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

message to my own children: “Breathe the scent of your ancestors.” That moment lingers in my memory. Later a folded note was found in my father’s room, bidding a final farewell. We don’t know when he wrote it, or if he had a premonition that he would die. As much as he had enjoyed his life, the note said, he didn’t intend to come back again. My mind flashed to lines from the Persian mystic poet Rumi: “When I die I will soar with the angels. When I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine.”
    Yet that moment of fullness fled quickly. If a life is contained between its most ecstatic moments and its bleakest, then for me the two collided into each other. I became subdued and downcast.
    I wanted to talk to Sanjiv about this feeling of doom. I wanted to hear what he would say. But as the days passed, I held back. This wasn’t a topic that we felt sympathetic about when we shared our conflicting views. I was the medical maverick, he the establishment. Brothers can share genes, a family, and a culture that weaves theminto its complex fabric. That much was unspoken between us. Yet twins who are born with identical genes are not clones. At age seventy their genetic profile will be completely different. Genes switch on and off. They listen in on the world and eavesdrop on a person’s every thought, wish, fear, and dream. Twins diverge as much as the rest of us, although they may retain a subtler bond. Did Sanjiv and I have that? Daddy had abandoned us to our dream of life. Did he wake up from his or simply vanish?
    The scattering of the ashes done, my brother and I arrived back at Link Road after midnight. The pouch that held our father’s ashes was empty, left discarded in the backseat. On the way home neither of us had said what was in his heart. The extended family dispersed after four days. I passed Rita when she arrived, and as quickly as I had entered the province of death, I was back home under the California sun. But the province of death is portable, it seems. I became haunted by an overpowering sense of gloom: My father doesn’t exist anymore. There is nothing left. He is leading where one day I will have to follow.
    Spiritual awakening begins when you realize a simple fact that most people spend their lives avoiding: Death is stalking us at every moment. I cannot say that I felt it as vividly before Haridwar, but as a child I had literally been woken by a death.
    I was six at the time. My parents had gone to England so my father could complete his advanced training in cardiology. Sanjiv and I remained behind, living with our paternal grandfather and two uncles in Bombay. (Sanjiv and I lived with various members of our family as our parents studied or traveled for work, or when we left home to attend private school. Our aunts and uncles were considered our second parents. It has always been that way in India.)
    For an Indian to travel to London for medical studies was rare in those days. In this case, my father had been medical adviser to Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. In 1947 Mountbatten was ordered to liberate the country in a matter of months. Events moved swiftly and with barely a look behind; three centuries of colonialism unraveled.
    In the mad confusion that ensued, Mountbatten didn’t forget my father, and it was through him that the path of Krishan’s medical training was smoothed. This wasn’t enough to overcome ingrained prejudice, though. At the British army hospital in Pune, my father trailed behind the white doctors during grand rounds. He pored over his textbooks late into the night so that he would be prepared when the attending physician called on him to answer a question, but he was never called on. He was ignored, frozen out. He became a silent attendant to a procession of British superiors. One morning at a patient’s bedside, however, the other young doctors were stumped by a tricky diagnosis. The attending turned and repeated his question to my father,