Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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СКАЧАТЬ been happy enough. During festivals, the Brothers would dress him up like Krishna, paint him navy blue and stick a peacock feather in his hair so that wonderstruck passers-by would give him money. Sometimes they would take him to the slums through puddles of water into tin-roofed huts with shit curling in at the front door, so he could entertain factory workers and street vendors with his natural gift for story-telling. He said he had grown up close to the ground and in times of trouble, the ground would protect him. He was a renunciant who had vowed never to marry.

      ‘ A renunciant?’

      ‘ Sure,’ he smiled. ‘All pray and no work.’

      ‘ You say you want to purify love,’ she searched her mind for a suitable query. ‘But isn’t all love pure?’

      ‘ No, not all love. When god created love it was pure. But love is being ruined. Ruined by lust. Ruined by jealousy. The love of man and woman is being ruined by competitiveness. We have taken our message all over the world. To New York. To Paris. Asking people to purify their love.’

      His voice was defiant. He was inviting her to tease him because his outfit and conversation were tailor-made for ridicule; he was setting himself up to be laughed at, to have water dumped on his head, or for his hair to be pulled. He was ridiculous yet in need of protection; as if he was upholding the last of a dying world.

      ‘ And what religious denomination are you?’ she asked.

      ‘ We have no religion as you understand it,’ he said smoothly. ‘We worship the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. To us she is the ideal.’

      ‘ And finally,’ she asked before she switched her tape off, ‘you said the bow and arrow was the dress of a novitiate. But why the bow and arrow, exactly?’

      ‘ Bow and arrow,’ he shrugged, ‘is for Cupid. To create love where there is none. For aiming at those who have a heart of stone and making them love. Just an ornament. Just part of my dress. Look,’ he drew out an arrow and pushed it at her. ‘Completely blunt. Once I finish my apprenticeship I’ll take it off. I don’t think it’s stupid. No more stupid than a shiny tie. You don’t’ – he shrugged again – ‘have to believe me. You can forget me. You can do your interview and walk away with me as your crank of the day. Everybody who is different is a crank. Only those who keep on buying…what is it?…Dior and Nike…are not cranks. They are normal.’

      ‘ They too,’ Mia agreed heartily, ‘are cranks.’

      Anand used to paint at dawn. Dawn, he said, was the time of insight. Dawn was the time of vision. One’s own vision, not someone else’s, bottled and tinned to acquire at a price in the shopping mall of vision. After Anand had died, she had woken early to try and hear if he was calling to her through the first watery rays of the morning but all she heard was the jangle of Mithu’s new jewellery.

      Irrationally, she brought him a slew of expectations. He would fill the emptiness. He would help her down from her high wall of grief. The intimacy of childhood would return, he would always watch out for her and care about what happened to her.

      ‘ Sometimes,’ he smiled self-deprecatingly, ‘I think I’m a genius, far ahead of my times. Other times, I think I’m nothing but an idiot. And you,’ he pointed at her, ‘think I’m a crazy guy from India who eats snakes and drinks human blood.’

      ‘ Karna,’ Mia’s voice was quiet. ‘I don’t know how to say this. Sounds silly. I’ve been a bit off lately. A bit loopy. My life’s been a bit…here and there. My dad suddenly committed suicide, I moved back in with my mother, but it’s not really working out. I need to make a new beginning. With my life. For some reason – and there’s a good reason – for this good reason I feel as if I know you very well. As if I’ve known you all my life. No, no,’ she said hurriedly as she saw him stiffen and sit up straighter, ‘please relax. Nothing to be scared of. I know you are a – as you said – a renunciant, and I’m not making a move on you. What I mean is, I can’t stop here. I can’t just stop my interview and walk away and never see you again. I’d like to be friends and I’d like to get to know you better.’

      ‘ Of course,’ he said excitedly. ‘There is a connection between us. There is definitely a very deep connection. I have sensed it too, from the start, even though I did not want to mention it for fear of scaring you. We are going to be here all week for our publicity campaign. Please come again. And please come and visit us in India.’

      ‘ And can I meet you here?’

      ‘ I will be here,’ he said after a pause. ‘But then I leave on my mission.’

      ‘ Your “mission”?’

      He smiled. ‘Yes, my mission. There is a mission that I need to finish before I’m accepted as one of the Brothers. I can take off the bow and arrow once I have taught someone a lesson in love. But we will meet again. Let’s meet every afternoon from now on. I’ll be right here.’

      ‘ Great,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

      ‘ There are so many things I’d like to tell you. To convince you that there is no meaning in colour photos and magazines. Only a lot of stupid money chasing more stupid money.’

      It’s precisely because I’m so jaded, he sounds to me like a quack shrink. But there’s an invitation here to let go of the weighty shit, to drop the posturing and rejoice in miraculous coincidences. Papa had no time for overeducated fault-finders and I could never bring myself to be corny. Papa wasn’t afraid to sound foolish but I’m petrified of even a tiny concession to foolishness, to irrationality, to any kind of attention to that shopworn entity, the soul. The Drama of Depression is my bible. Rational thought is my shrine. Reason is my guide; I’m not driven by fleshy unreliable instinct or Zen intuitiveness or transcendental cravings. For my father, words were an obstacle; for me, they are everything.

      Perhaps Papa married Ma precisely because she didn’t have so many words at her disposal, while I’ve always searched for men who knew more words than me. Perhaps Papa jumped into the river so I would wake up to the seriousness of his way, to jolt me awake from my word-filled hauteur. Perhaps that’s why he secretly turned his back on Marxist reasoning and opted for the other way. He said that I didn’t think about salvation, never bothered about my soul or its journey, that I relied on my mind and not the wisdom of the heart, that I was too dependent on authors like Rosenthal and Silver.

      But how is one to grow old and face death without the unknown audience?

      ‘ This is a completely loony cult!’ she raged loudly at the SkyVision office. ‘Some weird, all-male sect. Purification Journey, how to purify your love, purify your desire, reject the market, Pure Love of the Mother Woman. Extremely right wing on women and family values and all that. Fundamentalists. The guy’s a nut.’

      ‘ Well, apparently you got on rather well with him. Careful, darling, next it’ll be Pure Sex with a Python.’

      The night streaked past on her way home. The music from the pubs made her wonder why she had let her social life become extinct.

      ALQUERIA, GOA

      Regrets, Indi thought, never come in a neat package marked ‘regrets’. They hang about in bits and pieces like shreds of ash.

      She СКАЧАТЬ