Book excerpt: That Was January, This Is June

‘Happiness? Is there such a thing that you can put your finger on, and be able to say, this is happiness, this is fulfilment?’ This question is posed by the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma in a short story titled ‘Zindagi Yahan Aur Wahan’. (The translation is mine. The title of Verma’s story has been translated by Vineet Gill as ‘Life Here and Thereafter’). Verma goes on to write: ‘… no, happiness doesn’t happen, it exists only as recall—when one is in pain. When you make the sudden discovery, this is June, that was January.’ (I like the fact that Verma links misery with the burning heat of June, and happiness with the cold of January, when flowers are in bloom in Delhi’s gardens.) We could take this thought in other directions. Example: There is nothing like love; we experience it most poignantly only when we have lost it. The more pressing question that Verma’s words evoke in my heart is whether it is always possible to recall life’s riches when fate has been particularly miserly.

There’s another way to approach this question. Let’s look at the drawing I have made here. This was a scene I had witnessed on the banks of the Ganga in Rishikesh. Let me first tell you what you can’t see in this piece. In the far distance there were beautiful green mist-covered mountains. And above where I was standing, pilgrims crossed over a suspension bridge as they hurried toward a giant mural of the monkey-god Hanuman on the opposite bank, where, as I was to discover soon, there were temples and ashrams and busy restaurants. Here, in what is represented in the drawing, was the river, the water both cold and quick-flowing. You couldn’t stand in the current if you didn’t have a secure hold on one of the iron chains that ran down the length of the steps that led to the river. I saw a small group of men (I suspected they were drunk, but I can’t be sure) having a lot of fun: They held on to each other and to the metal chain, laughing and dunking their heads in the water. There is one more thing that we don’t see in the painting. Only a couple hundred yards downstream, a corpse was being cremated on a pyre around which sat the mourners. The river, and perhaps this river in particular, the mighty Ganga, was the connection between January and June, between the dream of living and the drama of dying. To look at the river, to observe what was happening on its banks, was to experience the indivisibility of existence, its highs and lows.

When I was writing this book, a terrible tragedy occurred in a cherished friend’s life: her child, a college student, died by suicide. We live in a terrible world, a cruel world, a world that is utterly unjust, so much death from war and other tragedies. And yet this particular death flung me into dark grief. And it was during this period that I made the above drawing. I was trying to return to the river.

For her part, in a social media post, my friend quoted a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828):

This world of dew is a world of dew and yet, and yet.

And she added: ‘One must believe life is extraordinary.’ So much courage, such faith.

In the face of such resolve, how can I, with my insignificant, lesser sorrows, complain or give up? Not just not give up, what is really demanded of me is that I awake to a sense of wonder. And perhaps that process begins with my recognizing the extraordinary nature of my friend’s own words, these words delivered from a place of unfathomable grief. It is important to note here that Kobayashi Issa, who wrote the haiku that my friend had quoted, had himself been familiar with tragedies: his mother died when he was two; his stepmother was cruel to him and he was forced to leave home; he returned to nurse his father through sickness; when he married at fifty-one, a son was born but died within a month; the same happened to a second child, also a son; his third child, a daughter, was born healthy and lived to her first birthday but then, as a result of having contracted smallpox, she too died. The haiku that my friend had quoted is believed to have been written after this child’s death. Issa had further sorrows in store. His wife died while giving birth to a fourth child, a son, who also died in infancy because of a nurse’s mistake. Issa was paralyzed. He remarried but the marriage ended quickly. After he married for the third time, he suffered the fate of seeing his home burn down. He and his wife were forced to live in a storehouse with no windows. The couple had a child, a daughter, who survived into adulthood—but Issa himself had died even before the baby was born.

And yet, and yet. This was the same Issa who wrote bright lines filled with beauty and laughter. Call it the defiance of spirit, or call it faith, or call it art. For instance, this haiku:

The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children.

— Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins