A viper once struck the inner curve of my bare foot. Which foot? I no longer remember. It left two dots where it punctured my skin, two red dots like the one I used to paint on my forehead every day, long ago, when I lived in India, when I was a child.
One of the four most poisonous snakes in India bit me. I never saw it. I didn’t even hear it hiss, although the pain shooting through me tore an animal scream out of my throat. Tears spurted into my eyes. I wiped them away. I had never cried before my siblings and would not start now. In the insight of that instant I understood the cliché of pain like hot swords; my brain, losing its sense of reality, had searched to see a little man holding white-hot metal knives, ready to pierce my skin again. How could I have missed
such a sound, my brother asked, for it was dark and the road to the doctor’s home was long and potholed and he did not want to drive. My mother could not drive and eager not to disturb her first son’s evening, she, too, insisted it could not have been a snake.
Their certainty overwhelmed me. Perhaps by then I was tired of fighting. I had won many fights, left the country already, though in my late teens, ready to live alone in a country far away across the ocean. I had won enough and was too tired to battle again. For one thing, the pain was excruciating. Worse than labor, I can say now, although I knew nothing of child bearing then: I was busy baring my soul
baring my detest of unquestioning obedience, my refusal to stay quiet in the face of injustices reaped by my elders though not my betters, societal wrongs I had to fight, I mean. My teen years were too full of larger issues for me to stay self-obsessed. It was an age when girls were shunned for days when they had a period – a custom many South Asian Indian American friends observe even today, even all these miles away from the oppression into which they were born….
Most snakes weren’t poisonous anyhow; and I had been foolish, my footsteps muffled by sand, as I shuffled through beach grasses ruffled by the starlit breeze in the wildest acre of my sister-in-law’s rambling garden. So I let it go, without argument.
My silence made it harder to protest later. I almost fainted, I could have said. Take me to a doctor, I could have said. If I had fussed enough, perhaps they would have grumbled their way to a clinic, with me in tow. I stayed quiet, although it took an effort not to sob with pain; I who had not shrieked, not once when my father took the horsewhip off the wall and sent it snaking, repeatedly, onto my six-year old skin.
Why? I had not protested my innocence as a child, because I was too busy biting my lip, thinking I shall not give him the pleasure of hearing me scream, I shall never weep before this man. It was the same stubbornness when my mother and siblings said it was not a snake. My mother hated to be a burden to others. My siblings, nineteen, seventeen and fifteen years older than I found me a burden,
You crave attention they’d say in a few days when I’d passed blood for the second time and finally said I had to get to the hospital. This is just something you brought on yourself because you’re such an angry disrespectful girl. To this day, they insist I am not independent. They must know. They live near the place of their birth, still, the place I left when I was not-quite-nineteen,
To make my way alone. I loved alone-ness. Loneliness caught at my throat every now and then as a child, but alone-ness was another universe. A universe I escaped into each time I walked alone or stood alone. A universe waiting in the dazzle of dewdrops dancing on waxy lotus leaves that rose above the squishy mud of the pond in that same garden where I was snake-bitten. Sunlit dewdrops, diamond bright before they disappeared
out of ephemeral lives. Perhaps my love of alone-ness was why I wasn’t scared when the doctor held my hands in his and said, "You are so cheerful, you give me hope." “Aren’t you the one who should be giving me the hope?” I said and laughed. Yes, I laughed right through the pain, though pain I was and still am scared of. The indignity pain can bring. I never want to suffer such a thing. So I joked as much as I could
Intravenous dinner for me tonight, I guess? Some doctors forced their lips into smiles. Plural, yes. There were at least three around my bed and then many visited through the night. It was like being in a cage at the zoo. I was a specimen, important to look at, certainly other people would suffer snake bites and it was a matter of professional interest to ensure they saw my rainbow skin
"Lovely as a Renoir painting," I said, though my skin was colored by poison not scintillating light. Four nights after the bite I’d come. Just within the outer limit, they said. An hour longer and I’d have gone, they said. Four nights they waited to write my death certificate. I laughed a lot. My life was not all pain, after all, there was beauty and moments of happiness.
my body and hovered above the room, watching my brother try to use the melodrama of my impending death to try and make peace with my father. I saw pieces of love I’d felt in my life. My gardener who’d comforted me when I’d said to him, bravely, I think I’m about to die, having felt my first loose tooth.
At five, I was scared of death, as I no longer was by fifteen. He’d held my hands in his leathered palms and smiled and said, no I wasn’t going to die. Everyone’s teeth fell out and then grew back and then fell out again and that second time they wouldn’t grow back, but that was far away. Or maybe never
If I died there in the gray hospital room, the stench of phinayl filling my nostrils. If I died there, the world would still spin the next day I thought and it filled me with such joy. Strange, yet why should it be strange? Stars had sequined the black sari of sky before my birth and would shimmer on after my death
Starlight, reaching us from so far, after, perhaps the star the light emanated from was gone. When we peer into the night sky, we see the dead looking back at us. That’s what physics shows us. Physics and the beauty of math had dazzled me as a child, with the notion of infinity and that night as I journeyed beyond words and numbers, as I voyaged,
infinity infused
my soul. I enter a place indescribable, a peace unending, a joy, oh what joy!
And this is what I hold, what I know to be sure, as I am jerked back to the world by the sight of tears, like starlight streaming down my beloved gardener’s night-black cheeks,
As I return to my body and my hospital bed and whatever years of life are left in me, my mother weeping tears of relief, my aunts saying “Thank God her daughter didn’t die, she’s been through so much already, her husband deserting her, leaving her penniless after all the wealth they’d shared and that huge home they’d had, leaving her with a daughter who said she would prefer to live alone with her mother than move into her grandfather’s home; an indecently strong daughter….”
As I return to doctors in disbelief writing my birth certificate
This is what I know to be true:
Wherever we go, our names matter not;
nor do the names we use to describe that immense, infinite, indescribable power of good that so many of us call God. The ancient Hindus, the sages whose blood runs in my veins, spoke of God not as he or she but ultimately as “it.” What a terrible coincidence that L’Engle used that word to describe the ultimately evil brain!
To me, God will always be it. Not this, not this, not this, my sages sang in Sanskrit. No better description shall I ever find. Not male nor female but both, nor human nor animal nor plant, but all three, neither only alive nor inanimate, perhaps because of my Hindu upbringing, I shall always in my blood feel the surging song of the Vedanta.
As each river follows its own path to the one great ocean, whether it runs slow or fast, straight or meandering, smooth or not, in the end, each river rushes into the arms of the all embracing sea. So do we, each of us souls, in the end, I surely believe,
attain God – or if you prefer, the power of Good, the ultimate Good which is compassion, the ability to feel from within another’s skin.
Because in the end, we are not bodies that have souls, we are souls in possession of these material bodies for a while, are we not?
Whether the souls reincarnate, an idea I give credence to as Hindu, or not, is immaterial. Ultimately, I don’t care. Those trivial details are interesting. The variety of our beliefs is interesting. I enjoy diversity.
But I shall speak up always against those who insist on preserving and protecting and perpetuating soul racism.
Too strong? To me, coming from a religion that spoke of acceptance (not mere tolerance) and yet also a religion that birthed a million inhuman inequities, I believe God is beyond soul racism.
If God were to believe in untouchability, a Hindu leader once wrote, I would not recognize Him as God at all. I say, if God were to recognize religion and prefer one religion above another, I would not recognize this behavior as Godlike.
All of us who have touched infinity,
whether through an experience of near-death in a hospital
or while working in a laboratory
or while reading a book and experiencing that miracle of empathy that words may bring, when we breathe another’s breath, think their thoughts, live in their world, see as they see, hear as they hear, feel as they feel, as we inhabit another’s soul,
or raising voice in prayer in a church or synagogue or temple or mosque or one of the million other places we humans erect to savor the power of infinite good and infinite love,
all of us whose soul moves in those moments of life when we feel most aware and most loved,
all of our souls, to me, must be accepted as equal. To do otherwise is to place undue importance on impermanence. To emphasize too strongly what our eyes can see, what our ears can hear,
to emphasize names is to emphasize material things and forget the spiritual,
to entirely misunderstand the unseen.
