Maximum City (85 page)

After Sevantibhai started walking on the religious path, their friendship was put under some strain. On his regular trips back to India, Hasmukh began to avoid meeting him. Not because he felt uncomfortable with his friend’s penances, but because he was afraid he was retarding his friend on his path toward moksha. When Hasmukh came, Sevanti would temporarily stop his daily prayers, and then he would have to fast the whole of the next day to atone for the sin. Their conversations took on an increasingly didactic tone. One day, Sevanti talked to Hasmukh for four hours on the nature of a drop of water, of the lives in it, of the cosmic significance of that one drop. On that day too, Hasmukh found out that the whole family would be leaving the world.

Suddenly, in the midst of the jubilation, we hear a loud wail. Laxmichand, Sevantibhai’s eldest brother and King of Metal Business, is crying. He wails, and everybody rushes to console him: the women of the household (who have also been wailing), the men, and, not to be outdone, the Jain swamis standing around. (Later, Laxmichand comments acidly about the senior gurus who keep harassing him with instructions about the ceremony. “Have they no other business?”) Suddenly, the atmosphere in the Ladhani household changes from one of a wedding to that of a funeral. An older man is remonstrating with him that this is a joyous occasion. Hasmukh, weeping, says, “Look at that. That man is Raksha’s father; he is losing his own daughter, and he is consoling Laxmichand! That takes guts!” Even now, says Hasmukh, Laxmichand would rather that his brother stop the whole show and stay in samsara. There have been fierce fights among the brothers—some of the merchants say to stop the diksharthis from leaving their fold, others say over distribution of their property.

Utkarsh, the younger boy, is sitting outside. Here, in the midst of the huge clan, I learn the family’s nicknames for them: Utkarsh is called Chiku, his older brother, Vicky. “Tomorrow I’ll have to say maharajsaheb to you and fold my hands in front of you, but today you’re still Chiku to me,” Hasmukh says, and laughs with the boy. During the last meal, the entire extended family—a hundred strong—feed them, one last time, with their hands. One of the children asks for bhelpuri. After today there can be no pleasure permissible in food, and that will rule out bhelpuri forever for the kids from Bombay. The meal ends, the women begin singing, and a man comes to the courtyard with a flame at the end of a long wick and begins lighting hundreds of oil lamps. Then someone reads out a document that has the tone of a will. Sevantibhai is disposing of the remains of his wealth among his relatives. All of them will get something, from a few lakhs to 2,100 rupees. Then Sevantibhai folds his hands and says to his relatives, “I have made many mistakes. Forgive me if I’ve hurt anyone.”

Later, Hasmukh takes me inside the room where Sevantibhai is being massaged by his relatives. The diksharthi confesses to me that he is in some turmoil. “I’ve been trying to think, but I keep getting disturbed. I’m thinking, What will I do after tomorrow? Where will I be? I’ve been sick, I have a temperature, and right now I have all the facilities, they’re pressing my arms and my legs, but I think, How will I tolerate this sickness after tomorrow?” Of all his family, he is the only one that admits publicly to some doubt or uncertainty. Perhaps he is the only one allowed to. I ask him what he intends to do now. “I want to study Sanskrit for ten years. Only after ten years of study will I speak.”

I ask him how he will bear the separation from his family, if he is thinking about not seeing his wife and his daughter again. He replies that he feels confident at the moment. “But I will only know the real test the day after tomorrow, or the day after that, when I’m really separated from them.” Would he come back to Bombay? “The desire to return to Bombay is less, both mine and my guru’s.” Hundreds of people are waiting to see him, so I give him my salutations and leave the dark room.

I speak to the rest of the diksharthis, first to Rakshaben. “I only feel ulhas,” says the woman from Ulhasnagar. So much happiness, she says, that she won’t miss her husband or her sons. Snehal, too, says he is giving up samsara “for real happiness.” Moksha is real happiness, and you can get moksha only after you take diksha. It is a circular definition: happiness is
moksha, and moksha is happiness. Then Karishma is summoned for an “interview” with me, by Laxmichand, who is sitting stubbornly under a fluorescent light. Someone is kidding her about her power to demand, on the next day, the day of the diksha, any boon from her family. Will she ask Laxmichand to give up smoking? “I can’t give such a rule,” the girl says. “He’ll only give it up if it comes from within.” When her uncle was weeping, the others asked her to go and comfort her Laxmi Kaka. “Why is he crying, on such a happy occasion?” she demanded to know. In Bombay, when she left, she didn’t look back once at the building she grew up in. Of all the diksharthis, the youngest is the one who has the least doubt, the least hesitation in her answers. Perhaps she has never asked the questions.

That night, which is his last in the world before his diksha, Sevantibhai goes to bed at 3:15 a.m. “He couldn’t sleep till then,” Hasmukh tells me afterward. “I saw that he was really thinking, How will I begin my life tomorrow?” Forty-five minues later, he rises, goes to the temple, and prays to the god, does his puja. It will be the last time. After becoming a monk of his sect, he will never be able to do a puja. The senior maharajsahebs are forbidden from even folding their hands and bowing to the gods in the temple; Jainism is, at its purest, an atheistic religion. Not the least of the worldly comforts Sevantibhai will be renouncing is faith in God.

T
HE
L
ADHANIS
’
FINAL MORNING
in samsara is so cold that my diesel car won’t start. When I leave the doctor’s house at six, the sky over the arid country is crowded with stars. There are very few people on the roads, and all of them are going toward the Ladhani household. Inside the house, there are even more people than the night before. This is, after all, the moment the five diksharthis will be saying good-bye to their families. The women lament and celebrate:

The Ladhanis are praying in the storehouse, and then a cordon is formed outside it. Big steel plates are put down in a line outside their room, filled with rice, coins, precious stones, and the keys to their various houses. I am standing near the first plate. Sevantibhai emerges at great speed, clad in his most extravagant costume, and kicks aside the plate full of his wealth. Then his wife and children do the same thing, all in a line; by the time Karishma comes out of the storehouse there is hardly any money left on the trays to kick aside. Outside, there are men with crossed swords blocking their path; the renunciates push aside the swords and march on. As they leave their ancestral house, it is very important that they never turn back, even for a second, to look at what they are leaving behind.

All along the route from the house to the diksha site, which is lined with more plates heaped with the Ladhani fortune, village children with their sharp eyes scan the ground for the money the Ladhanis have kicked away. The entrance to the diksha-mandap is flanked by five elephants. Inside is a vast tented enclosure and thousands of people seated in separate groups on the floor. I take my place in the diamond merchant section. The audience is handed out packets of a pearl-and-rice mixture and invited to shower the diksharthis with the fabulous confetti. On the stage above us, first the parting, like the bidai at a wedding (when the bride’s family says good-bye to her), is done in full public view, by the blood relatives and the business partners. Another will is read out. Over two crores has been given away to charitable institutions, including money to animal shelters, and another crore to religious bodies. The compere, the same one from the diamond merchant meeting, reads out a good omen: The previous day, the Bombay Municipal Corporation lost a Supreme Court appeal against a lower-court verdict that forbade the killing of stray dogs. A Jain family’s petition will now save the lives of fifty thousand stray dogs a year. There is a resounding cheer from the audience.

The moment has come. In front of thirty-five thousand people, Sevantibhai seeks permission to take diksha from his guru. A flare of trumpets announces the guru’s assent, and the diksharthi dances madly around the stage, clutching a large white duster. The rest of the family follows, and then they leave to get their heads shaved, except for seven hairs, which will be plucked out by the maharajsaheb. Meanwhile, the charitable auction starts, for the right to buy the vestments that are to be presented to the diksharthis for their monastic life. The first item, a cloth for Sevantibhai, is
sold for 151,000 rupees. A string of white prayer beads for Snehal goes for 68,000. All around me, there is a tremendous din of figures, as the auctioneers shout out the competing bids, standing amid the seated audience and egging them on to invest in spiritual gain, like a hot stock tip. “This kind of opportunity for labh won’t come again! Only thirty-one thousand, you lucky people!” There is wealth on the stage, and wealth in this audience, as the assembled millionaires and billionaires compete for public demonstration of their piety.

Then the name auction commences. First, the name-page is opened. The gurumaharaj has given each of the men the names they will be called henceforth; and the head sadhvin has done the same for the women. Now the entire audience waits to hear the new names of the diksharthis. The bidding begins for the right to reveal Sevantibhai’s name; a layman will announce it to the audience. That right is purchased for 361,000 rupees, and the winner turns to the crowd and pronounces it: “Raj Ratna Vijayji!” The huge space rings out with applause. Then the right to say Snehal’s—Vicky’s—new name is bought: “Raj Darshan Vijayji!” Then Utkarsh, or Chiku’s: “Ratna Bodhi Vijayji!” Then Rakshaben’s: “Divya Ruchita Sreeji!” Finally, when the bidding starts over Karishma’s name, the three sisters of her father, who had the right to name her when she was born and had given her a name that most Indians associate with a sexy movie heroine, outbid all others to give her this new name and pay 150,000 rupees—one and a half lakhs—to face the audience and shout out, through their sadness, the three words: “Darshan Ruchita Sreeji!”

When the Ladhanis come back onto the stage, the change is startling. They have replaced their uniform cream-colored silk robes and saris with uniform white sheets; almost all of their hair is gone. After Rakshaben comes out with her head shorn, Hasmukh tells me later, “I marked that Sevanti didn’t look at Raksha. Raksha didn’t look at Sevanti. The children looked, but the couple didn’t look at anybody.” It was Hasmukh’s wife who wept when she saw what had been done to Raksha. “When her head was being shaved, Raksha put her face in her hands and didn’t look for one second at anybody as her hair, the mark of beauty for an Indian woman, was taken off.”

Hasmukh also tells me that during the hair-cutting ceremony, all the family members had to pour water—in the January morning, this meant freezing water—on the diksharthis as their final bath. They poured the
frigid water on the feverish Sevantibhai, and they poured it on the other four. After this, Rakshaben and Karishma started running temperatures as well. “They had to first bathe with cold water. I don’t understand why,” says Hasmukh, shaking his head, like a child trying to understand an adult custom or rule that he is told has some sense behind it but the logic of which he is unable to grasp. Then Hasmukh said farewell to his best friend and uncle. “When I come back to India, I will visit you.” But his friend didn’t answer him. “He had his stick in his hand, he had his belongings around his neck. He didn’t look in my eyes, he just shook his head.” When Hasmukh said good-bye to the other four, they didn’t respond either.

Sevanti and Raksha have been married for twenty-two years. The last time they touch each other is when Raksha puts the tilak on Sevanti’s face, as she did the first time she touched him—when she married him. The little woman reaches up with her thumb, anointing his fevered brow with the saffron paste, and they smile at each other and laugh. His hot forehead feels the cooling impress of that last touch from his wife.

Finally, the five diksharthis sit on the front of the stage, and all the extended family honors them. The maharajsaheb says to Laxmichand, “Look, Laxmichand bhai, they were yours, and they are yours, but now they belong to all of us.” Laxmichand keeps weeping; the maharaj has ever so gently reminded him that the five of them have now gone beyond the Ladhanis’ orbit, beyond the extended family and out into the world. They have left behind everything from their former world; all traces of Sevantibhai the diamond merchant, Rakshaben the housewife, and their Bombay-bred teenagers, Vicky and Chiku and Karishma. At long last, they have abandoned all their possessions. Except their spectacles. The two boys keep their spectacles. They will need them to see the path ahead.

They sleep the night in the upasara, or rest house. At four-thirty the next morning, the first day of their lives as renunciates, they will set out to gather their first meal—they have fasted all the previous day—and the first house they will go to is the Ladhanis’. It is a fitting metaphor for renunciation: The first house you beg in should be the one you’ve left as its owner. Then, with the two adults and Karishma still in the grip of fever, they will set out on the road away from Dhanera. They will not be able to come back to their ancestral town for at least five years. After Bombay, it is the next forbidden place.