Of Men And Motorcycles

I finally gave up on ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.’ I think that, at least in my case, the author (Robert M. Pirsig) achieved his probable objective – he proved that he’s smarter than the reader. This is, in my opinion, a questionable objective to harbor when one is a recovering schizophrenic, as Pirsig claims to be. It seems to me that he’s merely hoping to drive home to the reader just how very SANE he has now become.

Maybe nobody has told Pirsig that a surfeit of facts, figures and philosophy is virtually indistinguishable from insanity… but never mind. I couldn’t finish it. I’d hoped for a book on the very special and personal romance of owning and riding a motorcycle – what I got was a treatise on what could be quantum physics, but may equally be the manifestation of too much research laced with an overdose of mind-befuddling antipsychotics.

Motorcycling is not rocket science, and the experience should not be reduced to research. Motorcycling is, in fact, one of the last bastions of personal male freedom in a world rapidly being drowned by the Female Prerogative. Not that women don’t ride bikes too – they do, and I salute them for it. However, I don’t think they can derive much more joy and fulfillment from it than a man could from embroidery or cooking. Certain activities simply mean more to one gender than to the other. (This is not the right place and time to make too strong a case against the horrendous epitome of mutated natural inclinations and drives called the ‘metrosexual’, but I hope you know what I mean…)

When I got married the first time around, my grandmother placed a certain sum of money at my disposal for a wedding gift. I find it significant that my mother insisted on me buying a ‘real’ bike with it (and it was a beauty for its time – a Hero Honda Sleek, God bless its now busted steel heart). Why did my mother insist on this? I didn’t exactly need transport – I mean, I still had a very serviceable moped that could shimmy my ass from Point A to Point B without much problems. Nor had I ever expressed a burning desire to own a powerful bike (at that particular point in time, the only thing I really had a burning desire for was to get laid – repeatedly, and in as many ways as possible. I was getting MARRIED, not baptized, okay?!?)

I have a theory about why my mom pitched so hard for me getting that bike back then. It seems to me that she was unconsciously performing the last rite of passage into manhood for her son. She knew what marriage means. Moreover, she is a woman and knows what a woman does to a man after marriage. Dare we breathe the word ‘emasculation’ here? No, we dare not. Shhh, here there be dragons.

Let’s just say that my mother knew that, after marriage, her son would need to underline his essential masculinity with something more substantial and convincing that a series of sexual acrobatics. He would eventually find the vital line that distinguishes the male from the female eroding. He would eventually begin to doubt that he ever WAS a natural male to begin with. He would need someone else to hang on to during this process – and I say ‘someone’ because a man’s motorcycle quickly assumes a persona of its own in his life.

I’ll concede that a bike can mean different things to different men. To many, it may even be little more than the mode of transport it was originally meant to be. Diplomat that I am (I didn’t say anything nasty about metrosexuals either, remember?) I will not say such men have missed the point. I will simply say that such men have missed the entire fucking BALLPARK.

If his horse is nothing more to the redskin than a means to ferry him, his squaw and his papoose around, that redskin certainly does not belong on the warfront or the hunting ground. That redskin essentially belongs back in camp, where he should help other squaws mind papooses, clean poop and make soup. Such a redskin is a disgrace to his horse, and not worthy of owning one. Let us all shed a reverend tear for the poor horse that falls in the hands of such a loser – can death be anything but blessed release for such a luckless nag? It will spend its lifetime un-cherished, dishonored and neglected. It will never be able to raise its head high among other horses. “My owner is a wimp,” I can hear it whinny disconsolately. “Please shoot me – I can’t stand the disgrace.”

I don’t want to talk of such a pathetic creature here. I’d rather talk about the man who honors his horse and gives it its rightful place of pride in his life. That horse is his loyal and invaluable companion, and the fact that they both knows it reflects in all the man’s other relationships. A man who cannot honor and take care of his horse cannot take care of anyone else, either.

This brings me back to Pirsig’s book, if only to briefly disagree with him. A redskin does not need to know every intricacy of how his horse functions. He does not need to tote a detailed anatomical manual on equestrian physiology around. Of course, it helps if he DOES know how sinew connects to bone, as it were, but a LACK of such knowledge is not a significant handicap. In fact, too deep a knowledge of such matters can prove to be a serious hindrance. I mean, how helpful would it be if I constantly carried with me a detailed mental picture of how my lovely wife looks under her skin? How conducive would such imagery be in an amorous moment? Would it not suffice if I just knew her moods and needs and responded to those in instinctive love and concern, rather than from a platform of detailed knowledge? Blessed are the ignorant, for they shall know reverence…

Fine. Let’s talk about bikes now.

My first bike was often my only escape from the tacky feeling of domestication that began manifesting itself around four months after my first marriage. It accepted wordlessly the love that my wife would or could not receive from me. It thrummed when I stroked it right. It roared exultantly when I gave it all I had. It also grumbled when I ignored a jammed sprocket or neglected to take it for servicing. However, when I did my part, it was a perfect give-and-take relationship, and it took me precisely where I wanted to go – at my chosen speed. Moreover, my wife did not see it as a malicious contender for her rightful place in my life. It was steel and chrome to her, after all, and did not seem to have any qualities or traits that I seemed to respond to with possibly suspicious fervor.

My second bike was a glitzy fluffball that should never have left the glossy magazine page I’d first seen her on. Sure, she sported the low-waisted look with style. Sure, she winked alluringly in the midday sun. Sure, she purred like a contented cat as long as I didn’t push her too hard. And sure (gulp) all my friends wanted to ride her. But that bike had no power, no endurance and no character - and therefore lacked all relationship-building properties. She guzzled fuel like there was no tomorrow and gave nothing in return by ways of mileage. She squealed whenever I tried to take her beyond her 60 kmph comfort-zone. I don’t recall feeling so much as a twinge of regret when I let her go.

A couple of years ago, I bought a second-hand CBZ because it was all I could afford at that time. Man, how I loved that bike – and how she loved me. She never let me down, even when I pushed her far beyond her limits on intercity rides in the peak of summer or the dead of winter. She was nothing much to look at, but she gave me all she had – and she never complained. In return, I attended to every creak, every suspicious shimmy, every sign of possible trouble in the engine. I never fed her anything but the best gasoline money can buy. However, I finally outgrew her, and we both knew when that time came that she’d have to make way for someone new.

This time I cried. As I left her there at the dealer’s, a mere part-payment exchange for the 225 cc, jet-black, drop-dead beautiful Karizma I bought a month ago, I cried hard. I couldn’t bear to look back at her standing there, soon to be ridden by someone else or maybe even taken to pieces for spare parts. She didn’t say anything, but in that last silent space of communication we had before I rode off on my new black steed, I knew she understood and wished me well.

A final word on my new Karizma. This is the first new bike I’ve owned in years, and I’m quite paranoid about doing right by her. Folks around me say I should lighten up, but it’s hard to do - it’s just so awesome to have such a formidable campaigner by my side. She is almost painfully new… but when I ride her, I feel an ancient, unplumbed power working beneath me. This is a tidal wave of primordial, pulsating, bristling gristle to be unleashed on the Mumbai-Pune highway, and on the long, looping mountain roads of Lonavala’s hinterlands. As I let her fly, I know the true, shrieking resonance of man merging with machine.

At its best, a man’s relationship with his bike must – at the time of actual relating – transcend and surpass all his other relationships. It cannot be otherwise. At 140 kmph, you are no longer on edge - you ARE the edge. If you hit a mountain wall at such a speed, they will be picking what’s left of you off with tweezers. If you go for a skid, the tarmac you slide along for a few hundred feet will sharpen you like a pencil until there’s nothing left to sharpen. At 140 kmph, you do not think about the electricity bill or the fact that the filling in your molar needs replacement. You do not wonder why you never got that promotion or why your wife doesn’t understand you. You are completely focused on pushing you luck in the Sheer Survival sweepstakes. You stroke that throttle sensuously , get the rise, feel the friction of your passage, plunge into the landscape on your way to the peak and finally climax to top speed.

You do not hit such speeds because you feel invulnerable - you do so because you know you can depend on your bike to come through for you. You have a relationship based on trust with it, and it’s a pretty focused one. You do what you must to keep it thrumming. You pay heed to every odd sound in the engine, tighten every nut and bolt that works loose, and keep it well-fed with good oil and gasoline. In return, you have the assurance that it can handle the rough spots on the road ahead. You know it won’t give up on you when you need it the most. You test each other constantly to renew that assurance, but there is nothing but a shit-eating grin of joy on you face all the way. This is the essence of motorcycle riding.

After years of dithering on the surface of all that such a relationship can be, I see in my Karizma a gleaming promise breaking free into a crescendo of fulfillment – and as I ride her, tasting the unleashing, metallic flavor of that promise, I forget everything that has been occupying my mind till then. One with my bike, one with the elements around me, unthinkable power at my disposal - above and beyond everything else.

This, at last, is pure freedom…

The light of sheer beauty appears before you
Before your eyes adjust, it vanishes…

No science can capture it glow
For it was not meant to be harnessed

This beauty’s light is not a candle flame
That you could trap in a lantern to dispel your soul’s shadows

This beauty’s light is a firefly
That owes its glow to a larger landscape than yours…

Ah, but who will teach man to accept
The limitations of his fate…

Will he not always strive to capture
Beauty as though it existed for him alone?

Enough has been written on this subject to wallpaper every square inch of the planet if the printouts were to a laid out edge to edge. The Internet space it occupies could, if put to more fruitful purposes, host enough information to the true nature of politics to put that revered business model out of the running forever.

And yet, there are no answers – only vague suppositions, amateur conjecture, the dubious assurances given in the Bible, Koran and Torah, and the impotently dry intellectualism of philosophers. Nobody has really been able to tell us, with immutable logic and indubitable power of conviction, why we crawl across the planet.

No, I don’t have the answer either – but I have two eyes, a like number of ears and a backside that learns reasonably well from experience. Even with limited knowledge, the power of observation and deduction can carry one pretty far. In fact, because everyone has at least a modicum of these faculties, we all know at least SOME baseline facts about the nature and purpose of human life. The problem is that they’re so unpalatable that we look for better explanations.

The best (and worst) I can do here is to stand on my soapbox and spill these facts out in broad daylight. Nobody will thank me for doing this, and I consider it fortunate that I’m NOT here for gratitude. Now, to the subject.

The last office I worked in had a creaky old lift, traveling in which was always new incentive to reflect on whether one’s life insurance policy was still paid up and current. The walls of this death contraption were generously plastered with stickers, posters and scribbles that promoted some product, service or school of thought or the other. One of these, half torn away but still faintly legible, simply stated:

MAN IS BORN TO BE HAPPY.

“WHAT?!?” you scream. “HAPPY?!?! How mercenary! How shallow! How utterly bereft of social spirit! We are here to HELP EACH OTHER!! To make this world a BETTER PLACE TO LIVE IN!!!”

Yeah, right. Okay, your time is up. Gimme my soapbox back.

Let us examine some facts here, shall we? Yes, yes, I know it will hurt, but hey… you can’t expect a perpetual ride through La-La Land, now can you? There have to be way stations, right? Places where we can alight and have a quick cup of hot Realitea before we embark on our cocooned journey again.

Now stop whining. The facts:

* Nobody achieves anything of true universal importance in his or her lifetime

* Suffering achieves no purpose other than to displace happiness

* Nobody’s watching, applauding or preparing a Welcome Cart on the other side

* There IS no other side

I have no real reasons to give you, but I strongly suspect that whoever put that sticker up was right. We are, indeed, here to be happy, simply because being sad is such an inferior option. However, the pursuit of happiness is traditionally equated with hedonism. ‘Hedonist’ is NOT a qualification that most of us would want on our visiting cards. So, even though each of us definitely DOES want more than our share of the good times, we make sure that there’s enough misery in our lives to soothe our uneasy conscience.

Let’s define misery. No, forget the Oxford dictionary, I mean let’s really DEFINE misery here, okay? No farting around with semantics, just the bare bones. Misery is the state in which our wants are not met, and those that were being met before are also compromised. That’s misery. Misery is also other people, but only to the extent that OTHERS get what THEY want and we don’t.

Pretty self-centered, huh?

Did you just mention the bleeding-heart social activist who is miserable because his PEOPLE (or maybe not even HIS people) are being deprived of their rights? Gimme a break. The man may be crazy now, but he wasn’t born that way. He had this harebrained stance implanted into him by his parents, in school or perhaps in the Army. His natural state is as selfish as yours and mine. Anyone whose heart bleeds for others is merely on a sanctified ego trip. And even THIS person is looking for a state of personal happiness, even though he or she erroneously believes that this state is somehow linked with the happiness of others. We are here for ourselves, period.

Closer home, we are often tempted to believe that our purpose on this earth is to serve our family and fulfill their needs. Another ego trip – we just want to get a healthy chomp of the feeling of personal achievement that doing this provides us with. Examined closely, it would logically seem that we would be happier WITHOUT those appendages that we added or were added to us somewhere along the way – if we had never met that doe-eyed beauty, scraped that orphan off the road or taken that doggie home. After all, it’s not as if anyone is desperately UNHAPPY until he/she is married or accepted into the local Lions chapter. It just so happened that we did, thereby inheriting a whole new slew of complications on the final journey towards personal happiness.

Now let’s go to the original model of the human being. No, I don’t mean the protozoa crawling out of the primordial ooze. Not THAT far back, okay? Let’s examine the blighter who recently descended from the trees and found that this cave actually beats that nasty old tree hollow when it rains, shines or freezes over. Did I hear a Christian anti-evolutionist squawk back there? Put a sock in it and read your Bible, okay? We’re talking REAL LIFE here, not your grade of nebulous candy floss. Hey, barkeep, give that poor numbskull a double shot of Holy Water and make him shut up.

I have understandably not met such a recent descendee myself (though I DO get a brief glimpse of him when a traveling relative lands up at my doorstep, asking if he can crash out here for the night.) However, I do believe that the kind of brains going round then were pretty rudimentary, and therefore not too hard to pick. Simple motives.

What did it take to make a caveman happy? No philosophy about the meaning and purpose of life there. Get fed, get laid, keep warm/cold/dry, biff that fuckhead from the next cave on the head if he comes sniffing around your mate, and a swim in the river would go down pretty well, too. Bingo, happiness. Purpose of life achieved in full – let’s file that report! No concerns about the state of the nation, the absence of a red Ferrari or the fact he can’t pay for bambino’s summer camp this year. Just because we’re complicated matters of personal happiness beyond all salvage today doesn’t mean that it is no longer what we want, and what we live for.

Yes, we’re here to be happy, but there is a problem there. Happiness is a highly subjective term, considering that some folks are happiest when someone is whipping their hide to shreds while they’re chained to a post. In fact, some folks are only happy when they’re in the midst of a state that most other humans would pay considerable amounts of moolah to avoid.

Yup, happiness is subjective. By the same coin, so is sadness. Some folks are only sad when they’re in a space that others would equate with happiness. These worthies find the state of being without problems intolerable. If none exist, they bend over backwards and sideways to create problems. You get the picture – happiness and sadness are subjective, and YOUR take on them is by no means the global standard.

Okay, now for your original objection. We are here to help each other, is it? Why are we here to do that? Does our help somehow change the equation? You’re going to die, and so will the dude you’re helping. His life’s purpose is the same as yours – to be happy, period. No more and no less. So now you’re going to fulfill HIS purpose is life, are you?

Even if your help somehow results in him becoming the president of your country some day, everybody in this country is going to die too. You may not have noticed it, but human life comes with a limited shelf life. Whether you help someone else or not, that fact will not change. So, what precisely ARE you achieving? Totting up credits in Heaven for yourself? Well, even if that’s the case, you’re still being selfish, aren’t you?

The purpose of human life is to make this world a better place to live in, you say? Playing God again, are we? This planet is going to hell in a handcart. Nobody on it is going to make a dime or a difference in that fact, or in the Universal context. My guess is that in a thousand years or less, it will be no more than a smoldering cinder cluttering up space. Nobody will have got off it long enough to impact any larger scheme of things. The Earth is an essentially doomed, localized infection, of absolutely no significance to God’s plans for the Big Picture.

No, you are not going to make any difference. Don’t worry and be happy, already. You’re running out of time.

Deep in the most thickly populated part of a metropolitan suburb, the police break down the front door of an old single-bedroom apartment. The neighbors had reported an increasingly fetid odor coming from it – an odor that now hits the cops like an olfactory tsunami.

We’ve all smelled it to different degrees while driving down anonymous country roads and highways. It is the smell that announces that organic life of some kind or the other has recently reached the end of the cycle and is shaking hands with Mother Nature again. There is no antiseptically sanitized version of this process in nature – decomposition is decomposition, period. It stinks, it’s messy and it does NOT make for good dinner-table conversation.

They find the source of the stink lying on an old metal cot, dead as the dodo but alive with a rather energetic colony of maggots. We will not talk about maggots here right now – they have their place in the larger scheme of things, and there is a time and place to talk of maggots, but this isn’t it. I’m trying to make a point about the guy UNDER the maggots here – the guy whom everyone in the apartment block knew as “that strange recluse in 3C”. He had lived in his seedy little flat for something like fifteen years, but may as well have not existed for all the impact he had on the neighborhood. Let’s call him Bill.

Bill was not an antisocial sort, but he mostly kept to himself. He would greet those who greeted him, help search for a lost dog when required, contribute to the small charity drives that the building’s unrealistic idealists undertook from time to time… but he kept to himself. Nobody knew where he came from, if he had ever been married, what his life was all about – nothing. He asked for no information and sure as hell never gave any.

Now he was dead, and they’d have to fumigate the entire second floor because he hadn’t been considerate enough to inform the building superintendent well in time of his intention to kick the bucket.

Never mind how Bill died - suicide, stroke, what does it matter? He was dead, and there was no foul play involved. My point here is that he died alone, and it seems fairly certain that this is exactly how he would have preferred it to happen.

Sounds familiar? It should. You read about such stuff in the tabloid almost every day. Some poor old (and sometimes not-so-old) blighter or blightress is found moldering away in his or her home, and the neighbors have something nice to talk about for a while. I’ve only been around for a bit over four decades, but I’m pretty sure that folks had been dying alone long before my dad first noticed that my mom had some pretty appealing curves to her.

So why does it happen? Why are some people alone enough to DIE alone? Don’t we have a population problem? Aren’t there more people around than there should ideally be? Is there any shortage of company if we really WANT it? No, there isn’t – and that may be the key reason why certain folks prefer their own company over that of others.

Many call me negative about people, but I’d like to state here that I’m not, really. I firmly believe that we were designed flawlessly in every respect. We all started out as perfect players in the piece called Human Life – it’s just that we hopelessly buggered up the stage. We added stuff where nothing should ever have been added, subtracted where there was simply no scope for subtraction, fixed what wasn’t broken and wound up as fallen angels cooking in a Hell of our own making.

Yes, we were designed as social animals, but then we discovered ‘individualism’ – that celebrated concept which states that the best of the species do NOT conform. Right from the start, we toe the line only to the extent required to get all the goodies of social life – but then strive to ‘be different from the rest’.

Since it is not really feasible to be REALLY different in this massive cauldron of human life we’ve launched, we find the most puerile ways of differentiating ourselves. We become MCPs, feminists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and what have you and start barking at everyone else, or we simply draw a febrile line around ourselves and call it our ‘space’. We state our personal ‘rules of engagement’ and make as big a deal of them as possible. We require our friends, spouses and associates to change enough in our presence to conform to our personal image of ourselves as a unique human being – much as they would have to in the presence of a ‘child with special needs’.

That’s all very nice and charming – sort of like kids playing ‘House’, kidding themselves that they really own a physical or metaphysical corner of this teeming planet. The fact, however, is that we’re ALL at odds with the planet to begin with, and we lost our ability to live on it with true dignity long ago. I genuinely feel that the last time anyone at all lived a perfectly normal life – in the way it was meant to be – was around the time when we still lived in caves.

So here we are today, touting our ‘unique’ differentiators and – paradoxically – pitying the folks that die alone in their bachelor/spinster apartments. With the staggering loads of attitude, baggage, traumas and ambitions that we expect everyone else to dance attendance to, aren’t we ALL actually working real hard to be as alone as possible?

I try to see it from the urban hermit’s point of view, and must say I see rather clearly. Out there is nothing but a huge mess of humans waiting to tell you why what you’re thinking, doing and eating is wrong and why you should change your ways. They will not miss a chance to tell you why you must pay court to their painstakingly attained individual peculiarities if you want to befriend, marry or employ them. They drag a formidable machine bristling with rules of engagement behind them, and the urban hermit has very likely tried to operate that machine many times in the past, getting mangled each time.

However, he has an alternative – unlock that single-bedroom apartment, walk in and close the door behind him. No people, so no rules of engagement. Behind that closed door, he feels the pressures of this artificially embellished world drop off his shoulders. He is free to be what he truly is – sloppy and ill-mannered, his face bereft of false smiles, his soul free from the bondage of pretended regret over some misdemeanor or the other. He is NOT relating to ANYONE – and therefore he is free.

And if he dies that way, would it be more appropriate to pity him for his pathetic solitude, or to envy him for having the courage to face the final fact of 21st human life – that we have modified and individualized ourselves beyond all hope of relating to each other anyway? At least he was not pretending that there is any hope at all for any of us.

Sometimes it all gets too much for me, and I have to withdraw. Yes, even from my family and friends. Mumbai’s frenetic pace can mesmerize you into thinking that manic activity is normal. That we have always lived this way. But I guess, deep down where we carry our legacy of freedom encoded in our being, we know that this is a lie. The truth is…

Mumbaiites have not always fought for every square inch of space. We have not always attached a monetary value to every aspect of our lives. We have not always had to feel the do-or-die rush of toxic adrenaline as we gear up each morning and evening to engage in choiceless battle with our fellowmen on Platform 2, or automotive anarchy in the rush-hour traffic.

We have not always had to walk our streets with wary caution, our bodies clenched like fists do reduce the space we occupy to a bare minimum. We have not always had to have mastered the skill of looking through others as if they don’t exist, hoping only that they will be considerate enough to return the favor. We have not always had to traverse this city with one hand on our wallets and the other one clutching a kerchief to our noses.

I have learned of a saner Mumbai at the feet of Dadasaheb Lohekar, who occasionally holds court at the local park where I live. The man is 91 years old and looks every day of it as he sits there with his decrepit Alsatian. However, his memory is as sharp as a Grant Road pickpocket’s blade and he has some stories to tell of this city.

Of course, he’s not old enough to actually remember some of the things he talks about, such as the days when Mumbai’s only inhabitants were the Koli fisher folk. Yeah, the people we resignedly make way for in the locals today, as they climb on with their noxious baskets, most of us unaware of the fact that Mumbai is named after their patron goddess Mumbadevi.

But Dadasaheb is old enough to talk authoritatively of them, and the standards of coexistence they adhered to. He is old enough to remember the Parsi, Gujarati and South Indian Hindu families, that lived together peacefully here at one time, when property was not an issue of power, and the sharing of resources not restricted to partisan community pockets.

His eyes, already filmy with advancing cataracts, cloud over even further when he regales us with stories of a Mumbai we would never recognize today. I don’t blame him. I get sort of misty-eyed myself. And so, on some nights after the daily struggle to emerge intact from the teeming human anthill, I take off on my old Enfield and look for evidence of Mumbai in the urban apocalypse. I leave my suburb behind, aware of the fact that the bike’s exhaust is not doing much to improve the pollution I often complain about.

I see a different Mumbai emerge after midnight, though the city truly never sleeps. This Mumbai tosses uneasily in its half-awake somnolence, the relative quiet after a day of commercial convulsions probably allowing it to reach back into its memory and remember that another order once existed.

For some reason, I always end up staring at Haji Ali bathed in the moonlight, glowing an eerie, timeless green. Its aloofness from the madness of the mainland seems to tell me that one can be part of the chaos and yet be apart from it.

As its walkway disappears under the tide, I understand that I, too, need to occasionally deny the city access to the essential me. The rat race churns on less than a hundred yards away, but Haji Ali finds an island of detached peace just by drawing up the bridge once in a while.

I’m up by seven, my mind already strategizing the commute to work and the uncertain odds of another day in Mumbai. I’m bleary-eyed but ready. The most profound insights of a Mumbai night cannot match swords with the realities of the city by day….

There are days when my family and I are don’t see eye to eye on certain things – like the validity of my life. On such days, I generally do something spiritually uplifting. The guilt-trip scene has limited entertainment value and fails to fascinate me after the first three rounds.

Anyway, I had such a day a couple of weeks ago, so I went to a local church and lent my ear to the priest’s message. Yes, I do that sometimes. It’s not a religious thing – I go to any place of worship where I can possibly learn something of value to me – or at least get a couple of hours of quality time with someone other than me and mine. I’ve attended Muslim discourses, Hindu satsangs and Christian sermons in equal measure.

Well, this evening I was startled to see a rather prominent local Hindu octogenarian sitting in the meager congregation. I usually meet him only when I visit the local park, where he’s something of a permanent evening fixture. He’s a fascinating old man, full of the kind justly acquired wisdom we spend our lives trying to find shortcuts to. I nodded at him with a weary smile and sat down to listen to the sermon.

Not surprisingly, it was on sin. Sin is a very marketable commodity – the more painfully aware you are of yours, the more money some people seem to make. Sin never goes out of style. It keeps us in line, the awareness of sin does.

Anyway, the good priest quoted extensively from the Bible’s Old Testament and generally served up a generous helping of fire and brimstone. In particular, he belabored the various transgressions for which God flash-fried his people before society invented the judiciary, the Income Tax department and organized religion to do the job. I peered over to the old party to see how he was taking it. It was my guess that he did not go much for such stuff. He’s old enough to have outgrown religion and found God instead.

He was looking thoughtful and even nodded geriatrically at some points of the sermon. At other points he grinned toothlessly, the way a grandfather does when his grandson makes a foolish but cute juvenile statement.

After the sermon, I gathered my flayed senses and left the church, one virtual eye peeled for lightning bolts from heaven. My people back at home make it very clear that I will pay for my maddening non-conformism eventually, but they never mention a specific timeframe….

“So what did you think of the sermon?” I asked him as we stopped for tea outside the church gates. He also untied his fleabag Alsatian, who is at least as old as he is in doggie years.

“Oh, very nice,” he replied. I kept a good two feet between us as we talked - he tends to spray people with whatever he’s ingesting if they’re too close while he does sibilants. He doesn’t believe in dentures.

“I mean, did the priest have a point?” I pressed on. “I don’t think about it much, but my family and I have been discussing my failings over the last two days. If they’re right about them, I’ll be out of the reckoning soon. The Man Upstairs has me in His sights.”

He looked out at the thronging crowd on the main road long enough to convince me that he hadn’t heard me. I was about to repeat the question when he turned to me again.

“I agree with him that sin is what distances us from God,” he said. “What we perceive as our sin fills us with guilt. What we perceive as others’ sin fills us with self-righteous pride. In either case, God is kept at bay.”

I listened carefully, knowing that this was a very important moment in my life.

“The priest also says that God can save us from sin. All we need to do is turn to Him and call on him as a friend. Is it that simple?”

He laughed so hard he almost choked on his last sip of tea. His dog looked up at him worriedly.

“I’m sure it is. But then, how many of us consider God our friend? Sin leads to trouble for sure. When we’re in trouble, we turn to our friends, right?”

“Uh… yes, of course,” I replied.

“Well, who do we turn to first when we are in trouble? First to ourselves - we all consider ourselves our best friends. In our hearts of hearts, each of us believes that he or she is the ultimate standard of human virtue and excellence, and that our own resources are the best. When no solution is available within us, we turn to others – starting with our next-closest friend. When finally not even the last person we consider a friend can help, we do what our pride has prevented us from doing until then. We go to last person we’d ever consider approaching. Who is such a person?

“Hmmm, our enemy?”

He nodded sadly. “Yes, the one we obviously consider our enemy – as a last-ditch solution.”

“Who is that?”

He smiled affectionately at me.

“You tell me, my friend – but didn’t you come looking for Him in church today….?”