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Originally published in THE NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY, Fall 1994-95

Autobiographical Explorations
Thomas Palakeel

My friend Paul said he'd heard a rumor that the English monk at
the monastery on the mountains was a friend of George Bernard
Shaw. Soon I traced the monk's name: Dom Bede Griffiths,
himself a famous author. A decade after the British Raj, this
Benedictine had left England to establish an ashram in India.
In his autobiography, The Golden String (1954), he had
ruminated about the decay of Western Christianity and
expressed a desire to enter into a dialogue with the Indian
spiritual tradition. His quest brought him to Kurisumala, a
tiny mountain village not too far from our hometown. Growing
up in the valley, I heard much about the new monastery on the
mountains and now I longed for a visit, for I secretly wished
to speak to the man who knew Bernard Shaw!

Thus, at the age of fifteen, I joined three older
friends, James, Chacko, and Jose, on a trip to the mountains.
As aspiring writers, we were still stuck in our Romantic
phase; we considered ourselves worshippers of sublime nature,
like Wordsworth and Keats. Having published a few stories
and vignettes, I was already aspiring to become a more
serious writer, perhaps an Indian Wordsworth, a Bernard Shaw,
or a Romantic like Changanpuzha or Edappally, two poets who
had died young.

We took a bus to the monastery. Barely a dozen miles up
on the mountains, a new landscape began to unfold before my
eyes; the hills were reminiscent of the European landscapes
lined with evergreens and grassy knolls--I had a collection
of picture postcards from Germany that showed similar
exquisite scenery. Now, I felt ashamed to have blamed my
village for being so far away from any place of importance:
London, Timbuctoo, Swizerland, New York, Mt. Everest,
Hollywood, and of course, the Lake District of the Romantics.
When the four of us arrived at the monastery at noon,
the monks were at prayer. I rushed ahead to join them inside
the chapel, but James held me back. We had to keep moving,
he reminded me. We had set out to go hiking on the hills,
not to join some prayer-group. I said I wanted to stay
longer to speak to the monk who knew Bernard Shaw. My friends
had a good laugh about it and dragged me away.

For two years I did not return to the monastery. In the
meanwhile, Mrs. Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in India.
She silenced the press, arrested writers and artists. And I
managed to reach ninth grade. More importantly I was
finishing the novel. The book would make me the youngest
novelist in Malayalam. The book was going to free me from the
clutches of my teachers and all those cursed subjects:
English, Mathematics, Hindi, Physics, Chemistry. As every
boy and girl began to prepare for the next year's final
examination, I was more worried about the Emergency and the
future of art under dictatorship.

Talking to our group in the bus one morning, I was
mocking the strident patriotic poems being recited over the
radio. A man tapped on my back and said it was dangerous to
speak like that during Emergency. Any cop could arrest me.
Watch out, he said, gravely.

That year we also got a new headmaster, a Jesuit named
Father M C Joseph. Everyone called him Father M C. In his
very first assembly, he held up the blank editorial space in
an English magazine called Himmat and asked us to think why
the space was blank. No one answered. Why? I thought about it.
What is the meaning of a blank space? Think. What does it mean?

No one uttered a word.

What else? The editor was prevented from speaking the
truth. From filling the blank space with truth. Now everyone
understood. I kept gazing at the serene face of our new
headmaster. He was a petite man, sported an elegant salt-and
pepper bulganin. He was clean, his gestures spontaneous, his
eyes profound. Father M C was also a quiet person, relaxed,
meditative, the opposite of the practical, versatile, flighty
and roughly-hewn Fr. Manjil, who had begun to write a weekly
column about his adventures in England.

Though the boys scoffed at Father M C for his constant
talk of "values," he offered many of us our first opportunity
to think about other human beings. However, he seemed rather
inaccessible because he spoke such elegant English and he
appeared polished, and in his room, he had no animals, no
chaos, no smell, no charm for a boy like me.

When Father M C spoke, people listened. I myself
started to chase his voice around in its tranquil highs and
lows, and it was from his classes and speeches that I began
to hear for the first time the cadences of the English
language, and there was no arguing that this man had a gift
for the language. I realized that everything he spoke I
could understand, the meanings, the feelings, the
indignation, the rapture.

And, it was from our headmaster's digressions in his
religion class that I finally grasped the fundamentals of the
English language, which had eluded me for over five years.
Father M C found out that I was not alone and decided to
change it. Before he proceeded with the religion lessons
every morning, Father M C wrote down his favorite mnemonic
phrases on the board: "Bird flies. Birds fly. A bird flew
away. Birds are flying in the sky."

After he had written these sentences, he would read them
with elegant gestures that captured the essence of the
sentences: flight, sunrise, mountain, sky, birds, mystery,
grace, the past, the present, the future.
In one of his religion classes I actually had a mystic
moment of grammatical awakening. Initially, I didn't grasp
the point about the bird sentences, yet I tried to imagine
the meaning of the sentence: "A bird flies".
A bird flies. Yes, I imagined the flight as it was
taking place; then and there, in the present: "A bird flies,
but two birds fly." To indicate the plural, "s" is dropped
from the verb. After we extended the meaning to a wide range
of similar actions in the present, the headmaster took us to
the past: "A bird flew. Two birds flew. All the birds
vanished." They all flew in the past, he said.

Now, he asked us to imagine the nature of pastness.
Think of the nature of time, Father M C said. What is time,
after all? Isn't it the past, the present, and the future?
Nothing but one big expanse of being. The same human
experience. Being. Think of being. Being is our life,
being makes our language. When is the difference between a
human `being' and being human? He asked us.
I understood what our man was getting at. Yes, I did.
Whenever the word "being" was used in English as a
grammatical vehicle, I never had a clue what it meant. Now
our headmaster was telling us that "being" is time, tense,
life. Everything boils down to "being" and "being" could be
projected into "is" "was" "be" "were" "am" and "will be",
indicating different locations of time.

What is your life? He asked. What is it made of? Time
is your life. Time makes life. And grammar is nothing more
than the labels used to articulate "being" and "time".
It was a transparent moment for me; the dark screen
lifted before my eyes, revealing a deep clarity that was
eluding me for a long long time. I said: "I get it. I got
it. I am getting it. I will get more of it."

That evening I went home with a new appreciation for
grammar, and of course, for religion classes. I went back to
my old grammar notes from sixth grade; I saw it stated all
clearly (past, present, future, singular, plural, verbs) but
I had missed the point completely. With clarity I saw that language
was all about time, about ordering of time, of experience, of desires,
signalling the various moves. Verbal indicators of the collapse of the
present into the past and the projections of the present into
the future! Suddenly I felt in my bones the difference
between is and was, grip and gripped, and cut and cut. Like a
magnificent parade, a host of meanings marched into me. And
I saw verbs in their magical, kaleidoscopic possibilities. I
began to perceive recalcitrant English as nothing more than
an elaborate game played with the two words is and was.
It was a substantive recognition, came to me so delayed.
Why I failed to grasp it in the sixth-grade? Simple. No
teacher ever bothered to point out the connection of grammar
to my own breath.

Next, Father M C suggested we bring a great quotation
every morning. In Fr. Manjil's time, we had to bring a
flower every morning. Before Father M C began his session,
he wrote down the quotes on the board in phonetic script, and
slowly, he would slide into a meditative speech inspired by
the sound and the sense of the words, and in no time we would
be discussing life, God, love, time, sex, good, evil,
language, poetry, and of course, grammar. And we repeated
the mnemonic sentences: bird flies; birds fly.
I made up sentences of my own patterned after "bird
flies; birds fly" and I chanted them in the bus, swinging on
the branches of the coffee tree, switching the cows home,
turning in the bed awaiting sleep: "Bird flies. Birds fly.
She flies. We fly. I love. Love blooms. Lovers run. The world
is too much with us. Bird flies. Birds fly. I fly."

After I learned the big lesson, everything began to fall
in place. The large, unused vocabulary I acquired over the
years now came in handy, and suddenly I was able to write
long compositions and letters. I even challenged myself to
write a story in English, at least five pages long, but when
I finished it, it was double the length; I could do it.
"I can create sentences. I can write English!" I cried
out in joy. Soon I was vowing to memorize ten new words every
day. On the margins of all my notebooks, I wrote down these
new words: volition, proxy, abracadabra, unction, ablution,
dynamics, eschatology, encomium, menopause, serendipity,
juxtapose, sensibility, grip, tumid, dynamics, ridiculous. I
glanced at these words whenever I paged through the books and
inserted the new discoveries into my compositions, generating
tiny marvels of style such as the following: "I gaped my
mouth, stood spellbound seeing the immense visual charm, of
long long spread wild green, of peaks resembling the rippling
sea.... That miserable bonded childhood is over... They stop
to hate people and look into their souls with higher meaning
in everything, based on so many eschatological dreams."
The English teacher, who had only recently hinted at a
possible learning disability in me and offered not to whip me
in the future, noticed the sudden change in my English style
and wrote in red ink near words like `eschatology': "Do you
really know what this means? Good job. Keep it up."

Early in 1976, I received a letter from a girl, who lived in
the northern coastal city of Calicut, where Vasco da Gama
landed in the year 1498. She wrote that she had read two of
my stories. She just wanted to tell me she noticed my work.
Didn't say she liked them. The letter also hinted that she
preferred to live in a world where everybody wrote letters to
each other; she didn't like to open her mouth, she said. Her
family was much worried: writing and reading, writing and
reading, and speaking too little. How was this girl going to
make it as a doctor? Years later, she made it as a
psychiatrist, apparently without too much speech.
The girl said she did love the world, but feared people:
let's write to each other. Face to face, she said, she might
have nothing to say. It was true, ten years later, when we
met for the first time, she hardly smiled, hardly spoke.
Writing to an intelligent girl helped me overcome some
of my self-pity, and the nagging sense of inferiority I
earned at the English School. So, while the whole of India
lived in fear during the Emergency, I began to feel free. I
did not tell her this was the first time I ever got to write
to a girl. As the written friendship progressed I could only
imagine her face because she refused to send me a snap; she
never had her photos taken. Slowly, I started constructing
an image of an ethereal creature and I started to worship her
as my Dark Lady, my Girl of Letters, and it was for her I
started to write my first letters in English.

As I became more comfortable with my English, I also looked
up my old friend Sebastian, from the movie theater. Lately,
he had found work as a proof-reader at the Cochin edition of
The Indian Express, the same English paper I pored over with
the help of dictionaries, making vocabulary notes, jotting
down concepts, memorizing certain purple sentences, already
dreaming that someday I would publish in it.

Many people in our village tended to think of Sebastian
as a failure. A sad story. He was the village genius when
my eldest brother was in school. After college, he fell in
love, married, became a father and remained unemployed for
long. He did nothing to win the rat race. How else would
someone smart enough to become the editor end up as a proof-
reader? It was during his lean years he spent smoking away
at the theater that I came to know him as an elder friend.
When I renewed our friendship, I found him a happy man,
enormously perceptive. He had not shed his old Socratic
habit: asking difficult questions. However, his question for
me was simple: Why was it that I had no belief? What did I
care about in this world? Why was I running around frantic,
seeking out the writer's glory? Why? Why did I need glory?"
Unfortunately, Sebastian's life was about to take a bad
turn, and I ended up visiting him at a mental clinic, near
our village; he had become too stressed out after all those
night-shifts, proof-reading. He had been on medication, he
told me when we met. His face had become suddenly bloated,
his hair grey, no longer the ebullient youth I knew, but his
thinking was clear, and there was much benevolence in him.
We sat under a tree in front of the small clinic and
chatted for some time. He smiled easily, encouraged me to
address his questions. I had mulled over them: What did I
believe in? Why am I doing the things I do?
"I want to be a good writer," I said.
"Do improve writing by all means. But why see it as
anything more than school composition?" Sebastian was giving
my vocation no more credit than a childish fancy. Isn't
writing its own justification? Like the justification for
living? Defending the one activity that brought me comfort
and an interminable sense of enchantment, hope. I asked
myself: What else is there for me? What else?

What else? When I read a book about Buddha, I could see what
had made him abandon his home to set out on a spiritual
journey. The prince was looking for that unknown, that
something else. Indeed, I had thought about such matters.
Recently I had purchased a complete set of the philosophical
works of Swami Vivekananda. I also sent for a book of Zen
stories by a famous "Guru" named Nitya Chaitanya Yati, who
published beautiful essays in Mathrubhumi weekly. I had seen
his pictures in magazines. He looked like Sanata Claus.
When I received his book in the mail, along with it, I also
got a letter from the author!

I wrote back to Guru Nitya, thanking him, saying that I
wanted to be a good story writer, but my life seemed too
confusing at times, and that I wasn't sure whether I was on
the right path with this story-business. Is there something
else? Everywhere I turned, good people hinted at something
else, I said. What is it?

Guru Nitya responded: "Story writers are people who
absorb the dreams and terrors of contemporary experience.
They connect themselves to the immutable truths about our
lives. Just as the laboratory experiments help advance the
progress of science, these stories provide the basis for our
societal dreams. See how the parables of Jesus and Buddha and
our great epics lead various peoples in their life-journeys.
What do you do to write good stories? Read good stories.
Understand their form. The little tricks writers use. Read
Aesop Fables. Grimm's Fairly Tales. The Little Prince.
Tagore. Gorky. Tolstoy. Hugo. Get the style. Understand
the symbolic structures of these great stories and acquire
their playfulness. I have been teaching in various US
universities where my philosophy students write stories and
poems. Stories are essential for our survival. Why don't
you send me your stories? And I am sending you in separate
mail some of my other books and a copy of a new story book
you'd like, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

If you can write letters in English, please write to my
American student Johnny Stallings. He writes good stories.
You two can learn from each other."
That the letter affirmed the profound value of a life
spend to write good stories I had no doubt. However, I
noticed a story in Guru's own book, which seemed to side with
Sebastian: an enlightened monk tossed into fire the books his
master had bequeathed him, showing that books didn't matter
in the long run, suggesting, perhaps, there was something
else, after all.

Through the roller-coaster ride of my teenage crises, I kept
working on my novel, and finally, it was all revised and
recopied. A neat manuscript. Shrunk from two-hundred to one
hundred and twenty pages. I kissed it with love, gratitude
for filling a whole year of my life and more, for bringing me
surprises, and a profound joy about myself and the world.
I took the bus to the city. At the time, everyone who
finished a book took it to SPCS, a prestigious co-operative
publishing house run by writers; rumor was that they paid 35%
royalty! Quickly, I found my way to the chief-editor's door.
Inside, I could hear loud talk. Laughter. A man looked out
the door and said: "There's a kid to see you."
I went into the congested room where several writers
were huddled around the publisher, Mr. Nair, a twig-like man,
much respected and feared in the business. Among the men in
the room, I recognized a novelist and a popular playwright.
I was happy to see the novelist, whose fiction and
travelogues of Africa and Southeast Asia had given me
infinite enjoyment. Besides the two, I could guess, the
others were critics; they talked and laughed too much,
whereas the two writers were quiet.
"I've brought a novel," I said.
"Who send you? Your brother?"
"It's my novel; it's my first novel," I said.
"You seem too young to write a novel," he said. The
critics and the famed writers were observing me, quietly,
with a smirk in the corner of their mouths.
"I've won a Mathrubhumi prize," I said.
"You have? Good for you," the publisher became slightly
more accommodating. He took the manuscript. After a minute
paging through my novel, he pointed at the famed novelist and
said: "Listen, if the great author here writes a bad novel,
we'll still publish it, because the readers will only blame
SK. But if your novel is not brilliant, I mean truly
brilliant, the readers will only blame us, not you."
Everybody in the room broke out laughing, poking fun at
SK, the famed novelist. I laughed, too.
"So let me be frank: we may not be able to publish this
work. Don't be discouraged, you're so young."
The meeting took less than five minutes. I got out; I
had a foolish smile on my face, which I wiped out with my
palm. On the way home in the bus, I sat at the window
thinking about the five minutes and about the year I spent
writing the novel. Slowly, tears started streaming down my
cheeks. I thought the meeting was amiable, nothing to make me
feel dejected. Still I could not face the huge cloud that
came over me.

For a moment I seemed to have nothing else to
live for, and I understood Sebastian's questions.
An old man who sat near me in the bus, touched my
shoulders and asked: "Why you crying, son?"
I did not know how to answer him. The old man was
smiling and I was crying.
"Tell me," he said.
"My grandfather passed away," I said.
"Oh my child," the old man said.

Back home, I lay low for a few days. I studied my lessons
for a change. The only thing I could do now was to seek out
the help of my friends. But the novel had been a secret.
Nobody knew about it. How would I tell James that I wrote a
novel behind his back?
Finally, sitting on the attic floor, I confessed.
First, James did not believe me. Then he became furious: "Is
this the way to treat your friend?"
I could say nothing.
"Why did you live the big lie? Weren't you the one who
talked to me daily about writing and novels?"
"Hm."
"How could you not tell me about your novel?"
"Please understand," I said.
"I don't," James said.
I tried to explain why I was ashamed about writing a
novel so early, before I was an adult. Besides, I had heard
James the arch-perfectionist scoff at writers who attempted
big things before they were ready. James remained bitter for
some time, and then, he forgave me.

After the failure of the novel, I spent practically all my
time writing letters. I wrote at least two a week to the
Girl of Letters in Calicut. Paul, who was studying at the
engineering school in the same city, paid a visit to her
house the same way he visited our house, and he reported that
the party was a little child, and that I ought to be careful.
To Sebastian I kept writing about my novel as if it were
a beloved, lately dead. He wrote that he wished I'd fail as
a novelist because he'd hate to see me fail in my true path,
my self-discovery. He said that I ought to get over my
fantasies and think about truly substantive goals, like
becoming a saint.
After enduring too many denigrations of a literary
career, I pointed out to him that he himself was talking
always about fellows who were primarily know for their books:
St.Augustine, St.Thomas Aquinas, and St.Thomas More. Though I
didn't expect my writing to be as good as the works of the
saints, I wished to write stories that would please a few
thousand. Sebastian wrote me that for a schoolboy, literary
ambition would bring nothing but distraction from the right
path; in a letter he also hinted that he looked forward to
the day when he could kneel before me and kiss my palms!
Yes, he was sad I wasn't even listening to the divine call.
Sebastian told me that of all his learning and his
English, the most substantial things in his life he had
learned, he learned from someone I knew: my father. My father
taught him Sunday school.

I did not pay too much attention to Sebastian's
suggestion about my spiritual call, for I was still betting
on my novel, my literary career. Little by little, I was
beginning to grasp the English language. With increasing
comprehension, I was reading books in English: the
autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, the Carlos Baker biography
of Ernest Hemingway, and English fiction written by Indian
writers such as R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao,
Khushwant Singh, Kamala Das, Dom Moraes, and Nayantara
Sahgal. The moment Sebastian sensed my growing interest in
Indo-Anglian writers, he said that an Indian like R. K.
Narayan can write and publish all he wants, but he will never
be part of the history of English literature; an English
novel written by a colonial would be an anomaly, something
abnormal like a two-head horse.

Then I ended up visiting my friend at a clinic in Palai.
He had offered me a hint that his machine was breaking down.
When I visited him, he told me that he felt much better. I
sat near him. Asked no questions.

Sitting under the shadow of huge banyan tree, I listened
to him as he joked about his illness and the terrible work
at the paper. While I was about to leave, Sebastian produced
a copy of Elected Silence by Thomas Merton, borrowed from his
doctor, a great fan of the book; he had lent it, warning him
not to read it again until he was completely recovered
"You read it," Sebastian said, laughing. "At least
you're not going nuts. Or are you crazy, too?"
To avoid responding to his self-mockery, I exclaimed,
Elected Silence! What a beautiful title!"
"That's the British title. The Americans call it Seven
Story Mountain," Sebastian said. "The man has touched a lot
of hearts with this story. Read Evelyn Waugh's introduction,
too. You know, Waugh was a great English Catholic novelist."
I didn't know there was too much Catholicism left in
England. Why else would Bede Griffiths run away to India?
Sebastian explained how in spite of the old hostilities,
Catholicism blossomed in England, producing such great
figures as Cardinal Newman, the author of our school anthem,
"Lead Kindly Light," and of course, Francis Thompson whose
poem, "The Hound of Heaven," I heard Sebastian allude to
frequently in his polemic against my self-centered literary
aspirations. "You will never escape the hound of heaven!"
Sebastian used to tell me.

That evening on my way home from the clinic, paging
through Merton's Elected Silence, quite unexpectedly. I felt
being sucked me into his world unlike any of the two dozen
English books I had read. Starting with the Carlos Baker
biography of Ernest Hemingway, I was now greedily consuming
biographies of great writers, hoping to reshape my
insignificant life. As I progressed into Merton's story, I
felt no distance of language, no distance of culture or age.
For the first time, I could hear a book, hear the author's
solemn voice in the English language. It was as if Thomas
Merton came into my room and spoke to me, in his stable
voice. Even in any randomly picked passage in his book, I
could hear that voice and the intelligence behind it.
Though I shared nothing with Merton's childhood in terms
of social and economic conditions, neither in terms of his
great privileges nor his many depravations, I found one
common denominator: both of us were failed novelists. His
life-story was that of a progressive disillusionment with the
world, which I personally found quite satisfying in spite of
my isolated, rural, middle class existence. An agnostic who
lived the first half of his life desiring nothing better than
a writer's glory, Thomas Merton renounced his cosmopolitan
past enriched by so much culture and art and materialistic
pleasures, and instead, as he entered the second half of his
life, he elected a lifestyle that sought perpetual silence.
The autobiography touched me in particular when he spoke
of competing against his friends over a summer to write
novels. Merton produced a five hundred page work, but in his
new monastic thinking, he was embarrassed by the novel: "[I]t
went to several publishers but to my great sorrow never got
published--at least I was sorry about it in those days, but
now I am full of self-congratulation at the fact that those
pages escaped the press."

Deeply touched and puzzled by Thomas Merton's abandonment
of his literary ambitions and his entrance into a Trappist
monastery, I began to long for the monastery I visited once,
in the company of James. This time around, I went back with
Father M C. To make our trip a truly spiritual journey, he
suggested we walk most of the 15 miles up the mountain. As
the two of us progressed through the cold air and the mist
that veiled the hills, I felt we were ascending some mystical
highway; I feared I might not want to go back to my family or
school. A boy from my class who had made a similar journey,
dropped out of school to join an ashram; we never heard from
him again.

As the howling wind leaped over the mountain slopes, the
headmaster said that our journey reminded him of John
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I said I had tried to read the
novel in Malayalam translation, but found it crudely written.
Father M C smiled appreciatively and continued to tell me
about the great thinkers and poets of the Jesuit order. But,
soon, he, too, became silent. The power of the sublime nature
that enveloped us made it pointless to speak. Quietly we
trudged up the deserted road that slashed through the endless
flanks of the dark rock that reached up into the clouds.
When our legs got tired, we sat down on the edges of the
road, facing the light of the valley. Constantly whipped by
the wind, a tiny cascade up above a giant rock kept spraying
invisible waters over us. When I heard the persistent swoosh
of the wind, I remembered Merton's evening meditation on
wind: "Cold winter wind along the walls of the chapel. Not
howling, not moaning, not dismal. Can there be anything
mournful about wind? It is innocent and without sorrow. It
has no regrets. Wind is a strong child enjoying his play,
amazed at his own strength, gentle, inexhaustible and pure."
Finally, when we knocked at the door of Kurisumala
Ashram late in the afternoon, two monks clad in simple earth-
colored robes came out to greet us. In spite of our spiritual
yearnings, we were hungry, tired. The monks took us straight
into their kitchen and fed us home-made bread and vegetable
stew. We drank warm, unsweetened milk, produced in their
famed dairy. The food they gave us tasted sacred. It was a
revelation to me that we didn't need much of the
indispensable elements of modern cooking like sugar and salt
to live in this world. To this day, I can taste the
authentic smell and flavor of the ashram bread.
As I sat in the cold room, eating the bread dipped in
bland stew, I began to understand why the monks wanted to run
away from the material world of salt and pepper and sugar and
newspapers and radio. The futility of participating in the
frantic activities of the world outside became clearer to me.
I asked the monks about the routines of monastic life.
I was told, they paid no attention to the world outside. They
went to bed early and woke up at three in the morning to work
in the cattle-shed, washing cows, milking and feeding them.
They never went home to their kins; they shunned the presence
of women. When a woman, from Yonkers, New York, entered the
dark corridor of the chapel, I saw the monks briskly withdraw
their heads and arms into their habits.
Every one at the monastery worked in the fields and
helped out in the kitchen. None of them possessed anything;
even the abbot walked around barefoot, slept on a hard wooden
cot. While we were there, the monks gathered in the dark
chapel two times, and kneeling on the hard floor, their hands
outstretched like crucifixes, they prayed. Though they
repeated the monotonous Syrian Christian prayers to St.Mary,
their prayer sounded to me like the purest voice of
communion. Hearing the prayer recited in a French accent by
the bearded white man, the abbot, and repeated by two dozen
monks, I was quite shaken up, inside. Later, sitting in a
hermitage, my headmaster explained to me that the abbot was
Dom Francis Acharya, a Belgian who came with Dom Bede
Griffiths. The two built the monastery in 1958, but later
Griffiths moved to the state of Tamil Nadu, to take up an
older monastery on the banks of the river Cauvery. When we
got a chance to pay our respect to the abbot, I noticed a
small photograph on the wall: Francis Acharya and Thomas
Merton, together at a conference in Thailand, hours before
Merton was accidently electrocuted; the year, 1968.

Upon my return home after our visit to Kurisumala
Ashram, Merton's photograph and the voice I heard in his
autobiography still lingering with clarity in my conscience,
I picked up Bede Griffiths' The Golden String. In the
prologue, I noticed his description of an experience of
nature I myself had been going through quite frequently after
I studying Wordsworth's poetry in class. Though I flunked
most of the tests, the spirit of the Romantic experience was
not lost on me. I recognized this spirit in Bede Griffiths.
While walking alone after school, the young Griffiths
was awakened to the singing of birds in a full chorus of
song. He felt he had never heard birds sing like that. As
he walked on into the fading sunset, awakened to the epiphany
of song, he had an experience of the original garden. A
choir of angels would not have surprised him, he wrote. That
moment he felt inclined to kneel on the ground. He hardly
dared to look at the face of the sky, because it seemed to
him "as though it was but a veil before the face of God."
Though I did not kneel down at such sights, I, too, had
been nourished so by epiphanies of nature. Before the woods
around our house disappeared, I dwelled in such a territory.
I was transformed into a creature of nature, a part of the
hedges and the woods and the ruined stone fences and I
remembered standing in the shade charmed by a knowledge.

When I read about the monk's experience of bird song, I was
convinced of my kinship with Griffiths. Merton's life-story
also seemed to have the same message. However, the conclusion
of The Golden String was not meant to provide mere comfort;
it asked for more: "To be a Christian is to accept the
responsibility for sin not only in oneself but in others
also. It is to recognize that we all bear the responsibility
for one another." Having responded to the deep resonance of
his conscience, I felt compelled to make another trip to the
monastery. This time, I went alone.

The evening I arrived at the monastery, I said to the young
monk in charge of visitors that I was interested in staying a
few days. I said I had read The Golden String and that I
wanted to think through some things. The monk went back to
consult with his elders, and he came back, welcoming me to
share a room with another visitor. It was in this room that
I met a young aspirant who did not want to tell me his name
because he was planning on giving it up the next day.

The youth had arrived a week before. He was a few years
older, healthy, with big arms and shoulders. He gave me a
toothy smile as I entered the room, and right away asked
whether I had made up my mind to join.

"No," I said, a bit irritated.

It didn't seem the monastery had that many youths lining up to
become monks. The youth did not speak to me for another hour. When it
was time for prayer, the entire community gathered in the
dark chapel. They all knelt in the front, waiting for the
arrival of the abbot. The silence of the cold place was
haunting, unbearable, but strangely comforting, too. Even
the visitors in the back of the chapel, knelt down and melded
with the silence. The old Belgian abbot entered the chapel.
Though Dom Bede Griffiths had been long gone from this
monastery, it was his presence that I conjured up that
evening in the chapel.

The prayer lasted for hours. It was a windy evening on
the mountain. The monastery was not heated. After the prayer,
I sat down with the monks to eat supper. Again, I got to
relish the simple dishes cooked with rice and potatoes and
vegetables, gathered with their own hands from the field.
Throughout the supper, a young monk read from the monastic
writings of the medieval and the modern periods. The abbot
gave a beautiful sermon about the selfless munificence of
trees. A tree takes nothing for itself, he said. Prayer and
reading continued for two more hours and then, they all
retreated to their sleeping hall lined with wooden cots.
Back in our cottage, the youth said to me that he had
already made up his mind.

"Made up your mind?" I said.
"It is the only sensible thing I can find in this
world," he replied. He had spoken with the abbot; the two
had agreed to try each other for a month. The youth said he
felt relieved to be able to commit himself, to reach his
enduring home, finally.

That night, as we lay awake in the adjacent cots, I
asked him: "Why do you want to run away from the world?"
His response was a question: "Why are you still living
in the world?"

I said I liked the world. Sometimes, I loved it so much
I did not want to die at all, ever; I would do anything to
live. Anything. The youth told me that he also liked it,
but he found no meaning in running in too many directions.
What mattered now was the fulfillment of God's plan for him.
I admitted I didn't even know whether God existed. The
only thing I knew for certain was how passionately I wished
to live and how I enjoyed the experience of the world.
Perhaps, that was God's plan for me, I said.
The youth did not argue. He was sad.

Early next morning I came home, but the youth moved from the
visitor's cottage to the inner lodgings of the novices. Many
years later, when I visited the monastery, I recognized the
youth; he wore the simple white robe of the junior monks;
beneath his thick beard, I recognized his old toothy smile.
Later, I made a trip to the neighboring state to meet
Dom Bede Griffiths. Yes, now I could speak English. And I
could even pop the question whether George Bernard Shaw was
his friend, but I did not. Already I knew his famous writer
friends included J.R.R. Tolkien, and of course, C.S.Lewis,
who dedicated his autobiography Surprised by Joy to Dom
Bede Griffiths.

I found him in his grass hut by the river. The place
was idyllic, innocent; it seemed connected to some primordial
memory. Unlike the Belgian abbot who stayed on at our local
monastery, running it according to strict monastic rules, Dom
Griffiths' ashram seemed more Indian. Griffiths himself
lived like a Hindu mendicant. Sitting in his hut one
morning, Griffiths answered my questions about the relevance
of the monastic ideal in the modern world and explained how
small communities will spring out again to save the world
from the mechanistic, industrial system that had already
destroyed our harmony with nature and shut us out of God's
presence. He was eloquent. I sensed much excitement in him
about the changes within the scientific community in the
West. Fritjoff Capra had published his Tao of Physics; a
Cambridge biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, had completed a New
Science of Life while staying with Griffiths at the ashram.
His parting statement for me was, "The new age is beginning!"
The image of the lean, well-tanned, saffron clad
Englishman made me think of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz in
The Heart of Darkness, of course, in a benign reversal. Three
decades after the departure of the Raj, I could see how one
Englishman had arrived.

For many years after my encounters with the monks, I
continued to picture them all at prayer and work, and at
their quiet hours, alone. I read more books. Gradually, I
began to suspect that what intrigued me the most about the
monks was the Romanticism in their lives, their pastoral
striving, their attempt to return to the original garden.
Even as the monastery began to lose its hold on my
conscience, I continued to remember the elegance of the
rituals, the silence, the darkness, the genuine bread earned
by the sweat on their brows, and I continued to feel guilty
about not being able to dedicate my life for such a lofty
ideal.

Then suddenly I had an armchair revelation: I felt like
an equal to the monks; it occurred to me that my struggles to
write stories were much like the monks' strivings. My calling
was writing, I told myself. I was a writer, not a very good
one, certainly not inspired, not with the gift of tongues,
but still a writer who sought self-fulfillment. To attain my
kind of spiritual ecstasy, what I needed was not a monastic
garment like the one worn by Thomas Merton or Bede Griffiths,
but plenty of writing and rewriting, my "monastic" work.
Revision, that is what matters, for revision demands much
humility, a true monastic virtue.