Silence With The Storm Chap 1 (standard:non fiction, 5861 words) [1/2] show all parts
Author: Rattan Mann	Updated: Oct 05 2003	Views/Reads: 3928/2731	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An Autobiography

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

and happily upon that, because everybody around me beleived it and so 
many wise and honourable people could not be wrong. 

I said my caste is Beta. I am actually Beta-minus-minus, a subcaste of
the Kshatriyas called the Jats. " As stupid as a Jat " and " For a Jat 
two times two is always eight " are just two of the many sayings in 
northern India, the others being hard to translate because the joke - 
or the truth, according to those seekers of truth who can relish it 
only at others expense - lies in the rhyme. Beta-minus-minus are 
warriors and farmers: Both my grand-fathers, my uncle, my father - who 
rose from the ranks to become a major, promotions often coinciding with 
the birth of one of us, the children - and my brother, all had been or 
are in the army. And those of my relatives who are not yet in the army 
dream of being in it some day. It is the irony of human existence that 
the profession of killing another has a higher social status than the 
profession of nourshing another, even among believers of peace and non- 
violence, and throughout Indian history the tillers of Mother Earth 
have always dreamed of becoming the killers of men some day. 

With so much of my fate and future already sealed, I came into this
world in the summer of 1945 as the second child, after Bimla, to pilfer 
from Destiny what still remained of a mutilated and distorted freedom 
and life. 

From the dusty layers of a misty memory creeps out a fatty throwing
pebbles into puddles to watch tiny dots of water growing into full 
circles and rushing towards their annihilation at the edges. The next 
moment the fatty is gaping with horror at Munshi Ram, the village 
school-teacher, beating a Delta with a rod and then stuffing warm ash 
into his gaping wounds to stop the bleeding. Fatty knew such a thing 
would never happen to him because he was the son of an army captain, 
but still he hated to go to school after that day. Every morning as he 
trudged towards school he felt, in his own way and without knowing the 
feelings of horses or any other creatures, like a horse taken to a 
slaughter-house. And the irony of it was that he never complained or 
cried or told mamma that he disliked school. Perhaps in his own 
child-like ways he knew there was no way out and therefore no point in 
complaining. 

Then there was that chilly winter evening when he stood helpless,
embarrassed, almost ashamed, a distant spectator, and mamma lay on the 
ground in a pool of blood, as uncle Pratap Singh tried to split her 
skull into two with a wooden plank. This was the inevitable climax of a 
joint-family feud  which had been raging he did not know since when. 
Mamma wanted to break free from the shackles of the joint-family 
system, leave the village, move with papa to the city where he was 
posted, and give the children - even girls - a proper education. For 
Grandma and uncle Pratap money spent on education, especially of girls, 
was money wasted, and so they won't allow it under any circumstances, 
even if it meant killing mamma before she went too far with her crazy 
ideas. Who had ever heard of girls being educated? Girls are the 
garbage of another house, the sooner they are disposed off in marriage, 
the better it is. So every evening there were horrible quarrels, one 
against two, mamma against grandma and Pratap. 

Grandma: You think yourself to be too modern. Your feet have grown
wings. But I will clip them to the roots. From now on you will not go 
out even for a walk with your sister Sato. Mamma:   I will go out 
whenever and wherever I want. G:	 If Satto steps inside this house I 
will chop off her legs. M:	 You dare touch even a hair of her's. G:	 
You will not talk to Satto's husband. Is he your husband that you have 
to talk to him? M:	 I will talk to anyone I please. You can't stop me. 
G:	 You are a whore. M:	 I am not a whore, you lame bitch. G:	 
Prostitute, you are a witch. You bewitched Raja and then ate him. ( 
Raja was Pratap's nine year old son who had died sometime back fom a 
liver sickness) M:	 You killed him yourself. To save money you did not 
even take him to the hospital. If you had listened to me he would have 
been alive today. G:	 Man-eating witch, eat Rattan. 

And on and on it would go till late in the nights. One late night when
everybody was asleep and there was no one to hear a cry for help, 
thrice did Pratap rush towards mamma to choke her to death and thrice 
did she grab an iron rod and warned him in no unclear terms, " Come, 
you one-eyed bastard, touch me and I will tear you to pieces." 

Of course, she was shivering inside because she knew she was not strong
enough to fight a man, but the fluke worked and it was all she had ever 
hoped for. How she wished papa was at home or the children were a 
little bigger and stronger to be able to come to mamma's rescue at such 
times. 

She cannot be finished like this, reasoned uncle Pratap, and so he wrote
to grandfather asking for his gun. Both my father and granfather had 
guns. But my father never brought his gun home just to prevent such 
tragedies. My grandfather had a farm-house in a sparsely populated area 
three hundred kilometers from Delhi so for him a Gun was a necessity 
but he too never brought it home when he visited us in Delhi. 

" Don't be a fool. Don't do it." Grandfather replied in a short, cryptic
letter. " If she wants to seperate from the rest of the family, let her 
go her own way. And if Katar (papa) is the lice of her sari, as you 
say, well, it is not a crime to listen to one's own wife." And 
grandfather did not send his gun. 

Gun or no gun, uncle Pratap decided to go ahead with his plans. 

So came that evening when mamma sat in the yard, sifting wheat for the
evening porridge, and fatty played near her with his wooden rabbit. 
Nobody was expecting any trouble because the day had gone by 
peacefully. Mamma felt safer than usual because papa was at home on 
annual leave from his unit. Suddenly, without warning, Pratap came from 
behind with a wodden plank and dealt two blows on mamma's head and one 
on the back before she knew what was happening. Pratap had assumed that 
he would be able to finish the job before papa had time to interfere, 
and later ask for forgiveness and get away with everything. But papa 
was warned in time by a neighbour and could come to mamma's rescue 
before it was too late. And instead of bashing a helpless woman to 
death Pratap found himself confronting a well-trained soldier and that 
was a totally different story than he had expected. Papa wanted to go 
to the police and have Pratap jailed. But mamma was more forgiving. She 
and the neighbours talked papa out of it - a brother should not destroy 
a brother for "such things". 

Fatty stopped his game and stared at the strange sequence of events
rushing before his eyes. It all looked so distant and unreal. It 
produced no anger or fear or tears - only embarrassment. He was not 
part of anything and nobody took the least notice of him. He just stood 
there totally empty and irrelevant untill uncle Summer Singh took him 
gently by the hand and whispered," Come son, let us go out. This is not 
for children." 

That kid of six was not me. It would be a mistake to think so. Whatever
he felt he felt, without knowing they were feelings. It was all mist 
and haze with no definite shape. He did not know that actions should 
produce reactions. He should have gone to grandma and told her, " My 
mother is not a prostitute and whore with fifty husbands in each 
village as you say, you lame bitch " because I would have gone and told 
her exactly that. But he did not. He was a blank canvas with no 
reference points to tell him what he should do. I am a canvas painted 
all over with references to my past and pointers to my future actions. 
He could compare himself with nothing. I can compare myself with my 
past, my future, and my surroundings. He thought without knowing it was 
thinking. I think. I know that I think. And I know that I think and 
therefore I am. And therefore he is he and I am I and never the twain 
shall meet. 

From every drop of human blood shed upon this barren earth sprout not
mushrooms and vegetables to fatten laboratory rabbits and guinea-pigs 
with, from those drops sprout human endeavours, human dreams and 
aspirations, however shattered and unfullfilled in the end but noble 
human efforts nevertheless. Out of the blood of my mother that spilled 
upon the ground that evening and sank into the mute and downtrodden 
dust sprang our education, Bimla's crazy ideas about emancipation, my 
so-called ideals and love for mathematics, philosophy, and theoretical 
physics, and everything else that was noble in the family, because at 
last mamma won and had her own way. Papa agreed to take us all with him 
to the town where his unit was posted and give the children proper 
education in the best of schools. Sacrifices there were in plenty. When 
there were not enough beds, Bimla slept on chairs with a horse-blanket 
as her bed-sheet. For seven years there was no visit to any 
cinema-hall. And fatty ate his first chocklate when he was twenty-one 
and no longer so fat. But for education in expensive private American 
schools there was, and there had to be, enough money all the time. 

The day they left for town, grandma wept for hours, but suddenly and
strangely papa had acquired a heart of stone and he did not say good 
bye to her. As they left, grandma limped to the roof crying bitterly 
and hoping that somebody would look back. Nobody did. But there was no 
joy in anybody's heart. Fatty didn't feel like he was going to a new 
exciting place. He never spoke to grandma again. 

His real education began when papa took him to St. Xavier High School
Jaipur and said, " Son, tell your name to father Wilzbacher." In his 
confusion he forgot how to say his name in English. 

In kindergarten he won't show others what he brought for lunch. He
mumbled his daily prayers without understanding a word of what he said. 
'Hallowed be thy name' was 'Hello pe kei name'. 'May I be excused' was 
'May I go excuse' because he thought excuse was pee. He tried to figure 
out for himself what a lot of English words meant but was too afraid to 
ask the lady-teacher. One day she caught him mumbling ' May I go 
excuse' and asked him to repeat the words clearly and slowly. It was so 
embarrassing. Excuse is not pee - was his first acquaintance with 
higher English. 

One day he told a boy that he was only four when he was in fact nine,
and ran away in shame when the latter shouted, " Come boys! Look, Fatty 
is saying he is only four years old." 

In the first standard, to which he was double-promoted, he wrote "Simon"
behind the door, and sat innocently as miss Francis took Simon to task 
and humiliated him before the whole class. The poor boy protested all 
the while but miss Francis did not beleive him and forced him to wipe 
the door clean. Fatty meant no ill to Simon but he was too clever to 
write his own name and too cowardly to admit later what he had done. 

In the third standard to which he was again double-promoted, boys would
gather around him to watch him eating chalks and Father Extross 
nick-named him " the chalk-eater". 

For the first time in his life he rebelled against injustice and later
regretted it. In the boarding school, two boys and only two boys got 
milk during lunch. " Why not he?" he asked himself. It was unfair. 
Every evening before going to bed he would make a firm resolve to 
himself, " Tomorrow I will ask for milk." And every afternoon the next 
day he would chicken-out in panic. But after fifteen days of inner 
struggle he finally made it. " I want milk", he told the bearer and 
expected the latter to pour some into his glass instantly. The bearer 
did nothing of the sort. Instead he went to Father Willmes and Father 
Willmes came to him and whispered something in English which he did not 
understand. Then Father Willmes whispered something to the bearer, and 
after ten minutes a glass of milk finally appeared. But those ten 
minutes seemed like an eternity of embarrassment because every boy on 
the table was staring at him all the time. Without knowing it then, he 
felt like Oliver Twist asking for more. He never asked for milk again. 
Gradually he learned that the two boys got milk for medical reasons. 

Despite Freud, India believes in the innocence of childhood. But the
childhood he knew wasn't that innocent after all. The third standard 
was buzzing with sinister rumours. Boys of ten whispered in subdued 
voices that something was going on between a Jesuit Father and a 
married lady-teacher. They were often single-by-double was the exact 
term used. What it meant was that the Father often had sex with the 
lady-teacher. Once a class-mate hissed to him between pressed teeth and 
muffled giggles that somebody had just told him that somebody from 
fourth standard, he did not know who, had actually seen these two 
teachers coming out together from an empty room. In plane words, 
somebody had actually seen them immediately after a sexual intercourse. 
He never invented such wild stories himself, but enjoyed hearing them. 
For months he kept a watchful eye on the infamous couple, hoping to 
catch them red-handed someday, but he never saw them going into or 
coming out of empty rooms. 

He was again double-promoted to the fifth standard, but papa wanted him
to proceed more slowly by going through the fourth. And there she was, 
the new class-teacher, the pretty woman with an ugly reputation in the 
underworld of childhood fantacy. 

So for long hours in class his eyes wandered from the blackboard to her
sensual pretty face and drank the distant, unreachable charm of her 
inviting lips and heaving breasts. Then the eyeballs rolled down her 
breastballs in great hurry to her legs and crawled up slowly into her 
skirt to catch a glimpse of her underwear. On the other side of the 
white linen was the abode of eternal happiness and romance that won't 
leave him in peace even at home. Lost inside the darkness beneath her 
skirt he metamorphosed into a grown-up man rivaling her age if not her 
beauty. Then the two lovers, he now a handsome Jesuit priest and she as 
always the fountain of life , were alone under a lonely tree or the 
shade of a burning rock, deep in the deserts of Rajasthan, unseen, 
undisturbed, and unmolested except by eternity, looking into each 
others presence, and hoping against hope that eternity would stop 
metamorphosing itself into time. The next moment they were united 
together, lips against lips, breasts against breasts, and thighs 
against thighs and not even time, their eternal foe, could tear them 
apart. Then with her moist lips she would spray into the shifting sands 
of time the H of their first Happiness and beside her bold, dreamy H 
fluttered a clumsy, timid L of his first Love. Once and for all 
Eternity was imprinted with his Existence and his Dreams. 

The toddling lover did not yet know that love and sex are the enemies
par excellence of the deepest philosophical assumptions of Indian 
society, nor did the following thought experiment occur to him: 
Consider a society based on the cast-system in which suddenly men and 
women are permitted to intermingle, understand and love each other. 
Love and understanding know no caste-barriers, and within a few 
generations there would be no caste left. But in India caste has 
survived generations after generations, from which it follows that 
under- standing, love, and sex have been destroyed generations after 
generations. QED. This is the origin of the arranged-marriages 
tradition of India. 

Besides love and sex, he experimented with alcohol, though this time the
experiment was a real one rather than a dream-experiment. As an army 
officer, papa always kept a few bottles of rum and whiskey at home. 
When nobody was around he would rush and grab a bottle and pour some 
whiskey on his folded palm and gulp it down in a hurry before he was 
caught. He tried it a couple of times till time overtook him and 
changed him into a more philosophical and saintly person. Thank God, 
two things never happened - he was never caught and he never broke a 
bottle. 

If something fascinated him, though the child did not yet know that it
could be called a fascination, it was the two dogs, one Alsatian and 
the other a Dachshund, and a dozen white pigeons he was allowed to 
keep. And he hoped that some day those dozen pigeons would become two 
dozen, three dozen because they were his best friends and he was never 
tired of watching them as they flew overhead for hours. But somehow 
their number never rose beyond thirteen. 

" Do your home-work and don't sit there watching pigeons the whole day.
I will give them away and you will never see them again unless you do 
your home-work first, you lazy brat." Mamma's angry screams always hung 
like a sword over the head and spoiled some of the beauty of that 
otherwise perfect paradise of innocent happiness where there was no 
boredom. Boredom was not yet his terror as it was to become later when 
he had to plunge into a new universe of books to escape this deadly 
enemy. 

Then came the latency period, not only in the narrow sense of
psycho-analysis, but also in a wider sense when the soul literally 
enters the dark caves for a long winter-sleep, and nothing leaves an 
everlasting impression on the slumbering mind, unless the still 
lingering memory of a bored boy, lying alone in bed in the hot summer 
afternoons, searching the dictionary for sexy words, or arranging 
secret marriages between himself and Bollywood actresses or 
lady-teachers, could be called everlasting impressions. 

And then suddenly it exploded - almost overnight, it seemed. The mind
woke up from the long slumber of puberty and adolescence, from the 
nothingness, meaninglessness, and hollowness of past existence, and 
burst into a frenzied spring-time activity which struck ruthlessly at 
the very foundations of his Being and ushered the first philosophical 
crisis of his life. A headlong fall from papa's cavalry horse at the 
age of sixteen which left him unconscious for a night, the first 
seperation from parents and home to join the boarding- school when papa 
was transferred to South India just a few months after the fall, or the 
first unjust failure in exam two years later, may each have contributed 
to the change. But he felt only the change - sudden, clear, manifest - 
not the obscure, underlying causes of the change. If goaded into 
defining his existence, he might have cried out, " I feel, therefore I 
am!" had he heard of Descartes. But he had not. The universe, both 
internal and external, was suddenly surcharged with a new meaning, a 
fresh summer-like intensity, holding a surprise round every corner, and 
he plunged into this new terra incognita headlong like an explorer bent 
on conquering new territories. 

The external world did not prove to be very stimulating, however, and
his curiousity for it cooled down very quickly. For example, when he 
tried to visit a new radio-station about two kilometers from home, and 
a textile factory in the city, he was insulted and denied entrance. In 
those days of Indo- Pakistan tension, people thought he was a Pakistani 
spy. After asking some very technical questions about machines, the 
textile factory manager told him angrily how he could ever think of 
visiting a factory without knowing the ABC of it. Stunned by these 
unexpected insults and humiliations, he suspended his explorations of 
this side of terra incognita. 

Then he wanted to gaze at the heavens, but could find nothing better
than an old binocular to serve as his telescope. Even the moon did not 
look big enough to excite him further. For months he tried to find out 
if there was a telescope somewhere in Jaipur, but nobody could tell. So 
his interests shifted from astronomy to chemistry and he got very 
excited about opening his own private laboratory at home. So he 
searched for a chemistry-box all over town. But none of the 
shop-keepers he asked had even heard of the name. 

The first attempt to explore the mysteries of the mountains was equally
futile. Explorers don't visit hill-stations. They are for tourists. So 
on his first trip to the Himalayas he landed in Chakrata Hills near 
Dehradun. And was arrested immediately. Chakrata Hills is a military 
area. And he looked like a perfect spy - alone, bearded, wearing a grey 
army overcoat, roaming in places where tourists don't venture. The 
police first searched his body and luggage, and then took him to the 
army HQ for interrogation. It took a lot of effort to convince the army 
captain that he was just a harmless lover of mountains, not a spy. The 
captain let him go provided he took the next bus back to Dehradun. 
There he could roam as much as he wanted and nobody would bother him. 
But the well-meaning idiot never seemed to learn. Later, once again he 
ventured into another forbidden territory in Kashmir. Again he was told 
to turn back immediately unless he wanted to be beaten into confessing 
the alledged espionage. It looked as if both times he was lucky enough 
to meet interrogators who were decent enough and intelligent enough to 
distinguish an innocent man from a spy. With more impatient 
interrogators things could have been much different. 

But there was something which nobody could deny him, he thought, though
later he was to learn the hard way, both in India and Germany, that it 
too can be denied: Man's birth-right to read books from the library. 

Guided only by the tiny black marks upon paper, he took the first long
journey into the unknown, and went to the far-away, snowclad Antartica 
where a tiny, innocent piece of his credulous soul froze to death and 
was forever buried under the snow with Scott, while the rest escaped to 
the stars and distant galaxies to witness, through the same strange 
books that lay before him, the birth and death of the universe itself. 
For the first time in life he came across names like Einstein, Leonardo 
da Vinci, Michaelangelo and they became his best living friends. 

What sort of life should he choose for himself? Writer? Never! Great
writers always wrote in their mother-tongue, while his tongue was tied 
to a foreign language and so would never be utterly free. He did not 
want to write in English and he could not write in Hindi because 
English was his de facto mother-tongue, a step-mother whom he could 
never love like a mother. 

A philosopher? Yes! This is what he thought he really was. Once, when he
was hardly seventeen or eighteen, he said to himself, " I would write a 
book on human nature, because nobody has ever written such a great 
book." And he was embarrassed and disappointed when he came across 
Hume's " A Treatise On Human Nature " just a few weeks later. Thank 
God, he hadn't told anybody about his plans and so there was no loss of 
face. 

And when he read Hume he beleived in Hume, and when he read Bishop
Bradley he beleived in Bishop Bradley, and when he read Kant he 
beleived in neither. And long after he left the study-room, he wondered 
if the chair upon which he sat was a chair only as long as he sat upon 
it, and is a chair no more now that he was out and playing hide and 
seek with Usha and Ravindra. At least Bishop Bradley thought so. 

Then he received a healthy dose of realism from Russel, and having
convinced himself that Truth is to be found in mathematics and physics, 
he left the chair in peace, believing that it exists all right and will 
not disappear in thin air when nobody was looking at it. 

Scientist then? Is philosophy and science the same? Or had he to choose
between the two? The final push over the barrier of doubt and 
hesitation was given by Father Pinto, his class-teacher in the final 
two years at high school. Father Pinto taught mathematics, was a 
philosopher, and had a beard. He took all three verbatim. The future 
course of his mentality, if not his life, was determined once and for 
all. 

What Father Pinto would have said to this he never knew. In India,
elders and teachers are Gods before whom one must silently bow one's 
head in reverence, and not friends before whom one may also bare one's 
heart. Russel was a better friend of his than anybody around him. So 
mathematics became his new meta- physics, and only after ten years, 
when he had examined every nook and corner of mathematics in search of 
a hidden metaphysics, did he learn that mathematics is not metaphysics 
after all. Russel had already said long back that metaphysics is 
nonsense. But it takes very long to reach one's own conclusions. 

Out of these self-studies in philosophy, mathematics, and physics grew a
new bond of friendship and understanding between him and Bimla. He was 
in high school and she was in college. His school library was for kids 
and her college library was for thinkers. And now he looked upon 
himself as a "thinker". So the burden of keeping the younger brother 
well-supplied with advanced books fell upon the elder sister. But there 
was a problem. Bimla studied history and so could not borrow books on 
philosophy and mathematics. After a lot of looking around she found a 
philosophy student who was willing to help. But often she came 
empty-handed because something or other always went wrong. 

Once he waited for days for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. And then he
saw Bimla coming with a smile on her face and a thick book under her 
arm. But as he took the book from her his own joy vanished instantly. 
It was volume two. He knew what trouble she was going through for him. 
So he said nothing. It was not her fault. She had not heard of Kant. 
Nobody could understand why a history student was interested in 
philosophy books. And so she was glad to get anything without knowing 
what it was. Ironically, the budding "thinker" never got into the mood 
to try to read The Critique again. Whether he would have understood it 
or not is totally another matter. 

Then somewhere in the white, polar deserts, or the golden glow of
exploding galaxies, or the thick, dusty systems of tottering 
philosophies, God laid down his head and died. If he could have, he 
would have gone to the most distant and desolate corner of earth or 
heaven to lay a tablet of memory there: Somewhere here I lost my best, 
last, and only friend, God. For months he walked in stunned delirium, 
mourning the death of a beloved one and asking again and again: What 
now? What next? 

As to so many of his age on the other side of the globe, God was not to
him a commodity to be gladly bartered for a Ford car, a Suzuki 
motor-cycle, a pretty girl-friend, or even to be tucked away in memory 
as the relic of a bygone superstition. Like so many of his kind on this 
side of the globe who must cling to something in order to live, God was 
his belief, his hope, his life and existence. And when God died, the 
solid rock of youthful paradise was washed away by the stormy waters of 
doubt and lonliness. He could speak to no one about the loss. So he 
spoke to no one at all. Who could have understood him? Mom? She was an 
illiterate woman with a serene face. She could have asked," What is 
this science which has taken God away from my dear son?". But she could 
not answer anything he wanted to ask so badly. Dad? He was a soldier, 
not a philosopher or scientist. His only answer could have been more 
questions," Who are Russel and Einstein? Why are you interested in 
them? And what they have to do with God anyway?" What answer did he 
have to these counter questions? During the quiet evening walks the sad 
and puzzled faces of mom and dad looking at him curiously would haunt 
him. And he decided to leave them out of all this. 

A man is born alone, he dies alone, and in life he suffers alone, so say
the wise men of India. And gradually he was learning how right they 
were. He plunged more deeply into science and philosophy because they 
had taken away his Friend and they and they alone could offer something 
in return. 

At times he took the path of asceticism and self-mortification with
fasting, getting up hungry from meals, and even torturing the body with 
needles. He wanted to see light, a vision which would take away the 
pain and expel all doubts, but even the angels kept away. He saw 
nothing except his own mind in turmoil. 

In this state the years at school slowly drew to a close and he moved
from Jaipur to Delhi to study mathematics at the university. 

End of Chapter 1 

Copyright @ Rattan Mann Oslo, Norway 


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