Nicola Barker - The Cauliflower

A mere sprinkling of years before the mother of the beautiful Rani Rashmoni gave her birth (in 1793) we see saltriots playing a central role in the American Revolution; the gabelle , a much-loathed salttax, spurring on the French Revolution a few years later; and beyond that, flowing far off into the future, we see the fragile brown frame of Mahatma Gandhi (a passionate adherent of the philosophy of Sri Ramakrishna) dressed in his humble white dhoti and leading a hundred thousand protestors to the sea — a critical moment in the heroic march toward Indian independence — on his 240-mile SaltSatyagraha.

But the episode we are to briefly dwell upon here is not an especially glorious one. It is little more than a mere technicality, a brief doffing of the cap to Pritiram Das, no less, father of the Rani’s husband, Rajchandra, who started off his meteoric business career as a poor and humble clerk in a Calcutta salt-distributing agency.

The story of Sri Ramakrishna started with salt. Salt. Although it’s probably equally conceivable that it may have started with sugar, a granule to which Sri Ramakrishna was passionately attached (although he passionately eschewed all earthly attachments). Yes, it’s probably equally conceivable that his story may have started with sugar. But it didn’t actually start that way. Not this time. Not in this telling. Not here. Not with sugar. Not so far as we are aware. No. The story of Sri Ramakrishna started with salt.

Salt …

Or — if you feel the sudden urge to rotate it on your tongue in the form Ramakrishna himself would have used— lobon .

Just over the border in Bangladesh (which wouldn’t exist until 1971) this same word, lobon , means “nun.” And if we think of Calcutta (364 miles from the border) we often think of the free flow of people, of poverty, of refugees, and then our minds sometimes turn (a sharp incline, a small bounce, a quick jink) to Mother Teresa.

Salt.

Nun.

Mother.

Saint.

Ma .

Ah …

Sri Ramakrishna.

1857, the Kali Temple, Dakshineswar (six miles north of Calcutta)

There are so many strange stories I could tell you about Uncle’s boyhood. In fact, all the stories of Uncle’s boyhood are very curious. It would be difficult for me to recall a single story that is not thus. Uncle was always the weft in the weave. He was singular. Chandradevi tells how she was once holding the baby Uncle in her arms as she was relaxing in the sunlight by a window when she suddenly felt him grow very heavy on her lap. Somewhat alarmed, she quickly lifted Uncle up and placed him down onto a winnowing fan lying on the bed close by. Moments later the fan began to crack, then the bed underneath Uncle started to creak and complain.… She tried to lift Uncle but she could not. Uncle had become an extraordinary — an unbearable — weight!

Chandradevi — and she is a simple soul, by nature — began to wail. Nearby villagers ran into the house to try and aid her, but she could not be calmed until a ghost charmer was summoned. Only once he had sung a mantra to pacify the spirits could she be persuaded to hold baby Uncle in her arms again.

On a further occasion I have been told how she left Uncle on the bed and turned around for a moment to perform some minor chore or other, and when she turned back again the top half of the baby’s body (Uncle could not have been more than three months of age) was hidden inside the nearby bread oven. The oven was cool and full of ashes. Uncle withdrew from the oven and proceeded to roll around on the floor until he was coated from head to toe in white ash ( ash , the dust of renunciation — Lord Shiva’s habitual raiment). Chandradevi simply could not understand how Uncle — still such a small baby — had crawled into the oven, nor why he now suddenly appeared so large to her as he rolled around. Again she began wailing, inconsolable, until a local woman ran into the house and — apprehending the dreadful scene before her — scolded Chandradevi for her terrible neglect of the child.

On a further occasion Chandradevi had placed the baby Uncle under the mosquito net for a doze. She then went off to perform some small task, but when she returned a fully grown man was sitting under the net in Uncle’s place. Chandradevi was dreadfully shocked and alarmed. She simply couldn’t understand where her baby had gone. Again, the tears, the wails, the pitiful calls for assistance. But on this occasion it was Kshudiram, Uncle’s father, who rushed to her aid. I am told that Kshudiram was always a profoundly devout and holy man. People accused him — just as they do Uncle — of being truthful to the point of mania. In fact, he had lost his fifty-acre family estate in Derapur after a powerful but corrupt local landlord tried to force him to testify falsely in court against an innocent neighbor. When he refused, the landlord’s wrath became focused upon Kshudiram himself, culminating in a second court case and the eventual loss of his entire inheritance. Kshudiram, his wife, and his family (Uncle had a sister and two considerably older brothers) were saved from complete destitution only when a kind friend — Sukhlal Goswami of Kamarpukur — stepped in to help him with the offer of a group of huts on his property and a half acre of fertile ground. Kshudiram accepted this gift most gratefully. He thanked his chosen deity, Sri Rama, for it and then — apparently without any bitterness or resentment — he dedicated himself still more heartily to a dignified Brahmin ’s life of quiet meditation, japa , pilgrimage, and worship.

Every happening in Kshudiram’s life was perceived by this devout and well-respected man as a sign from God. On apprehending his wife’s distress at Uncle’s transformation, for example, he calmly told her to collect herself, hold fast her counsel (to please avoid encouraging the villagers in idle gossip or unnecessary speculation), and simply accept the fact that these strange occurrences were a part of God’s divine plan for their son. They were beyond mere human comprehension. Uncle was different. It was ever thus. He was golden. He was special. He was oddly blessed. Most important of all, Uncle was ours. He was ours . He came from us.

Twenty-one years earlier

The streets of Calcutta are flooded with books. Piles of books from England and America. Books in incredible, immense, inconceivable quantities. A veritable infestation of books; a plague!

At every brief stop or blocked intersection people thrust them into carriages or through palanquin windows. Huge consignments of novels and philosophical tomes. Books about free will and independence and revolution. Every kind of book. Sometimes (it occasionally happens) a ship from England or America bound for Calcutta is wrecked at the Cape of Good Hope — the Cape of Storms — and the sandy African beaches are littered with novels. Thousands of novels in colorful mounds, in prodigious literary heaps, in giant fictional dunghills. And the savage wind blows across them (as the savage Cape wind invariably must). Their pages flip and tear and whip over and over and over and over. A million sentences, a billion well-turned phrases, all clamoring for attention. Read me! Read me! Read me! Please .

The gulls circle and then take fright — keening pitifully — at this awful, bright mess of fatally sodden torsos, this tragedy of broken spines, this terrible, deafening flapping and beating of horribly disabled limbs.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Chapter 6 (1852–53)

“I don’t mean literally a child,” pursued Mr. Jarndyce, “not a child in years. He is grown up … but in simplicity, and freshness, and enthusiasm, and a fine, guileless inaptitude for all worldly affairs he is a perfect child.” …