Bhava

Afterword

Towards the end of Bhava, the young Prasad — who already possesses considerable spiritual stature — stands before his mother and says, ‘Who am I?’

At first, Gangu thinks her son wants to know who his father is; then she recognizes that Prasad is announcing his wish to explore the question at its deepest levels. But Gangu's initial reaction is understandable. To ask ‘Who am I?’ can be a spiritual practice, a mantra, a device for distinguishing between self and ego (‘I’ changes; ‘I’ accumulates layers: what, then, is the nature of my changing and changeable sense of being? And is there a part that doesn't change?); it is also an evanescent thought, a way of locating oneself in society, a means of identifying oneself to one's self — these and other variations on the theme are played out at the heart of Bhava.

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Bhava is like a mystery story, or series of mysteries both factual and metaphysical. (Most of the questions, however, don't get answered.) What happened on the night of Saroja's ‘murder’? Did she survive, and later kill herself, or was her death an accident? Had she been seduced — and impregnated — by Pundit? Whose son is Dinakar? Whose son is Prasad? Such concrete questions plot the tale. Perhaps equally compelling are the enigmas of human nature: how did Gangu, who seems so simple and direct, conduct intense, secret love affairs with two men — themselves close friends — at the same time? What explains Saroja's character? Is Pundit a rogue or a saviour? And, more generally, there is the mystery of extremes of being: on the one hand Sitamma, Chandrappa and Radha, who occupy their lives so placidly and unquestioningly; on the other hand Dinakar and Shastri — troubled, unstable, ambivalent — who torment themselves and hurt others.

The two men at the centre of the tale, Shastri and Dinakar, long for relief from uncertainty and anxiety. Their unsettled state of being is signalled by the fact that, when we first encounter them, both wear costumes extravagantly at odds with their inner lives. Despite the traditional garb of puranik (Shastri) and pilgrim (Dinakar), each is acutely aware of the discrepancy between public perception and inner reality, and so feels something of a hypocrite. Yet costumes can be shed. When ripe, the cocoon bursts; when ripe, a person can be transformed, can ‘turn over’ (as Dinkar thinks of it) as easily as one turns over in sleep.

Shastri is seventy, a far more conventional type than Dinakar, and limited in his taste for subjectivity and self-analysis. Since the death of Saroja, he has tried to redeem himself in the traditional and public spheres: he earns both merit and respect through his role of puranik, reciting ancient tales of the gods and saints. Yet in private life, he continues to be cruel and unable to control his violent temper, especially with his second wife and his daughter. His soul-searching never amounts to much more than wondering, ‘Why am I like this?’

But one day Shastri notices that a younger man in his railway carriage is wearing around his neck a Sri Chakra amulet that looks identical to the one Saroja used to wear, the one she was wearing when he killed her forty years before. And, astonishingly, the man resembles Saroja. This encounter plunges Shastri into crisis. For more than half a lifetime, he has lived and relived the guilt, jealousy, rage, fear, and remorse surrounding his attack on Saroja, whom he had covered with earth and left for dead. But if the amulet is Saroja's, it means she might have survived, that he might not be a murderer after all, and that the man wearing the amulet could be Saroja's son (and therefore Shastri's as well).

The shock of realizing that he may not be who he thought he was readies Shastri for transformation and a possible rebirth.

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In Samskara, Anantha Murthy's celebrated early novel, ‘The chaste Acharya commits an illicit act, and as a result his transformation begins’ (A.K. Ramanujan). In Bhava, Shastri discovers that he did not commit an illicit act, and as a result his transformation begins. So Shastri's experience might be viewed as a perverse inversion of the Acharya's rite of passage.

Shastri also lives out the Acharya's nightmares. Soon after Acharya sleeps with Chandri, the Acharya's wife dies and he decides to ‘go where the legs take me,’ and finds himself besieged by the crude and unfamiliar temptations of the outside world. He feels, ‘… my person has lost form, has found no new form.’ As one who has lost his old world and not yet found another, he dreads ‘being transformed from ghost to demon.’ But this he means figuratively: is he to be released from being like a disembodied ghost (preta), only to become a demon?

For Shastri, the dreaded transformation seems to be enacted literally. At times, he has felt without substance, like ‘a ghost in his own house,’ but increasingly he feels possessed by a deeply malevolent force, turned into a demon or other evil form. When he rapes Saroja, he couples with her like a demon; when he accuses her of becoming pregnant by Pundit, the ‘demon inside him [began] to wail and laugh grotesquely’; when he carries her body to bury her in the pit, ‘he strode like a gloating demon.’ Years after the crime, he says, ‘it seemed this body into which the demon had entered has never learned anything.’

And so, when he sees the amulet on Dinakar's neck, he wonders whether he is about to be possessed once again.

Dinakar, dressed in the black clothing of an Ayyappa devotee, has been undergoing a crisis of his own. That is why he has tried to lose (or find) himself through taking the Ayyappa vow—‘blacking out’ his accustomed dress, his eating and drinking habits, even his name, for the forty days of his pilgrimhood. In daily life, he is a famous television star, a man of the world who has had numerous sexual intrigues with women. But it has all come to seem wilful, stale and jaded.

At the end of his Ayyappa pilgrimage, Dinakar — who has lived nearly all his life as an orphan — has gone in search of Sitamma, the ‘other mother’ whom he had met more than twenty years earlier. He looks forward to her unconditional affection and an experience of renewal through contact with a simple, peaceful life. At forty-five, he is fully, even cynically, aware that he has been shallow and cruel, and that his present spiritual emptiness mirrors the way in which he has chosen to live. He suffers in part because his mind is alert and discerning; a ‘modern’ man, he is both blessed and cursed with the yearning for an integrated self to which his highly developed self-consciousness is an obstacle.

Dinakar — egotistical, but with a true, if acquired, sensitivity — is of a type that goes far back in Anantha Murthy's fiction, as does the portrayal of unconflicted characters such as Sitamma, who says with intuitive wisdom, ‘The whole country thinks this [Dinakar] has grown into a very intelligent man, but this man doesn't even know who is his mother, who is his father, which is his town, so perhaps he wants to believe that God himself is his mother and father and that is why he wears these kind of clothes and goes wandering here and there.’ Perceiving Dinakar as rootless and divided, she teasingly reduces his pilgrim's austerities to the wanderings of a little ghost, a little boy in search of home.

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‘Dinakar, reading from an English translation of Bardo Thodol, listening on his Walkman to the chanting of Tibetan lamas, tried to relate his present state of mind to the bardo state described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’

‘Shastri began to pray,’ “O God, save me from these tormenting doubts which make me like a ghost in limbo.”’

Both Dinakar and Shastri (in common with the Acharya) have been caught in a ghostly transitional limbo, like the ‘bardo’ or ‘between-state’ of Tibetan tradition. The ‘bardo of becoming,’ for example, connects death and rebirth. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says:

‘…the Bardo or intermediate state … lasts right up until the moment we take on a new birth … the bardos … are periods of deep uncertainty … the seeds of all our habitual tendencies are activated and reawakened.

…The shifting and precarious nature of the bardo of becoming can also be the source of many opportunities for liberation …’

‘Bardo’ is ‘equivalent to the Sanskrit term antarabhava,’ and ‘bhava’ itself means rebirth (in the Buddhist ‘twelve links,’ that is, the cycles of death and rebirth).

‘Bhava’ is also for Anantha Murthy a shortened form of ‘bhavavali,’ the Jain cycle of death and rebirth — which, unless escaped, is an endless chain of becomings. Although such cycles are also central to Hindu belief, the orientation in Bhava is closer to the somewhat existentialist Jain or Buddhist world-view.

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Dinakar, typically, uses his intellect in trying to comprehend what is happening to him. He thinks of himself in terms of ‘bardo,’ in terms of ‘bhava,’ and the nuances of his confusion are nicely displayed in his letters to women — particularly the long, intense outpouring to Mahamata which forms one of the centres of the novel, and in which we get the most sustained and unguarded view of Dinakar. Mahamata has become a holy woman; she does not even recognize Dinakar when he comes to her ashram for darshan; he expects that she will never even see his letter: so he writes as if to a mother/divinity/guru, or as if to a confessor, with the openness and vulnerability one would expect in such a privileged, protected context. Here (and in the other letters as well) he uses ‘bhava’ to mean ‘worldly existence’ and ‘becoming’ interchangeably — even simultaneously.

Unlike Dinakar, Shastri has no such conceptual framework; he lives the nightmare directly, uncomprehendingly — for him the demons, ghosts, burning red eyes, possession by something evil, have all been real. He is like a spirit in limbo, in a between-life-and-death bardo meant to be a transitional phase, but in which the spirit can ‘get stuck,’ or emerge reborn as a ‘hungry ghost.’ Terrors of just this sort seem to haunt Shastri. And for more than one reason. He feels condemned to limbo not only because he committed murder, but because in murdering Saroja he may have murdered his own son, the very one who must perform the funeral rites in order to transform him from ghost (preta) to ancestor (pitr).

For Dinakar and Shastri (as for the Acharya, who is perhaps Anantha Murthy's quintessential man-in-transition) the prospect of an endless state of limbo seems unbearable. Yet it is as if we meet Dinakar and Shastri at the point where we take leave of the Acharya. They are going in different directions, shedding different skins; each, in some way, moving towards what the other must leave behind.

The Acharya began as an idealized type with, in effect, a received identity, an inherited dharma with which he feels fully identified; by the end of Samskara, he is becoming a self-conscious individual. He has little choice, given that — as he says of sleeping with Chandri—‘That act gouged me out of my past world.’ With his new ‘awareness that I turned over suddenly, unbidden,’ he cannot go back to his old identity; therefore any impending rebirth must involve individuation and alienation. Shastri and Dinakar, on the other hand, have been alienated for years. They cannot aspire to the sort of innocence that characterizes Sitamma (or the Acharya in his ‘past world’), but they would like to achieve a more balanced state, to incorporate something of the serenity that comes from a secure, unconflicted sense of being. They would like to ‘turn over’ (Dinakar uses the same word as did the Acharya).

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Dinakar and Shastri receive solace — and glimpses of a possible source of transformation — through literal or symbolic participation in a kind of life which calms their demons. This is why Shastri plays the role of puranik, why Dinakar takes the Ayyappa vow, why he feels so peaceful in Sitamma's presence, watching her lay the rangoli, watching her cook … For Dinakar, Sitamma's unquestioning acceptance of herself and her life are magical. As her son Narayan Tantri says, for her ‘there will be no rebirth. She lives in this bhava without being of it.’

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The solace available through experiences of timeless renewal, or through exposure to a peaceful, orderly life, is conveyed not only thematically but in the very language of Bhava. A lyrical intensity occurs in moments of transcendence, when the ego-bound, socially-defined self is immersed in something larger:

‘What for thousands of years took form on the walls of temples and in the verandas of poor people's cottages, no matter how poor, had begun to manifest this morning on the veranda swept with cow-dung. A vine where one was necessary, and a leaf on the vine; for every leaf a flower, and a swastika to guard it all, and then peacocks, and then — look — there was Lord Ganesha, and even his mouse to ride on.’

‘Nine triangles joining, one inside the other, creating an orbit which becomes a circle in turn becoming a chakra, the chakra becoming a petalled flower, the flower a form manifested within a square opened out to the four directions, the whole figure wombing in itself the creative energy of earth and sky.’

‘First, as if from the depths of a cave, one, one, or two, two, sprouts of melody, and now the clear sound of a bell emerging, and then a bass melody oooooo, and then jingling as if from belled anklets. All melody as if made from itself inside itself. As if going deeper and deeper down inside, melody wandering and searching the depth of the depths. Even as everything ended, again a melody arising from a deeper side of the kundalini. Did the melody find what it sought? As if saying look, look, the wonderment of small, small bells. Was it being lost, or drowning in ecstasy?’

‘In the sky, the sun's love-play was over and the moon's grace appeared. While the sky seemed serene and peaceful, frothing waves moved over the sea, like thousands of white horses rushing forward in battle. The waves wet the feet of the two friends.’

With several significant exceptions, this blossoming into poetry is absent from descriptions of emotional and sexual relations between men and women. Although such relations (mostly Shastri's and Dinakar's) permeate the novel, they are more often a source of confusion and pain than of joy. (For the men, that is; we have little direct access to the intimate thoughts of any woman in the story, although Saroja's disgust is painfully apparent.) Consider Shastri's relations with his two wives, or the irony and brutal ‘honesty’ in Dinakar's letters to women with whom he has had an erotic connection. For each of these men, the involvement that most attracts beauty of language is the earliest and most innocent: Shastri with Radha, Dinakar with Gangu.

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Language itself is also a theme in Bhava.

Anantha Murthy has commented that Indians live in an ‘ambience of languages,’ that the story plays with the notion of translation, and that the ‘translation of events’ was one of his preoccupations in this work. For example, translation comes into play when telling someone at home what happened in the workplace; or in telling something to one's mother, as opposed to a colleague. What is spoken in the home, in the street, in the office, on ritual occasions — all of these differ. And while the narrative of Bhava is in Kannada, to an exceptional degree the experiences of the characters originate in a multiplicity of languages: not only Kannada, but English, Hindi, Urdu. As well as sign language. And the languages of the heart. In many of the conversations, at least one character cannot use his or her mother tongue. Frequently, two or three characters converse only in a second language. Above all, at times there is no common language at all: so we have a Kannada narrative in which Dinakar, a major figure, cannot speak with a woman who is like his ‘true mother’ because she knows only Kannada, and he speaks none. Yet they communicate. In fact, that they do not share a language and still communicate so well emphasizes the deep connection between them.

Therefore the use, or mis-use, or circumventing of language becomes a metaphorical component of the novel, which is also about communicating: difficulties in communication echoed as difficulties in language.

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Bhava is a departure for Anantha Murthy; he hasn't written any novel quite like it before. This may be a matter of disappointment to some readers who have come to expect from him work that is iconoclastic, rigorously challenging beliefs and practices, revealing forms that have lost their meaning — all of which characterize Samskara, for instance, and are absent from Bhava. The concern with crises of identity and spirit, although present and compelling in much of his earlier work, always has a dual purpose. The Acharya's spiritual crisis serves also as a microcosm of the crisis of Identity in a whole community of brahmins. His rebirth takes place in a political/sociological context, necessitated by the surrounding religious and social decay. There is no such context in Bhava, which has a much smaller canvas; its crises of identity are not placed alongside the monoliths of community, society, tradition. The crises are simply there, products of individual defects in bhava; which is to say, products of being human. Bhava spotlights the individual caught in the web of being, of samsara. Everywhere there is evidence of samsara's illusoriness, the bane of ‘not knowing‘: I don't know what is real. I don't know what ‘real’ means. I don't know who I am. I don't know whose father I am. I don't know whose son I am. I don't know what the ‘I’ in ‘I am’ means. So while the details of this novella are rooted in the Indian reality, the ultimate resonance is more immediately universal.

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As in many traditional tales a question is raised; kept alive, despite possible solutions; maintained, till profounder questions are raised. Answers are delayed until the question is no longer relevant.

— A.K. Ramanujan on Samskara

Few of the mysteries in Bhava are ever resolved. The author's reluctance to solve them for us — his adopting a perspective that is diffused, not omniscient — is connected with the theme of ‘not knowing,’ and with the changing relevance of having questions answered. The characters move beyond the kind of resolution they required earlier, because critical changes take place in those most in need of a shift in their terms of being, most in need of a rebirth.

Shastri and Dinakar — who, especially if we think of the bhavavali, could be aspects of the same character enacting the same fate in different parts of the cycle — echo one another when abandoning their questions about paternity:

‘“What does it matter if he is my son? Or if he is not?” Dinakar thought. “Whether I am his father, whether I am not, I should touch his feet.”’

And Shastri thinks, of Dinakar,

‘“Whether he is my son or not, he seems to be one who can give me a new life.”’

By the end of Bhava, Shastri is, for the first time, benignly preoccupied with the future — his unborn grandchild and the reconciliation with his daughter. He begins to feel, wonderingly, tentatively, that even in old age he may yet, for a while, live without suffering and fury. The ordinary blessings might be his.

Prasad decides that he can live in the world while not being of it. Having adopted the saintly simpleton, Chandrappa, as his spiritual father, he becomes unconcerned with the identity of his natural father, and loses his resentment of Narayan Tantri. In consequence, the pressure on Narayan Tantri to marry Gangu evaporates. Although Narayan Tantri is prepared to marry a woman born into the prostitute caste, Gangu herself comes to feel that the loving acceptance by Sitamma renders a public ritual unnecessary.

Dinakar, even without full awareness, has never before been so much among family: his ‘other mother.’ Sitamma; Shastri, who seems like ‘a relation from some past life’; Prasad, in response to whom he experiences, for the first time in his life, the ‘welling up of love for a child.’

When, at the end of his pilgrimage, Dinakar comes down from the hill and thinks, ‘“That” is not to be won if you seek it wilfully,’ he expresses an earned — if not completely experienced — response to Prasad's ‘Who am I?’

‘Thou art “That”.’ Tattvamasi.

Then he thinks of the evening when he ‘became captive to Prasad's unshakeable calm, and for a moment at least … was fully open, free of any desire or expectation.’ He thinks of blessing Prasad — how it had seemed that Prasad ought to have been blessing him — and is in a state of exaltation.

The dazzle of illusion, even when we see through it; the ways in which we entangle ourselves, the ways in which we work free—

How dp we get to change?

When all is said and done, it seems a matter of grace.