The Twice-Born
Page 25
I was getting up to leave, and as is customary, I asked after Tripathi’s family, his wife, his ailing daughter. It was only then, in passing, that I was given a sense of the terrible year Tripathi had been through.
“My daughter, after a five-year struggle with illness, died last year in March. March 20, 2015,” he muttered, stanching the flow of emotion through the recollection of precise detail. “My wife followed her some five months ago. She, too, is no more. Those who have gone have gone.” He collected himself. “Those who remain, I try to give what I can, with what strength is left me.”
Tripathi had taken in a young boy, an electrician who left home at eight in the morning and returned at eight at night. “I was living completely alone, so a relation brought him over to live with me. He is very honest, very hard-working. He makes tea; he answers the telephone. In return, I give him a place to stay, food to eat.”
Tripathi stepped into the light to say goodbye, and as he did, his face glistened in the white fluorescent light. It was less a tear than the remains of one, like the gossamer trail left behind by a snail.
“I have many faults,” he said. “I had them before, and I still have them now. I must turn my gaze upon myself. Not the egoistic self, but that Self in which you and me both are extinguished. For one thing I know: death is a reality. Death,” he said again, as if he had misspoken the time before, “is real.”
ABOUT THE BOOK
When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition.
Known as the twice-born—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past.
From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.
The Twice-Born is a deeply individual, acutely perceptive, urgently relevant book: it revolves around questions of culture and politics that are going to define our future as a nation. But beyond the inherent interest of the stories it tells, it is a wonderfully written book, characterized by the music of Aatish Taseer’s prose, which will haunt the reader long after the final page has been turned.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aatish Taseer was born in 1980. He is the author of the memoir, Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, and three acclaimed novels: The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize; The Temple-Goers, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award; and Noon. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a contributing writer for The International New York Times and lives in New Delhi and New York.
ALSO BY AATISH TASEER
FICTION
The Way Things Were
The Temple-Goers
Noon
NON-FICTION
Stranger to History:
A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands
TRANSLATION
Manto: Selected Stories
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First published in India in 2018 by 4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
www.harpercollins.co.in
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Aatish Taseer, 2018
P-ISBN: 978-93-5302-388-1
Epub Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 978-93-5302-389-8
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
Aatish Taseer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this book.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover design : HarperCollins Publishers India
Photographs: Saumya Gupta
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
1. Foreigners in Their Own Land
SUMMER
2. The Color-Filled Eleventh
3. The Hour of Juncture
4. The Rape and the Seduction
5. The Conqueror of Destiny
6. The Modern Traditionalist
WINTER
7. The Revolutionary Brahmin
8. The Community of Death
9. The Isle of Rough Magic
10. The Dharma of Place
11. The Protection of the Seed
About the Book
About the Author
Also By Aatish Taseer
Copyright