Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra Read Free Book Online

that I was once wrapped in mythic ideas—and ideals—that had dropped away like an old skin. Romance wasn’t really the point. Campbell held mythology out as a living presence, the underpinning of everyday life. Unwittingly a businessman waiting on a street corner for the light to change was a hero in disguise. His life had the potential to be a quest. Beneath the mundane details of his days, a vision was crying to be born.
    I saw myself through Campbell’s eyes—I think millions of other people did at the time. I was standing on the corner waiting for the light. Only no one had ever promised me that it would turn green. We were very close with the Rao family. Dr. Rajindra Rao had the first private X-ray machine in Jabalpur. His practice primarily screened people’s lungs for tuberculosis, which was rampant at the time. He also made a team with my father, confirming with an X-ray what my father’s acute diagnostic skills had detected in a patient. His wife, Mallika, was also a doctor and had become the leading gynecologist in Jabalpur. Their combined clinic made them quite prominent in the city. The Raos’ daughter, Shobha, was nicknamed Ammu, the homey term used in South India for a little girl. Ammu was two years younger than Sanjiv. We accepted her as our sister. On the festival of Rakhi, a sister ties a braided bracelet around her brother’s wrist, while her brother pledges to protect her. Growing up together, weperformed the ritual with Ammu—and still do, with the occasional lapse (Ammu has a real brother, too, named Prasan, two years older). Today she lives outside Boston, following in her father’s footsteps as a radiologist.
    As the oldest, I was the leader of the pack, and I went so far as to assign each of us a military rank, with me as captain. (Looking back, I’m touched, with a twinge of guilt, at how trusting my troops were as they followed me, listening with rapt attention to my commands, which were more like iron whims.) We played every game together, and Ammu, a bit of a tomboy, even agreed to be part of the all-boy cricket team Sanjiv and I started in the neighborhood.
    Ammu’s father owned a prized possession that awed everyone he passed: a maroon Chevy Impala. The car was originally owned by a man who had made a fortune manufacturing bidis, the cheap cigarettes wrapped in the leaf of the ebony tree and tied at one end with a string. The poorest workingmen could afford bidis, and they were a constant smell in the streets. (Bidis remain a horrible health hazard, but the divine must have a sense of humor. Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the most revered south Indian gurus, ran a bidi shop in Bombay, above which he gave sublime spiritual guidance.) Bidis had made the Impala’s previous owner a multimillionaire, rich enough to import an American highway cruiser, before he tired of it.
    One day, with a wedding to attend far away from Jabalpur, our two families, the Chopras and the Raos, piled into the Impala in a state of great excitement. There were eight of us, but room was made to squeeze in the Raos’ jack-of-all-trades servant, who cooked for us at night and was presumed to be able to fix the car if it broke down en route. The trip from Jabalpur to Delhi was five hundred miles. We broke up the tedium by stopping off to tour the famous diamond mine in Panna. The mine is an open scar on the landscape, dug in stepwise fashion like an open-pit coal mine and filled with bright green waste water in the middle.
    Dr. Rao had turned the driving over to my father. As we pulled out of town, a noisy black car spewing exhaust seemed to be following us. A turn onto the main road, and it stayed on our tail. Dacoits.That’s what my father presumed they were: local bandits. The dacoits must have suspected that anyone leaving the diamond mine in a big American car must be carrying diamonds. This was still turbulent post-independence India. Some regions were riddled with racial and religious violence. The clash