Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (3 page)

I was six at the time. My parents had gone to England so my father could complete his advanced training in cardiology. Sanjiv and I remained behind, living with our paternal grandfather and two uncles in Bombay. (Sanjiv and I lived with various members of our family as our parents studied or traveled for work, or when we left home to attend private school. Our aunts and uncles were considered our second parents. It has always been that way in India.)

For an Indian to travel to London for medical studies was rare in those days. In this case, my father had been medical adviser to Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. In 1947 Mountbatten was ordered to liberate the country in a matter of months. Events moved swiftly and with barely a look behind; three centuries of colonialism unraveled.

In the mad confusion that ensued, Mountbatten didn’t forget my father, and it was through him that the path of Krishan’s medical training was smoothed. This wasn’t enough to overcome ingrained prejudice, though. At the British army hospital in Pune, my father trailed behind the white doctors during grand rounds. He pored over his textbooks late into the night so that he would be prepared when the attending physician called on him to answer a question, but he was never called on. He was ignored, frozen out. He became a silent attendant to a procession of British superiors. One morning at a patient’s bedside, however, the other young doctors were stumped by a tricky diagnosis. The attending turned and repeated his question to my father, who knew the answer. In a single stroke, he had earned respect.

As gentle and tolerant as my parents were, there was never a doubt about the line drawn between whites and “brownies.” Most colonials assigned to India had come out in Victorian times to make their fortune or else to escape disgrace. It was a time when the oldest son inherited everything, the middle son went to university to become a clergyman, and the youngest or most hapless son became a soldier. India was an escape route and a chance to rise higher socially than you could have back home. Salaried clerks lived like rajas. The colonial clubs were bastions of pretentiousness, stuffier than any club in London. The British were out-Britishing themselves.

By the time my parents were growing up, this fixed hierarchy may have shifted, but the attitude of contempt and indifference to Indian culture hadn’t. Which is understandable when you have conquered a people and want them only for looting and profit. India was a jewel in the crown for mercantile reasons. There was no real military use to occupying the country, only a vast potential for profit.

The Chopras attached their fortunes to the British because there was no other ladder to climb. My great-grandfather was a tribal chieftain in the barren desert landscape of the Northwest Territory and had held out with cannon rather than accede to the British army when they came to call. So family legend went. He was killed, but his son—my grandfather—accepted a position as sergeant in the
British army, which guaranteed him a pension. The linkage with the white colonials became second nature. England was the other place where tea, chutney, and kedgeree featured in daily life. Both countries stopped everything when the cricket scores came over the radio and worshipped cricket stars more devoutly than gods.

Still, when my father was ready to set sail, my mother, who wouldn’t follow him for a while, got him to promise one thing: As soon as he landed at Southampton, he was to go and have his shoes polished by an Englishman. He did and reported back the satisfaction of sitting in a high chair with a white man bent down before him. He remembered this incident in later years without pride, but without regret, either. While the British saw a benign empire (no one was legally enslaved after a certain date), the subjugated people experienced their psychological scars being rubbed raw every day.

My father traveled to Edinburgh to sit his medical license exams—it was riskier to take them in London, where the test was supposedly more difficult—and when he sent word back to Bombay that he had passed them, my grandfather was overjoyed. As when I was born, he went to the rooftop of our flat with his rifle and fired several rounds into the air. Then he took Sanjiv and me to see
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
at the cinema, which thrilled us. Even better, he was in such a jubilant mood that he took us to a carnival and lavished us with sweets.

In the middle of the night I was awakened by the anguished cries of the women of the house. Servants rushed in and swept us up in their arms. Without explanation, we were left with a trusted neighbor. Our grandfather, we learned, had died in his sleep. At six, I had no concept of death. My confused mind kept asking, “Where is he? Somebody tell me.” Sanjiv, who was three, reacted with a sudden outbreak of a mysterious skin condition. He was taken to the hospital; no credible diagnosis was made. But one doctor hit upon an explanation that still satisfies me today: “He’s frightened. The skin protects us, and he feels vulnerable, so it’s peeling off.” This man predicted that Sanjiv would recover as soon as my parents arrived, and he did.

A day later we heard that my grandfather was being cremated.
Two small children wouldn’t be taken along, but one of my uncles attended, returning with a bitter scowl on his face. He was a journalist, someone I was in awe of. He didn’t know I was in earshot when he blurted, “Bau-ji was celebrating with the kids yesterday, and now what is he? A handful of ashes in a jar.”

I’m wary of assigning defining moments to a life. Too many influences swirl around us, and secret ones percolate inside us from the unconscious. Experts in memory say that the most striking ones we carry from childhood are likely to be deceptive; they are actually amalgams of many related incidents congealed into one. Traumas blur together. Every Christmas adds to a single joy. But Uncle’s words may well have set my course. If so, they lay submerged for years while death stalked me and I kept intent on not looking back over my shoulder.

I cannot leave that moment without saying that old people seem to time their deaths, as some research now has confirmed. They wait for a significant day, a birthday or perhaps Christmas. Death rates among the elderly go up after major holidays. Years before any statistician thought to look, I had a moving experience of this. An elderly husband and wife had entered the hospital together. The husband was dying, in the late stages of cancer, as I recall. The wife’s condition was much less serious, certainly not grave. But she declined rapidly, while he seemed to go on, no matter how deep the ravages of his disease became.

I was a young doctor assigned to check on them every day, and one morning I was shocked to hear that the wife had died during the night. I went and told her husband, who seemed strangely relieved.

“I can go now,” he said.

I asked him what he meant.

“A gentleman always waits for a lady to go through the door first,” he said. He passed away a few hours later.

Now I’m launched into telling my story and how it crosses and collides with Sanjiv’s. Some part of me considers it a strange enterprise,
even though I make my living with words. The drawback of being in the public eye, which is also its great attraction, is that people feel as though they already know you. I’ve lived for a long time with this misperception. I arrived at a hospital in Calgary once to deliver a talk and saw a small group of nuns protesting with signs that read,
DEEPAK CHOPRA, THE HINDU SATAN.
Anyone can go to blogs run by scientific skeptics, where I’m castigated as the Emperor of Woo Woo (I’m not quite sure what that means, but it sounds a bit endearing, like something out of Dr. Seuss).

Other people look favorably on me and smilingly tell me that I am a guru (a label I would never apply to myself, not because of its odor of charlatanism in the West, but because the title is revered in India). Yet no one has asked me to my face who I really am. Indian by birth, American by choice. Part of the great postwar diaspora that flung South Asians around the world from Africa to the Caribbean. A physician trained at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences thanks to Rockefeller largesse and a stream of visiting professors from the U.S. As with anyone, my luggage is plastered with stickers from every stop I’ve made in life since the moment I was born. Do you want to know me? Look at my labels.

Telling your life story can be simply an exercise in riffling through labels. It can be the meeting of a writer’s insatiable vanity with the public’s idle curiosity. I have decided that telling my story can benefit the reader only if we share something so deep that we cherish it equally. Not love of family, dedication to work, a lifelong vision, or even walking the spiritual path.

What you and I deeply cherish is the project of building a self. Like a coral reef that begins as bits of microscopic organisms floating in the sea, gradually coalescing and finally erecting a massive edifice, you and I have been building a self ever since “I” meant something. As reefs go, ours is sticky. Almost any passing experience can glom on to it. There is no plan to this edifice, and for many people the self is built by accident. They look back to find that the person they’ve become is half stranger, half grumpy boss. Its quirks rule everyday
life, veering between “I like this, give me more” and “I don’t like that, take it away.”

Lives are founded on the whims of “I, me, mine,” and yet there is no getting around the need to build a self and cling to it. Otherwise you might wash out to open sea. I wouldn’t make so much of India except that it gave me the abiding sense that a self is built for a paradoxical reason that is at once wise, impossible, thrilling, and desperate. You build a self in order to leave it behind. A great philosopher once remarked that philosophy is like a ladder that you use to climb to the roof, and then you kick the ladder away. The self is exactly like that. It’s the little boat you row until it bumps on the shore of eternity.

But why would anyone kick the ladder away? We are proud of “I, me, mine.” Yes, but it is also the source of our deepest suffering. Fear and anger roam the mind at will. Existence can turn from joy to terror without warning, in the blink of an eye. When life seems like a prison, nothing is more enticing than the Indian teaching that life is play (or
Lila
). I’m telling my story to show that reaching the state of pure play, which carries with it freedom, joy, and creativity, means that you must give up the illusions that mask as reality. The first illusion is that you are free already. Actually, the self you have spent so many years building is a prison, as surely as the microscopic organisms that build a reef are trapped inside its rigid skeleton.

Sanjiv has his own voice and his own world. I will know only how much he agrees or disagrees with me by reading his chapters. I can foresee that he will not agree with my conclusions about spirituality. Modern Indians are eager to break the bonds of ancient traditions and a restrictive culture. America became an escape route for stifled Indians as much as India was once an escape route for stifled British—you can substitute the word “ambitious,” “restless,” or “alienated” for stifled. I’ve heard applause when I tell an audience that they are children of the universe. Those words may not exactly mesh with Sanjiv’s scientific point of view.

We will not know what it means to creep out of the self until we examine how we built it in the first place. I’ve asked many teachers what enlightenment is, and one of the best answers—certainly the most
concise—is that in enlightenment you exchange the small ego for the cosmic ego. The higher self exists in everyone, waiting to emerge. What holds it back can be seen in my past as much as anyone’s. Walls have to be smashed, all the more because we built them ourselves. I bow to the Buddhists who say that there is no alternative to emptiness. But there’s another strain in India, going back centuries before the Buddha, which attests to the contrary: that life is infinite fullness, once you awaken to reality and drop the mask of illusion.

2

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Blind for a Day

Sanjiv

Five-year-old Deepak and three-year-old Sanjiv outside their home in Pune, 1952.

M
Y NAME IS SANJIV CHOPRA
and I was born in September 1949, in the city of Pune, India. This was about a year after India had gained its independence from Great Britain. The entire world was recovering from the devastation of World War II, and it was a time of great change. I was the second child of Dr. Krishan and Pushpa Chopra and the younger brother of Deepak Chopra. Our father was a legendary physician and wanted to ensure that we received an excellent education. He never tried to influence Deepak or me into going into medicine. But when I was twelve years old, an incredible incident occurred that set me on my path.

At the time, Deepak and I were living with our uncle and aunt while attending St. Columba’s School in Delhi. Our parents were more than three hundred miles away in Jammu. They were keen that we finish our high school education at this preeminent school run by Irish Christian Brothers.