Dinakar — egotistical, but with a true, if acquired, sensitivity — is of a type that goes far back in Anantha Murthy's fiction, as does the portrayal of unconflicted characters such as Sitamma, who says with intuitive wisdom, ‘The whole country thinks this [Dinakar] has grown into a very intelligent man, but this man doesn't even know who is his mother, who is his father, which is his town, so perhaps he wants to believe that God himself is his mother and father and that is why he wears these kind of clothes and goes wandering here and there.’ Perceiving Dinakar as rootless and divided, she teasingly reduces his pilgrim's austerities to the wanderings of a little ghost, a little boy in search of home.
∗
‘Dinakar, reading from an English translation of Bardo Thodol, listening on his Walkman to the chanting of Tibetan lamas, tried to relate his present state of mind to the bardo state described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.’
‘Shastri began to pray,’ “O God, save me from these tormenting doubts which make me like a ghost in limbo.”’
Both Dinakar and Shastri (in common with the Acharya) have been caught in a ghostly transitional limbo, like the ‘bardo’ or ‘between-state’ of Tibetan tradition. The ‘bardo of becoming,’ for example, connects death and rebirth. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says:
‘…the Bardo or intermediate state … lasts right up until the moment we take on a new birth … the bardos … are periods of deep uncertainty … the seeds of all our habitual tendencies are activated and reawakened.
…The shifting and precarious nature of the bardo of becoming can also be the source of many opportunities for liberation …’
‘Bardo’ is ‘equivalent to the Sanskrit term antarabhava,’ and ‘bhava’ itself means rebirth (in the Buddhist ‘twelve links,’ that is, the cycles of death and rebirth).
‘Bhava’ is also for Anantha Murthy a shortened form of ‘bhavavali,’ the Jain cycle of death and rebirth — which, unless escaped, is an endless chain of becomings. Although such cycles are also central to Hindu belief, the orientation in Bhava is closer to the somewhat existentialist Jain or Buddhist world-view.
∗
Dinakar, typically, uses his intellect in trying to comprehend what is happening to him. He thinks of himself in terms of ‘bardo,’ in terms of ‘bhava,’ and the nuances of his confusion are nicely displayed in his letters to women — particularly the long, intense outpouring to Mahamata which forms one of the centres of the novel, and in which we get the most sustained and unguarded view of Dinakar. Mahamata has become a holy woman; she does not even recognize Dinakar when he comes to her ashram for darshan; he expects that she will never even see his letter: so he writes as if to a mother/divinity/guru, or as if to a confessor, with the openness and vulnerability one would expect in such a privileged, protected context. Here (and in the other letters as well) he uses ‘bhava’ to mean ‘worldly existence’ and ‘becoming’ interchangeably — even simultaneously.
Unlike Dinakar, Shastri has no such conceptual framework; he lives the nightmare directly, uncomprehendingly — for him the demons, ghosts, burning red eyes, possession by something evil, have all been real. He is like a spirit in limbo, in a between-life-and-death bardo meant to be a transitional phase, but in which the spirit can ‘get stuck,’ or emerge reborn as a ‘hungry ghost.’ Terrors of just this sort seem to haunt Shastri. And for more than one reason. He feels condemned to limbo not only because he committed murder, but because in murdering Saroja he may have murdered his own son, the very one who must perform the funeral rites in order to transform him from ghost (preta) to ancestor (pitr).
For Dinakar and Shastri (as for the Acharya, who is perhaps Anantha Murthy's quintessential man-in-transition) the prospect of an endless state of limbo seems unbearable. Yet it is as if we meet Dinakar and Shastri at the point where we take leave of the Acharya. They are going in different directions, shedding different skins; each, in some way, moving towards what the other must leave behind.
The Acharya began as an idealized type with, in effect, a received identity, an inherited dharma with which he feels fully identified; by the end of Samskara, he is becoming a self-conscious individual. He has little choice, given that — as he says of sleeping with Chandri—‘That act gouged me out of my past world.’ With his new ‘awareness that I turned over suddenly, unbidden,’ he cannot go back to his old identity; therefore any impending rebirth must involve individuation and alienation. Shastri and Dinakar, on the other hand, have been alienated for years. They cannot aspire to the sort of innocence that characterizes Sitamma (or the Acharya in his ‘past world’), but they would like to achieve a more balanced state, to incorporate something of the serenity that comes from a secure, unconflicted sense of being. They would like to ‘turn over’ (Dinakar uses the same word as did the Acharya).
∗
Dinakar and Shastri receive solace — and glimpses of a possible source of transformation — through literal or symbolic participation in a kind of life which calms their demons. This is why Shastri plays the role of puranik, why Dinakar takes the Ayyappa vow, why he feels so peaceful in Sitamma's presence, watching her lay the rangoli, watching her cook … For Dinakar, Sitamma's unquestioning acceptance of herself and her life are magical. As her son Narayan Tantri says, for her ‘there will be no rebirth. She lives in this bhava without being of it.’
∗
The solace available through experiences of timeless renewal, or through exposure to a peaceful, orderly life, is conveyed not only thematically but in the very language of Bhava. A lyrical intensity occurs in moments of transcendence, when the ego-bound, socially-defined self is immersed in something larger:
‘What for thousands of years took form on the walls of temples and in the verandas of poor people's cottages, no matter how poor, had begun to manifest this morning on the veranda swept with cow-dung. A vine where one was necessary, and a leaf on the vine; for every leaf a flower, and a swastika to guard it all, and then peacocks, and then — look — there was Lord Ganesha, and even his mouse to ride on.’
‘Nine triangles joining, one inside the other, creating an orbit which becomes a circle in turn becoming a chakra, the chakra becoming a petalled flower, the flower a form manifested within a square opened out to the four directions, the whole figure wombing in itself the creative energy of earth and sky.’
‘First, as if from the depths of a cave, one, one, or two, two, sprouts of melody, and now the clear sound of a bell emerging, and then a bass melody oooooo, and then jingling as if from belled anklets. All melody as if made from itself inside itself. As if going deeper and deeper down inside, melody wandering and searching the depth of the depths. Even as everything ended, again a melody arising from a deeper side of the kundalini. Did the melody find what it sought? As if saying look, look, the wonderment of small, small bells. Was it being lost, or drowning in ecstasy?’
‘In the sky, the sun's love-play was over and the moon's grace appeared. While the sky seemed serene and peaceful, frothing waves moved over the sea, like thousands of white horses rushing forward in battle. The waves wet the feet of the two friends.’