All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India
by Rachel Manija Brown
Reviewed by Kendra Crossen Burroughs, 10 October 2005
A Fish Comes Home to Poop
You are pen and ink
and You are the gifted writer.
You alone exist.
—Meher Baba
When Manija Mehera Brown was brought to India by her parents to live at Meherazad at the age of seven, her life went into total suck mode. Constantly told in a syrupy manner how lucky and blessed she was, she concealed the truth: she didn’t care about the dead guru Meher Baba, felt nothing at the Tomb, disdained the loony adults around her who believed in bizarre things (“Life is an illusion”), and had no “God magnet” whatsoever. At the Ahmednagar Catholic school she attended, she was a white foreigner among brown-skinned Indians, an English-speaker among Marathas, a Jew among Christians. At Meherazad she was an undersized child among grownups, an atheist among believers, a precocious intellect among fools. A complete outsider. A fish out of water.
But that was then, and now the fish has come home to poop on the Baba world. Deftly lampooning her family, the mandali, and a large cast of Baba-lovers, she writes entertainingly of her predicament: torn from a “completely normal” childhood in Los Angeles, she is thrust into a life without TV or peer-group companions, with snakes and scorpions, filthy toilets, poverty and disease, social injustice, and other stereotypical horrors of India. Well, there are a few fun things, like catching geckos, nursing wounded birds, climbing trees, performing in Baba plays, and especially devouring every book she can get her hands on.
Less happily, she reveals her constant state of fear from bullying and physical abuse at school, frightening and bewildering experiences at the ashram, and rage at her mother’s fixation on Meher Baba. Reading and a rich imagination are her salvation as she spins a compensatory fantasy of being a woman warrior or a hero like Shivaji, the celebrated guerrilla fighter of seventeenth-century Maharashtra, who defeated the Mughals and prevented the Muslim invasion from penetrating into South India.
If anyone is moved to either wipe away little Mani’s tears or give her a good spanking, forget about it. Little Mani is over thirty now and has a brown belt in karate. With a successful career and plenty of friends, she looks fetching in the author photo on the jacket (there’s also one of her as a child, cute as a button). Her name is Rachel now, and she doesn’t need our approval, book reviews, or Jai Babas. Writing well is the best revenge.
It was Rachel’s father who first suggested that she write about her years in India, but it wasn’t until she read the hit memoir Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs that she knew for sure she could do it.
Many Baba-lovers will pick up her book out of curiosity, to figure out which well-roasted character is which of our friends. Nearly everyone is given a pseudonym, aside from Meher Baba, a public figure. For some unknown reason, Freiny Dadachanji gets to keep her own name, maybe for being one of the few people that Rachel likes. Or was it because Freiny was the only Mumbai Baba-lover with twelve toes, so there was no point trying to disguise her identity?
Even Mohammed the Mast gets a makeover, as “Malik.” I don’t think Baba ever said whether dead fifth-plane saints have a tendency to litigate. But given that Rachel believes he threatened her with seriously evil intentions, it’s wise to be cautious. After all, Augusten Burroughs and his editor, agent, and publisher are all being sued by his relatives, even though he gave them pseudonyms in his memoir. They claim everybody knows who they are anyway.
I began reading the book with interest, not only as a longtime Baba-lover but as a professional nonfiction book editor. Part of me had an objective interest in seeing how one writer navigates a well-trodden literary genre, and part of me of course wanted to read what a self-declared infidel says about our community. There was a “benevolent elder” side to me that was ready to applaud the debut of a young author who is the daughter and stepdaughter of people I like. And, truth be told, there was another part of me poised to rip Rachel to shreds if I didn’t like what she wrote.
The heat of that emotion passed, and I’d like to share some slightly more rational responses to this significant publishing event.
With my editorial hat on, I am pondering what we look for in a book of this kind (humorous memoir of traumatic childhood), besides excellent writing, storytelling, and jokes. I think we want to read about captivating experiences that are unique but not limited to the narrator’s idiosyncratic situation. The story needs to touch something universal in us. We should feel that the author has spoken for us in some way or has articulated personal struggles that we have also lived through to some degree, in a way that brings heightened awareness, a new perspective, enjoyment, relief, or some other benefit. Hopefully the author demonstrates through the creative process some transcendence of his or her experience, some insight, healing, or further development.
Rachel’s book provides many of these elements along with a narrative that is lively and amusing. The experience of the outsider, the powerlessness of being a full-scale ego trapped in a child’s small body, the anger at injustice, the exasperation at other people’s weaknesses, the relief of liberation from a painful situation, the awakenings that come with growing up, the exhilaration of reclaiming one’s power, and the realization that one still has some learning to do. I can identify with such things.
In addition, I have a feeling of affinity with Rachel’s family, not just because of the Baba connection but for the silly reason that Rachel’s father is Ralph Brown and my grandfather was also Ralph Brown (changed from Bronstein, his parents’ name, after the family emigrated from Russia). In our family, too, there are “abuse issues,” stuff that’s not supposed to happen in Jewish families. (I’m NOT implying that Rachel’s family, G-d forbid, abused her physically or sexually.) The shadow of abuse that permeates Rachel’s story seeped into my consciousness and even led to several nightmares. I also feel a lingering sadness at the callousness of some of her portrayals. I was surprised that the book affected me as much as it did.
I remember Mani from a trip to India in 1984, when she was eleven, and how she loudly chattered away, showing off her brightness to the adults around her. She was called “little Mani” (to distinguish her from big Mani, I assume), the name pronounced in India with a short “a,” as in “Money.” If you’re an Indophile or a frequent pilgrim, you will be aware that some of the things she mocks as traits peculiar to Baba-lovers are actually specific to India. Preoccupation with the state of one’s bowels, for example. She calls the Baba-lovers “rectum-gazers” and marvels at how even Baba’s stools were a topic of conversation in Mandali Hall. With its widespread digestive woes, India is what my husband calls the Land of Natural Functions. I assure you that none of the Baba-lovers in Myrtle Beach is especially interested in poop, except maybe me as I monitor my senior dog’s daily indicators of health.
Although Mani’s anguish at being different was doubtlessly genuine (what child doesn’t want to fit in?), it’s obvious that Rachel enjoys being distinctive. She knows that her experiences in India are part of what makes her special. She conveys no understanding of what makes Meherabad/Meherazad special, how radically different it is, in positive ways, from the traditional Indian ashram, and why that is significant in terms of Meher Baba’s contribution to the renewal of spiritual life. But then the book is not about Meher Baba; it’s about Mani Brown and how she transforms into Rachel Manija Brown.
Do the problems of one little girl amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world? Of course they do. I think Rachel’s journey of self-realization is every bit as “spiritual” as the travails of a Meherabad/Meherazad resident. Her tale evokes the bigger picture of our common human predicament, of how we deal personally with individuation, relationship, suffering, and other challenges that life imposes on us.
Nobody gets out of here alive.
—Darwin Shaw, disciple of Meher Baba
Whether this is enough to sell books? (as the mandali member dubbed “Coconut” might phrase it). It’s too soon to tell. There are so many memoirs out there, and good reviews are not necessarily a predictor of sales. Although Baba-lovers may be the first to grab a copy, the book does not seem primarily aimed at us BLs of un certain âge. Probably the audience is Boomer-bashers, teenagers and young adults from Baba families, and the fellow misfits who Rachel says she hopes will feel “a little less lonely, a little less strange, and a little more cheered” after reading the book.
Before I read it, I thought the ashram theme would marginalize the book in the opinion of reviewers and booksellers. But now that I see it’s not truly a “Baba book,” I think it will do very well as long as a good buzz gets going. If that happens, the name of Meher Baba will reach many people who would otherwise be immune to his message. We’ll all slap our heads and say we should have known, because Baba always works in unpredictable, paradoxical, and “joke’s on you” ways.
Rachel concedes that someone reading the book might already be booking a ticket to Ahmednagar, because you never know who possesses the Baba magnet. It’s true that Baba can draw his lovers to him by any means, positive or negative. However, I have little investment in the notion of the masses literally becoming Baba-lovers from reading the book. For me the important thing is for people to just know that Meher Baba exists, to hear or read his name. To receive that impression is to forge an internal link. Avatar Meher Baba has something important to give us, and all we need is a link to be able to receive it, because he wants to give it to us whether we believe in him or not. That’s what I think, wacky eccentric that I am. I love that about Meher Baba: his all-embracing view that excludes no one, no living being and not even a stone or a bubble or a puff of air.
I trust Rachel’s agent is shopping the movie rights, because here at last is the “Baba movie” we’ve all dreamed of. (Sorry, Liam.) The warrior epic fantasy theme could really make it fun. It tickles me to imagine that somewhere there might be an offbeat young actress destined to make her name playing little Mani Brown.
So good luck to Rachel. Everyone, buy your copy and support the publishing industry.
Now for the minus. The fact that Rachel is not a Baba-lover (the ubiquitous pictures of Baba have “all the emotional resonance of wallpaper” for her) equates with incomprehension of what he is about; so even though she provides a workmanlike summary of what she learned from reading a libraryful of Baba books (she says she was reading at college level at age seven), there is no coherent reference point for any of the beliefs or behaviors she ridicules. For me, that’s the primary weakness of the book. Since most of her comments spring from the observations of a naïf, they lack any context that would be meaningful to those drawn to the deeper realities beneath the surface layers of existence.
Wash away all the leaves of your book if you are our classmate,
For the lesson of Love you cannot write in books.
⎯Hafiz
I doubt Rachel returned to the Baba literature as an adult except to research her book, simply looking for material that would serve her ends, not as a quest to understand what Baba’s appeal really is. And why should she, since her interests do not lie in that direction? It’s totally correct for her to pursue her own interests, which are pretty cool ones. But her attitude toward spirituality seems immature. Countless people have trotted out the challenge of how a just God can allow suffering in the world, but usually those who present this age-old koan as some sort of argument have not explored it with even a minimal degree of sincerity; they are just trying to justify their foregone conclusion that God does not exist or is not worthy of worship.
I know these issues don’t matter to the general reader who regards spirituality as nonsense anyway. Most of the reviewers seem to have bought Rachel’s angle (infamous guru, fanatical mother, ex-hippie kooks, and the sole frame of reference is Pete Townshend and “Don’t Worry Be Happy”). Consensus reality wins the day.
Rachel doesn’t really malign Meher Baba (or Mehera, whom she admires for not suffering fools gladly). Nonetheless, the outside world is bound to perceive this book as reflecting negatively on Meher Baba. Is that a problem? Not really. Baba can handle it. But it bothers me a little, because I’d like people to see the Baba I see, whose beautiful photos around me are a joy, not an obsession.
Rachel went home to California to live with her father and stepmother at age twelve and paid yearly visits to her mom in India until she was seventeen. Upon returning to Ahmednagar at the age of twenty-six, she finds that strangely enough the mandali and residents seem to have “mellowed’ compared with the insane, insulting people they once were (an echo of Mark Twain’s famous line: "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned").
Give her credit for that. Rachel has spoken her portion of the truth, which merits inclusion in the greater hierarchy of truths. If she has ridiculed others, she has also laughed at herself and acknowledged her limitations. She who fantasied herself an invincible warrior recognizes her inadequacy and vulnerability. She can be proud of having empowered herself: taking up martial arts, getting therapy, and trying to understand her parents’ history and motivations.
Survivor guilt rises up to haunt her when she owns that she gladly left Ahmednagar without concern for the fate of other mistreated classmates. I was reminded of an author I worked with, a meditation teacher named Gavin Harrison, who explored his story of abuse in the book In the Lap of the Buddha. Gavin returned as an adult to the South African school where his sexual abuse by older boys had been ignored by the staff; he met with the school administrators and told them what happened and how he felt about it—with no result, except the satisfaction of knowing that he’d bravely done what he needed to do. Rachel redeems herself by mentoring at-risk inner-city children.
An interesting sidebar: According to Dr. Lenore Terr, an expert on childhood trauma, people tend to blame anyone except the actual perpetrator of abuse. For example, in the famous 1976 Chowchilla (California) school-bus kidnapping case, the children who were abducted were angry at their parents, not at the men who held them hostage. The parents also deflected their anger, onto the school authorities. (See Terr’s book Too Scared to Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood.) Food for thought, though it doesn’t fully answer the question of precisely who or what crashed Rachel’s system. In any case, I think that by assuming responsibility for her own life, she’s taken care of herself admirably.
The conclusion to the real-life story is open-ended, and the book itself is tied up very neatly at the end, with a few surprises that I won’t spoil for you. Rachel’s journey will continue, driven by the need to resolve the conflict with her mother that lies at the core of the book. Alan Watts once said that there are two kinds of people: prickles and goo. No need to spell out who is which. Despite their being temperamental opposites, Rachel concludes that mother and daughter are not entirely different: they both have intense feelings for the objects of their obsession—they just don’t obsess over the same things. The conflict goes deeper than that, but what can I say (not being privy to all the facts—is anyone?) beyond “Welcome to the spiritual path,” which, whether she knows it or not, Rachel is traveling through the sufferings and joys of everyday life. I say she’s “lucky and blessed” to have the opportunity to work things out with her courageous mother.
If Rachel’s nasty cartoon caricatures were all there is to the book, it would never have deserved publication and praise. The story is part of a bigger, more human picture, and that’s why it succeeds. I predict that there will be forgiveness, because life is short, most Baba-lovers are inclined to be generous, and Rachel’s mother, father, and stepmother obviously love her. In time Rachel may become more attuned to the code of chivalry that is an integral part of the warrior’s way. (She might enjoy Chögyam Trungpa’s God-free teachings in his book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior.) She’ll accomplish this without losing her sense of humor, which is her weapon and shield. The spiritual path demands heroism, and like Rachel, we’re all in training.
Some trails are happy ones, others are blue
It’s the way you ride the trail that counts
Here’s a happy trail for you …
Happy trails to you
Till we meet again.