All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [127]
I met children like this, God’s most wretched orphans, all over India. Devoured by leprosy, missing arms or legs, they were all starving. Some were still crying, others lacked the strength even to speak.
My thoughts were with them as I questioned first an old man with a delicate face, then a gravely silent spiritual master, and finally a prudent and reserved official. How could a civilized state like India tolerate such misery and agony? I became more concerned with this question than with theosophical research. I was answered with smiles, shrugs, and long speeches about the transmigration of souls, about India’s quest for self-improvement, its striving to approach perfection at whatever cost. I wasn’t satisfied. In Judaism it is in his earthly life that man is supposed to accomplish something: by participating in the life of his fellow men, by doing good, by combating the injustice inherent in existence. After that, it is too late. Surely the doctrine of reincarnation is not a valid response to suffering. I can accept and bear my own suffering, but not that of others.
Granted, national independence requires its share of political sacrifice. And yes, considerable progress had already been made. The system of castes had been officially abolished. Jawaharlal Nehru’s decision to name an Untouchable as minister of justice was both daring and ingenious. But what about the multitude of rickshaws hauled by men resigned to their misfortune? What about the shelterless people lashed by the bitter Bombay monsoon, awash in the detritus of Calcutta, infected by the pollution of the Ganges? What of the tattered men who slept in the streets, whom passersby stepped over with an air of indifference? What about the widows in the country’s heartland, who were still being burned to death along with their husband’s bodies, or the countless lepers roaming the streets? I was unable to consider their distress within any value system I knew, religious or otherwise. This mass of suffering hit me hard. I had no right to ignore it or to make my peace with it through specious rationalizations or magic formulas.
Sometimes curiosity got the better of me and I tried to talk to one or another of these poor souls. But since I knew neither Hindi nor Urdu, I could do no more than mumble in a jargon incomprehensible even to myself or utter a few undoubtedly mispronounced and inappropriate words of Sanskrit, a language that in any case has not been current in India for centuries.
I set out in search of the country. The beggar-monks who roamed in processions from place to place reminded me of the wandering righteous. All masters look alike: you recognize them by the quality of their disciples. I met several Parsis, whose temples are off-limits to strangers and in whose cemeteries, known as Towers of Silence, bodies are not buried but exposed to the sun to be devoured by vultures. These towers confirmed how distant I was from this religion. I kept thinking of the biblical phrase “Born of ashes, to ashes man returns.” A Parsi journalist wondered at my astonishment: “Isn’t this more useful? In my tradition man nourishes living creatures even in death.”
I was revolted by the caste system, with its rigid, immutable rules. There were four castes, each with specified powers and privileges. At the summit of the hierarchy reigned the Brahmins; at the bottom were those without caste, the pariahs—or Untouchables—whose lot was misfortune. I got a better understanding of Gandhi, the towering apostle of nonviolence, whose philosophy, sadly, is rarely applied. But I couldn’t comprehend his anti-Zionism, despite everything I read about it, including his correspondence with Albert Einstein and his dialogue with Yehuda Nedivi,