“The Buddha himself took pains to say opposite things in different situations, since what works for a crowd of monks will make no sense to a group of businessmen. What we call “inconsistency” speaks in fact for a consistent wish to do the appropriate thing.” - Pico Iyer
One-third of a triptych of the early 19th century Marwar painting under the influence of the Nath yogis; by an artist Bulaki whose patron was Raja Man Singh of Jodhpur.
One of the remarkable things about living with somebody—not as a friend or a roommate, but as a partner; with somebody for whom your responsibilities steadily grow onto become more than your responsibility to yourelf—is the opportunity to see oneself metamorphose. From a callow or freewheeling youth, one changes into something else. The relationship seeps in and over time, it acquires the stubbornness of a sweat-stain in a long used t-shirt—perhaps even annotating the uneventful sublime of existence. Nothing will wash it away, except time. And even then, time is a fickle detergent. The other person during the course of one’s life slowly becomes a witness bearer to your own history and exertions, vanities and failings.
The truths of my being that I held as inviolable only a few years ago—as a young man about town—have now dissolved into the practice of everyday living that is one part sacrifice and one part self-preservation. This commingling of selflessness and selfishness—every waking hour and sometimes in my dreams too—slowly percolates to make men and women into somebody different than the one they were in their early youth. I thought about these shifting registers when I read the above the line by Pico Iyer on the Buddha—on the consistent desire to do what is appropriate, or the good, which is sometimes contrasted and foregrounded by actions and words that appear as inconsistent. Over time, I have slowly begun to realize that the essence of strife and reconciliation when living together with someone is recognizing that the ‘right’ and the ‘good’ may differ—and the roads to harmony is paved by the willingness to choose the ‘good’ over what may feel ‘right’.
A few months ago, I finished reading Pico Iyer’s ‘Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells’— an intimate chronicle of his life in Japan, written as a husband of Indian-origin to a Japanese woman, as an observer of the human flux, and as a writer paring down his own literary excesses. At the end of that book, the reader is filled with a kind of satisfying emptiness which arrives at the end of an uneventful day. Like in many marriages, ‘nothing’ out of the ordinary humdrum of living happens in the book—there is no contrived dramatic scenes, no urge to endow life with meaningfulness or to valorize marriage as a bourgeois version of mein kampf. In some sense, the reader is merely grateful for the tranquility he conveys. And yet there is a hard-won mastery of craft at work that is no different than a meditator sidestepping the distractions that come his way without rancor for irritation. While watching my own feelings rise and fall as I made my way through the pages, and at the same time trying to see how he constructs these scenes of domestic everydayness which had somehow allowed for these feelings to burble up in my mind, I realized the import of what Coetzee says of the creator of Emma Bovary: “what makes Flaubert a novelist’s novelist is his ability to formulate larger issues as a problems of compositions”.
In Iyer’s case, these problems of composition result not in a novel about marriage or living together, but a form of narrative that takes the most commonplace of human relationships and transforms it into a perch from which he watches himself travel through time. Like a snail through leaf. Eating a moment with relish, chewing over it for long hours. All the while, Japan shimmers and enters our mind as both, a slender land dangling at the north-eastern edge of Asia on whose grounds the book takes place, but also as a spectral otherworld, as a repository of unseen spirits and ghosts, norms and cultures that crowds into the lives of people. (“…the land is saturated with dead ancestors, river gods, the heavenly bodies to whom Hiroko gives honorifcs, as if they were her country’s CEOs.”)
Hiroko is everywhere in the book. Hiroko is Pico Iyer’s wife—a middle aged woman who speaks pidgin English (and Pico Iyer, self-admittedly elsewhere, speaks Japanese “like a 2-year-old girl”), who we meet in the book as a grieving daughter (she loses her father in the first chapter), as a mother to grown up children, as a caregiver for her aging mother, and is engaged in an effort to seek rapprochement with her estranged brother. But what makes Iyer and Hiroko’s relationship uncommon is it began at a time when Japan was deeply conservative. She had walked out on her first marriage, taking her two young children along, to live and marry Iyer, who was then a wandering reporter of Indian origin. To be with her, and her children (about whom Iyer writes as “our” children), he leaves his life in California and moves permanently to Japan. Love brought Iyer to Japan, and now Japan itself has become indistinguishable from love. That was twenty five years ago.
Still living there on a tourist visa—Iyer’s life as Hiroko’s husband allows him to enter the world of Japanese families, to watch it up close. Not as an anthropologist but as a warm and bemused son-in-law. Thus, we learn of a father-in-law who emerges from his well of loneliness by regaling Iyer of his days in Manchuria (a place where the Japanese set up a cruel colonial outpost before and during World War 2) and a distraught mother-in-law who was worried about her daughter who had taken to living with a dark-skinned Indian. That Iyer observes all this with gentleness, without strident moralizing, is implicitly a testament to his abilities to compassionately record the struggles of others and more profoundly of his deep commitment to everything that Hiroko brings into his life: her family, the strangeness of Japan, and the recognition of the impossibility of him ever ‘becoming’ Japanese. In another book of Iyer’s called ‘The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto’, a tale about the love between a journalist and a married Japanese woman called Sachiko, Iyer writes about a Japanese word ‘hidamari’: a small patch of sunlight along the otherwise cold stone of a nearby shrine. The journalist in that novel says: “In the dark of the Kyoto winter, Sachiko was my ‘hidamari’”.
As their life continues in a neighborhood called Deer’s Slope, on the edges of Nara—a city colored by forlornness—Hiroko continues to worship her ancestors and cleans cupboards to welcome deities, while Iyer watches the changing lights of the year and records their life as the blazing yellow of summer becomes the the shimmering golden of autumn. When he ends the book with a line—“Hold this moment forever, I tell myself; it may never come again”—I watched that sentence in silence. The ‘good’ and the ‘right’ had, for a moment, become one. []