A River Sutra Read online

  Standing here on the escarpment of the hill, a light wind cooling my body after its exertions, I can see the river flowing to meet her bridegroom in all those variations that delighted the Ascetic while on her banks the pilgrims move slowly toward their destination. From this distance the white-robed men and women seem the spume of the river’s waves, and as I watch them I wait to hear the sound of Tariq Mia’s voice calling the faithful to prayer.

  I do not wish to arrive before the old mullah has completed his priestly duties, so if I am early and have not yet heard the sound of “Allah-ho-Akbar!” echoing in the valley that separates us, I walk to a row of ancient Jain caves cut into the copper stone.

  I never enter the caves, for fear of snakes, unable to believe that even the Narmada will protect me from a serpent’s fangs. Instead I sit on a large boulder at one side peering into their darkness. The caves have been deserted for centuries, but I am always hopeful of encountering some passing Jain traveler who may have stopped here for a moment’s worship.

  Once I met two naked Jain mendicants, members of the Sky Clad sect whose rigorous penances include the denial of human shame. To my great disappointment they indicated by signs that they no longer even spoke. After smiling at them for half an hour I regretfully took my leave.

  On another occasion I met a Jain monk from another sect who had only recently renounced the world.

  I REMEMBER THE encounter well. It was winter and I was sitting on my boulder, the winter sun warming my face. In my hands was a bunch of bananas I had broken off a tree during my walk as a gift for Tariq Mia. I was about to peel one for myself when someone coughed behind me.

  I turned to see a slender figure robed in white muslin standing at my side. Under his shaved head, his large eyes examined me with peculiar intensity. A muslin mask covered his mouth but I could hear him clearly when he asked, “If I continue on this road will I reach Mahadeo?”

  I explained the route to Mahadeo, curiosity compelling me to find some way of delaying him in conversation. Then I saw the begging bowl in his hand. “May I offer you some fruit?”

  He accepted and I placed the bananas in his bowl. “Are you making the Narmada pilgrimage?”

  “I am not of the Hindu faith. I am joining my fellow Jain monks in Mahadeo, where they have gone to find a barber. We will beg him to do us the charity of shaving our heads.”

  I pretended ignorance to keep him talking. “Why must you shave your heads?”

  “To avoid human vanity.”

  “Do you cover your mouths for the same reason?”

  “No. These masks prevent us from killing some blameless insect by sudden inhalation.” He removed his mask in order to eat, revealing the strong lines of a handsome face only slightly marred by a jutting chin. “A Jain monk seeks to free himself of the fetters of worldly desire through the vows of poverty, celibacy, and nonviolence.”

  “Tell me, friend, which of such harsh vows is the most difficult for a man to keep?”

  He smiled, and the sudden relaxation of his austere expression showed him to be a young man, not more than thirty years of age. “This may surprise you. Nonviolence. It is very tiring to be worrying all the time that you may be harming some living thing. I must always look down while walking for fear that I may step on an ant. Even plucking bananas becomes an act fraught with danger. Who knows what small creatures live in the leaves or trunk of a banana tree?”

  He fell silent and I watched him surreptitiously as he ate. When he had finished he folded the banana skins and placed them neatly at the base of the boulder. As he retied the mask over his mouth I remarked with some diffidence, “I have also renounced the world.”

  “Was there a great ceremony to mark the moment of your departure?”

  I nearly laughed, remembering the views of my colleagues, but I only said, “My wife was barren so I had no children to concern themselves with my decision. My parents are no longer alive, nor my wife, and my associates hardly noticed the moment of my departure.”

  “You are fortunate. My father boasts of spending sixty-two million rupees on my renunciation ceremonies.”

  “Did you say sixty-two rupees?” I thought I must have misheard him through the mask.

  “No. Sixty-two million rupees.”

  “Million! Sixty-two million! How is such a thing possible? Please explain your ceremony to me.”

  “It is not appropriate for me to discuss the life I forfeited when I became a monk.”

  I persisted. “It is your duty to enlighten me. You are still a young man. I have much to learn from someone who gave up the world so early—”

  “Do not put such value on my actions,” the monk interrupted me sternly. “Giving up the world was no sacrifice for me.”

  “But what a sacrifice for your father! Sixty-two million rupees!”

  I patted the boulder, inviting him to sit by me. “We Hindus revere the spiritual teachings contained in our Upanishads. Do you know what the word upanishad means? It means to sit beside and listen. Here I am, sitting, eager to listen. As a monk, can you deny me enlightenment?”

  He flung his head back, blowing the thin muslin of his mask outward with the force of his uninhibited laughter. “You Hindus. Always disguising your greed with your many-headed gods and your many-headed arguments.”

  He placed his begging bowl at the foot of the boulder. “But if my story will help you on the path of truth, you are welcome to it.”

  Walking to a nearby tree, he retrieved a wooden stick tied with tufts of wool. For several minutes he carefully brushed the boulder free of insects. Satisfied at last that he would be harming no living creature, to my delight he climbed up beside me.

  2

  The Monk’s Story

  I have loved just one thing in my life.

  You ask about the ritual with which I gained the freedom to pursue this love. Why? Ritual means nothing if you do not know the longing that precedes it.

  Can the love between a man and woman be contained in the flowers they exchange, or a coin contain a merchant’s love of wealth? But if you must have only the symbols of love, not love itself, imagine it then.

  I am standing in the suffocating heat of a sports stadium, watching the hysteria of forty thousand people. Each time I move there is a roar of approval, as if in just breathing I am doing something extraordinary.

  Garlands of diamonds circle my neck, winking in the brilliant morning sunshine. Winking, did I say? Flashing. Filling the stadium with galaxies of light.

  On my head is a turban. Tied to it are strings of solitaire diamonds that hang down over my face, hiding me from the appetite of the crowds screaming my name. But it is not only the diamonds that are exciting the crowds. It is also, and more acutely so, their disbelief that I am giving up my wealth.

  Everyone in the stadium knows I am heir to an empire that stretches from the diamond mines of Africa and the diamond cutters of India to the diamond auctions of Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Moscow; the trading houses of Antwerp; the banking establishments of Zurich. My father owns one of the largest diamond companies in the world, and today’s procession is only the culmination of a dozen ceremonies already held all over the world when limousines filled with members of the international diamond trading community followed the Rolls-Royce in which I rode beside my father to distribute our charity at the offices of the Red Cross and UNICEF.

  I can feel the angry skepticism in the stadium even before I hear the yelled jeers below the podium on which I am standing with my father.

  “Arrey, Ashok bhai. O brother Ashok, how will you live without your luxuries?”

  “No Rolls-Royce and driver to bring you home when you tire of your spiritual game, brother. Think again while you still have time.”

  A row of young men with brilliantined hair are laughing below me. When they see me inclining toward them, they clasp hands and jump in the air.

  “Poor Ashok! No more whisky, no more cards!”

  “No more airplanes to take you to Gay Pareeee!�
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  “Remember, brother. You will never be able to lie between the thighs of a woman again.”

  “Oh, Ashok, repent your vanity! It is not human to give up those silken caresses.”

  “Those long black tresses!”

  Their betel-stained mouths open in raucous laughter and they slap each other’s shoulders in glee. How can these jeering youths understand how keenly I have waited to be free of the world? They sit in cheap cinema halls staring in hopeless longing at some voluptuous screen siren whereas I have possessed those female icons in such surfeit that I have sickened of them.

  A group of musicians climbs onto the podium. For a moment my view is obscured by a trombone. All I can see is dust being kicked up from the playing fields, which have become powdery with summer drought. The temperature is over 110 degrees. Under the intense sun my head begins to swim, but if I ask for water I know it will be lukewarm.

  There is no ice left in the city. No bottled soft drinks, no vegetables, no fruit. Yesterday my father fed twenty thousand people in this stadium, and lorries are bringing supplies from Ahmedabad City, sixty miles away, to feed another twenty thousand here tomorrow.

  In any case I cannot ask for water. I have begun my fast. This morning I took my last meal with my family although I was not hungry, unable to ignore the tears falling from my wife’s eyes onto the table as she silently placed my favorite dishes before me. I am forbidden further sustenance until my diksha ceremony, when I finally become a monk. Only then will I be permitted to walk the streets of the city, begging my food and drink.

  The thought that I must wait twenty-four hours to quench my thirst alarms me, and I fear I might faint before the procession begins, but the musicians move away from the podium, allowing me to breathe again.

  A line-of seven elephants lumbers past the podium. Imagine my mortification. Scenes from my life are painted in bright colors on their wrinkled skins—myself on the steps of my father’s bank in Zurich, at my wedding, holding my first child.

  Beside me my father glows with pride. He telephoned a friend who owns one of the big Bombay film studios, and the movie moghul responded by sending him a dozen poster painters whose garish art already deforms the city with billboards of forthcoming attractions. Today, displayed in all its stunning vulgarity on the buttocks, the haunches, the legs, the waving trunks, even the flapping ears of elephants, is the fruit of their most recent labors— my life.

  One beast ignores the imprecations of the elephant keeper, backing toward the podium, and I face a portrait of myself dressed as a cricket player throwing a cricket ball at a row of wickets painted on the elephant’s other leg. The mahout succeeds in urging the elephant forward. The wickets bend like rubber each time the elephant takes a step.

  Loud cheers sweep across the stadium. A cavalcade of horses is trotting toward me. Gold cloths cover the saddles under the riders, golden tassels sweep the dust. The riders spur their horses into a canter around the field and the crowds push back into the benches, yelling their appreciation until their attention is diverted by the camels swaying through the stadium gates, pulling camel carts crowded with musicians, veiled singing women, men with oblong drums strapped to their shoulders.

  “Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one . . .” the crowd shouts. The drummers pound their drums in response, feeding the crowd’s delirium with increasing crescendoes until all forty camel carts have rolled into the stadium.

  The crowds have become accustomed to witnessing new spectacles. To their delight, hordes of dancers now whirl into the stadium, brightly lacquered sticks held aloft in their hands as they dance in widening circles before the horses. Under our podium the mahouts are herding their elephants between the ropes tied from the tusks of the first elephant to the silver-plated chariot in which I will ride beside my father. Lashed to each elephant are massive drums, traditionally used to transport oil and grain. Today those drums are filled with cash and coins to be thrown as charity to the crowds. The elephants sink to their knees and once again the crowds cheer while my younger brother, three uncles, three cousins, gingerly climb onto separate elephants, trying to look regal on their shifting perches.

  . . .

  WHAT IS THE purpose of this display? you ask.

  Imitation, is my answer.

  My father is duplicating the procession with which Mahavira, the great teacher of the Jain faith, renounced the world.

  Unlike your busy pantheon of Hindu gods, we Jains follow in the footsteps of a man. A great prince it is true, but still only a man who found all his wealth, power, beauty gave him no more than transitory pleasure and who yearned for a pleasure that could be sustained. Wrapped in the luxuries of a great court by day, a beautiful young wife by night, Mahavira longed for the freedom to find this state of bliss, if it existed.

  And so one day he left his gilded cage in a mighty procession with dancers clearing the way for elephants, horses, camels loaded with wealth to be distributed to the poor.

  Since then, whenever a Jain becomes a monk, a procession and the distribution of charity mark his departure from the world.

  But my father’s grief at my renunciation of the world has become a desire to have my departure rival the splendors of the farewell of Mahavira himself.

  THERE IS PANDEMONIUM below us as the procession forms. People are surging onto the field. Guards with cane sticks beat them back, fearful a panicked animal might injure someone. I can see the riders positioning their horses in front of the camels lining up in front of the elephants roped to the silver chariot. Then my father pulls at my elbow and I follow him down the steps into the silver chariot.

  The dancers whirl out of the stadium, followed by prancing horses and camel carts rolling forward on their wooden wheels. At last the elephants move ponderously through the stadium gates, dragging my silver chariot into the narrow alleys of the bazaar.

  A sea of people closes on the procession as we force our way through the twisting streets toward the shop where my ancestors began their business.

  Once, when I was on holiday from school in England, my father took me to the shop, laughing at my grimace of disgust when I saw the open gutter running next to the dingy wooden shack.

  “You have lived too long in England. You see only the squalor of these bazaars. But this is a whole world in which the secrets of wealth are whispered from one generation to another. These alleys taught your ancestors the two things vital to success—how to sense approaching danger and how to be flexible.

  “When your grandfather’s grandfather first arrived here he was so poor he kept his entire stock, three small diamonds, wrapped in a cotton belt tied to his stomach underneath his shirt, never showing a stone until he was certain the buyer was serious about making a purchase.

  “From the doorway of his wooden shack he studied the secrets of the bazaar. He learned how its streets changed to accommodate necessity. Widening to seduce the Moghul armies that came to put them to the sword. Contracting in times of peace to such intimate dimensions a man could cross them in two paces to pursue a bargain or secure a loan. Expanding to absorb the goods pouring out of the factories of the British Empire. Shrinking for the austerities preached by Mahatma Gandhi.

  “Remember, in this squalid bazaar your family learned to negotiate, manipulate, intrigue, bargain. Armed with that knowledge —in only four generations—we parlayed three small diamonds into an empire.”

  Today those alleys are being carpeted in my family’s wealth, bank notes trampled into their melting tarmac. Through my visor of diamond solitaires I glance at my father. He is smiling with pleasure as he watches his relatives flinging fistfuls of money to the crowds. The paper currency hangs suspended in the air for a second, like confetti, before floating gently down into the forest of grasping hands.

  My father hands me a silver urn. Grateful that no one can see my shame, I plunge my hands into its glittering depths and throw pearls, diamond chips, silver coins in high arcs over the shifting mass of heads.

  Si
lver coins clink against the tin roofs of the bazaar shops, pearls roll down the broken steps that span the gutters. For a moment the glinting gems, the mirrors in the singers’ veils, the golden cloths that cover the horses, this silver chariot, all render the scene weightless and unreal. Then the crowd pushes against the guards, screaming and waving at my carriage, fearful of losing such treasure.

  There is a riot as the procession turns from the bazaar. People are clambering over each other’s shoulders to reach the silver carriage from which fortunes are being dispersed so carelessly into the air. I can hear the riders shouting at their rearing horses, see the guards trying to clear a way through the surging crowds as the camel carts rock wildly from side to side and the drivers fight to steady the camels.

  Our chariot feels as if it is coming apart under our feet. I grip my father’s arm so he will not fall. He turns and I see fear in his eyes.

  I know it is a fear of violence.

  When I was a child my father had taught me the cardinal doctrine of the Jains.

  “The most important thing in our faith is ahimsa, the practice of nonviolence. That is why we are bankers or merchants. There are so many activities we cannot undertake for fear of harming life. If we were farmers we might unknowingly kill creatures under our plows. In industry the earth is drilled for oil, iron, coal. Can you imagine how much life is extinguished by those machines?”

  “Diamonds are mined from the ground,” I had argued as a child.

  “I have never bought a diamond mine,” my father reminded me. “Even though diamond mines would have increased the wealth of the company immeasurably. But if a man believes in the doctrine of ahimsa; he must follow it to its logical end.”

  Growing up I came to realize my father’s dignity rested on his widely acknowledged genius as a merchant and his private adherence to the principle of nonviolence, which led him to distribute much of the company’s profits in charitable trusts. I admired him more than any man alive.

  Before I joined university I spent a year traveling around the world with my father acquiring an understanding of the diamond trade. During that year my attitude toward him changed. I was shocked to see he was unmoved by the conditions under which the diamonds were mined, or the distressing poverty of the miners.