Brotherhood: Dharma Destiny and the American Dream Read online

  This house, built on the parcel given to my maternal grandfather, is three stories tall, made of brick with one wall faced with river stones. My grandfather had camped himself on the building site, sorting the stones for choiceness and telling the workmen where to place them. This kind of facade was an unusual touch then. A small patch of manicured lawn and a few rose bushes decorate the front, but it’s not a tranquil setting. Link Road is full of traffic, and the noise presses on you almost constantly inside the house.

  Shanti’s anguish made me cry as we embraced. I don’t remember tears after that. (There was no wailing at the cremation, either. We have strong women in our family.) My mother was in her bedroom, sitting up, waiting. Because she had become more and more an invalid, none of us had expected that she would be the parent left alone. There were arrangements to be made about where she would live now. We had to face the creeping signs of dementia. But none of that came up the first night. My mother was somber and lucid. I remember only one sentence from her: “Your father’s upstairs. Spend the night with him.”

  His body lay on the floor in a third-floor bedroom. It was wrapped in a winding sheet that left his face exposed. When I saw it, there was no sign of Daddy in the grayish skin and masklike expression. I sat until dawn, letting my mind wander through memories that came randomly. My brother and I were well loved as children; none of the images that ran through my mind were troubling, and for that reason none were exceptional. The army camps we lived in, called cantonments. My mother sharing a meal with the kitchen maid; she and my father had no tolerance for the traditional caste system. A procession of anonymous sick people coming through the door. My father as a young man, striking in his uniform with a blaze of medals across his chest. He was comfortable being our household god, modest as he was.

  Flying in from Boston, Sanjiv had arrived at Link Road before me and had been sent to bed to soften the edge of exhaustion. He was waiting when I came downstairs after dawn. Nothing dramatic was said—few words at all, in fact. The extended family would arrive soon. Sanjiv’s wife, Amita, had flown over with him, but it was agreed that my wife, Rita, would come later, after the four days of immediate mourning were over, to help my mother settle my father’s affairs and sort out his papers.

  On the third day Sanjiv and I took the car to Haridwar, four or five hours north. The bits of bone from the cremation were to be immersed in the Ganges. Cultural genes taking over again. The city of Haridwar is one of the seven most holy places for Hindus. The name translates as the Gateway to God; it is where the Ganges tumbles out of the Himalayas and the steepness of Rishikesh, the valley of the saints, before it broadens out on the plains.

  The city is sacred chaos. The minute we stepped out of the car a gaggle of priests converged, assaulting us with questions about our family: my father’s name, my grandfather’s, and so on. Temples line the river, and countless people wade into the water for holy ablutions. At night a flotilla of burning lamps is launched, creating an incandescent mirror of the starry sky.

  Once we had answered enough questions, Sanjiv and I were guided down a narrow alley filled with pilgrims, putt-putting scooters, and sweetshops. Inside a small courtyard a priest unrolled a long parchment scroll. Before ashes are scattered over the Ganges, the deceased’s family marks their visit by entering a message on the scroll. The event doesn’t have to be a death. For hundreds of years this has been a place where people have come to mark important passages in their life, such as a birth or a marriage.

  The days of mourning for my father had scattered my energies. Now, looking at the messages left by my ancestors, my mind was suddenly thrown into sharp focus.

  In that dim, airless room I saw that the last few entries on our family scroll were in English: My father coming to scatter the ashes of his father. My grandfather arriving right after World War I with his new bride to “bathe in the celestial pool.” The record turned into Urdu and Hindi before that, and if the family line had held strong, the record could have stretched back to one of the earliest Vedic rishis, the seers who began the spiritual lineage of India before there was even a religion labeled Hinduism.

  I was unusually moved, even though I had had no real interest in our family tree. Impulsively I added a message to my own children: “Breathe the scent of your ancestors.” That moment lingers in my memory. Later a folded note was found in my father’s room, bidding a final farewell. We don’t know when he wrote it, or if he had a premonition that he would die. As much as he had enjoyed his life, the note said, he didn’t intend to come back again. My mind flashed to lines from the Persian mystic poet Rumi: “When I die I will soar with the angels. When I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.”

  Yet that moment of fullness fled quickly. If a life is contained between its most ecstatic moments and its bleakest, then for me the two collided into each other. I became subdued and downcast.

  I wanted to talk to Sanjiv about this feeling of doom. I wanted to hear what he would say. But as the days passed, I held back. This wasn’t a topic that we felt sympathetic about when we shared our conflicting views. I was the medical maverick, he the establishment. Brothers can share genes, a family, and a culture that weaves them into its complex fabric. That much was unspoken between us. Yet twins who are born with identical genes are not clones. At age seventy their genetic profile will be completely different. Genes switch on and off. They listen in on the world and eavesdrop on a person’s every thought, wish, fear, and dream. Twins diverge as much as the rest of us, although they may retain a subtler bond. Did Sanjiv and I have that? Daddy had abandoned us to our dream of life. Did he wake up from his or simply vanish?

  The scattering of the ashes done, my brother and I arrived back at Link Road after midnight. The pouch that held our father’s ashes was empty, left discarded in the backseat. On the way home neither of us had said what was in his heart. The extended family dispersed after four days. I passed Rita when she arrived, and as quickly as I had entered the province of death, I was back home under the California sun. But the province of death is portable, it seems. I became haunted by an overpowering sense of gloom: My father doesn’t exist anymore. There is nothing left. He is leading where one day I will have to follow.

  Spiritual awakening begins when you realize a simple fact that most people spend their lives avoiding: Death is stalking us at every moment. I cannot say that I felt it as vividly before Haridwar, but as a child I had literally been woken by a death.

  I was six at the time. My parents had gone to England so my father could complete his advanced training in cardiology. Sanjiv and I remained behind, living with our paternal grandfather and two uncles in Bombay. (Sanjiv and I lived with various members of our family as our parents studied or traveled for work, or when we left home to attend private school. Our aunts and uncles were considered our second parents. It has always been that way in India.)

  For an Indian to travel to London for medical studies was rare in those days. In this case, my father had been medical adviser to Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. In 1947 Mountbatten was ordered to liberate the country in a matter of months. Events moved swiftly and with barely a look behind; three centuries of colonialism unraveled.

  In the mad confusion that ensued, Mountbatten didn’t forget my father, and it was through him that the path of Krishan’s medical training was smoothed. This wasn’t enough to overcome ingrained prejudice, though. At the British army hospital in Pune, my father trailed behind the white doctors during grand rounds. He pored over his textbooks late into the night so that he would be prepared when the attending physician called on him to answer a question, but he was never called on. He was ignored, frozen out. He became a silent attendant to a procession of British superiors. One morning at a patient’s bedside, however, the other young doctors were stumped by a tricky diagnosis. The attending turned and repeated his question to my father, who knew the answer. In a single stroke, he had earned respect.

  As gentle and tolera
nt as my parents were, there was never a doubt about the line drawn between whites and “brownies.” Most colonials assigned to India had come out in Victorian times to make their fortune or else to escape disgrace. It was a time when the oldest son inherited everything, the middle son went to university to become a clergyman, and the youngest or most hapless son became a soldier. India was an escape route and a chance to rise higher socially than you could have back home. Salaried clerks lived like rajas. The colonial clubs were bastions of pretentiousness, stuffier than any club in London. The British were out-Britishing themselves.

  By the time my parents were growing up, this fixed hierarchy may have shifted, but the attitude of contempt and indifference to Indian culture hadn’t. Which is understandable when you have conquered a people and want them only for looting and profit. India was a jewel in the crown for mercantile reasons. There was no real military use to occupying the country, only a vast potential for profit.

  The Chopras attached their fortunes to the British because there was no other ladder to climb. My great-grandfather was a tribal chieftain in the barren desert landscape of the Northwest Territory and had held out with cannon rather than accede to the British army when they came to call. So family legend went. He was killed, but his son—my grandfather—accepted a position as sergeant in the British army, which guaranteed him a pension. The linkage with the white colonials became second nature. England was the other place where tea, chutney, and kedgeree featured in daily life. Both countries stopped everything when the cricket scores came over the radio and worshipped cricket stars more devoutly than gods.

  Still, when my father was ready to set sail, my mother, who wouldn’t follow him for a while, got him to promise one thing: As soon as he landed at Southampton, he was to go and have his shoes polished by an Englishman. He did and reported back the satisfaction of sitting in a high chair with a white man bent down before him. He remembered this incident in later years without pride, but without regret, either. While the British saw a benign empire (no one was legally enslaved after a certain date), the subjugated people experienced their psychological scars being rubbed raw every day.

  My father traveled to Edinburgh to sit his medical license exams—it was riskier to take them in London, where the test was supposedly more difficult—and when he sent word back to Bombay that he had passed them, my grandfather was overjoyed. As when I was born, he went to the rooftop of our flat with his rifle and fired several rounds into the air. Then he took Sanjiv and me to see Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves at the cinema, which thrilled us. Even better, he was in such a jubilant mood that he took us to a carnival and lavished us with sweets.

  In the middle of the night I was awakened by the anguished cries of the women of the house. Servants rushed in and swept us up in their arms. Without explanation, we were left with a trusted neighbor. Our grandfather, we learned, had died in his sleep. At six, I had no concept of death. My confused mind kept asking, “Where is he? Somebody tell me.” Sanjiv, who was three, reacted with a sudden outbreak of a mysterious skin condition. He was taken to the hospital; no credible diagnosis was made. But one doctor hit upon an explanation that still satisfies me today: “He’s frightened. The skin protects us, and he feels vulnerable, so it’s peeling off.” This man predicted that Sanjiv would recover as soon as my parents arrived, and he did.

  A day later we heard that my grandfather was being cremated. Two small children wouldn’t be taken along, but one of my uncles attended, returning with a bitter scowl on his face. He was a journalist, someone I was in awe of. He didn’t know I was in earshot when he blurted, “Bau-ji was celebrating with the kids yesterday, and now what is he? A handful of ashes in a jar.”

  I’m wary of assigning defining moments to a life. Too many influences swirl around us, and secret ones percolate inside us from the unconscious. Experts in memory say that the most striking ones we carry from childhood are likely to be deceptive; they are actually amalgams of many related incidents congealed into one. Traumas blur together. Every Christmas adds to a single joy. But Uncle’s words may well have set my course. If so, they lay submerged for years while death stalked me and I kept intent on not looking back over my shoulder.

  I cannot leave that moment without saying that old people seem to time their deaths, as some research now has confirmed. They wait for a significant day, a birthday or perhaps Christmas. Death rates among the elderly go up after major holidays. Years before any statistician thought to look, I had a moving experience of this. An elderly husband and wife had entered the hospital together. The husband was dying, in the late stages of cancer, as I recall. The wife’s condition was much less serious, certainly not grave. But she declined rapidly, while he seemed to go on, no matter how deep the ravages of his disease became.

  I was a young doctor assigned to check on them every day, and one morning I was shocked to hear that the wife had died during the night. I went and told her husband, who seemed strangely relieved.

  “I can go now,” he said.

  I asked him what he meant.

  “A gentleman always waits for a lady to go through the door first,” he said. He passed away a few hours later.

  Now I’m launched into telling my story and how it crosses and collides with Sanjiv’s. Some part of me considers it a strange enterprise, even though I make my living with words. The drawback of being in the public eye, which is also its great attraction, is that people feel as though they already know you. I’ve lived for a long time with this misperception. I arrived at a hospital in Calgary once to deliver a talk and saw a small group of nuns protesting with signs that read, DEEPAK CHOPRA, THE HINDU SATAN. Anyone can go to blogs run by scientific skeptics, where I’m castigated as the Emperor of Woo Woo (I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds a bit endearing, like something out of Dr. Seuss).

  Other people look favorably on me and smilingly tell me that I am a guru (a label I would never apply to myself, not because of its odor of charlatanism in the West, but because the title is revered in India). Yet no one has asked me to my face who I really am. Indian by birth, American by choice. Part of the great postwar diaspora that flung South Asians around the world from Africa to the Caribbean. A physician trained at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences thanks to Rockefeller largesse and a stream of visiting professors from the U.S. As with anyone, my luggage is plastered with stickers from every stop I’ve made in life since the moment I was born. Do you want to know me? Look at my labels.

  Telling your life story can be simply an exercise in riffling through labels. It can be the meeting of a writer’s insatiable vanity with the public’s idle curiosity. I have decided that telling my story can benefit the reader only if we share something so deep that we cherish it equally. Not love of family, dedication to work, a lifelong vision, or even walking the spiritual path.

  What you and I deeply cherish is the project of building a self. Like a coral reef that begins as bits of microscopic organisms floating in the sea, gradually coalescing and finally erecting a massive edifice, you and I have been building a self ever since “I” meant something. As reefs go, ours is sticky. Almost any passing experience can glom on to it. There is no plan to this edifice, and for many people the self is built by accident. They look back to find that the person they’ve become is half stranger, half grumpy boss. Its quirks rule everyday life, veering between “I like this, give me more” and “I don’t like that, take it away.”

  Lives are founded on the whims of “I, me, mine,” and yet there is no getting around the need to build a self and cling to it. Otherwise you might wash out to open sea. I wouldn’t make so much of India except that it gave me the abiding sense that a self is built for a paradoxical reason that is at once wise, impossible, thrilling, and desperate. You build a self in order to leave it behind. A great philosopher once remarked that philosophy is like a ladder that you use to climb to the roof, and then you kick the ladder away. The self is exactly like that. It’s the little boat you ro
w until it bumps on the shore of eternity.

  But why would anyone kick the ladder away? We are proud of “I, me, mine.” Yes, but it is also the source of our deepest suffering. Fear and anger roam the mind at will. Existence can turn from joy to terror without warning, in the blink of an eye. When life seems like a prison, nothing is more enticing than the Indian teaching that life is play (or Lila). I’m telling my story to show that reaching the state of pure play, which carries with it freedom, joy, and creativity, means that you must give up the illusions that mask as reality. The first illusion is that you are free already. Actually, the self you have spent so many years building is a prison, as surely as the microscopic organisms that build a reef are trapped inside its rigid skeleton.

  Sanjiv has his own voice and his own world. I will know only how much he agrees or disagrees with me by reading his chapters. I can foresee that he will not agree with my conclusions about spirituality. Modern Indians are eager to break the bonds of ancient traditions and a restrictive culture. America became an escape route for stifled Indians as much as India was once an escape route for stifled British—you can substitute the word “ambitious,” “restless,” or “alienated” for stifled. I’ve heard applause when I tell an audience that they are children of the universe. Those words may not exactly mesh with Sanjiv’s scientific point of view.