Vikram’s Talking Points

Ah, it had been a while since I attended a "family party," that peculiar term Diaspora Indians use to describe their intra-tribal gatherings. For my parent’s generation that arrived in the 1960s, the cliques comprised Indians from all over the desh and some Pakistanis as well. Those were the days when seeing an Indian on the road actually got one excited. (Now the Diaspora has burgeoned enough that regions, castes, even sub-castes have their own "associations," which I predict will be obliterated once the children decide that arranged marriages are for those turkeys who can’t get any action on their own.)  

Everyone looks older. You glance nostalgically at your "favorite aunties" whose exquisitely painted toes you once spied on in the revelatory moments between sashaying sari-steps. You sit with the uncles who used to mock the Gods as they got sweaty sipping their Dewars. Now they’ve gotten all religious on you; some even encourage you to "study a little." (Oh uncles, if you only knew how intense I am about the whole dharma thing; I often wonder if I’m an old sanyasi trapped in a middle-aged body.) One uncle - a quondam cigarette wholesaler - zips daily to the Brooklyn Hare Krishna temple for morning puja, having found the flute-playing God after losing his savings in the tech bubble. He sings some Surdas too, and not at all badly. The Punjabi host uncle  tells you that he lucubrates daily over the Granth Sahib to "prove" the Sikh Gurus were really Hindu. Obsessive codger! When you politely doubt the thesis he reveals a two-volume set of the holy book and whispers like Yoda from dog-eared pages. Another uncle, Rolex ice coruscating on the wrist, translates for yours truly, but you couldn’t be bothered about all that just then.

All the "kids" (peculiar term for thirty-somethings) talk up their achievements and show off their cute little progeny. You remember the pairs that used to run off to do the naughty-naughty; now they mesh freely, spouses in arm, as if nothing ever happened. A few of them have gone astonishingly fat; some have a touch of grey in the beard; some still get flushed and tipsy on the first beer. The food, thankfully, is as good as ever; though you spoon one too many dahi vadas into the elegant plastic bowl. You lament about the ones that passed on, mostly old uncles to heart disease, but also one of the kids in a rikshaw accident. Strange, all that: life and its seasons; the karmic peculiarities that bring people into the world for a passing murmur; endings.

You look at your father who looks back at you and smiles. Yes, you resisted coming, cursed your mother for guilting you into it; but for a moment, laughing with old friends, dancing with your daughter in your arms, you cannot help but feeling happy.

My Tamil mother put the fear of God in me. When I morally transgressed by, say, slapping my cherubic younger brother around, she told me Sri Venkateshwara was watching. Though a non-Brahmin, she fervently commends the power of  homams, and summons Brahmins to her home whenever she believes we - the family - are in a spot of trouble.

A fiercely intelligent polyglot, she is equally at home with the Tulsidas-reading Hindi wallahs and Tamils who chant the Tiruvaymoli. This familiarity extends beyond religious communities: We regularly visited St. Patrick’s cathedral in the city, lit candles and dabbed our foreheads with a little holy water. When we had Hyderabadi Muslim tenants, she always observed a day of fast during the month of Ramadan.

I kind of went on believing in this intercessory, beneficent God-who-comes-in-many-packages until I grew out of my teens, when, like most, I went through a doubting phase. This God who allegedly took care of his devotees had much to answer for in a world wracked with conflict and inexplicable acts of violence. 

This is when I discovered the teachings of Advaita, which assert that the God we look to is really illusory, and that beyond our imperfect conceptions of a personal deity lies Brahman, the non-dual absolute, which, to borrow a line from Nietzche, is beyond Good and Evil.

The goal of life is to realize our non-duality, which, like a flash of lightning, shatters the phantom self - the self which craves, which suffers, which rages against death. Those who have had this uniquely liberative experience proclaim the unity of all beings.

The beauty is that within our duality we can certainly accommodate many modes of worship, many images of the divine. And I believe my mother’s inclusivist outlook -not uncommon among Hindus - stems from this philosophical position.

There are also some deficiencies in Advaita: Its proponents have not sufficiently recognized the importance of social service. If all beings are ensnared in the illusory bonds of Maya, then shouldn’t Advaitins work toward alleviating the manifest suffering in the world? The Buddhists did exactly this, and envisioned the bodhisattva, who forsook his own enlightenment for the betterment of his fellow creatures. This ideal animates the socially-progressive engaged Buddhism. Though I frequently criticize Christian institutions, I have ample respect for Liberation Theology, which coupled grassroots political reform with Christian tenets in South America.

Then there is caste. If all beings share the same spiritual nature, then why do Advaita pandits continue to uphold caste hierarchy?  Hasn’t the idea of karma, in which our past is to some extent the determinant of our present, the principal religious rationale for poverty and untouchability in India? For the Advaitin, isn’t karma a convenient fiction? After all, if Brahman is the only reality, then what exactly reincarnates?

I still jostle with doubt, but I do recognize the wisdom of uncertainty in a world where the truth is often killed for.

The actuaries say that close to half of my allotted time is up. My uncle, an ER physician, tells me that if you make it to 60, you’ve done very well - the rest of the time spent in samsara is a bonus. My patience wanes: I find myself a tad more cantankerous than I was ten years ago. I am not so sure of my convictions and seem to re-think my position on almost every political issue more than I ever have. In knowing that there is no certitude in what I once considered the truth, I think I am perhaps a little wiser.  As the Buddha might say, nothing is permanent, all is truly in flux. Though more realistic about what I can do in this world, I have not lost my ambition completely - I continue to recklessly dream. There is a tiny girl who will look to me for guidance, love and protection into her adulthood, and I happily bear my responsibility.

The anglicized class in India is quite ridiculous. I had the pleasure of attending "Christmas celebrations" at the Delhi Gymkhana club a couple of years ago. You had hyper-thin girls loitering about in red leather pants; cackling aunties sipping "pegs" of Black Label and puffing Dunhills, young men in suits slow dancing with their portly dates to Bing Crosby’s "I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas." 

In the corner, a scintillant Christmas tree, tinselled to perfection, blessed the crowd.

There was pumpkin soup, well-garnished roasts, and a layout of puddings, some of which were probably last heard of in 1950s England.

It was Orientalism in reverse: Here, the supposedly authentic Indians were enacting a most unconscious mimicry. And this crowd, I might add, is the same one thats scoffs at the kitschy provinciality of Americans, (who, credit to the tribe, have at least invented a culture of their own).

To lose an uncle - the first death in your parents’ generation.

To see the good man in the casket: taut, lifeless and silent.

To see your father cry for the first time as he recites the Gita, which proclaims the Self is never born and never dies.

To see your cousin sitting in silence, her mind still denying the finality, knowing that you too will one day sit in silence in front of your father’s body.

To witness the tension between Hindus and Sikhs over the performance of final rites. It matters not at all. It is the only thing that matters.

To ask, as his casket is swallowed by the grumbling cremation machine, "Where is he and what is he now?"

To emerge from the funeral home into the open air of Southern California, where it is impossibly sunny and warm.

To discard your funeral clothes and take a final bath, and to feel strangely purified.

To cry in the airport in the eye of an indifferent world.

Changes your life - just a little.