Looking inward, growing outward

Interleaves is not merely a story of courage, or of change, or overcoming pain and fear. It is the story of acceptance, of readiness to be, says SANDHYA RAO, on a book that is like a breath of fresh air in our troubled times.

EVEN in these troubled, troubling times, we are embraced by the extraordinary. On a cool, clear morning in Bangalore recently, I had the extraordinary good fortune of meeting Lata Mani. It was an unforgettable experience.

Who is Lata Mani? She is a historian, a poet; she taught at the University of California in Davis. Readers of this newspaper may remember seeing her byline in these pages. Some eight years ago, she happened to be in Mumbai during the tragic riots following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Like many, she was outraged. When she returned to the U.S., she decided she had to do something about it

She was, she says, "a rationalist, a feminist, a leftist", and that January morning in 1993, as she drove to work with a friend, she was filled with rage against god. Some six police patrol cars came into view, their red lights flashing, "like usually happens if there is an accident." Lata eased the car into another lane.

Suddenly, a Pepsi truck they had noticed in the far distance, was looming down on them. At that time they didn't know it was going at 160 kmph. "It's going to hit us!" . . . "I know," Lata remembers saying, "but there's nothing I can do."

The impact was terrific. It's not our time to die, Lata remembers thinking. The next few moments seemed to stretch forever as she heard the glass shatter, shard by shard, and felt each twist and roll and turn. Eventually the car lurched to a halt beside a chainlink fence.

"The next thought was from the movies," recalls Lata. That they should get clear before the petrol tank burst into flames. And then, hospital.

Much later she found out that the Pepsi truck had been stolen by a very sick young man; he was unemployed, depressed and determined to end his life on the freeway. Lata's car was the first of six vehicles he hit. She took the brunt of his despair.

Everybody else who was injured was out of hospital in three or four months. Lata sustained a closed-head injury and today, eight years later, she has still not recovered fully. Although this is impossible to tell at one meeting, her life has changed irrevocably. Her career is gone, and many of her friends have disappeared:

"This transformation, this collision and its aftermath, has brought so much change, so much letting go. I sometimes feel I have stood at the edge of a pier and watched many people in my life set sail in a direction away from me. And I have lain, the mind a blur, barely functioning, thought so pared down by the damage to the brain that if I had ten thoughts in fifteen minutes, it would have been an unusually hectic quarter of an hour." (p.8)

With these words, Lata Mani begins the first chapter, after the introduction, of her just-released book, Interleaves: Ruminations on Illness and Spiritual Life. She speaks the words in the audio version, available on CD. Both these projects are self-produced.

Why has Lata Mani written the book, and then gone to the trouble of producing audio tapes as well? "It was an inner prompting," she says. And the words "sang themselves". The time of her recovery, especially the first four or five years, was a period of intense physical pain. She had plumbed the depths of the ocean . . . and then, through amazing grace, was awakened to the divine and lifted high above the waters. Lata wanted to share with others this inner universe she had inhabited.

The injury has taken a terrible toll: she cannot read, nor do mathematics nor engage in sustained, continuous narrative. "My cognition is entirely through my hearing," Lata explains. That is why the need to do audio tapes in which she speaks her experience. The passages in the book appear as they flowed, in shorter or longer bursts, each moment of inspiration transformed into a chapter. Friends transcribed and typed out the material. Juxtaposed appropriately, the pieces form a taut, compelling stream of thoughts and observations that tell their own story.

The book is in two parts: "The Journey" and "Contemplations". The first part takes the reader through illness. It is simple and profoundly moving. The second are Lata's reflections on the qualities - silence, courage, acceptance, concentration, faith, surrender and renunciation - contextualised by her experiences, that took her on the path to god. The first CD covers "The Journey". The second covers "Contemplations", and is subtitled"Qualities for living fully".

"Interleaves," Lata writes, "explores my mind's disintegration as the result of brain injury, and my baptism of fire into a new status as a disabled person. Like others who have faced catastrophic health crises, I learned more than I would have cared to, about the social construction of illness." For the longest time, people said she did not look ill, and she believed them:

"But the truth is, when I looked down at my body, it wasn't a body I could easily recognise, and when I now look at the one photograph I allowed to be taken so I could travel to a healer in Germany, I can see how absurd such an insistence was. My face is swollen, eyes crossed, neck thickened and shortened. I look extremely ill. I wonder how the German embassy could have blithely given me a visa for travel to that fortress in Europe. So eager is the frightened mind to turn away from the devastation in a life caused by illness, death, sorrow, parting, that it can even remake the face that stands before it and the body that lies in front of it. Trying to speak with others about aspects of this experience is really like yelling 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. Everyone gets up and flees."

Lata has 400 hours of tape into which she spoke. Growing up like any privileged, urban Indian child, she had had only a superficial relationship with religion. Through the period of her recovery, however, she felt the presence of god, she says, and knew, instinctively, that it was Kali, it was Durga . . . Devi Amma, as she calls her. Her meditation teacher, who worked closely and givingly with her, told Lata that what she was experiencing was "spontaneous meditation". Through prayer and song and the presence of saints, Lata was led into an exalted state of being. She was, she says, awakened to god.

But . . . how did it actually happen? She had no choice, Lata says, and adds she was given the courage to be open to the experience. When you read what she says about courage, you begin to understand how:

"It has taken far more courage, and been much more beneficial, for me to accept the disappointment and grief at the losses and changes in my life than to pretend that I could prevail undaunted. For the truth is that, in entering this kind of self- analysis, in committing to these practices of mercy and compassion toward my own self, I have become unafraid of my reactions and, to that extent, have freed myself from fear." (p. 84)

Yet, Lata Mani's is a not simply a story of courage. Nor of change. Or of overcoming pain and fear. Or finding god. It is the story of acceptance. Of readiness to be. To experience. And she communicates this with such felicity and grace, in turn inviting the reader/listener to go deeper within their own experiences. She writes:

"In the modern city, it sometimes feels as though sound is the medium in which we live. Sound of traffic. Sound of laughter. Sound of televisions, stereos, car alarms, loudspeakers, buses, children playing, people talking and of course, the occasional cat meowing, dog barking, and birdsong. The air is so polluted with carbon monoxide and other noxious gases. It seems that sound, not air, is the medium of our existence. For we are, of course, much more aware of sound striking our eardrums and issuing from our vocal chords, than of the breath entering our nostrils in a circular perambulation of our bodies.

"The sound of silence becoming is something quite different. It is sound arising like a tiny bubble from the depths of the ocean bed, taking exquisite shape as it travels across the threshold into that which we recognise as a note, a word, as sound. It is silence itself that determines when this transmutation of itself must occur. It is silence itself that arrives as sound . . ." (p. 78)

Interleaves leads the reader/listener into a still yet stirring engagement with oneself through every word. In a climate today of great defensiveness about one's relationship to one's religion, culture and ethos, Lata Mani's book comes as a breath of fresh air. It helps clear the cobwebs in one's mind through honest exploration and direct address. It is a book for our age, and our time, and yes, certainly also for our children. Read aloud, especially. In the group to whom I read aloud passage after passage of Interleaves was a child who listened, intently. That is because the truth of feeling transcended words and meanings.

As Lata says, so eloquently, "Humans are hungry for narrative. We have to be always doing something, going somewhere." You don't have to, really. But it's not easy to give up this old, familiar framework. When Lata says, "I understood that god is an experience. My instruction was just to be present," you take the first step forward.

All I ask, therefore, is: read Interleaves. Listen to the CD. Simply: be present.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Culture shock and culture wars:the search for
           identity
Next     : The view from the bottom