"One nation in the sky?"
"Yes. Or none. There's that option too, you know. These are terribly old-fashioned things you've taken to."
"If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?"
A cloud of uncertainty came over her face.
"Bapu Gandhi said—"
"Yes, I know what Bapu Gandhi said." She brought a hand to her forehead. She had a weary look, Mother did. "Good grief," she said.
CHAPTER 27
Later that evening I overheard my parents speaking.
"You said yes?" said Father.
"I believe he asked you too. You referred him to me," replied Mother.
"Did I?"
"You did."
"I had a very busy day..."
"You're not busy now. You're quite comfortably unemployed by the looks of it. If you want to march into his room and pull the prayer rug from under his feet and discuss the question of Christian baptism with him, please go ahead. I won't object."
"No, no." I could tell from his voice that Father was settling deeper into his chair. There was a pause.
"He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas, he pursued. "I don't understand it. We're a modern Indian family; we live in a modern way, India is on the
cusp of becoming a truly modern and advanced nation—and here we've produced a son who thinks he's the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna."
"If Mrs. Gandhi is what being modern and advanced is about, I'm not sure I like it,"
Mother said.
"Mrs. Gandhi will pass! Progress is unstoppable. It is a drumbeat to which we must all march. Technology helps and good ideas spread—these are two laws of nature. If you don't let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood! I am utterly convinced of this. Mrs. Gandhi and her foolishness will pass.
The New India will come."
(Indeed she would pass. And the New India, or one family of it, would decide to move to Canada.)
Father went on: "Did you hear when he said, 'Bapu Gandhi said, "All religions are true'"?"
"Yes."
"Bapu Gandhi? The boy is getting to be on affectionate terms with Gandhi? After Daddy Gandhi, what next? Uncle Jesus? And what's this nonsense—has he really become a Muslim?"
"It seems so."
"A Muslim! A devout Hindu, all right, I can understand. A Christian in addition, it's getting to be a bit strange, but I can stretch my mind. The Christians have been here for a long time—Saint Thomas, Saint Francis Xavier, the missionaries and so on. We owe them good schools."
"Yes."
"So all that I can sort of accept. But Muslim? It's totally foreign to our tradition. They're outsiders."
"They've been here a very long time too. They're a hundred times more numerous than the Christians."
"That makes no difference. They're outsiders."
"Perhaps Piscine is marching to a different drumbeat of progress."
"You're defending the boy? You don't mind it that he's fancying himself a Muslim?"
"What can we do, Santosh? He's taken it to heart, and it's not doing anyone any harm.
Maybe it's just a phase. It too may pass—like Mrs. Gandhi."
"Why can't he have the normal interests of a boy his age? Look at Ravi. All he can think about is cricket, movies and music."
"You think that's better?"
"No, no. Oh, I don't know what to think. It's been a long day." He sighed. "I wonder how far he'll go with these interests."
Mother chuckled. "Last week he finished a book called The Imitation of Christ."
"The Imitation of Christ! I say again, I wonder how far he'll go with these interests!"
cried Father.
They laughed.
CHAPTER 28
I loved my prayer rug. Ordinary in quality though it was, it glowed with beauty in my eyes. I'm sorry I lost it. Wherever I laid it I felt special affection for the patch of ground beneath it and the immediate surroundings, which to me is a clear indication that it was a good prayer rug because it helped me remember that the earth is the creation of God and sacred the same all over. The pattern, in gold lines upon a background of red, was plain: a narrow rectangle with a triangular peak at one extremity to indicate the qibla, the direction of prayer, and little curlicues floating around it, like wisps of smoke or accents from a strange language. The pile was soft. When I prayed, the short, unknotted tassels were inches from the tip of my forehead at one end of the carpet and inches from the tip of my toes at the other, a cozy size to make you feel at home anywhere upon this vast earth.
I prayed outside because I liked it. Most often I unrolled my prayer rug in a corner of the yard behind the house. It was a secluded spot in the shade of a coral tree, next to a wall that was covered with bougainvillea. Along the length of the wall was a row of potted poinsettias. The bougainvillea had also crept through the tree. The contrast between its purple bracts and the red flowers of the tree was very pretty. And when that tree was in bloom, it was a regular aviary of crows, mynahs, babblers, rosy pastors, sunbirds and parakeets. The wall was to my right, at a wide angle. Ahead of me and to my left, beyond the milky, mottled shade of the tree, lay the sundrenched open space of the yard. The appearance of things changed, of course, depending on the weather, the time of day, the time of year. But it's all very clear in my memory, as if it never changed. I faced Mecca with the help of a line I scratched into the pale yellow ground and carefully kept up.
Sometimes, upon finishing my prayers, I would turn and catch sight of Father or Mother or Ravi observing me, until they got used to the sight.
My baptism was a slightly awkward affair. Mother played along nicely, Father looked on stonily, and Ravi was mercifully absent because of a cricket match, which did not prevent him from commenting at great length on the event. The water trickled down my face and down my neck; though just a beaker's worth, it had the refreshing effect of a monsoon rain.
CHAPTER 29
Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult?
The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.
The mid-1970s were troubled times in India. I gathered that from the deep furrows that appeared on Father's forehead when he read the papers. Or from snippets of conversation that I caught between him and Mother and Mamaji and others. It's not that I didn't understand the drift of what they said—it's that I wasn't interested. The orangutans were as eager for chapattis as ever; the monkeys never asked after the news from Delhi; the rhinos and goats continued to live in peace; the birds twittered; the clouds carried rain; the sun was hot; the earth breathed; God was—there was no Emergency in my world.
Mrs. Gandhi finally got the best of Father. In February 1976, the Tamil Nadu government was brought down by Delhi. It had been one of Mrs. Gandhi's most vocal critics. The takeover was smoothly enforced—Chief Minister Karunanidhi's ministry vanished quietly into "resignation" or house arrest—and what does the fall of one local government matter when the whole country's Constitution has been suspended these last eight months? But it was to Father the crowning touch in Mrs. Gandhi's dictatorial takeover of the nation. The came1 at the zoo was unfazed, but that straw broke Father's back.
He shouted, "Soon she'll come down to our zoo and tell us that her jails are full, she needs more space. Could we put Desai with the lions?"
Morarji Desai was an opposition politician. No friend of Mrs. Gandhi's. It makes me sad, my father's ceaseless worrying. Mrs. Gandhi could have personally bombed the zoo, it would have been fine with me if Father had been gay about it. I wish he hadn't fretted so much. It's hard on a son to see his father sick with worry.