Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (9 page)

At the age of four Tilak began to have vivid memories of a past life. He described every aspect in detail, including where he had lived and the names of his family. Such an event is not uncommon in India. (In fact, decades later, researchers at the University of Virginia, beginning in 1989 under Dr. Ian Stevenson, would find that it isn’t uncommon anywhere in the world. Hundreds of children, usually between the ages of two and eight, have been documented as having detailed recollections of a previous lifetime.) My father’s family, who already considered Tilak an unusual child, decided to investigate his new memories. As a matter of course, this meant consulting an astrologer.

A neighborhood astrologer can be brought in to tell a young girl the most propitious day for her wedding or to predict whether a boy will travel abroad (a calamitous turn of events in traditional Indian society). But there is a special class of astrologers who specialize in past lives, known as Bhrigu readers. Here we can’t go in for a penny without going in for a pound, because Bhrigu comes from the pure world of miracles. When you consult a Bhrigu reader, he doesn’t draw up your astrology chart himself. Instead, he finds the exact chart that was
already
written for you centuries, even millennia, ago. In essence, an astrologer who lived at the time of Shakespeare or even Jesus, perhaps, knew that you were going to arrive for a Bhrigu reading on a certain day in the future, and to show his absolute mastery of time
and fortune, prepared a chart to answer the very questions you came to ask.

How this art came to pass carries us into the epoch of myths. When the god Brahma created the world, he had seven wish-born sons, who sprang into existence from his mind. The world was conceived in wisdom, and these primal rishis, or seers, were sent to guide newborn humanity. One day the wisest of these early humans gathered together at a great religious festival. They soon fell into dispute over which of the three gods—Brahma, Vishnu, or Shiva—should be worshipped as the greatest. To settle the argument, Bhrigu was sent to ask the gods themselves.

First he arrived at the dwelling place of Brahma, his father. But when he asked his question, Brahma waved him away impatiently, saying, “I’m busy creating the world. I have no time for you.”

Next Bhrigu went to the abode of Shiva, who was even more dismissive and arrogant. “I’m busy destroying creation as quickly as it is being made,” he said. “I have no time for you.”

At the third dwelling place, when he called on Vishnu, Bhrigu found the god sleeping on his side with his consort, Lakshmi, at his feet. Impulsively Bhrigu kicked Vishnu in the chest to wake him up. It was a hard kick that left an imprint still to be seen on images of the god. Vishnu sat up, rubbing his chest.

“Are you hurt, my dear Bhrigu, from kicking me?” Vishnu asked. “I am strong enough to sustain any wound, but you are not.”

This show of compassion rather than arrogance immediately made Bhrigu decide that Vishnu, the god who sustains the cosmos, was more powerful than the gods who create and destroy it. But before he could leave, Lakshmi confronted him, indignant that anyone should injure her husband. On the spot she cursed Bhrigu such that he would forget his immortal knowledge. Not to be trifled with, Bhrigu cursed her back.

“You, Lakshmi, are the goddess of prosperity, but from this day forward you will never be able to stay with any man.” Which is why no human can count on good fortune his entire life.

This myth comes with a tale that applies to the ability of astrologers to foretell the future. When he returned home, Bhrigu despaired of losing his knowledge. So his devoted son Shukra devised a secret plan. When his father went into deep samadhi, the state of meditation that reaches pure awareness, Shukra would whisper the name of one of his friends in Bhrigu’s ear. At that moment Bhrigu would see and reveal that friend’s entire span of births and deaths, which were secretly written down by Shukra. One after another the son received the charts of all his friends, and they went on to acquire deep knowledge, becoming the first astrologers in the line of Bhrigu. Their power to foretell the life of someone born far in the future had a divine source. (To most Indians the son Shukra is far better known than the father. His name refers to a brilliant light and became the Indian name of the planet Venus.)

My father’s family needed to call upon that power to see if Tilak’s memories of his past lifetime were correct. They traveled to the
sthan,
or seat, of Bhrigu in Hoshiarpur, in the far northeast corner of Punjab, where the charts were stored. There the readers confirmed that the boy was right: His chart gave the same village that he had seen and the same names of family members. The chart held some darker aspects, too. Tilak, it predicted, would wander between being a man and a woman. He would marry but never have children, and then he would die prematurely, in his fifties.

All of this happened when my father was only eight or nine, so he had only the vaguest memory of the trip to the Bhrigu readers. But when I was young I thought that Tilak was the strangest of my uncles. He had an effeminate body, with wide hips and a swinging gait; beneath his shirt one definitely saw breasts. Then it happened that he got married but had no children, and although they had been forewarned, my father’s family was shocked to learn that poor Tilak had died suddenly from unknown causes. He was only in his midfifties.

I had my doubts about becoming a doctor, and I almost didn’t. My father underwent a similar crisis when he was young. He came from
a conservative religious family. From an early age he became accustomed, as so many Indians are, to having his parents make decisions for him. Sometimes the decisions were trivial. He wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema, for instance, unless the film had a religious theme. But big decisions were also taken out of his hands. My grandmother took credit for fixing his course in life. Rather than fighting against his doubts, she said, “I agree. The course is long. I don’t expect you want to work that hard anyway.”

If this was intended to activate a young man’s contrary streak, or a Chopra family trait for never doing what we’re told, the tactic worked. After serving in World War I, my grandfather had taken his pension and retired to a piece of land outside Rawalpindi, the city in Pakistan now called Islamabad. The only medical school in a wide range was King Edward Medical College in Lahore. My father earned his degree there and became the breadwinner for his family until his younger brothers could finish college in Rawalpindi.

There was no question at any point that my father would take an interest in the traditional medicine of India,
Ayurveda,
even though in every part of the country it was Ayurvedic medicine that people relied upon. This brings us to a juncture that is still uncomfortable for an India rushing to overcome impoverishment and take a place at the world’s banquet table. Does modernism demand the extinction of ancient ways? It’s an exhausting dilemma. At the height of empire, Britain’s confidence in itself was totally unnerving to the people being colonized. Since traditional India had been toppled with barely a few skirmishes, opening its gates to the East India Company without a struggle, that must prove that destiny favored the West. So the thinking went. God himself smiled on the invaders, which was enormously deflating for a society like India that was immersed in God.

The defeat of traditional culture spread with insidious thoroughness. The most honored spiritual texts, like the Bhagavad Gita, became neglected, not among ordinary people or the priests, but among the educated, forward-thinking classes who fell under the sway of the West. There was even a religious revival along Christian lines, where Hindus went to church thinking that if the Christians could
conquer India, Jesus must have more
Shakti
—divine power—than the goddess Shakti herself. In these churches the chanting and rituals of Hinduism merged strangely with proper Victorian Anglican services.

By then the tide of modernism was unstoppable. Educated Indians were as convinced as the colonialists that tradition equaled ignorance and superstition. Most Westerners do not grasp what a shock it was when Gandhi, who had begun his career as a lawyer in South Africa, threw off his thick tweed suit and starched collars to dress in the traditional wrapped skirt, the
dhoti,
worn by common people. By a stroke of irony, when Gandhi’s generation was growing up, they had so little traditional knowledge that they first read the Gita in English translations, and the India Congress Party, which eventually succeeded in liberating the country, was founded under the aegis of an Englishwoman named Annie Besant. It wasn’t until foreigners fell in love with ancient India that permission was given for a select number of native Indians to look back over their shoulder.

They were filled with awe when they did, and a newfound sense of self-respect. But Gandhi’s philosophy of turning back the clock entirely, as symbolized by the hand-driven spinning wheel he sat beside and spun on (the same wheel later became the central emblem of the national flag) was clearly hopeless idealism. To raise your station in life meant becoming Westernized, and my father’s generation, while adoring Gandhi and freedom, didn’t turn their sights backward.

Krishan Chopra would be selfless and generous to his patients. He would accept responsibility for the care of an entire community and not ask to be paid beyond his army salary. That much seems un-Western in the extreme. But there was no science in Ayurveda, and the village
vaidyas
handing out folk remedies and homespun advice were not real physicians in his eyes. Like prehistoric crocodiles floating lazily in the river and bellowing to their mates at night, the vaidyas were relics who survived because India measures change in epochs, not decades. (Did it irritate him that my grandmother on my mother’s side had faith in homeopathic remedies or that she dressed
our childhood cuts and scrapes with herbal compounds? If so, he remained quietly tolerant. On both sides my grandparents turned to anyone at hand, including vaidyas and faith healers, when they needed healing.)

My father was so devoted to the science that Fleming and the great microbe hunters represented that it didn’t occur to me that rebellion might have motivated him, too. His father, whom everyone called Bau-ji, was a disciplined soldier and a disciplinarian inside his family. My grandmother bore him fourteen children, although only eight survived. He expected his offspring to walk, talk, eat, and act as he did. This must have been oppressive for my father. But Bau-ji also provided them with the opportunity for an education. Besides my father, my two Bombay uncles became successes, one as a prominent journalist, the other as a Bollywood movie director. (An uncle who is your father’s younger brother is called
Chacha
in Hindi, and one of these men, Rattan Chacha, would later become as important an influence in my life as anyone after my father.)

My father reacted to his strict upbringing in a fortunate way for Sanjiv and me. We experienced a loving, open-minded father, unsuited by temperament to being a disciplinarian. When I was around eight, my brother and I got into a fight with some cousins. My mother found out and demanded an explanation. Hanging our heads, we defended ourselves by saying that the cousins had used a curse word.

“And then what?” she asked.

We cursed them back, we explained. She turned her face away, and her silence meant that something bad was in store for us. She told my father about the fight at the dinner table, but he didn’t get angry.

“It’s my fault,” he said with obvious sorrow. “I should have taught you better.” He laid down his fork and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I won’t have any dinner. I will fast to atone for my failings.”

My father was sincere to the point of innocence all his life, so I know that this wasn’t a ploy. But as psychological tactics go, it was devastating. Daddy rose from the table while Sanjiv and I pleaded with him to stay. But he ordered his plate cleared and wouldn’t listen.
I learned very early how upsetting it is to betray your household god, all the more so if he is a gentle god.

The separate worlds we live in are artificially constructed. We live behind mental walls because we are convinced that we want to or have to. One simple proof is that no one ever walks away from India. To be apart from her is like being a child playing outside without seeing his mother watching from an upstairs window. In my case, Bhrigu must have been watching. I was sitting in my clinic office in La Jolla some years ago when I felt the urge to do something my mother taught me as a child. She would open the Bhagavad Gita at random and ponder the verse that her finger fell on. (I think some Christians do the same with the Bible, and like my mother, they probably try to divine a message intended especially for them.)

My finger landed on a famous verse in book ten, where Krishna describes his superlative qualities to the warrior Arjuna (“Among rivers I am the Ganges. Among mountains I am the Himalayas.”), and where my finger touched down, “Among rishis, I am Bhrigu.” At that moment the phone rang. It was my friend Professor Arvind Sharma calling from Canada. He had an acclaimed Bhrigu scholar visiting from India who was also a pundit—a Brahmin who kept the Bhrigu tradition alive. My name had flashed in Arvind’s mind. Was I interested in a reading? A tingle went up my spine. But unfortunately there were scheduling conflicts, and it was impossible to meet the pundit. The pundit told me to recite some special mantras, and through the mail I received a small effigy of Bhrigu. I did make an effort to try the mantras, but a week or so later I returned to my normal meditation and forgot about the incident.

Some time later I found myself in Delhi with my parents, and I mentioned Tilak Chacha and his strange story. For whatever reason, my father acted as though he had only the vaguest memory of his brother. Someone else insisted I get the astrology reading I had missed. I was doubtful. Countless Indians consult astrologers on a regular basis, but not in my family, and if anything, my interest was
less than that of my parents. But why did Bhrigu’s name keep popping up? Did he have something to tell me? The best place to find out was still Hoshiarpur. It was too far away to drive, but one of my mother’s brothers was a retired admiral in the Indian navy. He requisitioned a military helicopter, and within a few hours we were descending like an apparition out of the sky in Hoshiarpur, where my family had made a pilgrimage long ago. Villagers who had never seen a flying machine watched us with their mouths open.