Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (30 page)

The family I met around Maharishi was a small coterie of people for whom he was at least the equivalent of a world teacher. They revered him and jealously guarded their intimate relationship with him. The fact that he had laid an approving eye on me was as good as giving written orders. Gurus have whims of iron. If I was just a whim, the inner circle would still treat me as one of their own. I tried not to be self-conscious about how green I was.

People padded silently up and down the corridors of the converted hotel on H Street. The upper floor was reserved for Maharishi when he was in residence—as it turned out, he soon left the United States and spent the remainder of his life in a specially designed house in Vlodrop, an obscure village in the Netherlands. The colors surrounding him were soothing pale pastels. His flower-bedecked suite was old-fashioned and ornate in decor, like a room at the Ritz done up in pink. He saw visitors sitting in lotus position on a silk-covered divan. Directly under him would be a deerskin, the traditional seat for meditation as dictated in the Bhagavad Gita.

The reverential behavior on display in the inner circle exists around any guru, and it’s a reason many Westerners suspect gurus in the first place. But I was struck by the genuine benevolence that greeted me. Maharishi had laid down a code of conduct through his own example. Because he was friendly, approachable, highly adaptable to new events, and never less than optimistic about the future of the world, the whole TM movement reflected those qualities. In an early book, I wrote that TM meditators were the only genuinely happy people I had ever met, an exuberant outburst that earned me some scorn with reviewers. But at the time I meant it, not out of naïvety but because meditation is supposed to deliver bliss, or
Ananda
in Sanskrit. “Bliss” has become an iffy word, as if it is mindless or an enemy to reason, but I felt blissful once I began to meditate, and I saw blissfulness in the people around Maharishi, most of whom were high-performance types in the Western mode, the same as I
was. They included psychiatrists, physicians, businessmen, and Ivy League or Oxbridge graduates. There was nothing McDonald’s about them.

The only truly unsettling thing was the scope of TM’s ambitions. Maharishi was fond of making announcements that I couldn’t readily accept. He had announced in 1979 that world peace had been achieved. He knew as well as anyone that there were hot spots of war, as there always have been. But his whole perspective focused on raising collective consciousness. He was always looking for signs of a tipping point (the phrase only came into use decades later, but Maharishi was publicizing the concept in the Seventies). If a seed core of humanity actively practiced meditation, a peaceful influence would affect everyone else’s consciousness. Without knowing the cause, human beings would find themselves resorting to violence less and less, and in time—a very short time, as Maharishi saw it—war and crime would fade away. He found the tipping point in 1979, and typically for Maharishi, he wanted to let the whole world know.

I loved the idealism this expressed, and I was intrigued about collective consciousness. No one could doubt that spiritual luminaries like the Buddha and Jesus had, in fact, altered the global mind and moved history in a new direction. But Maharishi was using mass media to declare the same thing, and to focus the change on himself and his efforts to spread TM everywhere. As he did when TM produced the first evidence for the health benefits of meditation, Maharishi urged social scientists to provide data for decreasing hostility in the world. They did, but by this time the wider audience for his pronouncements had shrunk. Thirty years later, a body of findings from outside TM verified that deaths from armed conflicts started to decline around 1980 and have sharply declined ever since. More than eighty despots have been overthrown; democracy movements brought down the Soviet empire and continue to this day in the Arab spring. Can a guru be credited with foreseeing all this? To say yes or no requires a closer look at the ancient Indian world view that Maharishi stood for. I was just standing on the threshold.

Once I crossed it I would be stepping into the middle of a spiritual
enterprise that was boundless. I would have no choice but to adapt quickly, which meant that my own boundaries would have to expand enormously. Maharishi had issued other media releases to the effect that the earth was about to experience a new Age of Enlightenment. This was a variant on the ancient Indian concept of historical cycles, or
Yugas,
that rose and fell over spans of thousands of years. Maharishi telescoped the time drastically, declaring that humanity was about to leap from
Kali Yuga,
when people struggled in the darkest depths of ignorance, to
Sat Yuga,
when every person’s life would be illuminated and happy.

To prepare the way, he formed TM teachers into the World Government for the Age of Enlightenment, whose task was to prepare the way for a global rise in consciousness. I quickly discovered that such pronouncements, seemingly absurd to the outside world, had to be taken with total seriousness inside the TM organization. The immediate transformation of the world into a place of peace and harmony was discussed and planned for the way Ford and General Motors plan next year’s car models.

Which presented me with a dilemma. It was obvious that Maharishi wanted to sweep me up into the swirl of activity surrounding him. I could temporize, keeping my distance for practical reasons. It was a long way from Boston to Washington, and I had a medical practice to run. These obstacles were nothing to Maharishi when I brought them up. If I came on board, it was understood that I would be provided for. On the plane ride back home, I struggled with my conscience. I couldn’t espouse the Age of Enlightenment. The claim that TM had already brought world peace made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t possible for me to adopt the official jargon of the TM movement, either—among meditators it was simply called the movement.

As it turned out, Maharishi didn’t put any limitations on me. I could speak the way I wanted to. I could carve out my own area of activity. Any demands to conform, which were often quite strict for teachers in the movement, wouldn’t apply to me. I was being offered carte blanche because Maharishi placed his complete trust in me. To
my mind there was very little of “the process” that had transformed Krishnamurti. In India surrendering to a guru meant giving yourself over body and soul. All Maharishi wanted was for me to give talks wherever he sent me and to sit in meetings with his inner circle. I had arrived at the pathless land. As much as anyone, I hope that it led to the truth.

18

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Soothsayer or Charlatan

Sanjiv

Sanjiv’s family, Thanksgiving, 2012.

O
NE DAY IN MID-NOVEMBER,
when my daughter Kanika was six years old, she came home from school looking very unhappy.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said to Amita. “Are we Christian or Jewish?” As we discovered, all the kids in her class were talking about Christmas and Hanukkah. They were going to get gifts, and they were going to celebrate with family and friends. But when they asked Kanika what she was going to celebrate, she was bewildered.

“We are Hindu,” Amita explained. One of the most difficult challenges faced by immigrants is whether to integrate the traditions and lifestyle of the culture you left behind into your life in America, and if so, to what degree? “Assimilation” is a very important word in immigrant communities. Sometimes, in the desire to be thought of as completely American, to fit in, almost all of one’s own homeland culture is forgotten or buried. People want to leave their old life behind. I have a colleague in Boston, for example, whose name is Roger Komer. In India it was Raj Kumar. But more often, as in our family, we tried to find a way of combining our Indian heritage with our American life. We wanted our children to understand and respect where they had come from. And as Deepak had proved when he became an advocate for Ayurveda, sometimes the traditional ways have great benefits. Even in America.

There is nothing more important than discovering your own identity. When we arrived in America the relatively small Indian community kept a low public profile. Very few Indians were known to the American public. In fact, one of the people who first brought visibility to Indian immigrants here was my brother. The irony is that he did so by bringing the benefits of traditional Indian medicine—which we had been skeptical and dismissive of while growing up—to the West.

Kanika asked that question because she was feeling left out. We explained to her that Hindus, rather than celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah, celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights which symbolizes the triumph of the god Rama over evil. In India it is a very special holiday. Even poor people exchange presents, and everyone dresses in their best clothes. In fact, Deepak was born on Diwali, which is the origin of his name. It occurred to me that for Kanika, Diwali couldn’t possibly be as important as Christmas or Hanukkah because nobody got off from school. We usually celebrated this festival on the weekend. But from that time on, Amita and I decided our family would celebrate the holiday on the day it actually fell. I went to the Indian grocery store and purchased a calendar that colorfully depicted Hindu religious festivals. For the next several years, we would take off from work and the kids would stay home from school, and we would take them out for a special lunch and buy them presents. We would even (carefully) set off fireworks in our backyard. The next day our children would go to school and their friends would inquire about their absence.

“We were celebrating Diwali,” they would reply with glee, and then explain the holiday to them. We also celebrated
Holi,
a festival that welcomes spring’s glorious colors after the bleak winter, the traditional way—by flinging colored powder on each other.

We also encouraged our children to celebrate the holidays of their friends. Ammu married a wonderful Catholic man, Joseph Sequeira, and our family would celebrate Christmas with them every year. For us it was a celebration of faith, good deeds, and sacrifices; it didn’t have a religious connotation. One year we even had the kids’ Irish nanny help us put up and decorate a small tree in our house. On Easter we would color eggs and invite everyone’s kids to our house for an Easter egg hunt. We attended many bar mitzvahs, and our kids dressed in costumes for Halloween. The best part of assimilation is having more excuses to celebrate, more joy in our lives.

Probably the most important aspect of life in India that we missed by being in America was the constant presence of our extended family. We were surprised to discover that the family unit is not nearly as
strong in America as it is in India. What our kids missed in America was being smothered in affection from their aunts and their uncles, that huge, wonderful extended family and all the stories they would hear time and time again. It helped create a strong sense of identity; this is who you are, this is where you come from. They didn’t get that here.

Our cousin Dipika lived in America for several years but finally decided to return to India.

“When we were looking to buy a house in San Francisco,” Dipika told me, “we would go to a nice place with the Realtor and she would tell us that the best thing about this house and this neighborhood was that we wouldn’t hear a pin drop. That actually scared me terribly because I wanted to hear a pin drop. We were brought up with noise and chaos and people just walking in our house at any time.”

Her sister Ashima, who lived with her family in Mumbai, came to visit Dipika.

“I thought San Francisco was such a lovely place,” she recalls. “Everything was so beautiful there, but I couldn’t get used to the silence in the house. When I was there I felt it was too easy to be alone.”

When their father, my uncle Rattan Chacha, died, they agreed that one of them would have to move back to Delhi to care for their mother. Eventually, though, both families moved to Delhi and now the entire family, fifteen people, live together in one large house. As Dipika says, “It’s one hundred and eighty degrees opposite from what my life was in California, where my husband, our child, and I lived in a nice suburban home. Now they should put cameras in the house and do a reality show, because there are fifteen people constantly running up and down the steps and bumping into one another. But we are one happy family.”

To make up for that we did what many immigrants do: We formed a community with other Indians living close to us. When we first moved to Boston we lived in an apartment complex in Jamaica Plain with several other Indian families. About half of the thirty apartments in that complex were occupied by Indians, most of them doctors. Because many Indian doctors had immigrated to America and
worked at the hospitals in Boston, we were part of a rather large group of friends who often got together and whose children played together and celebrated Indian events together. They included Chander and Kanta Nagpaul, Madan and Piki Zutshi, Raj and Shashi Chawla, and Bimal and Sharda Jain. We have remained best friends for almost four decades and have shared our common experience.