12

Docherty’s Bengal Crisis
1961

After his ordination in 1960, Frank Docherty was sent by the Order to teach in its school in Calcutta, Bengal.

The India he entered did not seem to be the India of Gandhi. Leaving the airport, he passed slums which, in their crowded and chaotic variegations of material, were almost too much for the eye and the conscience to take account of. These masses would not, however, be the subject of Father Docherty’s educative endeavours. The school he was to join sat in ordered grounds; stuccoed classrooms suggested the Spanish Jesuit St Francis Xavier’s ambition to bring Indians to Christ in the sixteenth century. Nearby was the dusty vista of the Maidan, and in the hazy distance the wedding-cake exuberance of the Queen Victoria Memorial glimmered like a fevered dream of Empire.

The children who attended the Divine Charity campus were the well-scrubbed and handsomely fed offspring of wealthy Hindus, Muslims and urbane Zoroastrians, descendants of Persians, as well as some Goan Catholics of Portuguese–Indian origins. The parents of these boys wanted their sons to straddle cultures and religions with composure and worldliness, and exposing them to Catholic priests helped with that. The priests argued that they were imbuing humane principles into India’s future leaders, which would be itself an expansion of Western Christendom in one way or another.

Docherty was given the task of teaching English and history to the boys in the junior years of the high school. He would need to get older before he found himself teaching the senior forms. He felt a fraud, and had none of the customary confidence that his ordination had empowered him to instruct children wisely. As well, he soon began to feel that these privileged Hindu and Muslim boys were the ones in India who needed him least. He thought of the inhabitants of the shanty towns as the true Indians, the true target for an Order like his, and felt these places were where Christ would have located himself.

He tried to resist the inherent pride of such suppositions, and of the idea that he had some spectacular, non-institutional role to play as a sort of theological guerrilla. But he had read of priests who worked in squalid factories in Belgium, labouring beside people in their own grim environment, bearing witness to their industrial degradation when no one else did. And he had read of that extraordinary French legionnaire who became a Benedictine – Charles de Foucauld. As a monk, de Foucauld had travelled with the Tauregs of Algeria on the same principle as the priests of Belgium had toiled. There was something in Docherty that was attracted to such absolutes and humilities, that was embarrassed by the comfort of his life. Was it the hidden, proud zealot in him, or was it a true impulse?

Earnest young Father Docherty studied Hindu culture, made a pilgrimage to the house of Rabindranath Tagore, and found that his own romanticism, as well as his hopes for humanity, were drawn to Gandhi.

‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high / Where knowledge is free,’ wrote Tagore, ‘… Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’

As for Gandhi, even Indian priests in the Calcutta school would make ironic comments about his overstatements and the contradictions of his life. The line ‘It took a lot of money to keep Gandhi living in poverty’ was often quoted. They did not understand that Gandhi was a prophet, and thus like Christ he spoke with prophetic hyperbole. But Gandhi, and a disciple of the fabled Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – whose transcendental meditation centre Docherty came eventually to attend weekly – were helpful not only in suggesting to him methods of protest without violence, but also in allowing him to maintain peace with his own sexuality. For many in the West transcendental meditation was a fad. For Docherty, it had the coloration of a deeper necessity.

The Hindu government of West Bengal was kind enough to consider Christmas the basis for a school break, so in December the school emptied and the Indian priests of the Order went back to their home cities. The corridors resonated in the unpeopled school in a way that made you wonder if they would ever take on life again.

This period coincided with a rare state of mind and soul for Docherty – the dark night of which he had been warned about but barely experienced before. He felt an aridity, a sense of being blighted, and with it there set in the most severe spate of primal sexual temptation he had ever suffered. Wrestling with serpents in his own desert, he was too distracted to avail himself of an invitation to a Catholic boys’ home on Christmas Day. He could barely sit through the radio news with the priests who were left in the house.

This paroxysm of want was so intense that it seemed to Docherty it could only be solved by death or sex itself – he felt he had no intermediate stratagems. On what was, by the standards of Calcutta, a windy night, he took a bus from Park Street through the centre of town to the north of the city. He had chosen to wear a hooded jacket, khaki pants and casual shoes. He left the bus near the Marble Palace and went walking.

Soon, such a ridiculously small way from his college and Order’s house that he could have walked there, except for his fear of perhaps being identified while prowling, he reached the streets of Sonagachi, where women displayed themselves in almost continuous ranks along the facade of dwellings, brothels and small shops. Some of them were unbearably beautiful and could be had for a price in rupees that even he could afford many times over. But he was so deeply ashamed to be even thinking of trading for flesh in the street, it was as if he lacked the language or valour to negotiate the exchange – one for which he had never been trained or even contemplated making.

A young Indian man in a cricket sweater and smelling of cloves came up beside him, a healthy face half-glimpsed, hair sleeked but not flashy. The man spoke to him tenderly, in good English. ‘I can see,’ said the silken voice, ‘that sir has a natural delicacy. Perhaps the gentleman would permit me to find him what he requires.’

‘I don’t need help,’ said Docherty, his face raging with heat. He felt nearly cured of his concupiscence.

‘Sir, forgive me if I seem to intrude. But I own an establishment. I have no desire to grasp any supplementary stipend from the sahib. Nor would you be prevented in leaving should you not be suited.’

To get away from him, Docherty turned a corner, passing a blur of young Indian womanhood, girls from the country – some, it was said, sold to brothel-keepers by their parents. In this sea of prostitutes he felt revulsion and need in equal and towering proportions. He found he had not escaped the young man, and what was shameful was that he did want this man to present him with what his blood considered requisite, and to extract a price before or after the improbable transaction.

The man indicated a door. ‘If you please, sir,’ and he turned to face Docherty, looking in his Oxbridge sweater and scarf for all the world like an Indian provincial cricketer. I can follow him, Docherty thought. He has sufficient subtlety.

Up a staircase with orange walls a bulb shone on the first landing, and beyond that was a curtain, which the young cricketer parted, letting Docherty into a corridor. The smell was of incense, the sounds utterly normal, nothing exotic, dishes clanging from a kitchen, water running. Their banality did not calm the beast that roiled in his belly.

The young man gestured Docherty into a claustrophobic room with garish yellow walls and unframed pictures of Tantric copulation between Indian lovers. Immediately he felt chaste again. He could escape when the man was gone, bounce down the stairs, walk past those colonnades of used women, catch the bus at the Marble Palace and locate himself in the busload of humans making boring, unwracked journeys.

But the man was back, his hand on the shoulder of a slight figure he pushed forward. Docherty avoided looking at her for some time, but he now knew that sex must be done. When he did look, she was not a woman. She was a thin country girl, a flimsy child even by the standards of Bengal or Rajasthan. The circle of vermilion on her forehead was like an admission of powerlessness, a surrender to God. Her eyes were pretty, her jaw thrust forward prognathously. She was perhaps twelve.

The man had mistakenly read Docherty’s hesitancy as a desire for a child rather than a woman. His stomach heaved.

‘My God,’ he managed to say. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Tell the sahib your name!’ said the young man.

‘Rahini,’ the child said in a reedy voice.

‘Excuse me,’ said Docherty and, turning, he was aware as never before of his impotence in the greater world in the face of sex. Here, his priesthood and his lust were hollow boasts against reality. He rushed down the orange stairwell into the street and set out south. The Marble Palace swam towards him. On the pavement outside it he vomited as people looked at him with a level of suspicion that the equivalent illness in an Indian would probably not have evoked in them.

That night he tore release out of his body. Willing to die in the midst of the spasms, the dark paroxysm, he found it joyless and stupefying. A young girl lived in slavery in Sonagachi. She had no part in his fantasy, but now his fleeing her seemed unforgiveable. Priests could bind and loose, absolve and consecrate, and pontiffs could pontificate, but throughout all such earnestness and posturing Rahini was one of thousands of children alone in Sonagachi.

He did not say Mass the next day, and sought absolution for his range of vices, lust the least of them, from a Jesuit in the church near Xavier College. In the confessional, the priest said, ‘I have found Hindu meditation a great source of comfort. You should not be ashamed to look at its methods. Meditation is a human thing as well as a divine.’

He was lenient, as Docherty knew he would be. ‘I don’t think one lapse will bring down divine judgement,’ he said in a faint Lancastrian accent. There were many good men amongst the Jesuit brethren, and many sound jurists of morality. They were no doubt themselves flawed, self-chastened men, who, because of their own temptations, were wiser than their more rigorous, callow brethren. Docherty recalled Father Holland.

‘This was not one lapse,’ said Docherty. ‘This was an act of nihilism. It was full of hate and denial. It was a display of the most horrible despair. I’m terrified it will happen again.’

The Jesuit priest said, ‘Humans are driven to such emptiness.’

‘Walking away from the brothel was itself a crime,’ said Docherty. ‘I was offered a girl of, at best, twelve years. What will meditation, or my absolution, do for her?’

Yet Docherty would always believe afterwards that transcendental meditation had saved him, and had allowed him to become something like a mature priest. The classes he undertook were taught by the middle-aged Guru Surabhi in an upstairs room on Diamond Harbour Road. He began them with his critical faculties in place, but found little to criticise. TM was induced by the use of mantras, phrases expressing basic belief. Docherty found them useful, but not prescriptive. He used the Hebrew ‘I Am Who Am’ (‘Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh’) as frequently as he used the Indian ‘Om Namah Shivaya’, the meditation on and submission to the female principle of the universe. He was sceptical of the so-called Maharishi Effect, the belief that if one per cent of humanity practised meditation, there would be a resultant rise in the contentment of the entire species. That would remain to him a pleasant fable.

He took to meditating twice a day while sitting in his room in the priests’ house. The exercise gave him not only a sense of healing, but a space in which he felt the emotional sinews of his seminarian boyhood were stretched to mature form. Through meditation he confronted the true scale of desire; and yet, through contemplating some of Surabhi’s remarks, he began also to consider the essential unity of the world. This was no abstract idea to him. It related to how he should accept the push–pull within himself, his inner tides of hungers and recognitions. To dwell on the unity of the world and of the human entity, to experience it, or to consent to feel it as a potent essence within oneself was a liberation for a priest needing to be reconciled to himself, to what he was, the usual stray package of seemingly contradictory impulses.

For the Christian orthodoxy in which he had been raised claimed that the world did not possess unity, but was driven by dualities. God and the Devil were the poles of the earth-bound creature, and on top lay the poles of the flesh and the spirit. It was axiomatic that the spirit had to overcome the flesh to avoid damnation and chaos. The soul had to dominate the base meat of human existence as Europe had dominated the African darkness. That was a dangerous and destructive division to introduce into the one planet and, above all, into the one human being. It came to him gradually that he could not continue as a priest unless he jettisoned such beliefs, and became a sort of heretic. Unless the spirit somehow welcomed the flesh in as a brother, neither could happily survive. The crucial experience that had sent him to the guru on the recommendation of the solemn old Jesuit priest seemed to prove this to him.

He remembered reading one of the Desert Fathers, an Egyptian hermit of early Christianity, who had recommended a mental exercise: when attracted to a woman, or by the thought of her, one was to imagine lying with her after death, all her beauty putrefied and stinking. The body wanted her, that was the argument, but the spirit had the power to abstract her and condemn her to death. At the time, these legends had been codified – a debate still flourished about whether women possessed a soul in the same sense as men, and that argument would continue well into the Middle Ages.

But an instinct, developed through meditation, told Docherty, and reason told him even more pointedly, that he could not ‘conquer the flesh’; that to represent the body as a mere lump of questing flesh reduced those who were desired – women themselves – to mere lumps of yearned-for flesh and challenged the dignity of half the human species. He could not, as St Kevin of Glendalough had, throw women whose presence tempted him off high geographic points, and it was not his duty to imagine them putrefied. He must accept both the conditions of his life, and its coexistence with a world of beautiful and engaging women, many of whom he could have loved.

Thus meditation was for Docherty the great equaliser of body and spirit, and the great appeaser of elements. As a seminarian he had not been taught how to meditate, but simply told to do it. Now, exercises the downtown guru gave him, and even the incantation of the transcendental mantras, prepared his soul for the great totality – good and bad – and the coexistence of parallel splendours and demons. Sometimes in meditation he simply sat with Christ and the ‘Mother Principle’, Mary. Around these avatars, too, the tensions of desire flickered, for they were also human, appeased and validated and imbued – he simply accepted this – with divine force.

He did not advertise his interest in Hindu meditation, nor did he conceal it, and the people most amused were the few Indian priests of the Order, who nicknamed him Dox, short for ‘heterodox’, and made well-meaning but sceptical jokes about him as a levitating swami. The English deputy headmaster – the headmaster himself being Irish – came to refer to him as the Guru.

His confession with the Jesuit priest brought him not only to meditation but also to the office of Dr Fatima Deriaya. The priest had astonished him that day by saying, ‘There is a woman named Dr Fatima Deriaya. A Muslim. She negotiates with brothel-keepers and buys girls’ freedom. Perhaps you could discuss your concerns with her.’

‘I would have to tell her that …’

‘Exactly. You’d have to confess the experience of your weakness. As a Christian priest to a Muslim woman. Perhaps that is adequate penance.’

Dr Fatima Deriaya was a middle-aged, gentle woman with large, lively features and a persuasive, ironic delivery that reminded Docherty a little of his own mother. At their first meeting in her office, he managed to tell her how he had met Rahini. He gave Dr Deriaya the street and building to which the man had taken him, and asked Dr Deriaya whether her NGO could liberate Rahini. He realised, he told Dr Deriaya, that one liberation barely touched that huge bowl of ignominy. He gave her all the money he had accumulated over two years.

‘Can you afford that, young man?’ she said, unshocked by his confession, tolerant.

She bought out Rahini for what she considered an exorbitant price, and the brothel-keeper joyously held the money and declared, ‘For this I can buy two new girls.’

In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.

After three years, the deputy headmaster and headmaster’s reports on Docherty were so glowing that the Order decided to bring him home to Australia and into full-time university studies, though these would be interspersed with holding parish retreats and filling in for diocesan clergy in local churches.

He was uneasy to go, to exchange the scale of India for the smaller horizons of suburban Australian life, and had he been a man who had not taken vows to his Order and its superiors to obey their reasonable decisions, he might have chosen to stay. But he was no more free to remain than a soldier with transfer orders. So he went home.