Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

—JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

The next day, I went to trial. My father had managed to gather some seventy-six members of our extended family. They milled in the courtyard as if it were a festival day, sharing gossip—not least about the chain of events that had brought them there. They crowded into the large sitting room of Chacha-ji’s home, with the overflow spilling out onto the front porch. My aunts had the honor of the few chairs, but most people sat jammed together on the floor.

I sat on a daybed at one end of the room, facing the crowd. I had no idea what I could say that might convince them; I only knew that no one was eager to be convinced. Most of the faces were familiar to me in some degree. My father had arranged for carloads to come from our home village of Vishnupur Titirah, a couple of hours away, and other relatives scattered around Patna had been recruited.

It occured to me, looking back, that this was a much smaller crowd than had come to witness my thread ceremony, and certain faces—those elders who were most respected—were conspicuously absent. I don’t doubt that my father was ashamed of what I had done and anxious to limit the damage. If the whole sorry affair could be concluded quickly—if I failed to make my case to the satisfaction of the crowd and were defeated here today, if I backed down and gave up this regrettable fixation with becoming a monk—then it might also be quickly forgotten. Or if remembered, then as a passing phase of a commendably thoughtful and independent-minded child. One day this would be just another colorful story from my youth. And in his wisdom my father had arranged matters in such a way that a ten-year-old boy was both granted a sense of agency and obliged to account for himself as an adult member of his community.

For two hours they grilled me. They took turns. They took tea breaks, then came back refreshed, ready for more. The questions began simply enough, without hasty antagonism. Why had I run away from school? What had provoked me?

I spoke carefully. I told them I had no complaint against anyone. No one at school, or anywhere else, had mistreated me. Leaving was my own decision, made freely and not forced by external events.

There were a few taunts—“Maybe you would rather play than go to school? Maybe you can’t be bothered to study?”—but I wasn’t ruffled. That was how they talked to kids normally. Children were given a hard time to keep them on track. Everyone knew that I was one of the top students.

Then to the heart of the matter: “Why do you want to go back to Rajgir?”

“Why do you want to become a monk? What does that mean?”

Language faltered. Whatever it was I had found in Rajgir, the experience didn’t come packaged with a lot of words. I couldn’t begin to tell them what it was like, and in any case that wasn’t what they were asking. What they were asking, really, was whether I understood the outrageous price that was attached to what I wanted, and that the burden of that cost would not be mine alone, but would be shared by the whole family.

“Nobody is saying you should not be a spiritual person. But why all-or-nothing? Full-time religion is what people do when they have no education, no prospects, no other way to survive.”

“What is this monk business but escaping from your responsibilities?”

“Who will marry your sisters if their brother has shamed the family like this? Did you think that this is just about you?”

“Who would want a crazy fakir for a brother-in-law? Because if you do this to your family, for sure you are crazy!”

“Will you go begging? You, with your father in the finance ministry?”

So many of the questions were rhetorical and no one was waiting for an answer before firing the next shot, but the answer to that one came instantly. “There’s no harm in begging,” I said. “Buddha came from a royal family and he begged.” The words seemed to come from someplace outside of me. I didn’t know the story of Buddha’s life. Nor had I ever seen Nabatame begging.

Then the mocking began in earnest. “You don’t need to beg. We can sell that Buddha statue of yours! It must be pure gold, no?” There are ways to sting a child that only a feisty auntie knows. “Why don’t you give me your yellow bag? It’s perfect for shopping for vegetables!” At any other time, she would have riled me, as she often did, but in that moment I was impervious. Nothing any actor in this drama said could shake my calm.

I saw my mother standing still for a brief moment at the back of the room. She hadn’t sat down. Even in my uncle’s home, she was in some sense the host today and people had to be made comfortable. But the exchange about begging had halted her and the pain written on her face mirrored an image that was buried in my memory.

During the several days of celebration and ritual at my thread ceremony, there was one morning when we had to go out begging. My cousin Apoorva, Chacha-ji’s son, had his initiation at the same time as mine, and we did the whole business together. Our heads were shaved, we were wrapped in the yellow cloth of a sannyasi, given a bag to carry, and sent out into the village to beg from each house. But first we had to beg from our mothers, seated with the aunties in the drawing room. Everyone was dressed in their party best, all shimmering silk and jewelry. When I held out my hand and asked for alms, “Ma, bhiksham dehi,” my mother surprised me by bursting into tears. This wasn’t in the script. As if it were contagious, my aunts wiped their eyes and sniffled sympathetically. I wanted to say that it was okay, we were just pretending, but surely she knew that. How do you console someone who’s hurting for no reason? “I won’t be like this forever, Ma,” I told her. But then with the party and the presents—new roller skates!—and the physically exhausting exercise of bending down a few hundred times to touch my elders’ feet, I had forgotten that moment.

And now it was as if some terrible mistake had been made. Somewhere in the universe wires were crossed and shorted out. Because the whole point of the ritual of a small boy going out begging as an ascetic was that it was over and done with. That stage of life was complete and would not need to be repeated.

The arguments kept circling back to the dark consequences of abandoning my education. I would end up shining shoes or cleaning toilets, they warned. I would lose everyone’s respect. “I don’t want people’s respect,” I insisted. “I’m not doing this to gain respect.”

Education was the true religion in my family, and quitting school the unforgivable sin. Whether they were devout Hindus or atheists devoted to the ideal of a secular India, every member of my family shared an unshakeable faith in the transformative power of education. We belonged to the Bhumihar class of Brahmins who traditionally were not priests but landowners, wealthy farmers who didn’t need to get their own hands dirty and likewise didn’t need education to get ahead. But somehow my family had become fervent converts.

Though my father’s parents had no formal education, they made sure that every one of their children, including the five girls, was well educated; and they supported anyone in the village who wanted to study but couldn’t afford it. We all knew the story of the girl who came running into my grandfather’s house because her parents wanted to take her out of school to marry her off, and how he stood there on the porch in his white dhoti-kurta, brandishing his bamboo lathi and yelling at the crowd, “She is my daughter now! If you dare to come after her, I will break your leg!” She not only got to finish school but went to college as well. My father continued the tradition and, though his job took him all over the country, there was always someone from the village living with us while they attended college, and many more whose tuition he paid.

My mother’s family was no less committed to the cause. Her mother was the first in her own village to get a college education, then came home and started the first girls’ school. A portion of my summers were spent in that school, because too much vacation was not a good thing. We sat on jute sacks, writing out problems on graphite slates with lumps of limestone for chalk, but the mood was as lively, as warm and supportive, as the facilities were basic.

They all credited education for lifting people out of poverty, but my family didn’t come from poverty. We inherited the benefits of ancient feudal power structures, and education had the salutary effect of opening minds and turning that world upside down. One of my mother’s uncles was a leader of the labor movement and the Socialist Party; another was the preeminent Indian historian of his generation, with a hundred-some books to his name, and countless academic honors. His wife was the principal of the teachers’ training college in Patna. My father’s father had walked with Gandhi when he came to Bihar to unite the indigo workers, and his young wife—my grandmother—had struggled to keep up. “That guy could walk fast!” she marveled. His cousin, Baikuntha Shukla, was a martyred hero of the independence movement, hanged by the British at the age of twenty-eight—but before that he was a schoolteacher.

So when my relatives challenged me—“Why be a monk when you could be a sahib, a politician, a professor? Why this monk-punk nonsense when you could be respected and make a difference in the world?”—it was not blue-sky, dream-big advice to a child. There were genuine, real-life role models who set exceedingly high but not unreal expectations. And by quitting school I was throwing away every gift I had inherited.

Trouble came from another quarter as well. As the eldest—indeed, only—son of a Brahmin family, I had certain responsibilities. There were rituals that it would be my duty to perform on my parents’ death, and who knows what dire metaphysical consequences would follow if I neglected them. Could a Buddhist monk do what was needed in this realm? Beyond the ritual responsibilities, there was an even greater obligation at stake, one so fundamental to a son’s role that it worried even the least devout family members. Even the atheists had a stake in this one. “If you become a Buddhist monk, can you still marry and have children?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.” It wasn’t something I had ever thought about, but I could feel which way the current was pulling and I was swimming in the opposite direction.

Chacha-ji jumped in. “Why? Even Buddha was married. He had a son.”

Once again my answer came from nowhere, instantly, “Yeah, but Buddha left his wife. Who will take care of my wife?” Before I could wonder what I was talking about, Chacha-ji answered without hesitation.

“I will.”

I looked at my father across the room, his face frozen in an expression of unutterable sadness. And then the nightmare receded and I felt a strange sense of calm come over me. I was talking, but the words were unfamiliar. I was telling them that our relationship as family was temporary, however close we felt. The conditions that had brought us together would dissolve, and others would arise in their place. There was nothing about this particular constellation of relationships, whether father-son or husband-wife, that would endure forever. We would all die, and nothing we did to help one another could prevent that. Rather than put my faith in such illusory relationships, I had decided to devote myself to agama: spiritual studies, not academics. I was aiming for bodhi—enlightenment—and that was the only work that mattered to me. Everything else was illusion.

It was my grandmother who came to my rescue. Mama, as we called her, had been sitting in the corner, watching, saying nothing. She stood up abruptly, brushed her hands on her sari as if concluding some small task, and announced to the room, “It’s over now! Finished! You can all go home!”

She came to me and said quietly, “Let’s go eat.” I followed her out to the kitchen. Chacha-ji’s wife fixed us each a plate and sat down with us, watching me closely.

“You know, something happened out there. That wasn’t the Khilari I know so well. You were moving your hands as if…” She groped for the words. “You were consoling us.” My grandmother said nothing, just nodded.

My father stuck his head in the doorway. “Are you talking sense into him?”

Mama’s eyes flashed with disdain. “What do you mean? Weren’t you listening to him? He’s the one talking sense.”

At least I had one ally. My grandmother’s protection was a lifeline at a time when I had never felt more vulnerable. She could be fierce, I knew well, but not in the same manner as my mother and aunts and great-aunts, who each in their way girded themselves with authoritarian armor to meet the challenges of being modern women in India. No, Mama’s power seemed elemental, anciently rooted, and wildly independent. When she sat with the other old women, tattooed and smoking their hookah or bidis, the real affairs of the village were settled. Her pronouncements could be scathing, delivered with the confidence of an oracle, then sealed in calm when she visited with Bhu Devi’s earthen lump in the temple by the well each morning. She was never too dignified to entice me into dancing silly dances or to make me laugh by pulling faces, all wrinkles and no teeth. She gave the sweetest toothless kisses.

We stayed the night in Muzaffarpur, and the next morning I got up before dawn, as I had done every day at the temple. I went to the kitchen and got chai and two biscuits to bring to Mama. That was our ritual during summers in the village. She would feed the cows in the yard before she ate a bite herself, and the birds too had to be fed first. She would break the first biscuit into crumbs and call to the crows in their own language to come eat. There were no cows to feed at my uncle’s house. It was more city than village here, and the birds in that snake-infested garden hadn’t learned Mama’s drill, but she put the crumbs out anyway. “Always remember to offer,” she reminded me.