The Cauliflower Read Free

have been born to be a benefactor to you, by sometimes giving you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities. Why should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs, when it leads to such pleasant consequences?”
    Monday, 30th June 1884, at 4:00 p.m.
    Sri Ramakrishna ( with a melodramatic sigh ): “I used to weep , praying to the Divine Mother, ‘Oh Mother, destroy with Thy thunderbolt my inclination to reason!’”
    Truth Seeker ( patently surprised ): “Then you, too, had an inclination to reason?”
    Sri Ramakrishna ( nodding, regretful ): “Yes, once.”
    Truth Seeker ( eagerly ): “Then please assure us that we shall get rid of that inclination, too! How did you get rid of yours?”
    Sri Ramakrishna ( with an apparent loss of interest ): “Oh … [ flaps hand, wearily ] somehow or other.”
    Silence .
    1862, approximately
    This is the story of an unlettered sage who spoke only in a rudimentary and colloquial Bengali—described by some commentators as a kind of abstruse haiku. A curiously effete village boy who stammered. Who didn’t understand a word of English. Who went to school but wouldn’t—yes, wouldn’t—read. At a time when the world was ripe with a glossy new secularism—bursting at the seams with revolutionary ideas about Science and Knowledge and Art and Progress—this singular individual would tie his wearing cloth around his hips with an expanse of fabric hanging down at the back to simulate a tail (and him a respectable Brahmin —a temple priest), then leap—with beguiling agility—from tree branch to tree branch, pretending to be an ape. No, worse. Worse even than that. Believing himself to be an ape.
    Eventually he would be called God. Avatar . Paramahamsa . He would be called The Great Swan.
    This squealing, furtive, hyperactive, freely urinating beast is none other than Sri Ramakrishna.
    Although some people call him Gadadhar Chatterjee. Or Uncle. Or Master. Or Guru (which he loathes). And his real name, his actual name—the name you will rarely ever hear—is Shambhu Chandra.
    1857, the Kali Temple, Dakshineswar (six miles north of Calcutta)
    This is our story, because Uncle belongs to us. And it is colorful. And sometimes I don’t quite understand where the joyous kirtan s and ecstatic love poems of Ramprasad and Chaitanya—or the heroic stories of the Mahabharata and the Purana s—begin and the tales and mysteries of Uncle’s life end. Everything is woven together in my mind—by the tongue of Uncle himself—and it cannot be unpicked, because I, too, am a part of it all, and if I try to dismantle it, thread by thread, I will lose myself, and I will lose Uncle, and although Uncle depends on me for everything, my hold on Uncle has never been a strong one. Uncle has an independent spirit. Uncle is single-minded but he is also simple and humble as a child.
    Which of us may truly hope to understand Uncle? Ah, not one such as I.
    We are a poor family. There has been much loss and hunger and tragedy. And sometimes we call on the gods for aid, and sometimes it feels as though the gods are calling on us in their turn. They are very close. They are breathing down our necks. They are speaking through us and they are writing our history. They prompt us from behind a dark curtain. Of course, some of us hear them more clearly than others. They whisper mysteries into Uncle’s ear. From behind a dark curtain, or … or hidden under a cloth in the manner of a photographer. Precisely so. A photographer takes your picture, but the portrait he makes belongs to you. It is your own. It is yours. A perfect likeness. Simply in a more formal setting—the studio. And holding very still. And carefully posed. That is Uncle’s past. It needs to be stage-managed and well lit. I am Uncle’s technician. Although Uncle will not be managed and he will not be