Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (11 page)

Krishan Lal, thirty-four, and Pushpa Chopra, twenty-seven, in Jammu, 1960. They were blissfully married for more than fifty years.

I
CAN’T LET JESUS DOWN.
I should love him. Everyone says he loves me. What will he do if I don’t love him back?

Thoughts like these ran through my mind constantly as a teenager. To worry about God at that age is a common thing. But in India, worrying about Jesus isn’t. My situation was unusual, however. The teachers in school, who were all Catholic missionaries, kept an eye on us, a gentle scrutiny, and there was always a subtle expectation. It would surface in odd ways. An Irish priest, someone who had become a friend, who had played sports with the boys on the cricket pitch, would take me aside. He would put a hand on my shoulder and smile to reassure me.

Nothing’s wrong, lad, don’t worry. We just need you for Christ. Can you do that for me?

Every native-born boy they took into that school knew that the recruitment pitch lay in store. I pushed that day off by not thinking about it. Unlike my devout mother and grandmother, I wasn’t absolutely sure I knew the right God to pray to. Jesus had taken the British a long way. Was Shiva doing anything about it?

A Catholic private school was the elite option in India in the Fifties; if cricket flannels were an anomaly in the tropics, what about knee socks, a green blazer, and a school tie? Wherever we lived at the time, I threw on a uniform every morning before catching the six-thirty bus across Delhi, or walking up the hill past tea plantations in Shillong, or kissing my mother good-bye in Jabalpur. The religious aspect was never raised at home. My father was intent solely on giving his sons the best education. He had received a good one himself, but it took an act of noblesse oblige from Lord Mountbatten to grease the rails for him. Fortune had favored him extravagantly. My father didn’t want to take any risks with us. Everyone knew that the best education came from Jesuit schools run by the Christian Brothers, so
he enrolled us in one such school after another as we moved to each new post: St. Aloysius, St. Edmund’s, St. Columba’s. These weren’t just saints’ names. They were tickets for the first-class compartment that rolled toward our future.

In my whole life I can remember only two crushing humiliations. The second occurred in medical school, years later. The first took place in Shillong, one of the beautiful colonialist hill stations in the state of Assam. This was a landscape green and cool enough to make a sergeant major’s wife shed a tear for Shropshire and Kent. The station sat at five thousand feet, the rumpled earth around it anticipating the leap to the Himalayas stretching away to the north. Every morning, I walked to a school on a hill, St. Edmund’s, with fragrant tea plantations spreading a carpet of soft foliage as far as the eye could see.

The only serpent in this Eden was that St. Edmund’s was a much harder school than the one I had attended previously in Jabalpur. Every month, the principal handed out report cards in a formal ceremony, the boys lined up in order of merit. The highest you could receive was a gold card, which only went to one or two boys. If you got one, the principal would shake your hand warmly and invite you for tea and a movie. For a blue card he might shake your hand and give you a friendly hug. A pink card would be handed over with a neutral expression. If you had sunk so low as to deserve a yellow card, the principal would look away disdainfully as he thrust it at you. It was a devastatingly effective way to indoctrinate the boys, and I couldn’t bear the idea of getting anything less than a blue or gold card. I sweated to earn one, but after the first month, I suffered the agony of watching every other boy march up for his handshake until I was presented with a yellow card and that disdainful look.

To weep uncontrollably when you are eleven years old seems poignant from the distant perspective of an adult. At the time, though, it collapses your world. I thought the humiliation would stay with me for life, and the point isn’t that I was wrong. Just
thinking
that I was forever scarred is what burned the humiliation in. I indulged in melodrama alone in my room. Jesus had stumbled on the way to Calvary, and now so had I. Before, I had blazed a trail of glory. Approval was
the air I breathed, and of course it was impossible for me to see that my trail had been littered with vanity, greed, and fear. Aren’t they the common coin in school when you consider the dark side?

The dark side of life may be universal, but it doesn’t affect everyone the same. You may curse it for ruining your future or feel a kind of grudging gratitude—for lessons imparted or for greater dangers that were warded off. I’m sure that some of my classmates grew up deeply resenting the pressure that was put on them from Western Christian values. Years later, when I read George Orwell’s essays, I came across a dismal opinion. Orwell wrote that the worst advertisement for Christianity is its adherents. This wasn’t true when I was at school. I never personally experienced the abuse that has come to light among predatory priests, thankfully, though the practice of caning, which the missionaries brought with them from Ireland, has become rightfully disgraced.

We did have some intensely devout classmates, called the seminarians. They began studying for the priesthood at age twelve and lived at the seminary while attending school with the rest of us. A number were Christian from birth, since they came from Goa and had Portuguese surnames like Da Silva and Da Souza. I was puzzled by such devotion and asked one boy why he wanted to become a priest. His eyes widened.

“They fly you to Rome, and then the Pope makes you a priest. The Pope himself!”

So it was the travel? My dream was to fly to London and see the house on Baker Street where Sherlock Holmes lived. The seminarians were dreaming bigger—I was impressed.

Sprinkled into our school were also some Catholic converts; they came from poor families and attended on scholarship. Every day, the Catholic boys went to catechism class. The rest of us, the motley pagans, were given the choice to go along to catechism or to attend a class called Moral Science.

“Moral science” seems like a peculiar concept to me now. It was actually more like moral logic. The lessons were aimed at systematically proving why Christian morality was correct. If we understood
logic, we’d know that the teachings of Jesus were universal and irrefutable. I was already mesmerized by the story of the Passion in the New Testament, which couldn’t be improved upon for blood and poetry. Primarily I loved Jesus as an action adventure hero. What could be more adventurous than fighting for God against the devil until your ruthless enemies nail you to a cross?

Moral science drove home the iniquity of masturbation and homosexuality, both approached in a gingerly sidelong fashion. You left class certain that something was awful but not knowing exactly what it was. Those lessons had only a temporary effect. What stuck for life? An abiding trust that love is the basis of true morality. (I once read an apt definition of the law as a set of rules set up after love is gone.) Someone from a family that wasn’t as loving as ours would have had a harder time absorbing this teaching. I recall a debate on the existence of God that I attended years later. On one side was a scientific atheist, who hammered away at God for an hour with a barrage of rational argument. He sat down to scattered applause, and his opponent, a comfortably stout, smiling Catholic priest, took the lectern.

“Why do I believe that God is real?” he asked. “Because my mother told me so, and I believed her.” He sat down to thunderous applause.

St. Columba’s adjoined a girls’ school, the Convent of Jesus and Mary. Like ours, it was a day school, founded in 1919 by an order of French nuns. The two grounds were separated by a wall, and my friends and I would sometimes cross over. Girls attracted us, but Moral Science had let us down badly in the girl department. It hardly seems credible that adolescent males could quiver at the thought of holding hands with a girl for ten minutes under the gaze of a suspicious chaperone. Girls were a faraway dream to me and my friends. In all honesty, we crossed the wall just as much to see the grotto filled with flowers that had statues of the Virgin Mary for the devout to pray to.

We were very good boys, which needs no special pleading. We didn’t reek of incense. Piety comes naturally to a certain side of an adolescent, filled with sentimental dreams and naïve idealism. Those
are society’s labels, not mine. What makes idealism naïve isn’t that you grow out of it but that no one teaches you how to hang on to it.

The silent devotion of the Mary grotto at the convent felt beautiful to me. One day, looking on while people came and went to kneel in prayer, I had the overwhelming sensation of a divine presence. The statue of Mary was sending it to me without my praying for it, or even wishing. This was the first moment I had an inkling of what a famous phrase in Indian spirituality means: ocean of bliss. Many people have had a similar experience.

The secret is what to do after the presence leaves you. I wasn’t concerned with that at sixteen. It just felt as though Mother Mary’s love came over me. The air grew sweeter, and I felt safe and cared for. Because a well-loved child grows up with the same things, it might feel more intense to have them emanate in a holy place, but there is no epiphany. The contrast isn’t strong enough, perhaps? I didn’t shrug off my experience, which lingered for quite a while, but the road to Damascus didn’t stretch out before me, either.

On rare occasions my uncle Sohan Lal came to town. He was a traveling salesman who sold field hockey equipment, a Western game that India excelled at. No doubt he took the job because he was mad for sports. But Sohan Lal felt a strong attraction to saints, as I’ve mentioned, constantly finding obscure s
adhus,
yogis, and holy men in general. As he traveled the country, he would seek out the local saint and sit at his feet. Sometimes he would listen to the wisdom imparted by the saint, but mostly Sohan Lal wanted
Darshan.
This is the blessing that comes simply from setting eyes on a saint (the root of darshan is “to see” or “to view”). One time, however, the blessing went much further.

As he recounted it, Sohan Lal was visiting one of the huge congregations of holy men known as a
Mela,
where tens of thousands of spectators crowd the banks of a holy river to see spiritual luminaries—a meet and greet with God, so to speak. Remarkable encounters often occur at these events, and one happened to Sohan Lal. He met a yogi sitting in lotus position under a canopy.

“I know that you are a fervent seeker of God,” the yogi said. “Tell me what your heart desires at this very moment.”

“At this very moment?” Sohan Lal replied, flustered. “I want some barfi.”

Barfi is the most common kind of candy in northern India; it can be bought from street vendors for next to nothing. The yogi held up a fist, unfolded it, and handed my uncle a fresh piece of pistachio barfi, which he had apparently manifested out of thin air on the spot.

Whenever he recounted this incident—which all of us children believed without question—Sohan Lal would shake his head sadly.

“I could have asked for enlightenment or a million rupees at least. But what could I do? All I wanted at that moment was barfi.”

The day did arrive for the recruitment pitch. At St. Columba’s the older boys went to the poorest sections of Delhi to hand out milk to the children. We mixed powdered milk with water and delivered it in a big truck. The kids met us with smiles, and we played with them throughout. It was more fun than charity work.

One day Father Steinmeyer—Irish like all the rest despite his German name—asked me what I was reading. Without television, reading was a big part of my life. When I told him that I was immersed in P. G. Wodehouse, the good father frowned.

“Kid’s stuff. I thought you were more grown up than that.”

I hung my head. Even a gentle reproof from a teacher sank in. By the lights of a St. Columba’s boy, I had a right to feel ashamed for being so frivolous. Indian education was primarily by rote. At sixteen I could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare, not just one or two speeches. I had memorized long stretches of Tennyson and other Romantic poets.

Father Steinmeyer looked over at the four boys who were on the milk truck that day—me, another Hindu boy, a Sindi, and a Parsi.

“Have you ever thought about taking Jesus as your lord and savior?” he asked quietly.

We all shrugged and said no in embarrassed mumbles. It was the simple truth. The priest said nothing more. He turned back to the impoverished waifs crowding around us holding out their cups for
more. As a pitch to young converts, this one was barely halfhearted. The wily machinations of Jesuits remained a fable to me. A few days later Father Steinmeyer handed me some books that he said were more suited to a mature young man than Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. They turned out to be Catholic novels, and whatever impression they made, it is long forgotten.

Which brings me to an unflattering truth. Just because God is in the air doesn’t mean that you are breathing deeply.

Inevitably I grew to admire the British. The schooling did it to me. I could recite the whole of Macbeth’s speech, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day” before I knew any lines of Sanskrit—or had an inkling of the spiritual weariness that was killing Macbeth’s soul. But if my education was a devil’s bargain, both sides kept it. The Jesuits were playing for converts, yet they were also devoted to teaching; the boys were playing for a ticket to ride, but we seriously wanted to learn. A devil’s bargain could be thought of as a gentleman’s agreement. And we did our best to turn into proper gentlemen.

In 1962, my last year of high school, Sanjiv and I lived with an aunt and uncle in New Delhi. After we came home and threw off our school uniforms, we would run outside and blend into the neighborhood. The scene was a welter of tongues, a savory bubbling of English, Hindi, and Punjabi. Without a second thought, even though we knew Hindi just as well, my brother and I spoke only in English, and this marked us. English was the gentleman’s language, not the tongue of an oppressor.