Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Letters to Lord Ganesha

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-6817949

2164-0041

Ariel Dorfman,

Indian History and Philosophy

From the very start, Ankur had been against sending the invitation letter to Lord Ganesha, but had reluctantly agreed upon Roshni’s resolute insistence. Even though he didn’t want to begin their marriage with yet another argument, he couldn’t help himself from scoring a point or two. “What?” he said with clenched teeth, as if he were trying to bite his tongue, but not really biting it at all, not keeping that acerbic tongue of his under control. “Do you think Ganesha is really going to show up at our wedding? Should we set the table with an extra plate in case he decides to accept our invitation? They say his elephant head has given him a prodigious appetite, ready to eat the cutlery and even the wall decorations if we don’t feed him every last morsel prepared for the guests.”She did not respond to his sarcasm, merely shrugged in the direction of her mother and his mother in the next room, conspiring and muttering together, both of them adamant that things be done in the traditional way, that the blessings of the God with the face of an elephant be invoked as the initial step to happiness; the couple needed to invite Lord Ganesha to their banquet, no matter how much the bridegroom considered himself a thoroughly modern man, determined to sweep into the dustbin of history the excessively superstitious practices from the old India that were holding this country of ours back.It was the replica of a dispute they had been engaged in since they had first met, when he had espoused the need for radical, immediate change, and she had retorted with “It’s best not to overthrow a king unless you can guarantee that his replacement will do a better job.”A tired discussion that Ankur preferred not to revisit, not now, not with the delights and tensions of the wedding looming ahead. And besides, of all the Gods, it was Ganesha he liked most; he had always had a soft spot for elephants. If you can’t beat them, join them: he silently mouthed the words to himself, and in order to compensate for his mordant mockery of Ganesha as the Dinner Guest Who Never Showed Up, he surprised Roshni by suggesting that rather than a form letter, the typical clichéd expressions that adorn so many marriage invitations, with cream colored paper and golden bangles flittering from the sides, he and she, Ankur and Roshni, should write something real, should ask for concrete, tangible blessings, and use the occasion to imagine their future and cement their love.And, indeed, they enjoyed composing the letter, full of sweet words and eternal vows. In the years ahead, they would come to cherish those many hours spent side by side, the experience of writing a message with input from one and then the other, creating out of nothingness a perfect creature, as if anticipating the child they hoped to someday forge from within their bodies. Constructing their infinite tomorrows word by word by word, he so deeply communing with his wife-to-be and she with the man who was soon to share her bed and much more, that one evening he admitted to her that perhaps there was a deeper wisdom to the ceremony, that perhaps they should go and deliver their love letter and appeal for benedictions, do so in person. If Ganesha will not come to us, we should go to him.She deflated the proposal like an old, crumpled balloon. Though pleased that he had been enlightened, at least in this matter, she reminded him of the prohibitive cost of such a journey, time consuming precisely when he was working extra hours at the office in order to help pay for the honeymoon, and besides, she said to him, as she would often do over the years as their marriage foundered, you were against writing the letter in the first place, you were so thoroughly modern, so thoroughly up to date, against everything that reeks of old India, and now, typically, you want to make amends in a jiffy, not so quick, my dear, not so easy.And yet, back then, it had been easy. Not quick, but certainly easy. Ankur liked to recall the joy of those hours when she had suggested an adjective—bright—and he had countered with a similar one—light, like the name Roshni—and the harmony that had embraced them as they settled on dawn, which was both light and bright and sun and horizon and new beginnings—Lord Ganesha was the God of all that began anew, after all, wonderful to reincarnate their different views in one word.It had augured well for their marriage, this temple of terms and expressions and comments that they had erected with respect, a way for each to probe the other, hold hands in the mind, and kiss and fondle and caress before their nuptials, before anything carnal could join them or come between them. Touching each other with their tongues, meeting in the in-between, the paper laid out like a white sheet, like a canopy in front of them, each syllable like a drop of gentle sweat, like hair mingling from a woman and a man in the night, like breath in his mouth from her mouth into his and into hers, him caring enough to stretch his imagination, her welcoming him and guessing his innermost secrets, and him opening the many layers and lips that had remained private for far too long.“What went wrong?” Ankur would ask himself years later, when the nostalgia for that interlude of peace had been replaced by mutual recriminations and bitterness. “How could a love that started so auspiciously have turned into this battle for supremacy in the home?”And Roshni had echoed the thought in her own way: she also recalled the entwining of their souls that had occurred during those hours of composition. “Maybe it was the letter itself,” that was the way in which she answered from near and far, from her body so near, from his mind so far. That was the way in which she answered his unspoken apprehension, what he did not dare to state out loud. Yes, she was still able to divine what he was thinking, even before he had entertained the thought itself. “Maybe we expected too much, expended so much effort and pleasure into writing the letter and did not leave enough for the hard task of everyday life and strife, maybe the letter to Lord Ganesha was too perfect, set the bar too high, created an ideal impossible to grasp, so that it was all downhill and disillusion after that.” And then, when she was alone in her room, half-sobbing so he would not hear her and ask what in the hell was the matter, then, later, she would add to herself a reproach, the sort of hint she did not address to him—heaven forbid that she would accept that he was right about anything!—“Maybe it’s the other way around and we did not go far enough, we did not complete the pledge and promise of the letter by delivering its contents in person to Lord Ganesha. I was the one who insisted on writing it and then pulled back when he ended up embracing the idea so enthusiastically. Maybe I should have consented to the pilgrimage to the Shi Ganesha Mandir temple at Ranthambore, not clipped Ankur’s wings so swiftly and severely and caustically. Maybe if I had been less contentious or more adventurous or simply had real faith that what we were writing in unison was not mere words but a blueprint for what we needed to do, a time map to the future, maybe our marriage would have turned out differently.”If I had been different, if he had been different, if she had, if Ankur, if Roshni, if I had understood, if she had understood, if he, if she, if me, if you, if we, if we, if we.No use crying over spilled words—a reflection they both murmured to themselves resentfully, still sharing the witticisms of the past without knowing that they did so—no use in regretting the past when the present had so much miscommunication to regret. What’s done is done, the invitation was not conveyed in person to Lord Ganesha, not one of their fervent desires was conveyed directly to the Remover of Obstacles and the God of New Beginnings—and he, of course, had not deigned to knock at our door, did not sit cross-legged with his mouse at our banquet table the night we were wed.Trying to convince themselves they’d done nothing wrong.Like thousands of other young couples in Rajasthan and across the whole subcontinent, they had posted the letter in the most thoroughly modern fashion, pushed it into the slot with his hand and her hand united in one sublime geometric gesture, heard it plop onto other fluttering, stiff envelopes, had turned their backs on the post office without even a final goodbye to that proof of their love. They had not even kept a copy of the first document of their desire.Though they had both somehow memorized the contents—so much copying it out, so many little corrections and amendments and ameliorations that they had somehow consigned to the inner core and sanctuary of their recollections the letter’s verses and vocabulary. If anyone had asked—but no one did, no one knew, not at all, not at all—what they had revealed, what they had begged for, both she and he could have recited those longings with the precision of the astronomical instruments of Jantar Mantar, and the fragrance of the gardens of Jaipur. Indeed, it could almost be said that it was this mutual, unconscious, persistent, incessantly personal and intense daily re-creation of their common dreams, that kept them together through the decades of misadventures that followed, each of them holding on to the idea of the other when things went sour, each of them reminding himself, herself, that an unknown postman in faraway Sawai Modhopur, had received the letter and acted as their emissary, walked through the Forest of Tigers, ascended the steps strewn with jabbering monkeys and penitent pilgrims, entered the Fort and then the Temple, clinging to the message they had sent through him, the anonymous postman, to ask for blessings, Ankur and Roshni renewing their vows by imagining the journey they had not undertaken and the long ago letter that year after year kept fusing and confusing them. They had swum into each other’s depths once at least and were not willing, not him, not her, to abandon the hope it contained, the glimpse of an alternate tomorrow, the promise of splendor in the leaf that has not yet completely fallen. If he could write those words for me, if she could spell out her love for me, if he could show me his true soul, if she could smile her way and words into my heart as we wrote, if we could laugh together back then, if we could iron out our disagreements as we accepted the other’s suggestions and limitations, curtailing our doubts and conceding a point, if we tolerated discrepancies and contrasts, if we could do it once, why not again, who is to say that we will not mine the mirror of our souls again, find the lake we have lost on the road to wherever we were trudging or soaring, who is to say that we cannot regain paradise?Keeping them together till a day would arrive, when a light, a bright, a dawn, would arise, when fate would knock at the door like a wind or the solitary tusk of an elephant, and they would be given a second chance.So they were not surprised when that day did arrive, when the light and the bright and the dawn of a new beginning came, when there was a knock at the door, and the past rushed into their house, it could almost be ventured that they had, each of them, Ankur and Roshni both, been expecting that moment, been living for this moment.They had never before seen the old man who was standing there.And yet recognized him, somehow separately and concurrently recognizing that he had come to rescue them as in the old stories and myths, the knock had echoed in their home in the very middle of a huge row that had commenced with the slightest disagreement (whose turn was it to sort the dirty clothes?) and had escalated into rebukes and then screams and after that tears and false accusations and false defenses, and so they had hailed that interruption—anyone would have done the trick, forcing them to be outwardly courteous with the interloping stranger while inwardly seething at the all too familiar stranger standing next to them called husband, called wife, anything that would postpone one more session that invariably ended in resentment and exhaustion and, eventually, mutual silence.Ankur ushered the old man in without asking the purpose of this unexpected visit and she hastened to put the kettle on for tea without asking whose turn it was to perform that task.The old man—wizened and yet with sturdy legs and a strong build and a bashful, bowed forehead—sat himself down at the round table in their kitchen, as if he were very tired or perhaps mute, because he had not uttered as much as a sigh.But when he began to speak there was no stopping him.“You do not know me, Mr. Ankur, Mrs. Roshni, but I, alas, know you. Though I should have known you many years ago, but really only became acquainted, registered your names, read your desires, recently, much too recently.“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ashlesh Singh and I inherited my profession from my father, as he did from his. We should have been actors in my family, and perhaps, despite our name that indicates warriors among my ancestors, the truth is that we are all natural performers, able to elicit laughter from the sorrowful and drag tears from the most cheerful face, always eager to tell a good tale. We were endowed with voices like honey and the stamina of elephants and an ability like birds to inhabit the words of others and bring them to life and fruition as if they were our own. It may have been that empathy—or maybe that and a combination of so much else, not to mention good luck, which landed my grandfather his job of postman for Lord Ganesha in Ranthambore, a most wondrous and responsible calling: it is my family, my father and my uncles, myself and my brothers, and now my sons as well and their children tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we are and were and will be the men who receive all the cards and missives, the invitations and supplications, each letter addressed to the son of Shiva and Parvati, Lord of Hosts, Trinetra Ganesh Ji, worshipped in the important temple dedicated to him in the world, where the icon of the all the icons, the only one with three eyes, stands waiting benevolently, waiting for letters to arrive, waiting for the men of my family to read them to him.“From the moment I had use of speech and thankfully before, I was told the story of Lord Ganesha and how I would come to serve him and serve those who believe in his powers. Thankfully, I say, because the first sound I ever remember hearing was not the crooning of my mother or the many tones of my father rehearsing a joke or reciting a Bhajan, but the roar of a tiger, the striped threat of lightning in my throat, gorging on me, tearing my heart out—even if we lived in Sawai Modhopur, once in a while the tigers would wander into town, would prowl the streets in search of meat, and that night, the night I recollect as my beginning because it is what I remember as the beginning, that night a tiger had found its way outside the walls of our house and inaugurated my existence with a roar. I opened my eyes that Wednesday, hoping it was a nightmare, but it wasn’t. The growl reverberated again and portended my death, and it was then that I laid eyes on Lord Ganesha above my cradle—it was a picture, of course, but how is a child to know this, how is a child to distinguish a picture from reality, a story from a dream, a dream from a fact? Lord Ganesha appeared in all his chubbiness and his belly so big and his many hands and his three eyes, and the tiger suddenly grew still and slunk away into the quiet; later I was to discover that elephants were used in tiger hunts by kings, that tigers are aware in their bones that an elephant cannot be defeated, I was to tell myself that Lord Ganesha had paid me in advance for the services I would render him, he was protecting his postman and performer.“So I was more than ready for the story of how he had been born while his father Shiva was away and that’s why his mother had demanded that her boy allow no one in to see her while she was bathing. I don’t know which of the many versions of the story you have been taught, but in the one recounted to me, Lord Shiva, as befits the Lord of Destruction, had come back from who knows what war and tried to enter his home and was stopped by the son he did not recognize. And in wrath had killed the boy, had cut off his head with his three-pronged sword and sent the skull a million miles away, into the ether of space from whence it could not be retrieved. This story I repeated to myself as the years went by, because I was destined to serve as the bridge. On your devotion rests the happiness of so many remote couples; you will pronounce words of hope from a woman and a man about to wed, an invitation to the feast and an invitation into their lives. It was as if Lord Ganesha himself were speaking to me: I am alive only because of the love of a mother. The child was dead. What is done is done, Lord Shiva declared with finality. When life is over, the future has dried up like a river that will never again flow. But my mother would not accept this verdict, Ganesha whispered to me. Time and flesh are not irreversible. There is no river that cannot return to its source, even if each river returns in a different form. And my own mother, the mother of Ashlesh Singh, repeated the same belief to me. Say it, she whispered, and Lord Ganesha echoed her inside me, say it. It is never too late. Say it. It is never too late. And Parvati forced her husband, Lord Shiva to say it. It is never too late. If there is really love, my father the postman said, and Ganesha smiled inside me at these words, if there is really love, just a spark of it, it can never be too late, remember that.“So Lord Shiva sent his men out looking. Find me the head of a baby, a male child that is nursing, even the hair on a head is enough. But they could not find even one that day—perhaps because the sun had hidden out of fear that a father should have cut off the head of his own child, perhaps because the stars did not want to see the world ever again if such a crime could be committed, perhaps because only the dark could illuminate the roads along which the soldiers ran, seeking and searching and burning their torches as they looked for the child—until, shattered and drained, they came upon a tiny baby elephant drinking milk from its mother, saw it was male and brought it to Shiva; this was all we could find. And though it is true it is never too late, even if this is true, time can run out for a miracle, the body of the dead son was about to decompose if it was not freshened with the blood and wisdom of another human or another animal, and Shiva made one body of two and Ganesha was born. And the one condition that Parvati demanded, if Shiva was ever again to lay eyes and hands and body on her, was that this child was to be worshiped before any of the other gods, that he was not to be the object of ridicule but of veneration, Ganesha would be there at each new beginning and would remove each obstacle for those who were good and place hurdles in the path of those who intended evil.“Mine was a long apprenticeship. I accompanied my father on his rounds, learned how to count by mounting the 523 steps up into the fort, learned how to survive in this world by avoiding the paths crossed by tigers and by celebrating the importance of shade to save ourselves from the relentless sun. I noted the reverence in the gestures of my uncles as they opened each letter no matter how trite and conventional, admired the inflections of certain words, the softening of what each performer in my family had guessed were mistakes in the message, appreciated the enhancement of the term that had hit the nail on the head and needed to be emphasized. I wanted nothing more than to imitate my grandfather as he presented as best he could what was loveliest in each letter and understating those aspects which were unfeeling and could lead to unwarranted trouble. I would someday become, I told myself, the latest interpreter of desires and maladies.“Though my father was my model, it was from my mother, at home, that I absorbed how to always put forward, on behalf of those to wed, the reasons why they deserved Lord Ganesha’s protection. She was always removing obstacles from our path, was always reminding us that each day, each hour, each second is or can be a new beginning. She was the one who made my father extraordinary at his labor. Remote couples could not hope for a better man and woman to represent them.“Over the years, I convinced myself that I was just as good as my elders. I did my best, I believed, to go even further as the ambassador of love—and perhaps the happiest day of my life is when I myself read to Lord Ganesha the invitation, a very simple and modest one, that, with my future wife, we had extended to him, would he please come to our wedding and bless us?“I knew, of course, that my performance of the words of others—or my own words, for that matter—was no guarantee of joy in marriage, that Lord Ganesha could not do away with every obstacle or preclude that a new beginning should crumble into a sad ending. So many marriages end disastrously, so much love slips away, so many couples are solitary exercises in futility, that it would be presumptuous on my part, or the part of Lord Ganesha, if I may allow myself to speak in his name, presumptuous and arrogant to warrant that my reading of anyone’s letter, in Hindi or English, was crucial to their happiness. That depended, ultimately, on them, on so many unpredictable circumstances, war and sickness and drought and human monsoons and financial ruin, so much that we do not control. No, of course, Lord Ganesha could not turn a marriage destined to be a sea of troubles into a bed of roses. But the fact of reading that original message aloud to that God who, because of his elephant head, was able to listen as no other entity in this or the other world can, and to do so in the very temple where the words might mingle with the words of so many of the aspiring lovers like flowers scenting the same sacred air, the very fact that a blessing had been sought for and received, was an important step in the right direction, something I could do for them without their knowing it.”At this point, Ashlesh Singh interrupted his story to sip the tea, though it had grown cold. He had till then spoken his words to the space that separated Ankur and Roshni, and had not looked either of them in the eyes. But now he did so as he repeated the words “something I could do for them without their knowing it.” And then looked down again at his folded hands and recommenced.“I am not making myself clear and I have come to clarify something, so . . . Let’s put it this way: that the message was delivered did not guarantee a satisfactory outcome. But if the message was suppressed, and did not reach its destination, if it never advanced into the air breathed by Lord Ganesha and by me and my family of messengers, if the plea was aborted, well, that was to risk failure before there was a chance for success, my failure and that of the couple itself. It would have been better to let that tiger devour me when I was a child.“So you can imagine that I have been scrupulous in my reading of those letters, working overtime to carry kilos of letters up the hill every day, often sacrificing my own life, the love of my own wife, the laughter of my own children, in order to fulfill my duty as healer of the world, be the bridge between God and men, the Lord and women, the sky in which fort and temple rise and the earth where the tigers roam and the rivers flow. I was proud of what I had been trained to do, the fact that I could not have been offered a better life, a task that better repaid how Lord Ganesha had smiled to my rescue when I was about to be eaten by the roars of a yellow and black animal. This sense of contentment, my friends, though I hesitate for reasons soon to be revealed, to call you that—that belief in the fulfillment of my life’s work, the notion that our planet has been made slightly better, a little less acrimonious, by our passing through it, that we did this by carrying out well the tasks assigned by fate and talent, that peace I gently kept carrying in those messages all these years, has now been disturbed and blemished.“You see my age, you see how gnarled are my fingers and bowed is my back. I recently retired from the post office. My four sons now continue the duty that was once my daily relief. If one is wise—and I always thought I might, through my proximity to Lord Ganesha and the three eyes in his elephant forehead which see more than anyone else could ever hope for, I told myself that perhaps a spark of wisdom would have glimmered into me—if one is wise, I repeat, as you grow old, you see the chance to renew your life, go through your mementos and memories and rid yourself of all the bric-a-brac that has cluttered our existence because we have not had the time to properly deal with each item. We have been too busy living to stop and purge our household of all the necessary litter one accumulates over the blind decades. I had spent such a long time consecrated to serving others that I had neglected to put my own life in order.“As my dear wife and I sorted through the mess inherited from our own past, consoled in each other’s company, she suddenly, one day, held up in her hands a letter which had somehow—but how? but why? but when?—lodged itself between the lips of a copy of the Upanishads.“The frown on her face as she passed me the lost letter should have warned me that it was bad news. Not what was inside the letter, no, no, that was good, supremely moving and well written, no, no, no, what was a calamity was the physical existence of the letter itself, that it should have languished in some corner of our home rather than finding its way to the temple.“A plea to Lord Ganesha that I had not delivered.“A hope for the future that I had obstructed.“An invitation to a new beginning that I had ended.“I, me, Ashlesh Singh, I was the provider of obstacles, not the remover. I was the destroyer of new dawns, not he who welcomed them and facilitated their light rising and their dance.“I had failed.“My first thought was to rush to the temple, climb each of the 523 steps on my knees, crawl up backwards and sideways and crippled and crying, and deliver, however belatedly, the words that had been patiently—or perhaps impatiently, insatiably—waiting for so long to echo in that sanctuary.“But my wife convinced me that this would not redeem me, would not flush the stain from my life, would not return peace to me or happiness to the couple I had thwarted. You must go, my wife said, and find the man and woman you have betrayed and beg their forgiveness. You must pray they are still alive and pray even more, that they are content in each other’s arms in spite of your hindrance. You must offer to guide them back here, help them to fulfill the task you have forsaken, you must find a way for them to complete their journey. That is what you must do. For their sake but also for your own, so you do not carry this impunity into the realm of death where it will weigh more heavily upon you than during life itself. Go, go—and I will make the house ready for our honored guests.”By now the old postman had started to cry.His tears fell one by one, as if they were the 523 steps that led down from the temple, they fell on the tablecloth, they seeped into the table, they dribbled into the tea that had grown ever colder as he spoke.For a long while, neither the husband nor the wife responded. They looked at each other in wonder, and with a tenderness they had almost forgotten could exist. As if Ashlesh Singh, by his mere presence, could return them to the words they had once woven together, the words that, it turned out, had never been dispensed, but which they both kept secluded and warm in the shared haven of their yesterdays, as if they were still writing side by side the invitation to Lord Ganesha.“Tell me, tell me,” and the postman lifted his wet face to them like a moon in the sky that hopes it will never fade while knowing it is destined to disappear, “tell me if you are happy, please tell me.”And they answered, he answered and she answered, both of them, Ankur and his Roshni, Roshni and her Ankur, neither of them needed to consult the other in order to say that yes, of course, they could not have lived a more placid existence, the postman should rest assured that he had not ruined their lives.“Please return to your wife and thank her from us and explain that there is no need for us to come and bother her or disrupt your own well-deserved retirement.”Who said this? He or she?It did not matter if they chanted the words separately or together because the postman knew they were only trying to comfort him, he had read too many letters of love not to realize when he was in the presence of emotional distress.“You must come with me,” he insisted, getting down on his knees, “if not for your sake, then for mine, so I can meet death and tell him that I have done all I could to leave the world a slightly better place.”They understood that they had to do the old man’s bidding. Again, it was not something they needed to consult with each other. Again, it was something that was clear as water, as clear as the translucent, cascading water they had been for each other—to look into the pool of each other’s eyes, to wash away each other’s sorrows—they had been returned to deeper wells of love that had not been entirely drained away. It had been so long that such concord existed between them that they hardly remarked on the transformation that was already winding its way into their lives, the softer angels of themselves that were being resurrected by this visit.And they had no time, indeed, to dwell upon