ALL SAINTS’ DAYS

The arcana of childhood are such that between chasing butterflies, Vladimir Nabokov would ransack his “oldest dreams for clues and keys” and retrieve the moment in which a little French girl twittered on the beach — to understand his own metamorphosis. Creating scrapbooks of childhood involves a journey backward, in search of old embarrassments and new epiphanies, and finally holding the “foolscap of life” against the light, to find a watermark.

Kirin Narayan does it, standing on the wet edge of a 1970s Juhu beach, as her past washes up at her feet, like old cans, cowries and driftwood. These are the very things with which Narayan’s precociously spiritual elder brother Rahoul crafts his “Rahoul-beings”, pasting on it, as a final flourish, the enormous eyes that he buys from the God’s Eyes Shop at the Bhuleshwar temple bazaar of central Bombay. The eyes, with all their metaphorical significance, remain throughout the book as do gods, saints and Rahoul — until he goes blind and, watched by another “Rahoul being” in New Mexico, dies of “a mysterious illness spreading among gay men”, AIDS. But we are getting ahead of the story.

Maw is a sari-wearing, bindi-sporting, guru-loving American artist from New Mexico who even arranges a few sets for Merchant-Ivory’s The Guru; Paw is a bottle-loving, studied-in-US, landed Gujarati who mocks at the soul-searching, tie-dye-wearing, sick and homesick hippies camping at his home. As everyone from American draft dodgers to German stained-glass makers pitch their tents in the garden, Maw boasts her address is passed all along the hash trail. And then there is Rahoul who drops out of school and joins an ashram, triggering a trail of mystic associations for Narayan — from Swami Muktananda with his sunglasses and trademark orange knit cap; to the Sixteenth Karmapa who gives Maw self-multiplying pills; to the bhajan-singing ancestors, sadhus and goddesses conjured up by her grandmother’s tales. There are also cameos by Rajneesh, “the suave, English-speaking professor guru”, and Jiddu Krishnamurthy and even a half-line presence of Satya Sai Baba “who pulled Rolex watches from his Afro” along with “the ancient French mother with her scarf-wrapped forehead”.

... contd.