Excerpts from Prologue to Sita’s Kitchen

1

I virtually grew up in a newspaper office where my father worked as editor, and which was as much home to me and my siblings as the flat above the office where we lived.

I am a middle aged man now, but a quite recent dream of mine situated itself in what looked and felt and smelt like one of the big rotary machine halls of the old Hindustan Times building in Con-naught Place in New Delhi; childhood’s cocooning nursery.

Alone, I found myself deposited in a corner of this enclosure dominated by giant printing machines; born to them, as it were, with a sense of being covered with the placenta of machine grease. It felt like war time, news-wise. This does not surprise me, because the years 1939 -1945 and their newspaper after-life were years of impressionable childhood which presented themselves to me – or seem in recollection to have done so – as a collage of newspaper pictures of soldiers and tanks and airplanes, Hitler and Churchill and Sub hash Chandra Bose; quite overshadowing, as far as I was concerned, the final phase of India’s struggle for independence, a confession embarrassing to the adult Indian patriot in me but true to memory.

The room of the dream had one long open window which seemed inexplicably narrow, but the sky outside it was dearly visible, and so were a cluster of military airplanes which soon filled a high and distant portion of it. And those planes dropped bombs which looked in my dream, as they do in movies, like great Brancusi birds descending successively, legs folded. But unlike in the movies, the bombs then flocked together and proceeded to move horizontally, and frighteningly, towards the open window of my sanctuary. Entering the room through the window, with quiet absurdity, they hit nothing, and dissolved into nothingness.

A second set of airplanes appeared in the sky and dropped bombs which, as before, straightened up after falling a certain distance and moved laterally towards the window. I noticed what hadn’t the first time round, namely, that the bombs were’ wrapped in newspapers. Sailing through the window as before with implausible ease, they moved towards me but dissolved harmlessly again into invisibility without making any impact; it seemed as though they had been attracted and absorbed by the big machines into their inky substance.

The planes came around a third time and dropped their brood of newspaper-wrapped bombs which journeyed as before towards and through the window, towards me. Somehow I knew that this time it was going to be a hit and not a miss. Hit it was, the singular moment immediately preceding it liberated from anxiety by the certitude of catastrophe. I waited for an explosion, a shattering of things, the ending of life, pain and annihilation. But everything now dissolved into light not darkness. I felt merged in a blissful silence, emptiness, full of reality, without pain and without a sense of anything having come to an end; except fear. I thought, I felt certain, that I had died; but I also saw this was peace not agony or loss.

Then from the depth of that peace and light and silence rose three words in a feminine voice: “I love you.” Words of frequent hypocrisy and deluding inaccuracy in waking life; but they rang deep and true in my dream. I woke up and have pondered the meaning of this dream for a long time now. I find revealed in it both contemporary and timeless truth, personal and universal meaning, at various levels of symbolism and suggestiveness, clarity and obscurity.

I am not unaware that the dream is littered with items of psychoanalytic significance, that much biographical embarrassment and enlightenment can be painfully and even liberatingly excavated from its suggestive imagery of closure and intrusion, submission and approbation, imprinting and identity; and so on. But I do not seek the liberation of adulthood from childhood and will not here follow the dream’s lead in this direction.

I find vastly more exciting the themes of moral responsibility and spiritual literacy, causality and communication, anxiety and advaita, which the dream introduces and illumines; and not only for philosophical but also for personal reasons. For these themes remind me of my indebtedness to parents, teachers, and to Gods, the latter perfectly represented by Sri Ramana Maharisi, advaita’s unique avatara in our age, whom I never met in the flesh; but without whose grace I could not have comprehended the nondualist significance of the Buddhist story which this book seeks to unravel as an integral vision of Indian spirituality of urgent relevance to the fate of life on earth.

The following readings of my “newspaper-wrapped bombs” dream are thus a dedication of this book of bhakti and vicara, devotion and inquiry, to ancestors, preceptors, and Gods, in discharge of our limitless debt! To whom alone can life be self-realizingly lived: and an introduction to the idea and reality of “Sita’s Kitchen,” as it turns out.

2

Although my father was himself an assiduous practitioner and custodian of fair journalism, he would have had no hesitation in admitting that untruthfulness and partisanship in journalism have greatly harmed the cause of freedom and justice and peace in our times: that bombs of hate have often been propelled by the machinery of newspapers, “wrapped” by them in respectability. Indeed all modes of public discourse and communication have sheltered falsehood and prejudice in our age.

Severely damaged credibility is the karmic consequence invited by all orders of speaking for this sin against truth and impartiality. The encoding of this warning in the dream’s retributive rhythm bears the strong imprint of my father’s, and his father’s, moral sternness; even as its reassuring consummation embodies their faith that contrite confession of guilt can only liberate the soul from the thralldom of ignorance and not harm or destroy it. May peace be upon their souls.

3

The stroke which eventually killed my mother had deprived her of the motor ability to write. I remember the day when a bank official came with an important document for her to sign. Tears rolled out of my mother’s eyes as she let her thumb impression be taken in place of a signature. She suffered not only because, though a writer, she could not write. Her disability broke her heart; I am convinced, because it prevented her from inscribing Goddess Lakshmi’s name when occasion demanded this, for Lakshmi was her name too. Close to death, she – a Brahman, a woman of wide social sympathy who belonged to an ancient South Indian tradition of Vaisnava  bhakti – would not have wanted to appear to be denying, even under duress, that all creation bore the imprint of Lakshmi ; who, as Mahalakshmi, is no mere consort of Vishnu, but herself ultimate reality, Godhead, Divine Creatrix.

Nothing is unreadable in the light of Mahalakshmi, who is also Sita. Even violence is not an illegible, unredeemable, irrationality at the heart of the nature of things; it too bears witness to Sita’s maternal indulgence of creaturely folly and notoriously longs in embarrassment to destroy itself, a very long time though it often takes to do so.

It was my mother who taught me to read and write, and who tried less successfully to teach me to be patient and discriminating in the practice of living. I take the newspaper-wrapping of the bombs of my dream to be her characteristic reassurance that properly understood, read, unmasked; hostility can be defused without hostility: a lesson in practical, but not fundamentalist, nonviolence, for which I offer thanks to her spirit.

At a deeper level, this lesson is an intimation of non-duality: of the truth that apparent others are not other than self, only another image of self. During the last few hours of my mother’s life, as she slipped steadily into the coma of death, I had ceaselessly chanted the names of Sri Rama and Sri Ramayana. No doubt by their grace, Amma attained the form and formlessness of Mahalakshmi, self and source of all.

4

Apparent otherness is undoubtedly a disguise of self, but what a powerful disguise it is! Let us make no mistake about this, let us not sentimentally deny the terrifying face of world-appearance.

The patch of sky visible from the window of my dream citadel can be seen as representing nothingness, that which devours all generations of all life, that into which all existence eventually vanishes: an undefeatable adversary. Equally adversarially, the airplanes which manifest in the sky and the bombs they drop can be seen as imaging invincible inorganicity: the causal furies and missues of materiality in the midst of which life coweringly survives, and only briefly.

No less disturbingly, the missiles can represent the pervasiveness and penetrativeness of microbiological malevolence against which nothing that lives is immune, a symbolism which more generally draws attention to the unavoidable violence against life which sustains the life process itself. There can be no doubt that this embarrassing fact of life offers at a subconscious level a rationalizing encouragement to the wholly avoidable violence we practice against one another and against nature; and at a deeper level still it probably erodes the will to live and help live.

The bombs as bombs in their cycle of return in the dream can be seen by the despairing imagination as representing the apparently unmitigatably destructive and self-destructive power of dualism in human life: but not as a newspaper delivery-system. The dream comically invites an alternative saving non-dualist reading of intolerable appearance.

5

The slice of sky visible through the window of the machine room can be seen as representing the self-restraint of circumambient emptiness which does not overwhelm all existence, miraculously improbably; and which can be “read” as a newspaper whose blankness allows itself to be covered with meaningful marks which image emptiness’ own meaning as a nothingness, i.e. as self, indubitable reality which is not a thing among other things and in competition with them; but which all things image, well or badly.

In its intelligibility and in the interconnectedness of its particularities, materiality is a magnificent image of the luminosity and autonomy of self. As is non-human life in its massive demonstration of vitality and ecological restraint a pointed representation of the unfetteredness and sufficiency of self. Punningly and unsentimentally, one could say that nature is not “red” but “well-read” in tooth and claw, “well-informed” by the wisdom which spurns violence beyond the necessities of survival. In the animate world this wisdom is disowned by the human species alone, especially if not exclusively by its non-aboriginal societies.

Whether regarded as representing materiality or non-human life, the bombs in their newspaper-borne flight back to the source of newspapers, printing machines, dramatize instructively the faithfulness of self’s self-imaging in these arenas of manifestation. For faithful self-images alone can return with the sure instinct of homing pigeons to the source of self-imaging sakti, self, nobly represented by the rotary machines.

Menacing as the bombs are in their power of multiplication and mobility, their self-sameness in plurality is a striking encapsulation of advaita; as is the unobstructedness of their flight in its evocation of the idea that singular self can only encounter the appearance, never the reality, of not-self. No density of self-obscuration can entirely shut out the light of self-consciousness; but it is sin enough to try to do so.

We can do without those bombs.

6

In their newspaper-clothed incarnation, however, the bombs represent to me nothing less than the grace of Sad guru Sri: Ramana; because, unenduringly yet undoubtedly, they blessed me with an experience of the death of ego, the dissolution of the idea that I was only a given body, mind, personality, biography, etc; and, as promised by Ramana, without the slightest sense of any loss of the reality and luminosity of self-consciousness. The experience didn’t survive the dream, but its promise does.

7

The child form of the dreamer enclosed (but with a skylight qualification) in the machine room steeped in the symbolism of pro-creativity is a rudely biological representation of selfhood, a vivid picture of “dehatmabuddhi,” of the presumption that one is but a given body, mind, etc.: ego in short. One would .expect the death of ego in this setting to provoke loud parental lamentation, for what is born and dies is ego: self is unborn, undying. What is heard, instead, is a reaffirmation of love in a feminine voice. Whose voice is this? And for whom is love reaffirmed?

She who speaks is my mother as self, imaged by all forms and not only by the beloved form dissolved by death eight years ago. Love is affirmed for a form which permits a nightmare to run its course and resolve into self-knowledge; for a child willing to suffer the shock of initiation into the limitlessness of home.

“We were afraid you might not come back home” is what my mother had said when I asked her, some years before she died, why I hadn’t been sent to Sri Ramana’s hermitage for a “darsana” of the sage, considering I was all of thirteen years of age when he left the body. Hindu women fear that their young sons might renounce the world under the influence of holy men, and guard them against this possibility. My mother need not have worried. The world is still very much with me, a poor householder though I have been. Sri Ramana in any case asks us not to renounce the world, but to see it as ourselves.

The movements of my newspaper office dream reconcile the claims of reproduction and renunciation, form and formlessness; and I accept the cinematic experience as a gift of initiatory surreality from both mother and sage and offer salutations to both; indistinguishably.