On October 7, 1979, at the age of 8 years old I boarded a Pan-Am 747 at John F Kennedy Airport for the long flight from New York to New Delhi. After stops in London and Karachi we descended into the murky night. Smoke from the coal and wood fires filled the air. The air was thick and burned my eyes as we stepped off the plane and as we walked down the steps onto the tarmac. My head was shaved bald and I was dressed in the saffron robes of a Brahmachari student. I was traveling with two other boys and the headmaster of the Bhaktivedanta Institute Dhanurdara Swami who had promised my parents that he would take personal charge of me. After claiming our bags we hailed a taxi. As we sped through the crowded streets our driver honked furiously not just at other cars and pedestrians but at the cows, horses, goats and even elephants and camels that were everywhere. Monkeys swung from the rooftops and the telephone and electric wires. Chai-wallahs and beggars call out to us. From Delhi it is a 99-kilometer drive to Vrindavan, the land of Krishna.
Krishna was born over 5,000 years ago in a prison cell in the city of Mathura in the province of Uttar Pradesh. Krishna’s uncle Kamsa had taken the throne from his father King Ugrasena and imprisoned him in the palace dungeon. Believing that the child of Krishna’s parents Vasudeva and Devaki would someday kill him, Kamsa murdered each of Krishnas’s older brothers and sisters. Krishna the 8th child escaped to live in the house of Nanda the headman of the village of Braja, also known as Vrindavan. As the story is told, Krishna spent his child living incognito among the cowherds of Braja and wooing the gopis (milkmaids).
When his uncle King Kamsa learned of this deception, he sent many powerful assassins to kill Krishna, shape shifting rakshasas with the ability to change their form at will. Even a child Krishna had the ability to see through their disguises and dispatched them all to Yama the god of death with ease. When Krishna grew into a young man he returned to Mathura and with the help of his brother Balaram, defeated the wicked Kamsa and returned his uncle King Ugrasena to the throne.
Jarasanda the king of Magda was a powerful ally of Kamsa and Kamsa had married Jarasanda’s daughters Asti and Prapti. Furious at the death of his friend and that his sisters had been widowed Jarasanda attacked Krishna and his family the Yadus in their capital city of Mathura. For many years Krishna fought against Jarasanda defeating him 17 times. Finally, desperate for victory, Jarasanda attacked Mathura from three sides and with the aid of the Yadava king Kaliyavana and the Naga king Narakasura Jarasanda captured the city of Mathura and burned it to the ground. While Jarasanda celebrated his victory, Krishna with the help of his brother Balaram engineered a daring escape, moving citizens of Mathura out of the city with their wealth and their livestock. Though he saved his people, after fleeing from the battle Krishna became known as a coward and was given the name as Ranchor ‘One who runs away.”
Krishna and Balaram moved the Yadu capital to Dwarka along the coast of the Indian Ocean. Krishna then married Rukmini the daughter of the King of Vidarba cementing his alliance with the powerful kingdom as a buffer between Dwarka and Jarasanda the king of Magdha. Krishna also married Satyabhama the daughter of Satrajit the Yadava king, Jambavati, Kalindi, Mitravinda the daughter of Jayasena the King of Avanti, Nagnajiti of Kosala, Bhadra and Laksmana and the princess of Madra cementing alliances with all the 16 major kingdoms and isolating Jarasanda from his stalwart ally King Narakasura of the Yavanas in the East.
Krishna had a beautiful sister by the name of Subhadra. Subadra was married to Arjuna the younger brother of Yudhistira the king of the Pandavas. Yudhistira was the rightful heir to the throne of the Kuru Dynasty and when Jarasanda refused to recognize Yudhistira’s claim and accept his supremacy, Yudhistira’s brother Bhīma challenged Jarasanda to a wrestling match. As a Kshatriaya (warrior) Jarasanda could not refuse the challenge from Bhima as a matter of honor. After a wrestling match that is said to have lasted for several days, Bhīma finally defeated Jarasanda, by splitting him down the middle into two pieces. Krishna then crowned Jarasanda’s son as king of Magdha. After decades of war and conquest with Krishna’s help King Yudhistira established peace in the land of Bharat (India) uniting the country for the first time in ancient history.
For many years Krishna tried to make peace between the Kuru and Pandava princes who both laid claim to the throne of Hastinapura. Krishna tried to remain neutral but, in the end, he found himself on the side of the Pandavas princes who had been cheated out of their kingdom in a game of dice by their cousin the Kuru prince Duryodhana. Krishna pleaded in vain for peace with the Kuru prince Duryodhana. Krishna even offered to accept 5 cities one for each of the five brothers to rule in exchange for peace but Duryodhana would not agree. Duryodhana declared that he would not give the Pandavas enough land to fit on the tip of a needle. War was inevitable. All the kingdoms in the Bharat were forced to choose sides, brother against brother, fathers against sons and grandsons.
The two armies assembled on the great plain at Kurukshetra in the state of Haryana. On the first day of the battle, Krishna who agreed not to fight in the war drove his friend Arjuna to see the two armies arrayed against each other. Arjuna was the greatest warrior in the land but when he saw his kinsmen and friends arrayed against him, he lost all his will to fight. Arjuna’s hair stood on end, his skin burned, and tears welled up in his eyes. Arjuna spoke to Krishna with a trembling voice, “It would be better to let the sons of Kuru defeat us than to win this war. Sin will overcome us if we fight this war against our own kinsmen and society will be destroyed if the women of our civilization are left unprotected. Dropping his bow and arrow he spoke to these words “Govinda, I shall not fight.”
Now Krishna who had worked all his life for peace but now found himself at war listened to Arjuna’s words and answered him.
“While speaking learned words you are acting like a fool. The soul is eternal and is not slain when the body is slain. Therefore, the wise lament neither for the living nor the dead. Just as death is certain so is rebirth for the atman (soul) is made of energy and can never cease to exist. From Lord Brahma the creator on the highest planet to the lowest insect all living entities in this material world are suffering under the spell of Maya’s illusion. Arjuna’ your dharma (duty) is that of a Kshatriya (warrior) and allowing Duryodhana to take the kingdom by deceit would be failing in your duty to the people you are charged with protecting. Allowing attachments to cloud judgment in the performance of duty will only lead to defeat and infamy. Krishna tells Arjuna to stand up and fight this war without attachment to the results.
This knowledge of the science of self-realization is known as the Bhagavad Gita or the Song of God. The knowledge had been passed down by word of mouth from Krishna to Arjuna and through a direct line of bona fide disciples in succession known as the Param-para for over 5000 years. In Vrindavan we studied the Bhagavad Gita like the Bible, memorizing each verse and translation so that we would know them by heart and be able to recite them at will.
The Bhaktivedanta Institute in Uttar Pradesh India was a big change from New Vrindavan’s little farmhouse school in Marshall County, West Virginia. The building itself was a massive 3-story structure just off Bhaktivedanta Marg, the main street that runs through Vrindavan. It sat next to the Krishna Balaram Mandir and the ISKCON guesthouse. Across the street were a number of small shops and stands. Bihari Lal’s where lassis and nimbu pani lemonades, and pani puris could be purchased for .50 paisa. We were forbidden from visiting these stores or leaving the school grounds without permission. The penalty was a severe beating, so these visits were made in secret which made them even more precious, and the snacks and drinks purchased there even more delicious.
The classical Sanskrit education I got at the Bhaktivedanta Academy in Vrindavan was exceptional. We were required to recite and memorize volumes of Sanskrit text to develop our mental capabilities, and we were taught Hindi, English, Math, History and Political Science. Discipline was harsh and violent and like most of the Western students, I hated the school, I hated our teachers, and I especially hated the older Bengali kids who ran the school like a POW camp. There was a rigid caste system in place. There were 4 Ashrams on the campus: Brahmins (priests, scholars, ministers of state) Kshatriya (soldiers, policemen, administrators) Vaishyas (bankers, merchants and herdsman) and Shudras (laborers, menial workers and artists). The teachers assigned the task of administering the school to their favorite Bengali boy toys who they assigned as “monitors”. The teachers and headmaster looked the other way while the beatings and buggering were as rampant and severe as they were frequent. All communication with our parents was censored and so our parents received only glowing reports of our academic and spiritual progress.
Fortunately for me I fell in with a bad crowd early. Though I had highest marks in Sanskrit, English and History, because of my young age and poor attitude towards authority I was demoted to the Shudra (laborer) ashram. . Shudras were the lowest caste, and our ashram was assigned the task of keeping the hallways and the bathrooms of the ashram clean. Other than that, we were left alone. Apparently, the upper castes preferred buggering people in their own social strata.
Students were not permitted to leave the campus without permission and all outside literature was forbidden. After I was demoted from the Kshatriya(warrior) Ashram to the Shudra (laborer) Ashram, I was put in charge of buying cleaning supplies for the school. Once a week I would take a rickshaw from the school to Loi Bazaar. While I was there buying supplies, I would also buy a few comic books from Amar Chitra Katha and smuggle them back into the school. We had no television or movies at the school and so these Amar Chitra Katha comics were extremely valuable. After some time, I managed to accumulate almost the entire collection of the Amar Chitra Katha library. Amar Chitra Katha comic books brought India’s elegant and extravagant history to life for us. We immersed ourselves in these illustrated tales of India’s ancient past reading stories from the Ramayana, the Mahabarata the great Rajput heroes and the merciless Mogul Invaders. We laughed till tears filled our eyes and our bellies ached at Birbal’s wit or Ramen of Tenali’s pranks. We reveled in the victories of of Rana Kumba and Shivaji against the Moguls invaders and wept at the defeat of Shuja Shah and Dara Shikoh at the hands of cruel Aurangzeb. We may have hated our teachers and the Bengali “mean girls” that ran the school, but India was our home and our Mata (mother), and we loved her with all our hearts. The fact that the books were banned by our teachers made the nectar we extracted from these flowers planted in centuries past by writers under the thumb of the Mogul invaders taste even sweeter than a forbidden fruit like no other. There was no TV, and only religious texts in the library and so these books were like water in the desert to children desperate to escape the Spartan reality of their dogmatic routine. Still though we hated our teachers unequivecally and the older boys, we all still prayed to Krishna. None of us were atheists yet.
The local shop wallas in Loi Bazaar had been given strict instructions not to sell Amar Chitra Katha comic books to the students from the Bhakti Vedanta Academy, but everyone who has lived in India knows that Indians are by nature a rebellious and mercenary lot. The wallas in Loi Bazaar all wanted my business. They knew that I bought cleaning supplies and whatever else was needed for the school. They also knew that I loved Amar Chitra Katha books. So they would call me into their stores when they got a new shipment of Amar Chitra Katha books and then look the other way when I took the comics off the shelves and left the money for them in their place. This went on for a few years and by the time my library was discovered I had built up a collection of over 300 volumes.
It was the spring of 1982 and I was 12 years old when my underground library was discovered. The headmaster Dhanurdara Swami who had brought me to the school and promised my parents that he would personally look after me now brought me before an assembly of the entire school. I looked out at the Bengali and white faces, shaved bald, dressed in saffron robes, wearing the yellow clay tilak of Vishnu worshipers down the center of their faces and some of them holding the tulsi beads around their necks as they stared at me. As I was dragged up in front of them, I avoided their gaze but as I looked out at them now I could make out the faces of my friends whose eyes looked at me with pity.
On the ground in front of me were the open footlockers containing all that I loved in this world, my precious Amar Chitra Katha comic collection, the treasure of knowledge I had spent the last 2 years building. The headmaster, Dhanurdara Swami, a former high school wrestler, now shaved and dressed in the saffron robes of a Sanyasi monk, pointed his finger at my looted treasure.
“You are not allowed to buy these and you know it. Admit it! You are a thief!” he screamed at me, his eyes burning with anger, purple veins bulging from his forehead and neck. He was visibly enraged at the sheer size and audacity of my literary horde and I couldn’t help myself. I was proud of my defiance. I fought to keep a smile off my face.
I looked him straight in the eye convinced he would see the truth in my eyes. After all he was supposed to be an advanced soul, a Sanyasi monk.
“l am not a thief. I bought all of these.” I answered.
Looking in his eyes I saw that there was no all-seeing wisdom of a holy man. What I did see terrified me. I saw anger and hurt pride. Dhanurdara Swami just could not accept that any of the wallas in town would dare to defy him and sell the comic books to me. So he convinced himself that I had stolen hundreds of comic books in broad daylight from Loi Bazaar risking being caught and being publicly beaten in the street which was the penalty for stealing in Vrindavan. Thieves were caught and beaten. We saw it happen all the time and none of us wanted it to happen to us. Now that he had convinced himself that I was a thief he decided to make an example out of me.
The left side of my face exploded as the force of the blow from his hand sent me sprawling to the ground.
“You liar!” he screamed and kicked me in the stomach which knocked the wind out of me.
Now his lips were moving but I could not hear anything he said.
He kicked me in the back which stopped me from catching my breath again. My eyes watered and I gasped for air. I gasped for air and started to catch my breath again.
“Get up.” He screamed.
My ears were ringing as I struggled to my feet again
“Admit it. You are a thief. Just admit it!
Another blow sends me sprawling again.
“Admit it! You are a thief!
“I am not a thief,” I cried out defiantly.
Then the beating started for real. Dhanurdara Swami began raining punches down on me with both fists. I raised my arms to protect my face and my ribs and this bit of defiance from a 12-year-old set him over the edge. The punches came harder and faster, but this was not the first beating I had taken, and I was determined not to make a sound. No matter how much it hurt I would not give him any satisfaction. I would not cry out. I wouldn’t make a fucking sound.
As the blows fell and the pain grew worse, I formed a plan in my head. I thought about my classmates. We were all prisoners there and dreamed of being rescued. If I could get Dhanurdara Swami to kill me in front of the whole school, President Reagan would send in the Marines to rescue us like the Iranian hostages and we would all be airlifted back home to the United States to be reunited with our parents. I would die like my hero Abhimanyu.
I blocked out all the pain. As the blows from the Dhanurdara’s Swami’s fists landed on me I had visions of my lifeless body collapsing in front of the whole school. My classmates gathered around in horror and looked down at me. My dead eyes were still open in defiant accusation and blood flowed from my nose and my ears.
Then came the sound of the Chinook helicopters landing on the roof. The first two gunshots were warning shots and the old Chokidara (security guard) who sat on the roof armed only with a BB gun to scare off the monkeys dropped his Daisy Red Rider and raised his hands to surrender. He unlocked the rooftop door and my father Syamakunda Das led the Marines as they charged out of the helicopters down the stairs. My dad waved his framing axe in the air pointing out the guilty culprits who were systematically neutralized with extreme prejudice. Blood spattered on the walls as the bodies of the teachers and Bengali “mean girls” hit the ground. The Marines armed with M-16’s machine guns and M-72 RPG’s marched through the hallways of school, blowing up all the bathrooms I had scrubbed and kept spotlessly clean for years, pulling the American children out of the classrooms escorting them on to the roof to the safety of the helicopters. My father followed them carrying my lifeless corpse to bring back to my mother.
After rescuing all the American children and bringing them safely back to the helicopters, the school was emptied and destroyed by two well placed Hellfire Missiles which they fired from one of the Chinooks on the way out. Along the road the remaining students left behind watched the building crumble.
Back in the United States there was a funeral for me in the rain. All my classmates were gathered there mourning me from under black umbrellas. President Reagan was there and so was Nancy Reagan as well as Prince Charles and Diana. My casket was lowered into the ground as the Marines in full dress uniform honored me as a fallen hero with a 21-gun salute.
Finally, the beating stopped and Dhanurdara Swami handed me a straw whiskbroom. He issued his punishment in front of the entire assembly.
“You will sweep this entire school from top to bottom. While you are sweeping you will chant Hare Krishna one time ant and then call out “I am a thief” so everyone can hear you. Do you understand?”
I staggered to the top of the stairs. I started to sweep the hallway. “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna KrishnaHare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare. I am a thief!”
I cried out, burning in anger sweeping the ground ahead of me. I cleaned the hallways from top to bottom that day. I dared not leave a speck of dirt out of fear of more beating.
As further punishment, while my classmates all gathered to watch a movie “The Ramayana” I was assigned to stuff the report cards for the spring semester and address them to the parents. For hours I sat in the headmaster’s office folding the report cards, sealing the envelopes, and applying postage to the envelopes, and addressing them to their parents. Did I mention that I had exceptional handwriting back then. I had taken a Calligraphy class my first term and my penmanship was superb. That was what gave Dhanurdara Swami the idea to give me this punishment. I was to address each letter like it was an invitation and I did. Finally I came upon my own report card. I scratched a note to my parents and stuffed it in the envelope with my report card. I wrote.
“Mata. I hate it here. Get me out now! “
The next week a ticket arrived by express mail and within two weeks I was on a Pan Am flight from New Delhi back to the US. Knowing that I was leaving soon, Dhanurdara Swami and all the teachers were really nice to me but I still told everyone about what had happened as soon as I got back to the US. By the time I got home most of my injuries had healed, Dhanurdara Swami insisted that I was a thief and the matter was swept under the rug. At least I was out of there. Some of my friends remained behind for years, unable to get word to their parents about the conditions. If not for the punishment I was given that day, who knows how long it would have been before I got that message to my parents and how long I would have been stuck there. I guess I was just lucky to back in America, free at last.