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.
