Blind Faith. Sagarika Ghose

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СКАЧАТЬ I’m your freak show for the day? The mad man with the bow and arrow?’

      ‘Not at all!’ she lied loudly.

      ‘Instead of interviewing me,’ he said wearily, ‘maybe you should interview yourself. Ask yourself a few questions.’

      ‘I do that all the time,’ she smiled. ‘But I’d like to know a little more about you.’

      ‘Well, I’d like to know a little more about you.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension, ‘I’d like to know why you think I’m worthy of being interviewed. We have been touring all over England, Europe, United States and Japan and I’ve met many people whom I would like to interview. I would ask them why they are all running to buy gold. Running to buy things. Why they are happy to serve the empire controlled from New York and London. I want to ask them, must everyone be a banker or an accountant? Just run after money? How much money do you want, Ma’am? How much money does everybody want? Is there no such thing as just a celebration of being human? To be remembered not for making money but for taking being human as far as possible?’

      ‘Lovely idea,’ she grinned. ‘Wish I didn’t have to work. Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s take being human a little further into the park. Let’s sit down somewhere. Please come.’

      They settled down on a bench, watching the buses circle around the trees down towards Oxford Circus.

      What was his name, she asked. Karna, he replied. K-A-R-N-A. And why the bow and arrow? Just part of the costume of a novice. He wore the bow and arrow because he was a novice. Once he had completed his first mission, he would wear the same white uniform as the others. And could he please tell her a little bit more about the Purification Journey? He thrust a black-and-white printed pamphlet into her hands. It read:

       Rebirth of Pure Love: The Need for a New Inner War

       The 21st Century has dawned. But we have strayedfrom the true path.

       The true path towards Pure Love is the rebirth of simple life patterns.

       Let us recreate the peace of the past.

       Let us work towards the Rebirth of the Mother Woman.

       Let us wage the war with ourselves so we may set free our best selves.

       Come to PAVITRA ASHRAM, NEW DELHI, INDIA for a 15-day Purification Retreat.

       In unpolluted lakeside air, learn about the martyrdom of past heroes, eat nutritious food; live a simple life.

       Learn to purify being human.

       Learn to serve in the new struggle and the war of our century: the war within.

      ‘This particular instruction,’ Mia said, ‘interests me. The Rebirth of the Mother Woman.’

      ‘Well,’ he leant forward. ‘If it was up to me, I would put that right at the top. But the Brothers thought otherwise.’

      ‘The Rebirth of the Mother Woman? What does that mean exactly?’

      ‘Exactly what it says.’ His stare was so sharp that she thought his glasses might crack. ‘Fight the female ego! Make the woman return to her natural habitat, her home, and accept her role as mother. Not aspire to become a computer-tapping sexual slave who wears less and less clothes.’ He shrugged, ‘Lots of people are saying it. We are also saying it.’

      ‘So what’s your solution?’ She scribbled, ‘Purdah? Burqa? Segregation?’

      ‘You are trying,’ he laughed, ‘to sensationalize it. Give it funny names. Make it sound old-fashioned and silly because you are so convinced of the rightness of your ways. You can accept no challenge, you can tolerate no disagreement because you only want affirmations of what you think you already know. All I said is that the human mother is becoming an object of lust. In fact, she is the object of her own lust, her own vanity. In the guise of freedom and equality, women are being degraded, encouraged to pursue their worse rather than their better selves. A mean selfish woman is apparently an ideal woman in today’s times. To paraphrase Rousseau, woman is born free but everywhere she is in chains.’

      Mithu, for example, Mia confirmed to herself, was definitely not capable of the Pure Love of the Mother Woman. In fact, Mithu was an excellent candidate for the Purification Retreat. Perhaps she should be sent off with this sporty brotherhood to their ashram and return, purified, dressed in white, and raging about the Inner War.

      She frowned into her notepad. Yet another eccentric whose life made an excellent alliterative tagline. How easily a clever sentence might leapfrog out of the paper. ‘Male Mystic Meets Modern Mom’. ‘Furious Forecaster Fights Feminism’. ‘Demagogue Demands Domestic Duty’. Just another clank of metal in her prison of 20-second summaries of events, her armoury of one-liners and text messages, a deluxe steel prison set back comfortably from the flabby rough heartbeat of the day-to-day business of evolution.

      Her father had analysed her predicament on many occasions. He would say:

      An excess of instant-knowledge has made you too easily pessimistic. Too many pictures have finished off your capacity to see and too many words have robbed you of the ability to speak. You’ve ceased to grow. Unless you free your mind to the possibility of faith, you’ll never understand the world.

      She had protested: But you don’t need to believe in order to grow! You just need to travel and read.

      Aha, but what is travel after all but a kind of pilgrimage, basically a journey seeking unknowable truths? One of the world’s greatest travellers, Ibn Battutah, wrote of how a nameless fakir carried him through a parched landscape when he was too exhausted to walk any further…

      Nameless fakir, who?

      Exactly. Just a stranger who carried Battutah to safety and then disappeared…

      You mean it was god?

      Maybe. Maybe not. The important thing is he never could find out.

      So the tourists on the Costa Del Sol are on a pilgrimage…?

      Of course they are! They don’t know it but they too are pilgrims, they’ve gone there to pray for love and happiness in the future. And they’re naked, just like the naked sadhus at the Kumbh, perhaps there’s some unconscious link between the search and nakedness.

      Perhaps Karna was searching too, trying to reconstruct a bruised world in the way he could. His words were meaningless. Yet he wasn’t just playing a part. He was struggling to believe his own clichés. He hadn’t said the right things. He hadn’t tried to reassure her by affirming that he was a mere anecdote. Instead his words had come tumbling out, amateur and raw. He had no polite skills. He was only a bespectacled monk from a river bank who had rushed out of his ashram to teach people how to love each other. For his pains, Scotland Yard might drag him away, strapped СКАЧАТЬ