Sunil Dutta - Stealing Green Mangoes

Before anything, there was God,

Had there been nothing, there would have been God.

It was because I lived that I died,

Had I never lived, what would have been?

GHALIB

I still do not know whether it was divine providence or sheer misfortune to have been born a refugee. I was born a few years after the partition of India and the following chaos in which upwards of one million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims killed one another. My parents and their extended clan survived at the expense of being uprooted, chased out of their ancestral lands, and hated for being Hindus in West Punjab, and therefore part of a religious minority. On the other side of the border, in East Punjab, the Muslim minority received the same treatment from the Hindus and the Sikhs.

The peace that followed brought its own madness. Frenzied fanatics and gross profiteers exploiting religious division killed dozens of my family members. The rest of us were scattered across India. My fathers family was left close to penniless, my mothers only slightly better off. Some of us never saw one another again; some reunited only accidentally, decades later.

This is the world into which I and my brother, Kaushalaffectionately nicknamed Rajuwere born. It was a world of bitter shame. My relatives, desperate for some semblance of their more exalted past, fought viciously with one another over property and position. Their squabbles were the background noise of our childhood. Their hopelessness made them lash out at Raju and me, and we knew abuse as well as poverty.

My brother and I faced exactly the same adversities. Raised in the same small room, we slept side by side and grew up steeped in the same history, fear, deprivations, anger, and resentments of a refugee family. But we made very different decisions thereafter. Raju and I have lived very different lives.

I turned inward as I grew up. I read. I became interested in poetry, music, and metaphysics. I found solace in study. I sought out mysticism and idealism before finding myself (perhaps paradoxically) in a laboratory, working as a research biologist. Then I transformed my life once more: I became a police officer on the streets of Los Angeles. And I wrote.

Raju also underwent transformation. His life took him into Pakistani terror camps, to Canada with Khalistani terrorists, to France, and then to prison. He destroyed many lives, including that of a woman he somehow enticed to marry him while on the run from the police, and a son, who died of cancer while Raju was in prison for murder.

The subject of this book is the possibility of a life full of compassion and meaning in a broken world. The challenges and dilemmas of my family will be the material of this story, but its lesson is not specific to my experiences. What I hope to convey, by pairing my life with my brothers, by juxtaposing the violence I have seen on the streets of Los Angeles with the violence I knew growing up as a refugee (and with the violence sowed by my own brother) is that events and tragedies do not define or shape our lives. I did not feel compelled to replicate the destructiveness and hopelessness of the family I grew up in, but Raju did. In between Raju and me is the world.

In June 2016, I also learned that I had terminal cancer. Suddenly the urgency to assess my and my brothers life took on a new meaning. I knew that metastatic lung cancer had the lowest survival rates of any cancer; less than 5 percent of those with this disease live five years after the diagnosis. Most die within seven months of their diagnosis. But that is statistics, not my life. This book is also an effort to confront my imminent destiny and a spiritual quest to seek meaning in our existence. It is also an examination of the tortuous paths our lives take and our reactions to events in the face of which we may feel powerless.

We may turn our eyes away from the past, but the past never leaves us. I felt it imperative to examine and assess the paths my brother and I took in lifethe decisions we made, the courses of action imposed upon us. Everything a human does is connected with his past. One who lives an examined life reflects, makes connections, and looks for the lessons learnedit is a ceaseless, sleepless quest.