Rasheed Ahmed Mirza: Close encounters of the bigoted kind

India is the locus of an ancient civilization whose primal ways persist in some form to this day. This subcontinent of Asia is comprised of the countries of Kashmir, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bharat (Republic of India or India) and Pakistan, where I was born.

From the Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa, India manifests wisdom, peace and compassion. Most of her people refuse to eat the flesh of other animals, fish or fowl, and consider the cow a sacred symbol for all animal kind.

But India also gave birth to the oldest and most heinous kind of bigotry the world has ever known: her scandalous Brahmanic caste system, a strict socio-religious institution that separates humans into different classes or castes, from the highest priestly Brahmans to the lowest servile Shudras – the outcasts known as the untouchables. One inherits the caste in which one is born. And the lowest of the Shudras that I know were the Bhungis.

They lived, separated, on the outskirts of towns, in their colonies. Every morning, men, women and children would come into town to clean open gutters of raw sewage and scrape off human waste from the floors of our houses with makeshift scoops and haul it off in old, dented buckets. Most of India does not have flushing or septic systems.

These godforsaken Shudras are born paleet (i.e., polluted, unclean, unholy). They are forbidden to read the holy Scriptures or even enter a temple. Their only hope of salvation from this wretched existence is to be reincarnated, after death, into a higher caste. The higher castes, or the twice born, avoid any physical contact with these untouchables lest they themselves become paleet. Albeit if only temporarily.

This 3,000 years of India’s endless subjugation, although illegal but an integral part of Hindu society through sanctified bigotry, belongs in the morgue of archaeological finds.

Charan Das was born of Bhungi parents. His father, an elder in his clan, somehow got him admitted to a public school. He was smart. After graduation and unable to get a regular job because of his caste, he tutored children of progressive parents. He was older than I.

My father was an elite of legendary status. I figured out, at an early age, how to use his name to open doors in the colonial bureaucratic system of government left behind by the British colonists. I used that mostly to help others. It pleased my mother immensely that one of her sons was using the family’s influence in the service of those of lesser means.

One day I was sitting in the front of the house. Charan Das stopped by to pay his respects. I offered him some chai (the mug he would use would be broken and disposed of as soon as he left, lest one of the family use it unwittingly). I handed him the mug of chai, instinctively avoiding contact with his fingers, thereby spilling a little chai.

For some reason, he started to talk about how he takes a bath every day, that his clothes are clean and he doesn’t have an offensive odor, implying that somehow he was my equal.

I was incensed. How dare he challenge me? Wasn’t it I who got them extra quotas of government-controlled rice for their weddings and festivals? Wasn’t it I, when a Bhungi mother brought her young son to my mother’s doorstep, crying that she did not want him cleaning other people’s toilets for the rest of his life – wasn’t it I – who got that Bhungi boy an apprenticeship (a first) in a mechanic’s shop? The shop owner was only too eager to please me, knowing he will need my friendship with the police chief or a local judge. Wasn’t it? That’s not enough?

Now he wants me to eat and drink with him in the same utensils? Has he forgotten his place? What would people say?

It has been 50 years since. But I clearly remember that day when a haughty, young son of an aristocrat took away the dignity of another human being. Not because of any deficit in his character, but because of the way he was born.

For the longest time, I blamed society. I’d look to the ancients, to the wisdom of their Scriptures, to their traditions, which have kept order for so long.

But I can no longer point fingers. All I have to do is look in the mirror. I vividly see emotions glistening in his eyes as I pulled away. Hot tears flowed down my face.

Forgive me, Charan Das, wherever you are; please forgive me, for I am a bigot. Can you find it in your heart to forgive a lesser man? For I cannot.

We all have our beliefs and strive to live the best we can. Some of us try to devote ourselves to the service of others: family, friends, neighbors, sometimes strangers who seem to have fallen on hard times. Some of us believe that eternal salvation awaits the dedicated in another life. And in anticipation and joyful euphoria, we magnanimously invite others to join us.

And when they are unable to meet the strict criteria set 3 millennia ago, we chide them, gently at first. How can they not see this simple and lighted path to everlasting bliss? Then we get angry. How can they disobey the laws of the God of Abraham that are written in stone? How can they go up against the traditions of our ancestors that have been guiding people for thousands of years? How can they, when the consequences of eternal damnation are so dire?

We condemn in our zeal to save!

The man from Nazareth did not preach judgment and hate. He preached love and acceptance: of the meek, of the less able, perhaps of those different than us.

Gay people are not aliens from some rogue planet who came down to destroy us. They are our sons and daughters, our sisters and our brothers. They only ask for the same rights and free will that we so cherish for ourselves. Do not shun them as outcasts.

We call ourselves Homo sapiens – man the wiser – as if to besmirch those who came before us. Maybe we jumped a notch too soon. Maybe we are still Neanderthals.

This story was originally published September 4, 2015 at 6:53 AM with the headline "Rasheed Ahmed Mirza: Close encounters of the bigoted kind."