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

the house and have a servant prepare him lunch.
    Before he reached his fifth birthday, my uncle went to Bare Bahenji and asked for sixteen rupees, then the equivalent of about two dollars.
    “Why do you need so much money?” she asked him.
    He needed it, he explained, to repay a debt to Daulat, a family servant whose name, ironically, means wealth. My uncle explained that he had incurred this debt in a previous life. He continued to pester Bare Bahenji until she relented. Daulat refused to accept the rupees until my grandparents insisted. A few days later Shukra told Bare Bahenji he would prefer to sleep on the floor. In India this is a common request made by adults who believe they are going to die and want to be connected to the earth. Bare Bahenji was dismayed and disturbed and refused to make his bed on the floor. Instead, she made his regular bed, carefully tucked him in, and sang him a lullaby.
    The next morning the family found Shukra’s lifeless body on the floor. My uncle had accurately predicted his own death and wanted to repay the debt from a previous life to Daulat the servant before he passed away. For me it’s hard not to believe in reincarnation when all this occurred in my own family.
    Stories like this one are not unusual in India. The founder and chancellor of Banaras Hindu University, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, was a very learned man. He devoted his entire life to the university. On his deathbed he said, “Take me to the outskirts of Banaras.”
    They were puzzled. “Pandit Ji, you have given your whole life to Banaras. You’re now going to pass away and go to heaven. Why would you want us to take you outside Banaras?”
    Among Hindus, there is a widely held belief that if you die in Banaras you achieve Moksha, an end to the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
    “My work on earth is not complete,” Pandit Ji said. “I do not want to achieve moksha. I must come back and finish my work.”
    India has always been a country where people—no matter how educated, sophisticated, or wealthy—accepted some element of mysticism, understood that some events in life couldn’t be easily explained. For example, there was a story several years ago that statues of Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who dispels all obstacles, were drinking milk. People were pouring milk over the statues and into a bowl at their bases as offerings late in the evening. By the morning the milk would be gone. I thought it was nonsensical, but there were many educated people who believed it. It actually turned out to have some scientific basis; the statues were made of a material that absorbed liquids and did soak up some of the milk.
    Unfortunately many people were taking milk their children needed and leaving it for the statue. I asked my mother if she believed the statues were drinking milk. My mother, an intelligent, sophisticated woman, said she did. Then I asked some of our other relatives, and several of them told me it was happening in their own temples. They had seen it!
    That was the tradition in which we grew up. There was more to life than what we could see in front of us.
    In the India of my childhood, we were exposed to a variety of religions and philosophies and taught to respect all of them. While we were Hindu, we had friends who were Muslim or Parsi and we went to school with Christians and Jews. For me the best part was that we had days off on all of the holidays. We were off for the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali; Easter; the Muslim holiday Eid. When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, we were living in Jabalpur attending St. Aloysius, a school that had classes from kindergarten through grade twelve.Our school was closed for three days. I was nine years of age and a six-year-old friend of ours stayed with us during those days off. We spent that time running around, playing cricket and games. It was a wonderful short vacation and we really didn’t want to go back to school. The night before classes resumed,