Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

distance, the railroad. One thing we did not often experience was silence; wherever we lived, the world was always rushing by directly outside my window. I remember being awakened very early many mornings by loud speakers blaring from the mosques reciting the Muslim prayers, or by the street merchants hawking their goods as they walked along: Alu lelo, kela lelo! Buy potatoes, buy bananas! The songs of the street vendors were the background music of our lives. And oddly, against that constant chatter, I also clearly remember the beautiful sounds of the birds singing during the day and the crickets chirping at night.
    By now I’ve traveled extensively throughout the world and, as a consequence of the world growing smaller, the easily identifiable smells of a society have become much less distinctive. There really does seem to be a McDonald’s on every corner, even in India, where they sell veggie burgers. But once, it was possible to know exactly where you were by smell alone. The spicy, pungent aromas of India are still very much alive in my memory. The fresh smell of rain soaking into dry parched earth is, to me, the scent of life itself. When we traveled by train, hawkers at each stop would come aboard selling Pakoras, Samosas, and fudge-like sweet Barfi. The aromas would fill the train compartment. Certainly one of the most memorable smells of my childhood was hot tea served in clay pots. One whiff and I’m back in India.
    Admittedly not all the smells were pleasant. There is a smell to poverty, and we knew that odor, too.
    The poverty around us was so much a part of our lives it was taken for granted. We barely even noticed it. When I asked my parents how it was possible that people could live and die in the streets, survive by begging and have nothing but rags to wear, they explained the concept of karma to me. Karma is an important aspect of the Indian culture, a part of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy; in a sense, karma is your path in life, and it is determined by your actions in previous lives. Hindus believe that a spirit has many lives and that after each death it is reincarnated in another form. Your actions in one life determine your status in the next. If I’m a good person in this life, then I’ll be rewarded in this or my next life; if I’m wicked, I’ll pay for it in this or my next life. This belief in karma is one of the reasons that the poor in India don’t seem to have much resentment against the wealthy; they accepted their poverty as their fate, in the sincere belief that they were paying for their past sins. But my parents also told me that your karma did not have to be your fate, that by working hard you can change your destiny.
    The belief in reincarnation has always been very common among most Indians. We had an amazing story of reincarnation in our own family, in fact. My mother had a brother named Shukra, who was four years older than she was; before he could even read or write, he could recite long passages from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures. When my mother was born, her parents named her Suchinta. Her brother objected to this decision. He told them that the name Suchinta incorporated the word “ chinta, ” which means worry in Hindi and therefore had a negative connotation.
    “What should we call her then?” they asked him.
    “Pushpa,” he answered, Pushpa means beautiful flower. And so my mother was known by this name throughout her life.
    When my uncle was four and a half, he admonished his father for shooting a pigeon with a BB gun. “What harm did that innocent bird ever cause you?” he asked. “The harm you did will now return to you.” This from a child.
    The stories about this young boy have been passed down in our family. According to my mother’s oldest sister, Bare Bahenji, he would be eating a meal in the kitchen, pause suddenly, and dash outside to the front gate just in time to greet a wandering monk he had somehow sensed. Then he would invite the monk into