Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“There is a period in the Hindu calendar called the ‘sharadh’. This is a period when all the souls of your ancestors are supposed to come down to the earthly plane. And you’re supposed to win their blessings. Somebody who has the ancestors on his side is supposed to have amazing good fortune. And when you don’t have their blessings, when you have annoyed them, the opposite happens. Everything you try to do there’ll be an obstacle. So I believe the reason I’ve faced so many blockages since my father and grandfather died because I’ve had what in spiritual terms is called the curse of the ancestors, or ‘pitra dosh’.

“The philosophy is like this. After they have died, the same father or grandfather who would have loved you in life, if their souls haven’t proceeded to the next plane, they will keep fingering you and bothering you, compelling you to do whatever is necessary for them to be released. In India we have two or three holy sites where you’re supposed to go to release your ancestors from whatever earthly plane they’re stuck at. Only a son can do this ceremony. That’s why Indians are so fucking crazy about having a son, because they believe they can’t get their salvation or move to the next level until their son actually cremates them and gets this ceremony done for them. So I did this ceremony finally this year to clear my pitra dosh, which is like twenty-two years after my grandfather and my father died, and I definitely do feel a tangible difference. And after that I went to my guru and he said, ‘Half your work is now done.’ And I can actually feel one of my channels is absolutely completely clear which is exceptional. I mean basically when you’re becoming a master all your three channels have to be absolutely clear — that means you have no pitra dosh, you have no ancestral problems, even your ancestors’ sins, which accrue to you, you’ve paid off. In Hinduism the ultimate son is supposed to be a guy who is so auspicious that he actually releases twenty-one generations of his ancestors from a certain plane and grants them salvation. That’s the ultimate son that can be born into a family.

“That bathroom-fittings guru has totally broken me down and rebuilt me, which was the only way I could have been saved. And now things are looking up. My lawsuit is near to completion, and the government has forgiven me the tax, which is an acknowledgement that the money is going to come back to me soon. But I’ve changed totally in the process. Some experiences I cannot even tell because people would think I’m insane. My ego has been broken down. I’m celibate. My rich friends come to me to find peace. They admire me, because part of them wants to be living the spiritual life like I am, dude. People with money are so attracted to me. Sometimes they have problems in their business lives — they make massive money off two deals and then nothing else happens — and I find a quote or a lesson that will unblock them.

“You see during the period of money-making in Delhi everyone lost their way, dude. My best friend’s become a coke addict who spends his time fucking hookers. He just sent me a picture of himself in the Ritz in Singapore with these two hookers. All my friends are going through crazy divorces. Money’s all they cared about and now they’re realising they don’t have anything else. So they come to me.”

I have asked Puneet to take me to see his guru this evening, and it is now time to leave. We get in the car and set out for Punjabi Bagh, one of the business enclaves of west Delhi, which is where the guru lives. Puneet is light-hearted on the road. He makes observations about the people in the cars around us. We pass two cops on a motorbike, a man in front and a woman behind.

“That woman cop is giving me the eye, man!” Puneet says. “She wants a piece of me.”

A white Bentley limousine powers past us, and we watch as it parts the traffic ahead. It crouches low on its massive tyres; the winged “B” on the back looks like a rapper’s medallion. Bentleys and Rolls-Royces used to sit upright like pillared country mansions, but those were the days when wealth aspired to the style of the English aristocracy. Now Bentleys and Rolls-Royces are made to look like vehicles for gangsters, because the aesthetic of twenty-first century money is different. The question of what ‘taste’ is, is no longer clear: from Los Angeles to Beijing, the rich assume a style of criminality.

We arrive at the ashram, which is packed with waiting people. We are informed that the guru is asleep. We decide to wait in the line, which snakes back and forth across the large basement, up the steps, and around the house outside. Volunteers hand out steel plates of rice and daal to the patient congregation. We wait.

“When he is sleeping,” says Puneet, “you’re not supposed to disturb him because he’s actually at a level of consciousness where he’s working on somebody’s problems.”

It’s hot where we are sitting, and this spiritual refuge attracts great numbers of mosquitoes. Puneet starts to get frustrated.

“God has been very kind to me,” he says. “My guru has been very kind to me. They’ve saved me from a lot of danger. Perhaps nothing good has happened in the last ten years of my life but I’ve been saved and brought out of a lot of danger. A lot! I mean you probably don’t even comprehend how much. I’m very grateful. But it’s been a long time without my money. It’s been a long time since I had good times.”

“What will you do when you get your money back,” I ask.

“I just want to get laid, man. Just leave all this behind. Spent too much time being a hermit. Do you think I don’t want the things other people want? I still like the idea of living in a luxurious house and driving a big car. I like nice women with nice asses. I like the concept of having a family and children and all that. I’ve put in ten years to cleaning up my spiritual account and my money still hasn’t come back to me. It’s tiring.”

I’m sure everyone with a monastic bent has thoughts like this, and I’m not entirely convinced that it is real. Has the last decade of his life been a “state of exception” — or is this perhaps just who he is? If his deepest impulse were to “get laid” would he not have devoted more of this decade to it? — he has not exactly been short of time. If he had wanted to, he could also have found other ways of earning money over these years, rather than opting out of Delhi’s boom. I wonder if he really wants his money back at all, or if the money is just one big alibi, if this money in the bank, which he mentions every five minutes, is not just an excuse for him to lead the kind of life he would like to live anyway. The story of his future liberation — when he has his money, and there will be women and parties and pleasure — may be just a fiction. An attempt on the part of a man who does not really like the world of money and struggle to appear ‘normal’ in this era of obsessive accumulation.

As if he can hear these thoughts, he says,

“But I don’t want physical things to ever smother my connection to God. I want both. So I’m a little confused right now. Because maybe God is just putting this money in my way as one more obstacle between me and him. If you’re gonna be so audacious to think that you want to be in God’s company all the time — that’s a very audacious thought. Out of the seven billion on earth only a few people have that ambition — that I want to be with God. Very few guys wake up in the morning and say that’s what I have to achieve today, right? So my guru says to me in that case, a person who’s thinking like that — in that case, which is your case, he says, God will do everything the fuck he can do in his power to discourage you. And test you. Because he doesn’t want sub-standard people in his company. So if I go the wrong way he’ll kick me the fuck out.”