The trial

An encounter with reality

Chapter 9 The trial

Neela finished checking on the chores and returned to the lobby of the hotel. The hotel had twenty rooms and a kitchen that only catered for breakfast and tea sessions. He had employed 4 staff members who catered to the housekeeping and kitchen duties.

Neela undertook the gardening himself. It was great therapy on his mind to be constantly engaged in something that was growing.

In the first ten years of his arrival in Srinagar, he was in a deep melancholy and depression. For starters, he was in a new place. The experience of the urbanized environment totally changed his outlook. It forced him to confront himself as the object of his pre-occupation and forced him to create an account of his actions. These were entirely new experiences to him.

But most of all, he missed being in charge, in the way that he was master of the landscape and environment. He used to be one with everything, here in the city he was just another individual in search of a job and survival.

He found a job in a shoe factory. However, the loss of the exclusive nature that he experienced, being a one of a kind person in the village, was lost and it caused pain in his feelings. He resolved to recover it and that caused him further anguish.

Finally, after two years of coming to Srinagar, he gave up trying to hold on to the past. It brought to him a moment of epiphany, that followed a nervous breakdown. In it, he saw himself as a person who has been trying to conquer the world in some way and have it move according to his will. Where this appeared as the main desire in his feelings, it caused him great anguish to think that he was totally unrealistic bout his expectations.

He suppressed these feelings with the shock of the realization. His mind became a total blank. Thereafter he created an absolute acquiescence to all matters around him, learning to identify the priorities and creating a focus of attention to them.

In the years that followed, as he grew to understand his condition and the environment around him, he realized that it wasn't that hard to follow a routine and anticipate people's needs around him. He applied himself to his self management like a method.

Work helped him create a focus. Beyond that his mind was like a storm that raged daily in respect of his past fondness of issues. He heard the other workers speak of their ambition to join the monastery some day. He heard them refer to za-zen, or the practice of ' sitting-just-to-sit ' as a way of controlling the storms in the mind.

He figured he might try it at home. Each day, before he went to sleep, he would spend an hour just leaving the mind alone, instead of imposing on it the usual imperatives. Eventually, he moved it to review the events of the day. As he reviewed his actions for each day, he formed an understanding of the basis for each action and engaged that as a guide. Soon he found his condition less catatonic and given to a mellowing of his manner.

In time, he came to settle down and the high acidic nature of his condition, lessened. Some years later, at thirty-two years of age he married a girl, his aunt and uncle had match made.

With the dowry received from his in-laws and the savings he had accumulated, he took over the the hotel, with an understanding to pay the balance in monthly installments. He undertook some renovations to the place and soon was wooing the backpackers back.

His marriage opened his eyes to the world of sexual pleasure, which was till then, kept in denial in him. They had one daughter.

The imperatives of the culture struck again. The wife could not bring herself to live in a hotel environment, with references to the impressions of her virtue. She took the daughter and went back to her mother's house. Neela would visit them once a month and paid for their upkeep.

He grew acclimatized to his life in the hotel and awoke one morning to the awareness of a curious new habit he had formed. The hotel was his door to the world. Through his customers, his dreaming mind returned, as every encounter with a customer raised his curiosity about the world.

He related to the way they looked, their dressing, attitudes, speech, tone of voice and the general demeanor of their behavior. It brought a curious contact with his own latent impulses, in the melancholic brew of his being. In it, he pursued each impulse to the very end, be it through feelings, thoughts, joys and sorrows, the rational and the overall feel of the world experience, each customer brought to him.

This had the effect of lifting the dementia his mind was in. He combined this with the programs on satellite TV and came to recover the experience of the world that was abruptly taken from him when young. He was rediscovering the world, with himself in it.

As the active nature of his thoughts grew, he frequented the second and bookshop in town and borrowed books for a small payment. The collection in the shop was quite considerable as many of the tourists will dump their books there after reading instead of having to carry it back again.

He found quite a treasure in the literature. It occurred to him that he was rebuilding his own life with his own thoughts and understanding. Fearful that he might go into a deviation, he visited the Kaliama temple, that was close by, and brought himself to view her as the force that determined all that took place in his life.

In coming into contact with Peter, he was reminded again of his childhood friend, Kozinsky. Peter had spent about three months, in Srinagar, all together, documenting Neela's childhood and growing experience.

It gave Neela the opportunity to view himself in the process and he engaged the inquiries, Peter made, as a way to rout out the hidden impulses in him.

He had been curious about how this compared with Peter's own experiences, but Peter created an avoidance of the issues. However, he ventured to say that he preferred a picture based account of describing such experiences, instead of referring to them in the physical.

He referred to Neela's experiences as beginning with a disagreement with the ' King of Nanda Puram.' Thereafter, Neela was banished, where he grew up alone and was forced to provide for himself. In the adventures that followed, Neela fought a huge monster of the city, lived with wolves in the shoe factory, wrestled a great big snake when he got married, and thereafter, was the great guru of the Himalayas with the many tourists who stayed there.

Neela laughed uproariously.

“Actually, half the time I was imagining all these things, myself,” he responded, “ except I was using American movies to do it with.”

They laughed together.

Peter was reminded of his own upbringing. His powerful experience of his aspirations were forced to go underground after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, he was learning to view himself, not as the world, but as one nation among many in a family of nations in the world.