Addressing a portrait of the Buddha at Bangkok airport:
Dear Buddha, sometimes being mindful just ain’t enough. I know you strongly refuted all beliefs in any kind of continuous selfhood, and it is profoundly sound advice — to let oppressive, mostly fictitious chains of continuity go. But I can’t, not unless I’ve helped Dada slip free of his as well. We’re weighed down by the same burden, the same moment in our different stories.
As Dada never tired of reminding me, there is perhaps no country better set up than New Zealand for someone of my circumstances to believe that the good life consists of nothing beyond paying attention to the immediate present (which in my case is often just the tennis ball I’m about to hit, or the pretend tea-party that Mira is hosting, or the sentence I’m trying to sharpen), but how can I turn away from what I’ve seen of his pain? Surely his release would be mine as well. And then for me to learn a little more about Didi, if only to find out that much else happened in her adult life that Ma and I cannot feel responsible for.
How lucky am I to have so many ‘good life’ options before me? I could close my eyes to my faraway siblings and practise a ‘narrow’ Buddhism back home. Or, now that Mira is a few months from starting school, I could act on my resolutions to get involved with refugees, prisoners and others who it would be rewarding to meet.
All the while keeping a mindful distance from those in my own home I know to be mired in sorrow. Surely that cannot be the path to choose.
O Buddha, even before I land in Calcutta, it’s apparent to me that my sister’s disappearance is a limitless, unknowable thing. Yes, I am hoping to meet her family (perhaps twice in my four days if I’m very lucky!), but Baba, Thamma and Didi’s mother are no more, and Ma’s recollections have their reasons to be partial. It’s stupid to imagine that I’ll even glimpse any definitive ‘answers’, especially in the absurdly tiny peep-hole of time that I’ve granted myself.
But Buddha, although I’m certain you will be smiling, there is one disagreement with your teachings that I will respectfully register. It is clearer to me than ever that there are all sorts of continuities which leave their imprints on our bodies, memories and habits, including forces that form us as we grow, from within and around, but also circumstances that begin their sculpting before we’re even born.
Both Dada and I are still the boys lost in Howrah, no matter what else we are. I will always be the brother whose birth sealed the loss of my siblings’ father. From earliest childhood, I have been encouraged to look away from this fact; Dada is unable to see anything but. So many other habits flow from these.
That is my view, Great One. One question I’m travelling to ask is — are new habits possible for us? Is history nothing but entrapment?
Meet back here in just under a fortnight?