mind which found unconscious expression.” Or, as Alice writes of sacred images: “If they are beautiful, it is because they are true.”

  The temples enshrined cherished concepts and ideas in stone, and as Shivam moved among them, he looked for these. “We see here”—he looked up at the low relief panel that ran around the base of one of the central temples—“the whole scheme of creation, and destruction. And here”—he pointed to a row of horses and elephants and men with drums—“is life in the middle. This art awakens in us an understanding of death.”

  My way of looking was closer to Alice’s; she had seen in the sculpture an “uninterrupted song of delight over the female body in all its unexpected aspects.” She reveled in the playfulness and movement of the sculptures; that “degree of warmth which distinguishes Indian sculpture from Greek.” She loved the way the light, as in the apse of a church, reached the innermost recesses of the sanctum. But she also knew that if her intention was to enter into the spirit of an unfamiliar art, then she would have to change her way of looking.

  “I always tend to succumb to the temptation to search for the beautiful contour,” she admonished herself, “the complete harmony of the composition, the logical distribution of light and shade. Yet this is not enough. It remains external. Every architecture, every image, has to be an expression of the inner life.”

  Shivam effortlessly sought to work his way back to the philosophical truths that underlay the art. One way to do this was through prayer and concentration, and it unnerved Shivam that the temples were dead. No worship occurred here anymore. Yet the culture that built them, the culture of which Shivam was still a part, was alive. For him, the gods had not been overthrown; the classical world lived on.

  “The early humanists,” Stephen Greenblatt wrote of fourteenth-century Europe in The Swerve, “felt themselves with mingled pride, wonder, and fear, to be involved in an epochal movement. In part the movement involved recognizing that something that had seemed alive was really dead.” The acceptance of the death of the classical world was a precondition for renaissance because “once one recognized what was gone, once one had mourned the tragic loss, it was possible to prepare the way for what lay on the other side of death: nothing less than resurrection.”

  India, on the other hand, was all continuity. The living faith papered over any breaks in the continuum. People sensed in their bones that a great deal had been lost, but they refused to acknowledge the loss. Their instinct told them to revive the continuum. “We must pull the thread of the past forward,” Golu told me once, “and tie it to the future.”

  The past in India is inseparable from the world of belief. Once faith was removed, Indians did not know what to make of their past. As with the dharma of place, what mattered was not antiquity or beauty, but sanctity.

  Shivam, once he had honored the gods, began to lose interest in the temples. The site was famous; he had felt obliged to bring me here, but he was not sure what to do next. There was no religious fervor to partake in, and the silence of the past disturbed him. “Keep in mind,” Shivam said, wistfully eyeing an active temple outside the complex, “that in those temples where worship no longer occurs, there is not that same light.”

  He spoke no English, but he used the English word, and it reminded me of his earlier remark about the blindness that had come with electrical light.

  “Now that”—he looked contemptuously at my green notebook—“is something worth noting down.”

  IT WAS EARLY EVENING WHEN we reached the village of Domhai. A cement road, lined with a fencing of bramble, curled out among fields of young wheat, mustard, and chickpea. The car nosed its way past mud houses with low red-tiled roofs. Shivam’s house was pink-washed with high pointed alcoves. A small sacred tulsi plant stood at the center of a forecourt on a whitewashed base fashioned from the earth. Shivam’s father, a sturdy Brahmin farmer with a dyed mustache and white stubble, welcomed us with a garland of handpicked flowers. On meeting me, he marveled at the unlikelihood of my being in his village: “Never, in all my life, would I have believed that someone from New York would honor me by being my guest.” I begged him not to be so formal. Indian hospitality is excruciatingly gracious, almost as if in anticipation of falling short.

  The house was dark, with smooth earth floors and undulating boulder-made walls. The front room, where we put our luggage, contained two beds of rough manufacture covered in bright floral blankets. Near a small window, unable to dispel the darkness of the village house, was a plywood coffee table with chairs draped in a thick begrimed matting. We put our phones to charge at a single electrical outlet, where the current surged and fell. Shivam gave me a lungi to wear and we wandered through the dark house. Down a passage, dinner was being cooked in a kitchen shed of corrugated steel. In a farther room, the walls were covered in bright posters of the gods; the in-built stone shelves were crammed full of sacred books wrapped in red cloth.

  The house, though open in places, was airless, and though sparsely furnished, it felt cluttered. The darkness pervading it was like none I had ever known; it was velvety, like the darkness of another time. It was brighter outside, even though the sun had set, and the black limbs of trees were visible against the darkening sky. A violet haze lay over the land. Soon Shivam’s mother emerged with a single smoky lamp, a steel plate, and a bell. She honored the tulsi plant outside the house, then went back in. The smell of dung, cattle, and woodsmoke carried through the air. It was a pastoral, and beautiful, but terrifyingly remote. I had never s
pent a night in a human habitation that had undergone so little change since the advent of agriculture. It was no wonder that the few artifacts of modernity that had made inroads into the village—the phone, the little bit of electricity, the television—were so out of place. They seemed less to herald a new time than to be themselves on their way from the future into the past.

  Shivam’s village, save for the odd family of the warrior caste, was exclusively Brahmin. I knew this without quite knowing what it implied. What, for instance, did my presence in the Brahmin household denote? My father was Muslim, and since religion in India is patrilineal, my staying overnight in the house should have been an unspeakable defilement, but strangely, it wasn’t. I seemed, perhaps on account of my being English-speaking, to be exempt from the rules of caste. Shivam did, however, make one small adjustment as the village approached: he stopped calling me by my conspicuously Persian name and rechristened me with a reliably Hindu alternative: Nitish.

  Caste had been with me all the while in Benares. There was no way to write about Brahmins without being aware of the system of which they were a part, but as the village approached, I realized that caste had been an abstraction to me until now. I had spoken to many Brahmins, but we had spoken in isolation. I had not seen them interact with the other castes, and more important, I had not seen the laws of caste pollution at work.

  Night fell. Dinner was served. The men were invited to come into the back room with the single weak-rayed bulb and the television set playing news of a terrorist attack in Indonesia. Round steel plates were laid out on the floor. The food appeared, and it was delicious: chutney, mango pickle, salt, lentils, roti, a rustic stew made of chickpea leaves. The pleasure of the food and the evening scene in the village house helped dispel the fog of nerves. I was able to take in my surroundings again, and no sooner had I done so than I realized I had forgotten all about Mukesh, who was certainly not exempt from the rules of caste.

  He came trundling in a moment later and sat down with us. As was his wont, he quickly hijacked the conversation, congratulating Shivam’s mother on the delicious food and regaling us with tales from Bihar.

  The atmosphere in the house seemed fine, even cheerful; but as dinner drew to an end, a terrific tension came over the household. Nervous glances passed between Brahmin father and son; something was murmured in dialect; the room grew so heavy that it even silenced Mukesh. I felt I was in a Buñuel movie, a dark social comedy in which something was amiss, and things were about to go badly wrong. But I knew too little about the world I was in to understand what was going on under the surface. We sat there for many moments, gazing in stupefaction at the mute flashing of the television, when at last Shivam leaned in and whispered in my ear. He explained that his family had made an extraordinary exception in allowing Mukesh, who was of a far lower caste called Yadavs, to eat with them, off their thalis. But now there was something the Brahmins absolutely could not do. “I can wash your plate,” Shivam said furtively, “as a favor to a friend. But I cannot”—he gestured to Mukesh—“wash his. If people in the village find out, it will become very difficult for us.”

  Mukesh’s plate, having come in contact with his saliva, was contaminated. It could now only be handled by someone whose social rank was equal to or lower than his. Shivam wanted me to make it clear to the driver that he must wash his own plate, in a separate place from the others.

  I froze. A deep shame came up in me, as if from the recesses of childhood, like the shame of wetting one’s pants. I found myself paralyzed. I did not have the heart to do either what was asked of me, or the courage to defy the laws of caste and get up and wash Mukesh’s plate myself. I just sat there in mute horror at witnessing the concept of caste pollution at work. The idea of pollution was at the heart of the Hindu social system; but pollution, as Taya Zinkin wrote in Caste Today, “is not a private but a corporate matter which affects the whole sub-caste and village even.”

  Shivam was acting not just to protect his family’s name, but the entire village from contamination.

  Mukesh was still oblivious. His foolish, talkative nature seemed only to add to the pathos. It was a terrible moment. He had been tolerated beyond anyone’s expectations. No harsh word had come from the Brahmins, no snide comment, no snub; but now this quiet mechanical acceptance of a much deeper flaw in him was so much more devastating than if someone had just found Mukesh irritating (which he was!) and told him to shut up. Again, it was made to seem, as Mukhopadhyay had, that the repugnant belief could easily be accommodated. After all, it was no big deal to ask someone to clean his own plate. Except that only Mukesh was to be singled out for this task. The others were to stay where they were. It made the idea of spiritual purity feel as real as race or class.

  But I was alone in my distress. Mukesh was part of the system that declared him spiritually unclean. When Shivam, seeing my inability to convey the terrible instruction, simply got up and himself told Mukesh, as if telling him where the towels were kept, the driver crumbled at the mere suggestion of the transgression: “You are like gods to me. I would never dream of…”

  I couldn’t listen. I walked away. A few moments later, I saw him washing his own plate outside, in the weak electric light of the village house.

  THAT EVENING WE WANDERED THE dark streets of Domhai. The families we visited, many of whom were related to Shivam, now all had televisions. They alternated between the news in Hindi and religious sermons delivered by whitebeards in saffron robes. Politics and faith formed a circle, one feeding the passions of the other. The village had basic electricity twenty-two out of twenty-four hours a day. Everyone had mobile phones. But the village, which had sustained so much, from the connection to the land to the life of tradition and ritual and the social organization of caste, could no longer sustain itself.

  We gathered in the village shop as one would in a pub. It was a small cupboard of a place with a flimsy two-leaf door. It sold biscuits and bulbs and practically nothing else. Young men in tracksuits, their blue rubber slippers worn thin, sat about on sacks of grain and wooden benches smooth with wear. There was a palpable sense of distress among them. Modernity had reached the village in the form of technology—which only exacerbated the need among these young men to get out—but it had also come in the form of a changing climate. One handsome farmer, bearded and bawdy, said in thick dialect, “The seasons are no longer on our side.” Then, laughing, he added, “The man up there, he either gives with all his heart, or he takes with a stick up your ass.”

  The young farmer left us a moment later to go water his fields. The old Indian fatalism, which allowed people to accept as karmic justice their lot in life, had died in this younger generation. Those with college degrees—many, in this Brahmin village—were doomed to do “service” at pharmacies and banks in the neighboring towns. Others dreamed of the Indian army as a route of escape. Those like the handsome farmer without a way out of the village were at a breaking point.

  The village had been static for centuries. Nothing had changed here since the invention of the plow, but now everything was changing at once. These men, who still lived as men had at the beginning of the Neolithic Age, were the recipients of daily stimuli that were designed to cater to societies at the apex of modernity. We sat in the village shop fetishizing the glamour of life in the West. Our conversation touched on every aspect of that shining world of images and objects, and the life it implied. Every dream that had ever been sold, everything one decried in London and New York as the false effervescence of advertising—chain restaurants, fake bodies, bikinis, shining SUVs—was set free of context; and wafting through the village shop, it all seemed brighter and more beautiful than ever.

  But after we had gone over the state of roads and buildings in America, and expressed awe at a society where bribes were not taken, we stumbled into a discussion of comparative values, and here was a gulf no less wide. Karan Singh, who belonged to the warrior caste, could not get over my having left my mother in India and gone to Americ
a. Every few minutes he would return to the same point, as if trying to understand the mind of a criminal. “Aur ma?”—“And your mother?”—he said, half in fascination, half in horror.

  The mother in India—above the father, above the guru, above even the gods—is the supreme object of piety. I almost began to feel bad for mine, until I thought of my actual mother, with her long illustrious career in journalism, her many books, her half a million Twitter followers, her industrialist boyfriend of many years, whom she had never felt the need to marry, and I thought how far away she must be from Karan Singh’s sanctified image of the Indian mother.