Songs From The Wood

One afternoon, when grief still hurt but not like bright sunlight, when parenting was just a synonym for exhaustion, a voice came out of the radio. An older voice, a voice that felt like it had known grief and beauty, love and loss. The voice said:

Almost to your birthday and as I
am getting dressed alone in the house
a button comes off and once I find
a needle with an eye big enough
for me to try to thread it
and at last have sewed the button on
I open an old picture of you
who always did such things by magic
one photograph found after you died
of you at twenty
beautiful in a way
I would never see
for that was nine years
before I was born
but the picture has
faded suddenly
spots have marred it
maybe it is past repair
I have only what I remember

The last line was the jolt of caffeine, stirring me from my slumber of exhausted days. He was saying what I had been struggling with since Kitty’s death: that I’d lose Kitty again once my memories of him started to fade. I have only what I remember. He was giving voice to what I fight even now in my time with Maya. It’ll not be long before I’ll not remember all her baby things, the way she is now. I have only what I remember.

The voice belonged to William Stanley Merwin and he read a poem “A Likeness” from his recent collection of poems, The Shadow of Sirius. Two other poems that he read aloud in the interview made me head to the local library for a copy.

Poems and lines flew off the page, lodging themselves in my brain in a way that few poems have.

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
From what we cannot hold the stars are made – from Youth

Time unseen time our continuing fiction
however we tell it eludes our dear hope and our reason – from Secrets

As those who are gone now
keep wandering through our words – from The Morning Hills

Like William Stafford, a poet who I’ve often written about, his poems are meditations. A few words of it and I am a willing vessel, ready to carry whatever the day has to offer.

W.S. Merwin

(Image from flickr, thanks to cpacker66).

I obtained a collection of Merwin’s works called Migration. The book stayed with me all through the nine weeks it takes before the book must be returned to the library. After two more withdrawals from the library, I finally purchased the book.

Merwin’s poems run the gamut of human emotions and subjects. He can write just about being:

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me – from A Momentary Creed

Of the moment when we’re more alive than the sum of all the other days:

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else – from One of the Butterflies

He can write about the beauty that we live immersed in, say a raindrop:

touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color – from To The Rain

About the sorrow at an animal’s coming extinction:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing – from For A Coming Extinction

Or of the loss of a rainforest:

I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language – from Witness

Or of the attraction of war:

When the war is over
We will be proud of course the air will be
Good for breathing at last
The water will have been improved the salmon
And the silence of heaven will migrate more perfectly
The dead will think the living are worth it we will know
Who we are
And we will all enlist again – from When The War is Over

Or of fairy tales, mystical one:

Stories come to us like new senses
a wave and an ash tree were sisters
they had been separated since they were children
but they went on believing in each other
though each was sure that the other must be lost – from Recognitions

Or of a lifetime spent together:

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment – from To Paula in Late Spring

The words, their arrangement. I want to hold them, running each one slowly through my mind, luxuriating in them. I want to be ensconced in them.

Very early on, Merwin let go of all punctuation in his poems. Read like this, eyes searching for the breaks, his poems take on an almost mystical quality, a freshness that never disappears. For example, consider the opening lines from the poem, The Emigre:

You will find it is
much as you imagined
in some respects
which no one can predict
you will be homesick
at times for something you can describe
and at times without being able to say
what you miss
just as you used to feel when you were at home

You can read a break after “in some respects”, reiterate that line and finish the rest of the stanza with one message. You can read a break after “imagined” and the poem reads well again. You can read a break after “predict” and the still the poem reads well. Each echoes a slightly different nuance of the same theme. Reread the two lines from “Secret” quoted above and you can play a similar game.

Merwin was born in the early years of the past century (how long ago it sounds, when I say ‘past century’). He came of age during WWII and enlisted in the army at age 17. Then, he realized what war meant and became a pacifist and refused to fight in the war. A crime for which he was sent to a mental institution. When I heard that, I was shocked. Here were a people, calling themselves the denizens of the greatest country in the world, thinking it was insane that someone refused to kill on order. Stafford too had refused to fight the same war and had been sent to a labor camp for that. In 1971, Merwin donated the money from his first Pulitzer Prize to fighting the draft, against the Vietnam War.

He eschwed a life in the academia and instead went to study Zen Buddhism in Maui and stayed back. He lives in a solar powered home that he built with his wife, Paula Schwartz, on an abandoned pineapple farm. He also worked to restore the neighboring rainforest of palm trees. He writes on scraps of paper with a pencil. He says that writing on a fresh sheet of paper or a typewriter is too much pressure to produce something deep and meaningful. With scraps of paper, anything is good. Stafford said similar things.

His poems, like Stafford’s, come from a place that lives on ideas like these, ideas of non-violence, ecology, a deep communion with all things alive, of living well and dying well. The sound of those poems stirs something deep in me, something that I cannot always access directly, but must come by obliquely.

Merwin’s output is prodigious by any standard: 25 volumes of just poetry. He also has nearly two dozen books of translations, 8 works of prose, and a memoir, “Summer Doorways.”. His output is also as varied as you can imagine.  Migration, a collection of his poems from 1952 to 2005, contains poems that are just a single line and poems that span double digit pages. He has written an entire novel in verse, The Folding Cliffs, about the history and legends of Hawaii.

In his interview with Bill Moyers, Merwin says: “… poetry always comes out of what you don’t know. And with students I say, knowledge is very important. Learn languages. Read history. Read, listen, above all, listen to everybody. Listen to everything that you hear. Every sound in the street. Every bird and every dog and everything that you hear. But know all of your knowledge is important, but your knowledge will never make anything. It will help you to form the things, but what makes something is something that you will never know. It comes out of you. It’s who you are.” Watch the whole interview. I found it a fascinating commentary on a life and the writing process.

These days, I’m a thief. I steal time. Mostly from Maya and Shanthala, but also from work, from all that calls to me all day, every day. I find little time to read long works of fiction or non-fiction. I switched to reading short stories and essays to better fit the time I could make. With poets like Stafford and Merwin, I find I can squeeze in an intense session in just a couple of minutes, reading that peels away the layers of my life, my self.

Who did I think was listening
when I wrote down the words
in pencil at the beginning
words for singing
to music I did not know
and people I did not know
would read them and stand to sing them
already knowing them
while they sing they have no names – from From the Start

Wormhole is a tunnel between two points in spacetime, one of the possible outcomes of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Wormholes lend scientific credence to time travel and interstellar travel within the relatively short life span of humans, or even shorter spans of a dramatic event. Widely adopted by science fiction writers everywhere, wormholes have never been discovered. They’re looking in the wrong place, if you ask me. If they looked for wormholes in India, instead of in space, they’d easily find them. I found a few during this recent visit to India.

Wormholes in Places

Before we returned to the US from our two year sojourn in India, back in 2006, Shanthala and I visited Rajasthan. We had yearned to visit the place for just about as long as we’ve known each other. The visit was the swan song of our stay. We visited the famous forts and palaces, probably the best preserved monuments in India (which may explain why Rajasthan is India’s numero uno tourist destination with foreigners). Something stirred deep inside me when I saw the armour worn by Rana Pratap, a famous Rajput king who loomed large in my history classes, the ancient mechanisms of measuring time, the movements of the planets, the chairs on which Nehru and Sardar Patel sat as the king of Rajasthan signed the agreement to integrate Rajasthan into India. In fort after fort, I saw the gilded rooms they lived in, the well preserved beds of the kings and queens slept in, the cradles their babies slept in. In Jaipur, I saw enormous jugs used to store holy water for one of the king’s journey to England and back and an intricate yet simple scheme by which they kept the interiors cool even in the summers of the arid desert they lived in.

Mehrangarh Fort, Early Morning, Jodhpur

During the tour of the beautiful fort in Jodhpur, I asked our guide, “What about the ordinary people ? Is there a tour I can take to see what their lives were like ?”.

“Just look outside”, he replied, gesturing to the blue houses outside the window, “Visit any of the poorer sections of the city today and the way they live now is not very different from how their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago”.

Blue City, Jodhpur

Wormholes. That’s what he was saying. A small step to the left instead of the right and you’re back in time, centuries ago, the narrow lane bypassed by most of the modernity the middle class take for granted. I heard echoes of that answer during this visit. Stuck on a congested arterial road, the driver took a turn into one of the many alleys to get past the jam. As we moved through the alleys, I saw houses that seemed to have not felt the effects of the economic boom that Bangalore is an epicenter of, houses that probably ran to ancient rhythms, where electricity and running water were as miraculous today as they were, say three-quarters of a century ago. Yes, the people living there probably own a TV, running off pirated cables and electricity, but are their lives vastly different from that of people long ago, I wondered. Maybe the people in urban settings receive a little more of the benefits of modern life compared to those who live in rural areas.

As I traveled by train to my in-laws place, the pastoral vistas combined with the rocking of the train, lulling my senses. I wondered if the scene outside looked vastly different from what I had seen as a child. At one of the stations, the train stopped for a while, waiting to let a train in the opposite direction pass. As I looked outside, I saw a group of people, working on the tracks, with shovels and picks, hauling the earth away in little containers balanced on their head. No heavy machinery in sight. Did their ancestors work any differently, I wondered.

A Railway Station Platform, Somewhere, India

Wormholes in Practice

A solar eclipse fell on one of the days we were in India. Unaware of the ramifications that an eternal  dance between the moon and the sun would have on my ephemeral stomach, I sauntered down to lunch at the usual time. I was living with my in-laws at the time.

“Lunch”, I demanded, “Maya is hungry too, by the way”, I said.
“According to traditional Brahmin custom, we’re not supposed to cook until the eclipse is over”, my mother-in-law replied, “You’ll just have to wait till 3 pm or so”.

I was flabbergasted. Not cook ? Worse still, they had to bathe before they cooked. Surely this was some strange custom that only my in-laws followed. No. My parents were in the same boat as were some restaurants in town and most people. I later found out that some colleagues at work had followed a similar rule, not eating till the eclipse was over. Customs millenia old hang around the houses, the primordial, demon-haunted world reaching through the wormholes of custom to extract their sacrifices from the present.

I slipped into a wormhole again whenever I walked into any high end restaurant. The music that played softly overhead was the music that I had listened to during my college days, the music of the late 80s: “The Final Countdown” by Europe, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits, “Lady in Red” by Chris De Burgh, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder, “Hello” by Lionel Richie  and on and on, even the same muzak: piano pieces by Richard Clayderman. When I met friends from my first job, back in 1990, I could easily imagine that we were the same, stuck in 1990. I was Rip Van Winkle, except that I awoke twenty years in the past.

A Personal Wormhole

Another day, the driver took a different route on the way to meet a friend, and I went down a personal wormhole. The street had changed a lot, was almost unrecognizable from the one I had haunted as a child, but I knew the lay of the land. We were on the street my grandparents had lived on. As we reached the corner that their house was on, I asked him to stop. I got out and took a few pictures.

The house has changed. Where the garage is, there used to be Sampige tree. My mother and her sister, my cousin and I, my sister and I, we all at different times, spent hot summer afternoons under the shade of that tree. The upstairs construction now has upstaged the terrace my cousin and I would play on. But the main door downstairs and the windows had not changed. I longed to go in and peep in through them, to relive the happy days I spent there.

We inevitably arrived when school was in full swing, my father’s work and his inability to let us go there by ourselves making the summer vacation to slide past. My cousin’s school was nearby. I would rush to his school and inform the teacher that my cousin had to leave for a family emergency, that his mother had asked me to inform the teacher and take my cousin home. I was so cocky and the times were so innocent that my cousin would be allowed to go. He would be half-thrilled to see me and half-scared that if his father found out, he’d be in for a beating.

My mother’s sister’s only son, he was my closest cousin and I treasured our times together. He lived with our grandparents during the week and went home to his parents, who lived in another part of the town,  over the weekend. With him home from school, our days were just packed. We’d eat together, bathe together, play together and not sleep in the afternoon together. My father was busy at work all day and so there was no one to force me to slumber the hot afternoons away. We played all kinds of games together, but my favorite was cops and robbers. The robbers usually came in for a thrashing and inevitably, I was the good cop and my cousin, younger to me by a few years, was the villain. I was Rajkumar, the Kannada matinee idol and he was Vajramuni, the Kannada matinee villain. “Ajji, save me”, my cousin would yelp from behind the closed door where I was delivering poetic justice.

Someone else owns the house now, it is not even in our family. I never had a sense of a place as home while I was growing up, thanks to my father’s nomadic work life. But this place. This place was as close to home as I could ever be in those days. I wondered as I stood in front of the house that day, snapping this picture, would I consider buying back this house, if I could. Empty the place of its inhabitants, restore it to its old days, put my grandfather’s books back, his bed back, restore the wood fired heater in the bathroom. Walk with ghosts and bathe in my memories.

I got back in the car and the driver said that he had to stop for gas. When he stopped at a gas station, another wormhole appeared. We were smack opposite the hospital I was born in. That hospital hasn’t changed its appearance from when my mother first showed it to me. I wonder now why I had not shown any interest in it. What floor was I born on ? What ward ? What color were the sheets ? Am I getting sentimental, I wondered.

My parents have preserved the original letter that my grandfather sent to my father announcing my arrival. Typewritten, addressed to my father in another town, it says “Mother and child are quite safe, absolutely no cause for even the least anxiety.” I was still unnamed, as was the custom then.

This wormhole is fading though. There are signs of construction, of the hospital expanding, maybe the facade will change. The next time I pass by, maybe it will no longer remind me of where I came from.

Each visit to Bangalore is a renewal of memories, memories that are over four decades old. As a child, Bangalore was the only steady rock I could anchor myself to as I was tossed around in a sea of small towns. As I age, I’ve anchored myself to a different rock, a rock far, far away from Bangalore. We’re not salmons or penguins, journeying against daunting odds to the place of our birth, to spawn and die. But we evolved from them. An echo of that dream maybe lives on in us, especially we emigres.

At times now from some margin of the day
I can hear birds of another country
not the whole song but a brief phrase of it
out of a music that I may have heard
once in a moment I appear to have
forgotten for the most part that full day
no sight of which I can remember now
though it must have been where my eyes were then
that knew it as the present while I thought
of somewhere else without noticing that
singing when it was there and still went on
whether or not I noticed now it falls
silent when I listen and leaves the day
and flies before it to be heard again
somewhere ahead when I have forgotten – Far Company by W.S. Merwin

Come, walk with me down the street where my parents live. It is a residential street in a middle class, middle aged neighborhood. Unlike the many newer neighborhoods in Bangalore that are reachable only via unpaved, uneven roads, the street is paved and well worn. The houses that front the street don’t look pompous, stately or garishly modern. They’re mostly just unimpressive, no different from the tens of thousands of such copies around the city. Uniformly, the houses occupy every possible inch of the property – most still are home to extended families -, are behind a compound with a gate (locked at night), and built like a locker with windows and doors behind thick steel bars to dissuade robbers. But, during the day, the doors of most houses are wide open, open to the possibility of neighbors, friends and relatives stopping by, no reservations required. And in the early evening, many doors are left open partly because of the religious belief that the goddess of fortune usually enters a house at that time.

True to a city environment, mom and pop grocery stores jostle for space with the houses, sometimes one ending up on top of the other, as if to note that living and making a living are deeply intertwined, unable to be compartmentalized, or abstracted away by distance as it can be in the zoned suburbs of US. The first building on the street is a house converted incongruously into a school. “Angel Convent English Public School” the sign reads, the owners having made sure that the name contains all the catch words to attract upwardly yearning parents. An American interpreting the nature of the school from this name would be completely wrong: the school is neither run by Catholic nuns nor by the state – as a public school in the US would be. But with such a name, parents who aren’t necessarily blind to the realities of the school, can still honestly (and proudly) claim that their children study at a “convent school” or a “public school”, convent and public schools being renowned from earlier times for the quality of their education and their middle class status.

Four houses down from the school, on the other side of the street, my parents’ house straddles a quasi-religious place on one side and an empty plot on the other, striking a middle class sensibility between eternity and emptiness. Maybe to preserve their memories of houses lived in as an executive of a government run industry, and maybe because of my mom’s fervent desire for a garden, the house is a little set back from the gate, with a little patch of garden in the front and along the side. Coconut trees, transported from Kerala, back when my father worked there, surround our house.

From sunup till about 10 at night, the street is alive with a small, but constant stream of traffic. Hawkers walk their beat, selling everything from tomatoes, greens and other vegetables to kitchen utensils and toys; recyclers proclaim their interest in newspapers and magazines. In the morning, kids hurry to school, some looking hurriedly dressed and in tears, with parents in tow, by themselves, or in small groups. In the evening and on weekends, the streets turn into a makeshift playground, with kids playing cricket or badminton. A group of stray dogs mark this section of the street as their territory, guarding it against other wandering strays, but knowingly ignoring the domesticated ones. Cows amble along in the morning or late evening, rummaging the refuse heaps at either end of the street for food. This river of life, constantly changing, never still, fascinates Maya. She can’t get enough of it, especially in the initial days. She stands by the gate of my parents house, absorbing the scenery.

As if this variety isn’t enough, some days, people beg alms, hoping to persuade the people with either a well dressed cow or a religious song.

Maya tires of all this eventually and wants a different vantage point. So, we go to the third storey (second storey to Indians and other Anglophiles) terrace of my parents’ home. Some days I hang our clothes to dry as she rocks a dilapidated swing. Most days she helps with the clothes and afterwards, is happy to just run around the open space.

The Wild

One day, keeping her company, as I surveyed the uneven skyline of our neighborhood, I spied an eagle. He was perched on top of a fence that protected a water tank, two houses adjacent to my parents house. His size was what caught my attention the first time. Larger than a crow or a pigeon, there is something very dominating about an eagle’s presence.

I don’t recall noticing eagles before or even if I did notice them, not paying much attention to them. Maybe it was that I had time on my hands, with Maya happy to play on the terrace, to look around and notice things. Not too long ago, a friend told me in an awestruck voice that her parents, living on the outskirts of Las Vegas, had seen a coyote the previous night. Maybe a fragment of that awe remained in some recess of my mind. The wild is largely absent from our lives today. Yet something from our past, our evolution, draws us to seek it. People splurge large sums of money to commune with the wild. They travel to far off places to visit rainforests, go on safaris. Lacking the time or the money for that, we even camp in their backyards with their kids, sharing with them the wonder of the night sky, of sleeping with nothing more substantial over our heads than a tarpaulin.

Spying an eagle is not the same as spying a pigeon or a crow. It is the difference between spotting a neighbor’s cat and spying a leopard in the neighbor’s yard. The eagle is a bird that commands our attention, so searing the imagination that it is revered in many religions around the world. Growing up in a Hindu family, I learned of Garuda, the eagle god and his story. How he came to be the vehicle of Vishnu, one of the gods in the divine trinity. Many Native  Americans revere the eagle too. In Buddhist lore, eagles are enormous predators with intelligence and social organization. Eagles are also the mascots of countries such as the US, Thailand and Indonesia.

Back to this specific eagle. The eagle spent a lot of time surveying the sky from his (or her ?) perch. Every so often, he’d fly off and sometimes returned with a prey in his talons. There are many varieties of eagle in India and while I can’t say for certain, I believe what I was seeing was the Indian spotted eagle (image courtesy of Wikipedia).

One day, he alighted on the ground next to our house, the empty plot. Watching him from the second storey as he crouched on the ground with his enormous wings spread and a rat in his talons, I could understand the reverence for this bird, his savage, majestic beauty, why he was called the king of all birds. The feeling may have been akin to seeing a lion in the wild, except that we no longer see lions or tigers without traveling far, spending money and getting lucky. And here I was, watching another king, for free. Before I could capture him on photo however, he flew away.

Another day, I had a ringside view as a crow took on the eagle for the prey in the eagle’s talons.  I was surprised that a bird as small as a crow would take on the king of the skies. The crow seemed undaunted by the eagle, circling him swiftly and swooping in for a peck. He forced the eagle to descend onto a parapet and drop the prey. But the crow didn’t dare approach the eagle any closer. He cawed from one end of the parapet. The crow is also an intelligent bird, a social bird. He didn’t attack alone. As I stared mesmerized, Maya forgotten for an instant, a few other crows joined the fight. They circled the solitary eagle and began to caw and feint approaches. The eagle yipped threateningly. One of the crows attempted a grab at the prey, hoping the eagle would rise up to chase him away, providing the other crows the chance to actually get the prey. But the eagle didn’t seem threatened and only spread his wings in attack mode. After a minute or so of this, the eagle rose up and with one Jackie Chan-like move, swept the entire circle of crows away by flying in a circle at each bird, but with the prey still in his talons. The crows gave up and flew away squawking their disappointment.

The sound the eagle made was quite mellifluous, not a sound I’d associate with a large bird of prey. As I played with Maya on the terrace, I enjoyed listening to his cries. As night approached, the eagle would fly away. Where his nest was, I wasn’t sure of, but I suspected one of the coconut trees that dotted the neighborhood.

I wonder if another reason I didn’t notice an eagle before is because they’re now forced into urban landscapes, with the forests they call their home is being decimated. The Indian spotted eagle, along with other eagles indigenous to India, is considered vulnerable.

The Naked

Another day, as I struggled to keep Maya occupied, as we each struggled with our jet lag, I saw what looked like the head of a procession walk down our street. I couldn’t tell if it was a religious procession, a political one or a cultural one. Whatever it was, hoping it would provide a diversion, I asked Maya to watch the street for something interesting. After maybe about ten or fifteen people had walked by, quietly (interesting for a procession I thought), the next group of people were naked. Completely naked.

I was stunned. Not shocked, but stunned. I was even more stunned that people on the street went about their daily business seemingly unconcerned at this spectacle. No one halted, averted their eyes or shouted any obscenities. The procession and the life around it was completely calm.

A few seconds later, my Indian identity reasserted itself and I realized that the naked people were Jain monks, Digambaras. Once that context was established, the scene seemed as natural as anything else on the Indian street.

My Indian self questioned my American self, what are the chances of seeing such a sight in the US, widely accepted, even if mostly self-proclaimed, as the freest country in the world. Nada, zilch. Such a scene would not only be impossible in the US, but also in just about every European country too. It is not that Indians are somehow sexually less prude than the US, or that their sense of nudity is somehow less self-conscious as the US, if anything Indians are far more sensitive to nudity. How then did this scene come to pass with so little effect ?

“Frames”, a term coined by Erving Goffman, a prominent sociologist and writer, I think explains social paradoxes such as this. I first encountered this idea in Daniel Goleman’s brilliant, insightful book, “Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self Deception”. Goleman writes: “A frame is a shared definition of a situation that organizes and governs social events and our involvement in them. A frame, for example, is the understanding that we are at a play, or that ‘this is a sales call’, or that ‘we’re dating’. Each of those definitions of social events determines what is appropriate at the moment and what is not; what is to be noticed and what ignored; what, in short, the going reality involves.”

Jainism is an ancient religion that is well established in India. Karnataka, the state my parents live in, is one of the states where Jains are aplenty (they first settled there in 1 BC). One of the tallest monoliths of its kind in the world, the statue of Gomateswara, a Digambar monk, is in Karnataka. Jains have two monastic sects, the Digambaras and the Shvetambaras. Digambar means “atmosphere-clad” or “sky-clad”. Digamabaras don’t consider themselves to be naked, but clothed in the atmosphere. According to this site: “Nudity is the main doctrinal difference between the Shvetambaras and the Digambaras. Outward appearance is seen by the Digambaras as an index of proper understanding of the doctrine. The Digambara view on ascetic nakedness was put by Aparajita in the eighth century. The true monk must be completely naked; even a loincloth is a compromise. He must abandon all possessions and be no longer subject to the social considerations of pride and shame.” Of course, Digambaras don’t require female monks to be nude. They seem to overcome the conflict between their claims for nudity and their dress code for female monks by claiming that women can never attain nirvana, they must first be reborn as men.

Indians, long accustomed to the nudity of Digambara monks, scarcely bat an eyelid when they see them. But this was not always so. As a child, I read illustrated history books called “Amar Chitra Katha”. One of them was about Mahavira (means the great courageous one), the 24th and most well known of the Jain Tirthankaras. In search of nirvana, he spent several years meditating in forests and wandered about naked. When he passed by villages or went into them seeking alms, he was stoned occasionally, partly because of his nudity.

Freedom of religion is defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as: “the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance; the concept is generally recognized also to include the freedom to change religion or not to follow any religion.” The First Amendment to the US Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”. With that said, I doubt if Digambaras could live or practice their religion in public in the US.

As an immigrant, I harbor two identities, my ancient Indian identity and a modern US identity. When I visit India, I always seemed to shed my newer identity, revealing my older, birth identity. With that identity, I could walk about India like an Indian, completely unsurprised and unthinking about sights and sounds that would shock a foreigner. This time around, it seems I couldn’t shed the US identity as easily, noticing things that I was oblivious to the previous times.