6. Wedding Crashers and Ashes
There is a Hindi word, baysharam, that literally means “devoid of shame.” To call a person “baysharam” is a strong insult; here in the West, it would be like calling a person a pathological liar.
This is part of the reason Eastern culture is not a culture in which we emotionally undress or, to use the Western metaphor, wash our dirty linen in public. In many ways this makes sense. Why and to what purpose does one need to bare all heartaches and inner struggles? Even if you do share some of yourself, you certainly don’t betray the inner workings of your home or relationships among your loved ones. It is one thing for you to bare your own personal shame; it is another thing to bring shame on another.
For that reason, I guarded my own inner agonies. One way or another, to let anyone else know what was going on inside me would reflect on my family. I successfully bottled up all my hurts and struggles, and no one had a clue about what was going on inside — except, perhaps, my mother.
I have said that my brother Ajit is like my father. Everyone who has known my mother says that I’m very much like her, both in personality and habits and in my features. If a mere morsel or two of food was left after a meal, she would save it. “You never know when you’re going to need it” was her approach. With a family of seven, she no doubt did that out of necessity. But to this day, those same traits show up in me. If even the tiniest slice of cake remains, I’ll wrap it up in a napkin and store it away. Or if I’m in a hotel and I’m about to toss a half-used miniature bottle of shampoo, I’ll instinctively stop myself, thinking, “Why am I throwing this away? I should take it home. I might need it.” That has its benefits, like hidden gold at a time you need it. But it has also brought me moments of red-faced discomfort when Margie is cleaning out my suitcase and says, “What on earth did you bring this back for?” Yes, I am the proverbial pack rat.
My mom was also very much a people-person. She was attuned to meeting others’ needs and had her own network that touched people’s lives. If she was ever given a position of authority, whether at the school where she taught or elsewhere, she always used her position to help people. Whatever she could do to meet another’s need, she did it.
She was a very gentle person, and she was also more of a story-thinker, never short of a proverb or a parable, in contrast to my dad. Whereas my father was skilled at making complex decisions in the moment, my mother never rushed to any conclusion on a matter of importance. She was very reflective, not so much in terms of philosophy, but in regard to people’s emotions and needs. I never heard her utter an ill word about anyone, and if she ever came close to it, it was almost humorous to hear. We would chuckle along with her whenever that happened. People connected with her readily, and our house always had a stream of walk-in visitors to see my mom.
There is one particular trait I continue to share with her. My mother was always aware of her roots, her small beginnings, and she never grew out of that. No matter how “big city” my dad’s life became, my mom’s heart was always “small town.” She was kind and generous to the poor and the needy. Many times I saw her give something extra or do something special for the people who cleaned the houses in our area. These people were called jemadars, meaning “the sweepers.” Sweeping and mopping floors was their trade and the entire source of their income. Some of them cleaned up to twenty houses a day, sweeping, mopping, and scrubbing the bathrooms of each home in the neighborhood every morning and evening. They are on the lowest rung of this highly stratified society — the “untouchables.”
The jemadars who worked in our area were a family who lived in two little huts behind our home. The huts, with thatched roofs, were made of cow dung and straw. About ten people lived in those two huts, really at the mercy of the elements and an ever-increasing family. Living so closely to such poverty, life and death takes place before your eyes. On a given morning you might hear some weeping and find out that there was a death that night — the death of a son or daughter or parent. But life went on, with an accepting of all this fatalistically. Their whole world was drudgery and minimal survival. My mother regularly saved up things to give to them — from our outgrown clothes, to old watches, to jewelry of various kinds.
Years later, after we had moved overseas, the jemadars were the ones for whom my mother loaded me down with things — food, clothes, and money — each time I went back to Delhi. They would hover around me and ask to see pictures as they oohed and aahed, watching the way our family had grown. They were always grateful for whatever I brought them, and they remembered my mother fondly. They called her Memsahib, a very fond and respectful term that means “the lady of the house.” On one occasion, when I went back and looked for them, I saw that the huts were broken-down and that nobody was there. On asking around, I was told that the parents had died, and so the family had moved back to a village, but no one knew where. I miss staying connected with them. I often wish I could find out which village they live in and go to visit them.
My relational skills also must have come from my mother, and I didn’t lack in them as I entered my teenage years. My friends and I had formed very close relationships, from being cricketmates to just hanging out together. There were ten or eleven of us, all from the neighborhood, and once a month we held a big lunch at one of our homes, during which our mothers cooked for us. But we cooked, too. We used to look forward to that monthly Saturday. My mother always put on a big spread when the time came for us to hold it in our home.
Ajit and I each had our own set of friends. But as he moved on to college in Madras and I remained in Delhi, there was also a growing sense of different values between us. “You and your friends,” he would often remark then — a typical older brother — “you’re all such innocents, so naive.” He knew that the mischief we got into was innocent, contrary to some of his new experiences at college. And today he would admit that his college friends had a different way of looking at life from the way we had been raised. I always admired him and loved to listen to his stories; he could really tell them. But we were on somewhat different paths.
I was seen in my family as very much a pragmatist when it came to humor. I knew how to joke my way through various situations. It never worked with my father, of course, but my buddies knew to beware around me. I was a practical jokester, ever on the lookout for mischievous pranks to pull. None of the stuff was ever intended to hurt anyone, but I didn’t pass up an opportunity to take advantage of a potentially humorous situation.
Before cricket matches I would limp a little, feigning injury so that our opponents would think, “Ah, here’s a hurt one. This should be an easy out.” I would step up slowly to the wicket, only to let loose with a fluent, powerful stroke to score the runs we needed.
My buddies were usually involved in my pranks. At times, Sunder was reluctant, being more serious-minded, but Ashok was always a willing participant. We might swipe a guy’s books before an exam to watch him begin to panic when he couldn’t find them. Or we would work in tandem to play some trick on a shopkeeper.
Once at summer camp we met a guy named Eugene, whose nickname was Turkey. (The reason isn’t important!) Turkey foolishly admitted to the rest of us that he was scared of the dark. As soon as he said this, I saw a look register on my friends’ faces that seemed to say, “Uh-oh. Turkey made a mistake by saying that. He never should have admitted it in front of Ravi.”
I asked Turkey, “Why do you get afraid?”
“Unexplained noises,” he said. That was another bad confession.
Somehow that afternoon, I found time to sneak away and implement my scheme. I tied some tin cans together onto a long string, then draped the string through the ventilation opening that ran from Turkey’s room to ours.
That night, well after lights were out, I tugged at the string gently at periodic intervals. We all heard Turkey climb out of bed and start pacing the floor. Every ten minutes or so, I gave another yank, and Turkey would get up again. We could tell he was looking around, trying to find out where the noise was coming from, but with no success. The next morning, one look at Turkey’s face told us he hadn’t slept a wink. That was mean, but, for my youthful sense of identity, successful. Today it troubles me a bit to think that such things gave me a laugh.
I found one prank to be particularly advantageous. I must confess this was not a good one. I pretended to be a go-between for any fellow and girl who were trying to establish a friendship. I loved pastries, so I would tell the guy, “You know, she really loves cakes.” He would bring cakes to me to pass on to the girl but, of course, half of them never made it to her.
Or I would pretend to one of them that the other was in the next room. I would say to the girl, “What do you want him to know? I’ll give him your message.” I would step into the next room, which, of course, was totally empty, and come back with a fake message from him. Then I’d pull the charade on the fellow. My sisters still talk about what a dirty trick this was. To understand this, you really need to understand how our culture separated the genders so as to limit any romantic involvements. So time spent with a member of the opposite gender, alone, was almost nonexistent. We had to find ways and means of something to entertain the fancy, even if it meant just sending a pastry to the other. When the day came that I had to disclose this whole thing as a farce, the two didn’t know whether to choke me or to say, “How did we really get taken in?” Again, I must say I feel pretty bad about this now because it exploited people, but at the time, I thought of it as merely a short-term prank that would not hurt anyone too much.
One of the benefits resulting from another of our pranks — and on this my friends and I all agreed — was that no one in India attended more wedding dinners than we did. In northern India, weddings begin with the bridegroom riding on horseback to the bride’s house. He is followed by what is called the “bridegroom’s party” — a company of up to three or four hundred people, with musicians playing, women waving lanterns, and others happily taking part in the celebration. When the bridegroom’s party arrives at the bride’s house, they are welcomed in a brief ceremony. Then all of the bridegroom’s guests are seated and served a royal dinner; the bride’s guests are served in the second round. As for the menu, it consists of the best chicken, rice, and curry dishes you’ve ever tasted. India’s delicacy is tandoori chicken — chicken that has been marinated overnight in spices and saffron in a yogurt base, then put on a skewer and barbecued in a clay oven. You talk about succulent, mouthwatering food! We couldn’t afford it very often, but it was served at every wedding if the menu was nonvegetarian.
Now, because these weddings can be so large — sometimes up to 1,500 or 2,000 people — it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. My cricket-mates and I found this to be a very advantageous situation. In fact, we relied on it to secure probably a significant number of the best wedding dinners in Delhi over the course of any given summer.
Sometime around late April or May, the wedding season begins. About six thirty every evening, you’d hear a band playing in the distance and see a procession coming down the road. Calling it a band is very generous. The instruments were probably left over from some prehistoric collection, and the out-of-tune sounds made for grimaces as we listened. Oh, but what an omen it was to hear a band playing in the distance, getting closer by the minute! That was the signal for us to drop our cricket bats, rush to our buddy’s house — where we’d made sure to bring our dress shoes beforehand — change out of our cricket shoes (maybe change our shirts as well), and casually join in the procession.
If you’re going to be part of the bridegroom’s party, it’s important to congratulate him heartily and cheer him on. With this rule we gladly complied, waving happily and calling out the lucky fellow’s name — once we learned it!
However, there were some risks. Since we were never dressed in typical wedding attire, we needed a plan in case a waiter became suspicious and started giving us the eye. When that happened, one of us would say to another, purposely within earshot of the waiter, “What time is your father coming?”
This usually gave the waiter reason to pause, because he would not want to offend a legitimate guest whose father was about to appear. It was also the signal for one of us to look at the waiter and order with great confidence, “What are you standing there for? Get us some cashews!” This would cause the waiter further hesitancy, we thought, as he would reason that we must belong there — otherwise we wouldn’t be ordering him around.
After these wedding-dinner outings, we’d usually get home around eight o’clock, just as my mother was serving dinner. I would walk in and say that I really wasn’t hungry that night. That in itself would be a shock to the servants. My mother would ask, “You’re not having dinner?”
“No, Mom, I’m not that hungry.”
“Have you eaten at a wedding again?” In utter frustration she would ask me, “Ravi, why do you keep doing this?”
“Mom,” I would assure her calmly, “all wedding invitations say, ‘We invite you along with your family and friends.’ There’s always a distinct possibility I might have had a friend there.” I’d pause and then say to my brothers and sisters, “You really should have tasted that tandoori chicken.”
Only once did a prank actually come close to risking someone’s life, including my own. A group of us, about half guys and half girls, were taking a train to a summer camp, when we made a stop at a certain station. A huge, burly Sikh wearing a turban was standing on the platform, waiting to get into our compartment. I could tell there would be trouble if I crossed this guy, but the opportunity was irresistible.
As the train began to move, he stepped onto the footboard to enter our compartment, which he was not supposed to do because it was reserved for our group. I was parked at the door and given the terrible assignment of blocking his way. “I’m sorry, sir,” I began, “but this compartment is reserved and full.”
He started to push and shove.
Now, I was just a skinny teenager then, and this guy was twice my size. But that was where the fun was.
“Let me on,” he demanded.
“You look like a nice man,” I noted, peeking back into the compartment, pretending to survey a full coach. I assured him, “We might try and find a spot, but just wait here.”
“Step aside,” he threatened.
“Please, sir, just give us a few moments to move some things to make room for you.”
I don’t know how I held him off for so long, but I succeeded. The train was moving slowly. He was standing on the step, holding on to the bars, and he began shouting at me that either I let him on or else —
That’s when I did the unthinkable. I furiously started to tickle him under his arms.
By this time, a horde of my buddies stood behind me, watching the scene. Panic set into the group. But my prankish mind was fast at work. As I kept tickling him under the arms — his arms shooting like pistons, holding on only one at a time — I wondered if this was going to be my last day on earth.
By this time, the train had picked up some speed. My tiring attempts to throw him off and his determination to hold on were growing old. One of us was going to have to give way. So I did the only thing I could think of: I went for his midsection.
In his attempt to push me off, he unwittingly let go of the bars and had to jump down, stumbling along the side of the train to keep from biting the dust. I really did not intend for it to get this risky, but I have also no doubt that, had he gotten on, we could have had a very fearsome situation. The Sikh shook his fist at me as we pulled away, and I returned to my seat drained, my heart pounding. I was applauded as a hero but would gladly have given somebody else that privilege.
A lot of these things I did to hide the inner struggle of my soul and to feed my need to act like I really was somebody. None of those friends, nor anyone in my family — not even my mom — would ever have guessed the depths of the loneliness that stalked me. Though I was close to my buddies, I still felt a sense of inferiority when I was with them. Maybe I even did some of these things to prove some sense of identity. It was during this time in my life that my dad, probably trying to shame me into facing reality, started saying things to me that cut deeply into my soul and seemed never to exit my thoughts. It culminated in one brief torrent when I found myself standing before him.
“You’re a complete failure,” he said. “You’re an embarrassment to the family. You’ll never make anything of your life.”
He could not have known my shame at those words, or my despair at his final summation of me.
To be honest, at that time I thought this was my loneliest moment. But there was worse to come. And then the wheels began to turn to make my plans.
In that culture, you were supposed to bear responsibility early on. At fifteen years of age, I was considered an adult, yet I knew I wasn’t doing what I needed to do with my life. And it weighed me down, burdening my every thought. I sat in my classroom at school thinking, “What is going to become of me?” That thought constantly haunted me. And so I found myself asking, “Am I a complete failure? Can I get out of life some way, painlessly?”
I didn’t talk to any of my siblings about it — I couldn’t. It just wasn’t done. Nor did I talk to my friends. I was aware that something deep and downward had begun in me, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
My mother must have known something was going on inside me. She knew that I felt I was the loser in the family. For that reason, I know, she always had a special place in her heart for me. She was a saint and watched me closely because she knew I was hurting. Margie continually reminds me of this. “Your mom had your heart in hers,” she says.
But my mom couldn’t have known what I was planning.
There is a certain story in my family that none of us want to dwell on today. Whenever we are together and one of us begins to reflect on this incident, the story never gets finished, or it’s somehow abridged. Even now, I can only relate it in its mildest form.
One night, my father kicked us out of the house — all of us, mother and children. It had begun with his verbal abuse of my mom, such as none of us had seen before. Then he turned his abuse on us, and we were taking some hits. It was a cold night in Delhi, and he told us all to get out. None of us can recall what caused such rage. We were all in our nightclothes, outside the house and shivering. My mother quickly led us to a stairwell between the flats in our complex. There, under the stairs, she gathered us together and, unwrapping her sari, covered us with its flimsy warmth. She protected us as best she could, while we trembled in the cold.
I said to my mother, “Why don’t we go to one of my friends’ places? They’ll let us in for the night.”
“No, no,” she answered. “Your father will get a bad name in the community. We can’t do that.”
So we sat there underneath the stairwell, wrapped in our mother’s sari, the only shelter we knew.
I cannot remember if Ajit was there with us or had already gone away to his university studies in Madras. We just don’t talk about it. That’s what actually makes writing all this quite hard. Yet, I should add, even if Ajit had been with us that night, I don’t know whether things would have turned out any differently.
I cried a lot that night, sitting in the cold under that stairwell. I was already aware of my despair. But I had become more aware of its great degree. All I could think of were my failures in life. “I’m not doing well in my studies. I’m not getting anywhere. I’m empty and lonely. And now this.”
I thought of what my father had done. And I decided, “This isn’t right. I have to find out how we’re going to survive. I have to find out what life is about. I have to do something.”
I decided I would deal with it in a serious way. I was determined to seek some answer. And if I couldn’t find one, I would let everything go.
“If this is what life is, then I have no hope.”
I turned my thoughts to the only remaining place there was to go.
“If there is a God, I want You to reveal Yourself to me. Otherwise, I am no more.”
Sometime that year, I faced another deeply unnerving moment. A very good friend of mine died in a botched operation, and I was quite shaken by it. I simply couldn’t come to terms with her death.
I decided to ride my bike to the site where our friend had been cremated, and just as I arrived, her ashes were being shoveled away. There was an old, bald man at the site, whom I recognized to be a Hindu priest.
“Sir?” I said, “may I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
I gestured to the ashes. “This was my friend.”
“I’m sorry for you.”
“Sir, please,” I stammered, “can you tell me where she is now?”
The old man looked at me very soberly. “Young man,” he began, “that is a question you’ll be asking all your life. And you will never find an answer.”
His words shook me. If even he, a man of such devotion and dedication, could not answer with any certainty what happens after death, what hope did I have to find the answer?
I could not accept it.
I got back on my bike and rode away. The search was building, the answers seemed nonexistent, the fears were mounting, and my heart was scheming toward something else. Neutrality to reality was no longer an option for me. I began my search in earnest.