And after my Nana's death, my Nani never went back to the village of
Kuchwada; she was so heartbroken. I have seen thousands of couples very
intimately because I have been staying with so many families, wandering
around India, but I could never find anybody who could be compared with
those two old people: they really loved each other.
When my Nana died, my Nani--my maternal grandmother-wanted to die
with him.
It was a difficult task to prevent her. She wanted to sit on the funeral pyre
with her husband. She said, "My life is gone-now what is the point of being
alive?" Everybody tried, and by that time... This is an ancient tradition in
India called sati.
The word sati means the woman who dies sits on the funeral pyre, alive,
with her dead husband. The word sati means truthfulness. Sat means
"truth," also "being"; sati means "who has a true being-whose being is of
truthfulness." She has loved the person so deeply that she has become
identified with his life; there is no point in her living. But after the British Raj
the sati tradition was declared illegal.
To the Western eye it looked almost like committing suicide; literally it was
so. And for almost ninety-nine percent of women who became satis it was
nothing but suicide. But for one percent I cannot say it was suicide. For one
percent, to live without the person whom they had loved totally and from
whom they had never thought for a single moment to be separated, living
was suicide.
But law is blind and cannot make such fine distinctions. What Britishers
saw was certainly ugly and had to be stopped. The one percent went on the
funeral pyre of their own accord. But it became such a respectable thing
that any woman who was not willing to do it. .and it was really a very
dangerous, torturous way of dying--just entering the funeral pyre alive!
Ninety-nine percent were not willing to do it but their families, their relatives
felt awkward because this meant the woman never loved the man totally. It
would be a condemnation of the whole family: the honor of the family was at
stake. So what these people did was they forced the woman; and a certain
climate was created in which you would not be able to discover that the
woman was being forced. She was of course in a terrible state, in a great
shock.
She was taken to the funeral pyre and on the funeral pyre so much ghee,
purified butter, was poured that there was a cloud of smoke all over the
place; you could not see what is happening. Around that cloud there were
hundreds of brahmins loudly chanting Sanskrit sutras, and behind the
brahmins there was a big band with all kinds of instruments making as
much noise as possible-so to hear the woman screaming or crying or
trying to get out of the funeral pyre was impossible. Around the funeral pyre
the brahmins were standing with burning torches to push the woman back
in.
When Britishers saw this--this was certainly not only suicide but murder
too. In fact, it was murder; the woman was not willing. The whole
atmosphere was created so that you could not hear her screams, you could
not see that she was trying to escape-everybody else was out of the circles
of brahmins.
When Britishers found out that this was something criminal and ugly, they
made it illegal: if any woman tried it and was found out and caught alive,
she would be sentenced for her whole life. And anybody who persuaded
her-the family, the priests, the neighbors-they were also partners in the
crime and they would also be punished according to whatsoever part they
had played in it.
So the institution slowly slowly disappeared; it had to disappear. But once
in a while those one percent of women were always there for whom it didn't
matter, because their lives were now a sentence unto death. Why not take
the chance of finishing it with your loved one?
So they all tried, everybody, to persuade my Nani not to do it, but she said,
"I have nothing to live for. I cannot go back to my village because in that
same house where we both lived our whole life for sixty years, I cannot live
alone. He will be too much there. I have not eaten a single meal before he
did; it will be impossible for me to eat.
In the first place, impossible to cook because I used to cook for him; he
loved delicious foods and I enjoyed cooking for him. Just to see him
delighted was my delight. Now for whom am I going to cook?
"And I have never taken my meal before him. Even if it was very late if he
had gone to some other village for some work, or to the court in a faraway
town--l had to wait the whole day, but it was a joy to wait for him. In sixty
years of married life I have not eaten a single meal before him."
That has been a tradition in India: how can you eat unless the person you
love and for whom you have cooked and prepared has eaten?..
For almost ten or twelve days my grandmother didn't eat. First it was
difficult to prevent her from going on the funeral pyre. Finally they all, my
whole family, told me, "Only you can persuade her; you have been with her
for seven years." And certainly I succeeded. All that I had to do--l said to
her, "You are saying constantly,
'For what do I have to live?' Not for me? Just tell me you don't want to live
for me.
Then I will tell the whole family that we both are going on the funeral pyre."
She said, "What!"
I said, "Then why am I going to be here? For what? It is good we both go."
She said, "Stop this nonsense. Who has ever heard of a boy, seven years
old..? It is not for you, it is for a woman whose husband has died."
I said, "Your husband has died, my Nana has died, and my Nani is going to
die—it is enough reason for me. And anyway, any day I will have to die, so
why wait so long?
Finish it quickly."
She said, "I know you are mischievous and even though your Nana is dead
you are playing a trick on me."
I said, "Then stop harassing the whole family, otherwise I am coming with
you." She agreed that she wouldn't go to the funeral, she would live for me.
She stayed in my father's town, but she was a very independent woman:
she did not like the big joint family; my father's brothers, their wives, their
children--it was a huge caravan. She said, "This is not the place for me. I
have lived my whole life with my husband, in silence. Only for seven years
were you there, otherwise there has not been much conversation either,
because there was nothing to say. We had talked about all those things
before, so there was nothing to say--we just sat silently."
And it was a beautiful place where they lived, facing a very big lake, so they
would sit looking at the lake and the water birds flying, coming in thousands
in certain seasons.
She said, "I would like to live alone." So a house was found for her near the
river where she would find some similarity; in this town we had no lake but
we had a beautiful river.
The whole day I was in school or roaming around the town or doing a
thousand and one things, and at night I always stayed with my Nani. Many
times she said, "Your parents may feel bad. We took you from them for
seven years, for which they cannot forgive us. We thought that we should
return you as clean as we had got you, not trying to impose anything on
you. But they are angry; they don't say so but I can feel it and I hear from
other people that we spoiled you. And now you don't go to sleep with your
father and mother and your family; you come here every night. They will
think that the spoiling is continuing--the old man is gone but the old woman
is still here."
I said to her, "But if I don't come can you really sleep? For whom do you
prepare the second bed every night before I come?--because I do not tell
you that tomorrow I will be coming. About tomorrow, from the very
beginning I have been uncertain because who knows what will happen
tomorrow? Why do you prepare the second bed? And not only the second
bed.."
I had a long habit which my physician somehow had to manage to finish; it
took him almost two or three years. I had, from my very childhood, as long
as I remember, needed sweets before going to bed, otherwise I could not
sleep. So she was not only
preparing my bed, she used to go out and buy sweets, the sweets that I
liked, and she would keep the sweets by my bed so that I could eat; even in
the middle of the night if I felt like it again, I could eat. She would put
enough so that if you ate the whole night there would be no problem.
I asked her, "For whom do you bring these sweets?--you don't eat them;
since Nana died you have not tasted sweets." My Nana loved sweets. In
fact it seems he gave me this idea of sweets; he also used to eat before
going to sleep. That is not done in any Jaina family. Jainas don't eat in the
night; they don't even drink water or milk or anything. But he lived in a
village where he was the only Jaina, so there was no problem. And it is
perhaps from him that I got the habit. I don't remember even how I started
it: it must have been he, eating and calling me also to join him. I must have
joined him, and by and by it became a routine thing. For seven years he
trained me!
I could not go to my parents' house for two reasons. One reason was those
sweets--
because in my mother's place it was not possible: there were so many
children that if you allowed one child, then all the children would ask. And
anyway it was against the religion--you simply could not even ask. But my
difficulty was this, that I could not go to sleep without them.
Secondly, I felt, "My Nani must be feeling to be alone, and here it is difficult
to be alone--so many people, it is always a marketplace. Nobody will be
missing me if I am not here." Nobody ever missed me. They just made
certain that I was sleeping with my Nani, then there was no problem.
So even after those seven years I was not under the influence of my
parents. It was just accidental that from the very beginning I was on my
own. Doing right or wrong-
-that was not the important thing, but doing on my own. And slowly slowly,
that became my style of life, about everything-for example, about clothes.
misery 01
I wanted to go back to the village of Kuchwada but nobody was ready to
support me.
I could not conceive how I could exist there alone, without my grandfather,
my grandmother, or Bhoora. No, it was not possible, so I reluctantly said,
"Okay, I will stay in my father's village." But my mother naturally wanted me
to stay with her and not with my grandmother, who from the very beginning
had made it clear that she would stay in the same village, but separately. A
little house was found for her in a very beautiful place near the river.
My mother insisted that I stay with her. For over seven years I had not been
living with my family. But my family was not a small affair, it was a whole
jumbo-jet--so many people, all kinds of people: my uncles, my aunts, their
children and my uncle's relatives, and so on and so forth.
In India the family is not the same as in the West. In the West it is just
singular: the husband, the wife, one, two or three children. At the most there
may be five people in the family. In India people would laugh--five? Only
five? In India the family is uncountable. There are hundreds of people.
Guests come and visit and never leave, and nobody says to them, "Please,
it is time for you to go," because in fact nobody knows whose guests they
are.
The father thinks, "Perhaps they are my wife's relatives so it is better to
keep quiet."
The mother thinks, "Perhaps they are my husband's relatives..." In India it
is possible to enter a home where you are not related at all, and if you keep
your mouth shut, you can live there forever. Nobody will tell you to get out;
everybody
will think somebody else invited you. You have only to keep quiet and keep
smiling...
I did not want to enter this family, and I told my mother, "Either I will go back
to the village alone--the bullock cart is ready, and I know the way; I will get
there somehow. And I know the villagers: they will help support a child. And
it is only a question of a few years, then I will repay them as much as I can.
But I cannot live in this family. This is not a family, it's a bazaar."
And it was a bazaar, continuously buzzing with so many people, no space
at all, no silence. Even if an elephant had jumped into that ancient pond,
nobody would have heard the plop; there was too much going on. I simply
refused, saying, "If I have to stay then the only alternative is for me to live
with my Nani."
My mother was, of course, hurt. I am sorry, because since then I have been
hurting her again and again. I could not help it. In fact I was not responsible;
the situation was such that I could not live in that family after so many years
of absolute freedom, silence, space. In fact, in my Nana's house I was the
only one who was ever heard.
My Nana was mostly silently chanting his mantra, and of course my
grandmother had no one else to talk to.
I was the only one who was ever heard; otherwise there was silence. After
years of such beautitude, then to live in that so-called family, full of
unfamiliar faces, uncles, and their fathers-in-law, cousins-what a lot! One
could not even figure out who was who! Later I used to think somebody
ought to publish a small booklet about my family, a Who's Who. .
I wanted to return to the village but could not. I had to come to a
compromise just not to hurt my mother. But I know I have been hurting her,
really wounding her.
Whatsoever she wanted I have never done; in fact, just the opposite.
Naturally, slowly slowly she accepted me as one who was lost to her..
I could not manage to live in the family according to them. Everybody was
giving birth; every woman was almost always pregnant. Whenever I
remember my family I suddenly think of freaking out--although I cannot
freak out; I just enjoy the idea of freaking out. All the women were always
with big bellies. One pregnancy over, another starts--and so many children.
"No," I said to my mother, "I know it hurts you, and I am sorry, but I will live
with my grandmother. She is the only one who can understand me and
allow me not only love but freedom too." glimps19
Everybody is born in a family. I was born in a family. And in India there are
joint families, big families. In my family there must have been fifty to sixty
people-all the cousins, uncles, aunts, living together. I have seen the whole
mess of it. In fact, those sixty people helped me not to create my own
family. That experience was enough.
If you are intelligent enough, you learn even from other people's mistakes. If
you are not intelligent, then you don't learn even from your own mistakes.
So I learned from my father's mistake, my mother's mistake, my uncles', my
aunts'. It was a big family, and I saw the whole circus, the misery, the
continuous conflict, fights about small things, meaningless. From my very
childhood one thing became decisive in me, that I was not going to create a
family of my own.
I was surprised that everybody is born in a family.. And why does he still go
on creating a family? Seeing the whole scene, he again repeats it.
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