“What does it feel like to take a human life?”
I had once asked a guy who had committed not one, but two murders. This was a time when I was in college and knew him because my friends described it in intricate detail. He shrugged.
Years later, when a friend calls me one day and tells me about a family in the diamond market that is about to renounce the world — take Diksha — I put aside everything else and go to meet them.
They are the other extreme — they are Jains. They are becoming monks in a religion that for 1,500 years has been built on the extreme abjuration of violence.
They are preparing to enter an order that has a different conception of life and its value, where they will stay indoors all four months of the rainy season because if they inadvertently step into a puddle of water, they will be taking life — not only killing minute water organisms but also killing worms.
From men who sleep peacefully after taking human life, I want to go to a family that thinks it sinful to end the life of a puddle of water.
I grew up with the Sardars and Jains. Many of my best friends in India and America are Jains.
At lower Parel, in Bombay, we lived close to a Jain temple; every day I saw monks sitting in the lobby of our building working on each other’s hair. I did not know what they were doing; it looked like they were picking lice.
Later I learned that it was how they kept their hair short, by pulling it out by the roots. Some days they sang hymns about renunciation set to Hindi film tunes.
On a particular day, the Jains paid the men with birdcages sitting outside the temple to release the birds; every soul they freed aided in the account book of their salvation. The small birds flew out and settled on the rooftops of the city, there to be devoured by crows, kites, and eagles. And the bird sellers went back to the forests and trapped more birds to bring next year to the city.
Downstairs, as I get into a taxi, I look around the street landscape of the so-called sinners that night. On the ground floor of their building is a Fiat showroom; the opposite is a bank, urging its loan money upon the public; and next to it is a bar, the Gold Coins.
The murderer who I met years ago now lives only a short walk away.
Some months after the Diksha ceremony, I go to see how Dayabhai is doing in his life as a monk.
He and the two boys are spending the monsoons in Vasai, in northern Bombay… The Jain temple and its attendant institutions are in a quiet quarter of the town, with old painted wooden houses all around. Dayabhai says to me. Then his body would have been better able to stand the demands he is putting on it.
As it is, he sometimes feels weak and can’t stretch his body as much as he’d like to.
“I wish I had taken Diksha thirty years ago,” he says again, in the presence of the wavering boy.
I ask him about the process. Dayabhai had defined moksha for me:
“In the bliss of moksha, there is no desire.” It is a simple straightforward definition: salvation is an absence of desire.
There was no competition in the village, he says. A potter would make only enough pots and cups as could be bought by the villagers, and he would barter them with the farmers for food. There would only need to be one potter, and he would work on a hand-powered wheel. But now, with electricity powering up his wheel, he can make many more pots than the village needs.
“What is he to do with all these pots?”
“He has to go elsewhere to try to sell them, and that creates competition.
It is the same with diamonds. Electric cutting machines have made possible the cutting of diamonds on a mass scale. A diamond doesn’t degrade; it doesn’t get old with use.
So with more and more diamonds being cut, people have to use more and more of them. What do you do after you have rings on all ten of your fingers?” Technology leads to surplus production, which leads to competition, to the death of the village and its barter economy, and consumption for its own sake.“
It is a Jain version of Marxism.
I talk to Dayabhai for a bit and I look at the expressions on his face.
He seems to be really at peace, a completely different person, and what was that joy I saw on his face, that frequent smile?
His children I am less sure about. He had a huge loss once in his business. Was that the real reason he quit the world? What did he get tired of? Did he quarrel with his wife?
“My past was very bad,” Dayabhai said to me. “All of my family knew this.”
Dayabhai admitted that his head had been full of worries for the seven years before he took Diksha, worries about money, and worries about his family. He had shown me his two red vessels, made out of a gourd that he now uses for a vessel.
“I eat, I shit. I don’t worry about whether the servant will come today to wash the dishes. There is no tension. I don’t worry about what to do tomorrow.”
His mind is completely free to concentrate on moksha. Whether his family survives or not, whether his business thrives or not, is no longer an issue.
For a long time afterward, in my life in the cities, I think of Dayabhai, of the utter final simplicity of his life.
In Boston, I am beset with financial worry. How will I educate my children? Will I be able to buy a home?
Starting the downward arc of my life, I feel poorer every day compared to my friends who went to school with me, who are making money in technology and on the stock market, and who are buying up apartments and cars and raising their prices beyond my reach. I am earning more than I ever have before — more than six figures, and I am also feeling poorer than ever before.
Each time it feels like I almost have it within reach at last — financial security (if not wealth), a working family, a career — it slips out of my grasp like the frogs in the pond of Versova Welfare Public School. We would catch these frogs with our hands and clutch them so tight it seemed impossible or miraculous when they jumped out of our fists.
Dayabhai has just bypassed all this.
He has leaped over his worries, outdistancing them, outfoxing them.
In response to the possibility of a loss in his business, his answer is: I have nothing, so I can lose nothing. When faced with losing his loved ones through death or illness, his attitude is: They mean nothing to me, so their illness or death doesn’t affect me.
Before anything can be taken from him, he has given it away from himself. As for me, I continue on my way, always accumulating the things I will eventually lose and always anxious either about not having enough of them or, when I have them, about losing them. Anxious, too, about death.
The greatest violence is your death — that is, if you fight it.
Dayabhai has even triumphed over death. He has divested himself of everything — family, possessions, pleasure — that is death’s due.
All that remains is his body, to which he has renounced title in advance and treats it as a borrowed, soiled shirt.
He can’t wait to take it off.
Dayabhai has beat death to the end.
He has resigned before he could be dismissed.
