An End to Suffering Read online

  To my surprise, Mr Sharma asked for a token rent: only 1000 Rupees per month. I was expecting more, and had even begun to wonder how I could afford the cottage. He said that he too had come to Mashobra many years ago, wanting to read and write. His father had set up the first Sanskrit college in Simla. Mr Sharma himself published a monthly magazine in Sanskrit from one of the rooms under my cottage. He said he hadn’t built the cottage to make money; it was meant to host needy scholars like myself.

  I felt uncomfortable being called a ‘scholar’. I had been an indifferent student, originally of commerce, which I hoped would help me avoid the conventional role of doctor or engineer set out for not very well-off Indians like myself. I hadn’t written much and had barely any idea of what I might write. But I didn’t correct Mr Sharma; I did not wish to disappoint him. I had lived far more precariously in the hill station of Mussoorie, at a boarding house run by Christian missionaries who saw me as a potential convert, and who accosted me on my evening walks and wished to know the state of my soul. As I saw it, I was closer to being a scholar than a Christian.

  And then it didn’t really matter after I moved to Mashobra – a few days after my first visit – and, with my books and my absorption in them, began to look like a scholar of sorts.

  It was very cold when I first arrived. For much of my life, I had longed for this kind of extreme cold. On the summer afternoons of my childhood, when a scorching loo raged just outside the darkened windows and doors, and while everyone in my family slept – the siesta being part of the obligatory surrender to the heat that emptied the streets of our small town – I sprawled half naked on the grainy stone floor and read and reread the Mahabharata, dreamily transplanting myself among the white peaks in the religious-kitsch calendars on the walls of our old railway bungalow. I imagined myself with the Pandava brothers in their self-imposed exile, and with the Hindu sages and seers shown meditating next to glaciers – men whose lengthy and bushy beards had seemed to the calendar artist a sign of wisdom and self-control.

  And, now, I was in the Himalayas. But for many days I was far from exultant. I felt subdued by the pale-blue light that filled the valley, delicately shading the hollows of the distant mountains. I was oppressed by the silences, which were so fine that they could be broken by the apologetic cough of the hunchbacked peasant working somewhere invisibly in the orchard. Strange apprehensions seemed to lie in the damp shade of the pine forest I went walking through. The smell of the home fires drifting upwards from the valley inspired no memories of the many smoke-filled mornings and evenings of my small-town childhood; nothing, in fact, seemed to have any clear associations with my past.

  It was as if the cold weather in a new place was forcing another side of me to emerge; as if I had grown too accustomed to living on the plains, where the same fierce white light fell from the sky all year long, enclosing everything – the self as well as the towns, fields and rivers – in a changeless substance.

  I felt particularly restless in the evenings. The bare apple trees in the orchard looked beaten, and, as the lights of a hundred unseen homes began to twinkle on the distant hillsides, vivid fantasies of security and warmth arose in my mind. Cruel icy winds, the residue of snowstorms in the highest mountains, sometimes blew through the cracks in window and door frames and almost extinguished my kerosene lamp. I bought a locally made heater from one of the shops in the village. But the power supply was erratic, and the two rods barely had time to glow a weak orange before the light went out altogether. The hours spent huddled under the igloo of Mr Sharma’s quilts and hot-water bottle did not finally relieve the viciousness of the tap water.

  Occasionally, Mr Sharma dropped in, after supervising the milking of the cows and paying off the hunchbacked peasant. He brought fresh milk, or tea in steel tumblers which, because of the cold, always had a thick layer of cream over it, and was consumed in two or three quick sips. We sat wrapped in thick shawls in my room on facing wicker armchairs, Mr Sharma very erect in his.

  We didn’t always speak. In fact, the silences could lengthen considerably; they made me uneasy and I was the first to break them, often by asking Mr Sharma if the power supply was likely to become more regular, whether the plumbing in the bathroom could improve soon, if the large spiders I had seen around the house were poisonous, or – and I knew that this subject did interest him greatly – if it had snowed enough over the winter to help the apple trees.

  Mr Sharma did not seem to notice either the silences or my questions. When he spoke in his slow measured way it was invariably about the depredations of modern civilization on nature. Even the supposedly eternal snows on the high Himalayan ranges were melting fast. The water in the river Sutlej that arose in Tibet and flowed not far from us was polluted. The hillsides were littered with plastic bags. The deforestation in the hills not only caused earthquakes but also terrible floods on the plains. Human beings had forgotten that they too were part of nature. They had been arrogant enough to think themselves masters of nature, and nature was now going to have its revenge on them.

  I thought he talked to me of things he turned over in his mind but couldn’t share with the people he lived with: his father, Panditji, a sprightly octogenarian with the appearance and robust self-absorption of a Hindu seer, who performed sacrificial rituals and made horoscopes; his affectionate mother who, like most women of her generation, had not received much formal education; or his sister, a woman of melancholy beauty who had been widowed some years previously and now worked at a government office in Simla.

  The difference in our ages was great – he was then in his late fifties. Perhaps that’s why he thought of me as primarily a listener, and responded frugally to my own curiosity about him. I wanted to know more about his past in Simla. He had first known the city when it was the summer capital of the largest portion of the British Empire, and perhaps subconsciously I wanted him to endow it with the glamour I had arrived too late to see.

  But he said he disliked Simla. It appeared from various things he said at different times that his father’s Sanskrit college had been of little use to him, and that he had to work at the missionary-run Bishop Cotton School in Simla, teaching Hindi to the children of rich local shopkeepers, people he might not have had much time for in the past. Mr Sharma seemed to me then to contain many unfulfilled aspirations, his over-formal manner being the defensive reflex of someone who saw the outside world as full of threats to his dignity.

  The weather steadily improved. In the morning, there was a thin layer of frost on the ground. But the afternoons were warm. I often lay on the grass outside the house during the long hours of sunlight. My book remained unopened as I surrendered to idleness. I watched the clouds in the sky and smelled the grass and the soil beneath me; the fragrance summoned the silent overgrown gardens of my childhood, the places of retreat where I had once watched the industriousness of ants and snails and enacted scenes from the Mahabharata.

  The rooms were cool and mysterious and aloof when I went inside. They had not yet insinuated themselves into my being as had the many provincial rooms I had lived in as a child, the rooms with their particular detail (the frayed wicker chair so hospitable to daydreams, the dry aroma of a cupboard, the pattern of cracks in the stone floor) from which separation was always painful.

  I began to go on little walks, to the shops on the main road, and learnt more about Mashobra. Most of the village’s two thousand inhabitants – farmers, low-level government employees, small shopkeepers – had little money. But there was no wretchedness of the kind found on the Indian plains. Its houses, opening out boldly on to the road, or hidden in cobbled alleys down the hill, were tall and large. The only ragged people on the road were out-of-work foreigners, Kashmiri and Nepalese porters, sullen, silent men wearing dusty ropes around their necks. The village seemed to belong to itself; and there were quiet Sunday mornings when the soft bells of the old English church could sound too insistent.

  One day in the forest on the hill looming over the
village, I came across a helipad and well-laid lawns, and then found myself surrounded by armed guards. I had strayed into the former retreat of the British viceroys, now assigned, like their much grander residence in Delhi, to the President of India, if hardly ever used by him. There were bigger and emptier houses on the road leading north from the village: old bungalows that hid behind tall hedges, and had, apart from the kind of melancholy gardens and arbours I had read about in Turgenev’s novels and stories, dingy smoke-filled sheds for servants, where women with broad Mongoloid faces squatted around wood fires.

  The road had more surprises as it cut through a pine forest, past a meadow and an old Kali temple and ended at a hilltop forest rest house, which the locals pronounced Carignano, and which turned out to be Craignano, the site of a mansion built in the late nineteenth century by an Italian confectioner from Turin.

  Mr Sharma couldn’t tell me what an Italian was doing in the Himalayas in the nineteenth century. But he did know that the wealthier British often escaped to Mashobra from hedonistic Simla. He had also heard of some of the Indians who now owned the bungalows. One of them was the descendant of a lecherous Maharajah whom the British had banned from entering Simla. One bungalow served as the hideout of a prince from Nepal. Three decades before, a famous film actress from Bombay had bought one of the best properties in Mashobra, but she had never been seen in the village. An industrial magnate from Delhi, someone fleeing private tragedy – the death of his young son – was the most faithful among the absentee owners of the bungalows, which were maintained largely by the servants, who were mostly migrant labourers from distant villages.

  I felt slightly diminished by this new knowledge about Mashobra. On clear days, when I walked to the top of the hill with the presidential house and saw the snowy peaks on the horizon and felt a fresh cool breeze on my face, I could believe that a new life was beginning for me, in which I too would have a claim on the world’s ample store of happiness. But the big houses made me fear that I was going to be as disappointed in Mashobra as I had been in Delhi.

  *

  I had taken to Delhi my provincial ability to be quickly impressed, and a hunger for new adventures, possibilities of growth. In well-protected enclaves, there were libraries and bookshops, cultural sections of foreign embassies, film festivals and book readings. There were even – if you had the money and the confidence – a dozen five-star hotels. But these excitements were temporary – best possessed at a high level of wealth and security, and maintained beyond the first few minutes only if, after the new European film, you were returning in an air-conditioned car to a house with high walls. For to emerge into a humid night from the cool auditorium of the British Council onto the broken pavement with the limbless beggars; to push and elbow one’s way into the sweat, dirt and noise of a packed bus; then to watch with a foolish little twinge of privilege the stranded men at the bus stops, was to be robbed of the new and fragile sensations of the previous few hours; it was to have yet again a sense of the hollowness of the city’s promise and the mean anonymity of the lives it contained; it was to know the city as a setting not of pleasure but of work and struggle.

  I was somewhat relieved to find out that my association with the Sharmas gave me a certain status in the village. Strangers greeted me with ‘Namaste’ as they passed me on the road. The men in the cavernous shops, idle behind open sackfuls of kidney beans and chickpeas and rice, were attentive, eager to talk and offer gossip about local politics.

  The Sharmas themselves lived quietly, except when a special occasion – a festival, a shradh (a death anniversary ritual) or a yagna (a fire sacrifice) – brought the scattered family together in a happy whirl of silk scarves, crying babies and sizzling puris (some of which came my way). Mr Sharma’s sister left for her office in Simla early in the morning and returned just before dusk. Only Mr Sharma and his mother remained in the big house with the many windows, which looked deserted during the long afternoon. There were visitors, middle-class people in new cars whom the shopkeepers gazed at curiously. Mr Sharma’s father, Panditji, who seemed to spend most of his day walking around the orchard or inspecting the cows while leaning on his stick, was, I discovered, very well known as a priest and astrologer. People from places as far off as Chandigarh visited him in order to know about, and improve, their prospects in this and the next life. He was also the personal priest of the former king of the nearby district of Rampur, whose political career he helped boost through elaborate fire sacrifices on his lawn.

  Each month, Mr Sharma, working away unseen in his house, brought out his Sanskrit magazine, Divyajyoti, from an antique printing press kept in one of the dark rooms just below my cottage. Mr Sharma told me that it had a circulation of five hundred copies, and it went out to Sanskrit colleges and institutions in India and elsewhere. He wrote most of the magazine himself during the first half of the month. I did not ask him what he wrote about, but I imagined he pronounced on broad social and political issues of the kind he discussed with me. Some of the articles may have been commentaries on a fifth-century BC book of grammar Mr Sharma often held up proudly as proof of Sanskrit’s divine origin and inspiration.

  He brought the loose pages to the press, smiling awkwardly when I passed him on the narrow path through the orchard. For the second half of the month, Daulatram, the big round-faced jovial handy man, would laboriously typeset the longhand version, a solitary figure in a corner of the dark room messy with wooden galley trays and metal sticks: the tips of his fingers were stained black when he came up to my cottage to replace a fuse or to offer some freshly plucked fruit. A week before the fifteenth of each month, the issue would be printed. The press would begin to hum loudly as Daulatram turned on the power, and then, after an uncertain staccato start, ease into a regular beat, which was as peculiarly soothing as that of a train at night. Then, on the morning of the fifteenth, Daulatram would jauntily walk up the hill to the post office, holding the finished copies in a small bundle under his giant arm.

  The days acquired a rhythm, began to pass. I was awakened very early in the morning, the sun bullying its way even through the thick coarse-textured blue curtains of my window. Shortly thereafter, I heard a knock on the door: it was Mr Sharma’s young nephew with a plate of parathas and pickle. This was the gift of the women in Mr Sharma’s household: his mother and his sister. The day stretched long and somewhat emptily after that, even though I went to bed babyishly early, at around nine o’clock, by which time the whole village was already asleep.

  For years, I had felt a small thrill at the sight of the sentence, ‘I read all morning’. The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure. It was what I did now: I read all morning, sitting out on the balcony, and then, early in the afternoon, with the sun roughly overhead, I walked up the hill, through a dappled pine wood, for lunch at a roadside food shack called Montu’s dhaba.

  Montu, a lumbering corpulent man with eyes perpetually red from drinking, ran the dhaba along with his wife. They lived in two dark low-roofed rooms at the back, curtained off from the road-facing dhaba with a torn cotton sari. At lunch I sat alone on the wooden bench, under the outdated calendar with pictures of Shiva, and read the censorious articles in Punjab Kesari, a local Hindi daily, about masturbation (bad for eyesight) and blue jeans (bad for blood circulation), while Neeraj, the couple’s polite young son, brought warm chapattis on a small aluminium plate.

  The food was unremarkable, the menu unchanging. There was frequently a lot of something called ‘mixed dhal’, which was all Montu said he could afford by way of dhal in the days of post-socialist inflation. But his son Neeraj asked hopefully each time if I had found the food satisfactory, and I had to lie.

  On the way back I stopped at the post office, a large dusty room with a disused telephone booth and an old damaged clock. There would often be a few men there – mostly servants from the big empty houses – sending money to the families they had left in remote Himalayan villages. They would ask me to write a f
ew cryptic messages on the small margins of their money-order forms. ‘Everything is fine,’ I usually wrote, ‘use this money for your medicines. I will send more soon.’ Or: ‘I am sorry that I can’t send more money. I have not heard from you for a long time. I am very worried. I pray that you are well. Please write and tell me so.’

  There was rarely any mail for me, apart from an occasional letter from my parents and a cheque – payment for one of the reviews I wrote to support myself. But the ageing postman was always grateful to give me some letters for my landlord and save himself the steep walk to and from the house. I, in turn, would hand them to Mr Sharma’s mother who sat knitting at the open second-floor window. She would sit there from late morning, all through the long drowsy afternoons until the sun disappeared behind the hills to the west, when the shadows, languid all day, swiftly stole across the orchard and the valley, and the soft golden peaks in the distance seemed to hold, briefly, all the light in the world.

  Weeks passed. The summer was warm and long. Some exotically coloured birds cut slow lazy circles in the blue air all day. In the evenings, smoke arose in thin nervous columns from houses deep in the valley, where, late at night, the dogs would abruptly begin to bark.

  The monsoons finally came in early July and pulled a thick veil of grey over everything; the rain was comforting at first, but then grew insistent and dreary. I began to long for clear days, and I think that it was soon after autumn set in, with the first of its long bejewelled afternoons, that I first went to the inner Himalayas.

  The Invention of ‘Buddhism’

  THE DAYS WERE SHORTENING with intimations of winter when I returned from the inner Himalayas to Mashobra. When spring came, and the roads cleared, I began to travel to the Spiti and Pin valleys. There, in the lonely cold deserts, speckled wherever the snow melted into streams with green oases of pea and barley fields, and watched over by hilltop monasteries of sun-baked bricks, I saw many more images of the Buddha. I visited Tabo, and found the oldest monastery in the region still full of lamas, as jaunty in their maroon robes as the prayer flags fluttering from electric poles in the treeless expanses.