Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

'Me?'

'Yes, you.'

I was too dazed and exhausted – somehow this conversation had tired me out – to tell him that I believed in no faith, no spirituality. I hung up, and tried to work, and was plagued that entire day by this conundrum, me as holy man, myself as mahatma. I dreamt that night of the great akharas of naga sadhus who came to Nashik during the Kumbh Mela, about their naked bodies covered with ash, their matted brown jatas curling to their shoulders and below, their tridents and swords. I dreamt of the great roar that went up when the regiments of naga sadhus swept towards the holy waters for their bath, and the ferocious gleam on the sadhus' eyes as they ran. I saw a small man, a peaceful man, amongst these great and good sadhus, and I felt bitter contempt for him, and I woke up with my heart rushing. I turned my mind away from Nashik, but all night I was pursued by this question: what does it mean to be holy? Who is virtuous?

The next time Guru-ji called, we talked about God. I told him that I had no belief in such a thing, and no need for such a belief. I said that religion was a tool with which politicians whipped their constituents and drove them in herds towards the slaughterhouse. I said faith was for men who had no faith in themselves. He did not argue with me. He listened quietly, and said, 'Those are reasonable arguments. You are correct in your logic.'

He stopped me short with that. I had expected him to dispute and quarrel and hector, maybe to curse me for a fallen man. But he did none of those things. He listened to me quietly and gave me respect. Then he said, 'But, Ganesh, what about all the symmetries in the world?'

I had no idea what he was talking about, but then he explained. He showed me how for every fire there is water, for every predator there is prey, for every love there is a hate. He talked about electrons and their charges, and strange attractions and repulsions. There were parts of what he was saying that came to me only as a sonorous hymn, but I understood instantly, profoundly, what he was talking about. Yes, for every Ganesh Gaitonde there is a Suleiman Isa. For every victory there is a loss. 'Yes,' I said to him, 'I understand. Everything comes in twos, or repetitions of two and more. Everything clashes, and swings apart, and loops and comes around again.'

'Of course, of course, Ganesh,' he said, his pleasure booming through his voice, 'see, you already have it. I didn't even have to explain it. You already know. You already are on the path.'

'On the path to this God of yours? No, I don't think so.'

'You must not think that I am arguing for Vishnu, or any other creator, Ganesh. You know I am not that simple. Listen to me: through these symmetries, lift yourself even higher. Can you see the patterns of the world, of the universe? The waves below you, under the boat, they may seem chaotic, but are they? No, only in a minor sense. There is an order that we sometimes glimpse, sometimes lose. But the order is there. Beyond the local and the immediate, there is this grand order. Ganesh, go ashore and look at a field of grass. See how the sun feeds the grass, and the earth sustains it. Observe how the grass shelters other creatures, and feeds them in turn. Do you see how everything fits together. Finally, after everything, Ganesh, do you see the beauty?'

I tell you, my head was bursting then. I had my fingers on the skipping edges of his meaning, but it vanished from me with every breath. He knew this. He told me not to worry, but just to watch everything for the next week. 'Deal with everything as normal. But also, simultaneously, try to see beyond that. And next week, tell me what you saw, just randomness, or a shape. Chaos, or order.'

Five minutes after I got off the phone I was laughing at myself. I thought, you weakling, listening to the babblings of an old man. But he had planted something in me. I didn't want to, but I found myself looking for connections and mirrorings. And I found them. I thought about the ways in which men and women needed each other, and how the human race rolled on, despite all the quarrels and the heartbreaks. This was obvious enough, banal if you stepped away from it for a minute. But that led me to conception and birth, the minuscule pin-headed worm thrashing its way up towards the enormity of the egg, and the mixing of their smuggled pieces of instruction, all to form a new creature that would one day be whole, and producing emissaries himself. Commonplace, and yet so complicated and amazing. I felt foolish at the wonder that swamped my head, at being able to see these mundane surfaces that hid whole universes of complication. But I kept quiet and kept on looking, as he had told me to do. Towards the end of the week, my mind turned from things to sequences. I had watched programmes on television about the dinosaurs and their extinction, the rise of mammals (while the boys groaned and begged for another television set, so they could go back to their prancing heroines), I had watched long-ago hairy apes make their first kills on the African plains. That was the arc of life on the planet, all the way to humans, and to me. This curve had direction and velocity, it swept upwards and it was still going, towards the moon and then to the stars. But there was my life. Did it have shape? Was there beauty in its progress, if you only distanced yourself enough to see? I thought about this, and worried about it. Could it really be that I was randomly tossed about by the surging waves of events? That one day came next to each other just because it had to, because of nothing. I couldn't accept this. This buzzing blur of chaos caused me pain, I mean a stomach twisting and flexing, a headache, and again my piles caught at me and left me dizzy and shaking in the bathroom. My body was protesting against this assertion that my life meant nothing. No, my life had shape. I had started poor and alone, I had struggled, I had won, I had moved upward, I had found a home and many who loved me. And even now I was learning, I was progressing, I had a mission for my country, I had a teacher, I was going somewhere. I had a story.

This is what I told Guru-ji the next time we spoke, and he praised me. 'Your instinct is unerring, Ganesh. The atman knows the nature of the universe, it understands its intricate connections, from the smallest to the largest. The atman knows because it is the universe. But the mind interferes. This incomplete structure we call scientific logic blocks our view and, paradoxically, keeps us ignorant. Otherwise, how could you see this enormous network of connections, and not believe that there is an author?'

'You mean God, Guru-ji?'

'I mean consciousness.'

That was where we had started, and he had helped me on my journey to knowledge. No, he had picked me up and carried me up the mountain of wisdom. He bore my weight with ease, and as we ascended he showed me these unborn truths, these eternal facts. He pointed out to me the cycles of history, and beyond those, the rhythms of evolution, of stars being born and sliding towards their inevitable dissolution, of the universe expanding and then racing to a point to explode again.

And then, months after we first started talking, he revealed the power that these insights had brought him. He told me my future. I had read testimonials on his website from hundreds of people, that he could do this, and that he had done this for them. I had read through some of these pages, marvelling at the desperate need that humans have for reassurance and comfort. The testimonials were quite detailed, giving names and circumstances: here was a doctor from Siliguri whose daughter suffered from leucoderma and remained unmarried, and Guru-ji told him not to worry, that in the last three months of that year a solution to his problem would be found, and sure enough, in that very winter a German engineer came to work on an agricultural project, and was struck by the grace and white beauty of the girl, and he took her away to happiness in Düsseldorf. There was screen after screenful of this, and not only happiness had been predicted, Guru-ji was frank about bad times, about accidents involving water and divorces and business reversals. I decided that this was all nothing but the obsessions of small people who did not have the resources, internal or material, to fight with life and win. But then Guru-ji told me one evening, 'Watch out for the Thais.'