If Truth Be Told: A Monk's Memoir Read Online Free Page B

come for readings and I would know their questions even before they had started speaking. At times, I would be walking in the street and would get similar guidance about a complete stranger walking on the road. I wasn't just seeing people but seeing through them.
    I wasn’t sure how to label this phenomenon. I called it intuition but there was a small problem with my intuition: it was wild and free. It ran its own course and I had no control over it. Even though it worked, I couldn’t call upon it with conviction or at will, nor replicate it whenever I wished. I wanted a more logical sequence, a degree of certainty. I needed my inner guide to answer my questions and not just give me random information about a stranger on the road, no matter how accurate that was.
    In the meantime, word spread about my readings in astrology and more and more people started approaching me. Going to school, reading, meditating and meeting people made my schedule rather hectic and there was little time left to play. I didn't mind this because, being asthmatic, I could not engage much in physical sports. There were no inhalers back then, not until I turned fourteen anyway.
    For four months every year, March–April and September–October, I was particularly sick. There was a high level of allergens during these months and the medication would take a while to ease my breathing. For long hours at night, I used to sit outside with my mother because lying down made breathing even more difficult. Resting in her lap under a moonlit sky, sometimes a dark sky, I used to look up and wonder about the vastness before me, the countless stars it held, some twinkling more than the others. The questions would come flooding back: Who made the universe? Why was I here and not on one of the other planets? Did people live on other planets too? Did God live on one of those distant stars? Where was God?
    Minute by minute the hours would pass and my wheezing would finally subside by the morning. Only then would I manage to fall asleep. My father would pick me up and carry me back to my bed. Often, inhaling the air outside wouldn't work and he would rush with me to the hospital. I didn't mind going because spending a night at the hospital meant getting a day off from school. I would stay back at home and catch up on my reading or meditate. An injection in the hospital was a small price to pay for these delights.
     

     
    I had learnt the basic Vedic chants from my astrology teacher, but he only specialized in astrology and didn't have the phonetic precision required in Vedic chanting. I felt it was essential to chant the Vedic hymns in the correct manner in order to continue my exploration and experimentation. It was not enough to just sit still and chant Om. I turned to my mother again, who knew a young but scholarly Brahmin called Pandit Surya Prakash Sharma. He had recently moved to our town.
    Over the next few weeks, Panditji taught me the correct and rhythmic pronunciation of the core hymns from the Yajur Veda, one of the four Vedas. Verses from the Yajur Veda are used in the invocation of various forms of divine energies. Sanskrit, the language in which the Vedas are written, has the ability to take the mind into a trance-like state. This is chiefly because of the use of rhyme, rhythm and nasal sound across various meters. So, Panditji agreed to teach me Vedic chanting. My work with him, however, didn’t last very long.
    Occasionally, people visited him for horoscope readings. Astrology was not his forte although his scholarly excellence in Vedic literature would have anyone believe that he was an expert in astrology too, for astrology was a Vedanga , Vedic branch, after all. One day, a man came to have his daughter’s horoscope matched. He had identified a suitable groom for her and wanted to ensure that the horoscopes of the two were compatible. Panditji calculated incorrectly and concluded that it was a flawless match.
    The maximum possible ‘points’