"I can do nothing more for you. You are now in Hanuman's hands." These are the words author Cheeni Rao hears his Indian immigrant mother sob as he stands locked outside his family home. A brilliant, promising young man who is the product of a devout Hindu family from a long line of Brahmin priests, Rao has been reduced to the life of a homeless drug addict and petty criminal on the back streets of Chicago's Southside.

The freedoms and temptations of life on an elite American college campus send Rao spiraling down into a hedonistic nightmare of drugs, sex, and crime. Desperate and alone, he is visited by Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god his mother evoked, and comes to realize that this unlikely guide may be his last resort. On his long journey to recovery, Rao is guided by visions of this clever, divine monkey, best known from the Indian epic poem, the Ramayana.

In Hanuman's Hands is a gritty, hauntingly beautiful memoir. Bringing India whole-heartedly into America, Rao weaves his own story of Western culture clash with mythic tales of his Hindu ancestors who served in the ancestral temples of Kali. With Hanuman as his loyal companion, the author finds his way back to recovery at a halfway house run by a mug named Tats and shared by an unforgettable gang of streetwise characters. In Hanuman's Hands is a striking debut from a new literary voice.

In Hanuman's Hands

A MemoirBy Cheeni Rao

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Cheeni Rao
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780060736620

Chapter One

Whenever virtue declines and unrigh-teous-ness rises, I manifest myself as an embodied being. To protect the saints and sages, to destroy the evildoers and to establish dharma, I am born from age to age.
—Bhagavad Gita 4.7-8

Long ago my ancestors lived in Kashmir, trapped in frozen valleys by the broad shoulders of the Himalayas. We weren't vegetarians yet—that would come hundreds of years later, after the Hindu faithful borrowed Buddha's nonviolent message. In Kashmir, we considered yak a delicate vegetable, and raised the sturdy beasts to help us plow the earth when it thawed. We slit their throats and offered up the meat in the puja, or sacrificial fire, to the Gods when winters lingered. We were priests in a hungry land, surrounded by sleeping demons disguised as mountains. We were needed and loved. We had no reason to leave.

During one of my drug overdoses, while a doctor pumped activated charcoal into my stomach through the tubes he'd coaxed down my throat, I saw one of those long-dead Kashmiri relatives. One moment I was looking into the eyes of a sweating Indian doctor, hearing him chant the mantra, "Don't die, you stupid bloody fool," and the next moment the sourness of my own vomit was replaced by the faint sweetness of the smoke of ghee and flowers and a revelation of frigid mountain air, the dull trickle of charcoal in my belly fading to absence. A man with hair on his body like thick black fur tended a puja fire. He crouched outside a temple that had been carved into the skin of the mountains, the puja smoke signaling to the sleepless eyes of the Gods above. The man burned bundles of wood, flowers, and cups of rice and ghee whenever he ended a mantra. His chanting trembled like snow before an avalanche, ringing like the crack of ice after each sloka. My relative looked up at the night sky, then over at me. He motioned me toward him, gently took my hands within his, then began binding them with an itchy twine. He kissed me on the forehead.

He pulled out a long, thin knife, tilted my head back. The blade was quick against my throat, a sliver of ice pressed deep into my skin, followed by my body's gasp at the heat of myself flooding away. He didn't need to push me into the fire—I knew what I was supposed to do. I lay down upon the bed of coals, the acrid smoke curling around me, the flames shriveling my skin. I was the sacrifice.

I looked into the night at the uncountable stars and watched as, one by one, they were shaken free. My relative would yell a mantra, pour ghee onto my burning body, and another star would fall. The Gods were plummeting toward us, flames streaming in their wake.

My family doesn't talk about why my relatives left Kashmir, but the night of my overdose, I learned a truth that makes sense. My ancestor, like many of the family line that lay between us, had wanted to be a god. He sacrificed a demon to show his power so that the Gods would lift him up and ask him to join them. He sacrificed his own distant grandson to show that he had no attachment to the human world.

But you can't change fate. We run this circle of time again and again, unchanged and unchanging. To ask to be a god is to make war against the fundamental nature of our universe, and so, as the Gods fell in a rage toward us, they cursed Kashmir to be forever at war, and they cursed us.

When I blinked my eyes, the cracked white ceiling paint of the critical care unit loomed over me. A hospital band wrapped my wrist and IV lines snaked from my veins, but my once-hairy hands had been singed clean. Thick burns crisscrossed my fingers.

Our family curse is a forgotten secret. The current generation of my family is sure our misfortunes are solely due to bad luck, inbreeding, and stupidity. My family won't believe because none of us are priests anymore—we have become devotees of logic, engineers and doctors sacrificing faith at the altar of science. When I first told my father about the curse, he scolded me for making up stories, and promised to disown me if I didn't enter into a drug rehab program. But in the time when my ancestors had sense to believe in the curse, we fled before it, doomed to wander the lands aimlessly in search of a God that would forgive us. For generations we searched.

In the past, when my ancestors tended the temples, the Gods spoke to them, reminded them of their sins, protected them, and guided them on a path that would lead to our family line's eventual salvation. My father had abandoned our ancestral temple and forgotten how to hear the Gods. But that night, as I lay in the hospital bed, my mind afloat on a chemical sea, drifting between the shores of my world and the transcendent, I realized that the drugs gave me the power to hear the divine in the way my ancestors had. It was the crack pipe that enabled me to see the reason for the curse, that I was part of the cause of it. The kiss of the needle revealed my dharma. I would need to find a God that would forgive me.

It took me years, but I finally found one in Chicago in an alley behind a tacqueria.

Seetharama Rao, my grandfather on my mother's side, could pour molding bandtha on a cold skillet, whisper a mantra, and produce masala dosais as delicate as gold foil. The feverishly ill, their souls moments from Yama's noose, would storm outside to play passionate cricket at the fiery kiss of his green-chili-, onion-, garlic-, and cilantro-studded oothapam. Chefs and priests made pilgrimage to his restaurant in Madras, hoping to learn the secrets of the Gods and taste divinity.

Continues...

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